Namwali Serpell (what a great name!) has a NYRB piece (archived) about the perennial issue of whether women’s writing might have a distinctive “style” (as she puts it). She has a lot of interesting things to say, and I approve of her take on it, but I’m just going to quote the first few paragraphs because I like the word she builds them around:
I learned a new word the other day: clocky. It describes someone who doesn’t pass as their (chosen) gender. It originated in the trans community and comes from the idea of “clocking” or recognizing something. Its use can be dysphoric or derogatory, a way to express the disappointment of missing the mark or to throw an insult back at transphobes. But lately, as the gender spectrum expands to include more ambiguous varieties, clocky has become a bit of a compliment. What a great word! I thought. It rolls off the tongue. It’s tongue-in-cheek. It has a little bite. Plus it rhymes with cocky—which makes for a lucky pun whichever way you spin it.
Clockiness has been on my mind because of a tidbit of literary history I also recently learned. In 1857 three stories about Anglican clergymen were published anonymously in Blackwood’s Magazine. The next year they were collected and republished as a book called Scenes of Clerical Life under the then unknown name George Eliot. The publisher, William Blackwood, sent copies to select members of the British literati, including Charles Dickens. Dickens knew of Marian Evans, the assistant editor of the Westminster Review who had scandalized London by living with a married man. But he had no idea that Evans had taken on a male pen name to publish Scenes of Clerical Life. He sent a letter to the writer via Blackwood, with a sly guess:
I should have been strongly disposed, if I had been left to my own devices, to address the said writer as a woman. I have observed what seem to me such womanly touches, in those moving fictions, that the assurance on the title-page is insufficient to satisfy me even now. If they originated with no woman, I believe that no man ever before had the art of making himself mentally so like a woman since the world began.
When I read this, I of course immediately wanted to know: How did Dickens clock her? What was the tell? Most readers at the time took the male name on the cover in good faith, so much so that some rube who happened to live near the town on which the setting in Scenes of Clerical Life was modeled started going around taking credit for it.
I am, of course, reminded of Robert Silverberg’s less successful attempt at gender analysis (the subject was James Tiptree, Jr.): “It has been suggested that Tiptree is female, a theory that I find absurd, for there is to me something ineluctably masculine about Tiptree’s writing.” (He later said, very graciously, “She fooled me beautifully, along with everyone else, and called into question the entire notion of what is ‘masculine’ or ‘feminine’ in fiction. I am still wrestling with that.”)
Oh, OK, I can’t resist quoting a little more (she’s discussing Judith Butler):
No one gets to dictate what a society’s current gender norms are. But in a free society, you can at least select which ones you wish to perform from the array in circulation—and when and where, too. You have, in short, limited agency. As Butler puts it, gender is “not radical choice and it’s not voluntarism…. Performativity has to do with repetition, very often with the repetition of oppressive and painful gender norms to force them to resignify.”
How does repeating a gender norm force it to resignify, or to signify anew? Whenever you aim at gender, you miss the mark ever so slightly. This is how imitation yields change. Butler explains that it “is not a simple replication,” “copy,” or “uniform repetition” because “the productions swerve from their original purposes.” […] Being a real man, being a real woman, being really nonbinary—in each case, gender expression is an approximation, an asymptotic curve to a line we continually redraw. In this sense, everyone’s a bit clocky.
What I love about this theory is that it helps us understand other cultural expressions, too, like literary style. We know, for example, that James Joyce wanted to write like Henrik Ibsen. And that Samuel Beckett wanted to write like James Joyce. Ernest Hemingway typed out sentences from hunting magazines. (Here, to imitate a style and to perform masculinity coincide.) In turn, Ralph Ellison typed out sentences from Ernest Hemingway, a practice Ellison likened to musicians playing jazz standards. This isn’t plagiarism. It’s imitatio or pastiche, neither of which is an exact reflection. Rather, this is repetition with a swerve. Just think of how distinct Ellison sounds from Hemingway. Beckett learned the limitations of Joyce’s style precisely through his own (failed) imitations of it—he then swerved in the exact opposite direction.
And here a different example comes to mind, which I quoted from Ivan Almeida back in 2010:
“La verdad, cuya madre es la historia…”, escribió Pierre Menard, corrigiendo a Cervantes, que había escrito “La verdad, cuya madre es la historia…”. Sería interesante, pero tal vez desplazado, analizar, a la manera de Borges en Menard, las modificaciones que sufre el texto que consideramos, por el simple hecho de ser atribuido no ya a Herold sino a Stair, y no ya a Stair sino al mismo Borges.
