Monsters: A Fan's Dilemma

Having constructed and deconstructed her notions of what it means to be a “monster,” Dederer concludes the book by stripping away the prestige associated with being an “artist.” This shift in focus from “monstrous artist” to “monstrous human” serves to lower the stakes of the questions posed by the book, and also to illustrate that these questions are constantly being answered every day by ordinary people. Moving away from the social grandiosity of the book’s opening (in which national political conflicts informed everything), Dederer’s concluding thoughts operate in the intimate settings of homes and communities.

In accordance with this de-escalation of subject matter, the portraits of artists Dederer offers in this last part of the book reflect a lens of empathy rather than criticism. Her empathy is particularly evident in her portrayal of Solanas, whose gender-based violence might otherwise be understood as analogous to the gendered violence of artists like Picasso and Hemingway. Dederer searches for meaning in Solanas’s violence and concludes that the “feeling of wanting to do something was frustrated when, in fact, she did something. Instead, that yearning found a better home in the teleology of the manifesto, which promised revolution” (216-17). Dederer explicitly parallels Solanas’s frustration over monstrous male artists, Misogynistic Structures in the Art World, and her cravings for action, to Dederer’s frustrations and desires amid the Trump presidency.

In her interrogation of Biography as “Stain,” Dederer extends her most empathetic treatment, however, to Raymond Carver. She empathizes most easily with Carver for two key reasons: their shared struggles with alcohol use disorder, and their shared roots in the Pacific Northwest. Returning to her biography-starved childhood, Dederer reminisces, “In the mid-to-late 1980s, the idea that Carver was physically nearby was important to me… In Seattle, a town still obscure in the popular imagination, I wasn’t the only one” (226). This identification with Carver echoes her earlier profession of identifying with Woody Allen as a child. Yet Carver’s monstrous transgressions did not disrupt Dederer’s love for him as Allen’s did. Even as Dederer posits that Carver’s redemption from alcohol use disorder was illusory, she emphasizes that illusion over the truth: “I, a devotee of Carver’s writing, find that I needed his golden redemption story” (231). This need derives from her personal battle with alcohol, an example of how her biography meets the biography of the artist in the moment of art consumption.

Dederer’s choice of Carver as the last artist discussed in Monsters recenters her own community in Seattle (and more generally, the motif of the Puget Sound region). On an even smaller scale, it recenters her feelings as an individual consumer of art. The opening passages of Chapter 13 indicate this return to the intimate scope, as Dederer recounts a playful debate she had with a friend: “In an argument, utility is almost always going to win. And so it was on this night: beauty lost—except, you know, in my heart” (243). In matters of her heart, Dederer seems to have a very clear sense of what to do. “Love is not reliant on judgment, but on a decision to set judgment aside,” she asserts, reminding readers that art is just as much about love as it is about thought (255). This attitude directly challenges the attitudes of Dederer’s colleagues who admonished her subjectivity and told her she needed to assess art based on objective aesthetic qualities, highlighting the tension between Objectivity Versus Subjectivity in Art Consumption. With this, the book comes full circle: In this final chapter, she offers the response to her colleagues that she was too unsure of in its earliest chapters. She champions her subjective feelings as the most necessary aspect of judging the art of monstrous men.