“Truth, whose mother is history” wrote Pierre Menard, correcting Cervantes, who had written “Truth, whose mother is history…” It would be interesting, but perhaps out of place, to analyze, in the manner of Borges on Menard, the modifications undergone by the text we are considering, by the simple fact of being attributed not to Herold but to Stair, and then not to Stair but to Borges himself.
(And what if Menard was actually Marian Evans? But the mise en abyme looms…)
I’ve always found it amazing that anyone could read James Tiptree Jr’s stories and not realise that the author was a woman, but I could be deluding myself, given that I’ve always known that.
I think that there are indeed characteristic male and female literary styles, BUT
(a) any individual person, regardless of sex, may fall anywhere along the line – this is a question of group averages, and you can’t predict any person’s literary style from their gender alone;
(b) it’s not just a ‘line’ anyway, but a multidimensional space;
(c) as with anything human, it is impossible to disentangle nature from nurture here. And a good thing too.
The other thing is that assuming that there really is a characteristic sex-based prose style, it’s highly likely to be the sort of thing that’s learnable and able to be imitated by a sufficiently dedicated/talented member of the other sex trying to convincingly “pass.” That some authors adopting a fake persona may not try particularly hard to do so is neither here nor there.
Come to think of it, this seems like one of the things that those “artificially intelligent” LLM’s ought to be able to help with. “Rewrite this draft in a way that makes it seem more like the work of a male/female author” would be the prompt.
I must say, I initially thought this was a mistake for, or another form of “clucky”.
But having checked, “clucky” is apparently Australian informal for describing a woman who shows signs of wanting a child. Its original usage was to describe the behaviour of hens. Has anyone else heard this word?
I’ve always found it amazing that anyone could read James Tiptree Jr’s stories and not realise that the author was a woman, but I could be deluding myself, given that I’ve always known that.
Yes, I’m afraid that’s classic ex post facto delusion. I was a dedicated sf fan in those days and talked with other fans and read reviews, and I’m not aware of anyone who clocked her.
Has anyone else heard this word?
Not I.
Try this link
https://chickencoach.com/blogs/learn/broodiness-in-backyard-chickens-what-to-do-with-a-clucky-chook?srsltid=AfmBOorCX7PrabQTphtYnEE7yz7ragbFg7J_KqfNEF36oWvXwgN0m8Np
I am familiar with the slang sense of clucky, but I don’t think I knew that it was specifically Australian, rather than British.
Green calls it Aus./N.Z.
My favorite anecdote about James Tiptree Jr.’s gender is that I was once enjoying a compilation of Hugo (or possibly Nebula) award-winning stories from a certain year, and each story had a little introduction from Isaac Asimov. Before Ursula K. LeGuin’s entry he noted that it was that year’s only story by a woman author, which was maybe a shame, we could use some more of them. And then before James Tiptree Jr.’s entry he noted that this was the only one of this year’s authors that he had not had the pleasure of meeting personally.
I should think that the markers of F vs. M writing which Dickens recognized were not something subtle, but a relatively big feature. I hereby confess that I know very little 19th century English literature, except the names; including, I have never read George Eliot. So I’ll take a guess based on nothing: were “women’s novels” of that time heavy on introspection and thoughts of their characters (other than narrators), as opposed to externalities? More specifically, would M writers ever describe what women were thinking?
For reasons which reflect badly on me rather than the author, I don’t much like George Eliot’s novels; however, I have in fact read all of them, with the major exception of Middlemarch, which I keep telling myself I really should read, and somehow never quite get round to.
I can’t say that her style has ever struck me as distinctively female.
A nice illustration of the difference between accomplished authors of the same sex (I gather) with quite different capacities for imagining the interior lives of women is Dickens versus Wilkie Collins. While Dickens is surely the better novelist overall, his women are poor pale things* compared to Collins’ (a view also held by my daughter, incidentally.)
My daughter first read Alexei Panshin’s (excellent) Rite of Passage, which has a teenage female first-person narrator, when she herself was a teenage female. She was unfamiliar with the name “Alexei” at the time, and was astonished to discover that Panshin was in fact male.
* Or one-note caricatures.
It’s worth having a look at what Marian Evans had written the year before, “Silly Novels by Lady Novelists.” It wasn’t just her scandalous real life living situation.
The next paragraph of Dicken’s Letter also deserves some credit I think. Though perhaps some of that is the chivalry she decried.
She did reveal herself to him the following year with an inscribed copy of Adam Bede. He responded with one of A Tale of Two Cities, which would have set you back more than a quarter of a million pounds a few years ago, because that’s how we measure things these days.
There is a family story that she was a distant relation of ours, but I have no idea if it’s based on more than wishful thinking.
My maternal grandmother, who knew everything about that side of the family, perished before anybody thought to record it all from her.
Its [‘clucky’] original usage was to describe the behaviour of hens. Has anyone else heard this word?
Yes I have occasionally, but not reliably enough to say whether Brit or NZ/Aus or both; and whether with different senses.
Without checking a dictionary, I’d have said Brit in the hen-like sense of obsessively worriting or mithering on a topic.
I was once enjoying a compilation of Hugo (or possibly Nebula) award-winning stories from a certain year, and each story had a little introduction from Isaac Asimov.
I have two volumes (1940 and 1941) of such a series with “best SF stories of the year” with such short introductions by Asimov. They also have the gimmick that there is a foreword where Asimov describes events in the “fictional world” (= actual world history) and the “real world” (=the world of SF) that happened in the year concerned. If that is what you have in mind, it isn’t tied to any awards, it’s just what Asimov judged to be the best stories published in that year. (And at least the German version of the series that I have is “presented by Playboy”; don’t know whether that is the case with the American original series as well.)
This “approximation of a a point on a spectrum using discrete labels” rings me as the precise inverse of the statistical/machine learning technique known as logistic regression. Its inability to ever get an exactly correct prediction is just the feature that allows us to keep correcting its parameters.
„Elena Ferrante“ is an interesting case. There are people who claim „she“ is simply Domenico Starnone writing under a pseudonym. And having just read a novel by Starnone, there are undeniable similarities in style and subject matter. My wife on the other hand, like many women I know, says there is no way any man could understand female psychology the way „Ferrante“ does. The other often proffered explanation – EF is actually Starnone‘s wife Anita Raja – certainly has some logic to it. It’s also possible EF is a joint project of Starnone and Raja. I wonder what people who think they can clock gender make of EF.
I associate, I’m not sure quite how accurately, the older sense of clocking (recognizing something or someone is hinky) with the Maryland-D. C. region. It almost definitely appears in David Simon’s transcriptions of Baltimore dialog, and definitely definitely in the fictionalized television adaptations of his books. Maybe trans kids more recently picked up the usage from John Waters movies.
@ DE
I read Alexei Panshin long ago and remember his novels of manners as striking and kind of deliciious
Both Ferrante and “the markers of F vs. M writing which Dickens recognized” are discussed in the linked essay.
I recall Harold Bloom’s claim that the ur-document behind Genesis was written by Bathsheba the Hittite…
Both Ferrante and “the markers of F vs. M writing which Dickens recognized” are discussed in the linked essay.
So they are. Thanks for the archived link!
We aim to please!
Wiktionary has “clocky” as an adjective in this sense (with illustrative quotations) but specifies that “clockable” (in what they have as its sense 3) is a synonym and also has illustrative quotations of that being used instead. “Clocky” is maybe more “cutesy” but I think “clockable” is, if you know the relevant sense of the verb “to clock,” more morphologically transparent, i.e. more clearly referring to an attribute of the clockee rather than the clocker. (In that sense, which appears unrelated to the “dope dealer” sense of “clocker.”)
This whole sense of the verb “to clock” meaning roughly “to identify as” (not limited to trans or gay people but also – to use examples from Green’s – correctly figuring out that someone is e.g. an undercover cop or of Italian ancestry) is not really in my own lexicon but I accept that it’s not a particularly new innovation.
Green suggests that clock ‘face’ is behind the meaning ‘punch, hit’ as well as ‘recognize’. Maybe?
I recall Harold Bloom’s claim that the ur-document behind Genesis was written by Bathsheba the Hittite…
“Erewhon” Butler famously claimed that the Odyssey was written by Nausicaa.
I don’t much like George Eliot’s novels; however, I have in fact read all of them, with the major exception of Middlemarch, which I keep telling myself I really should read, and somehow never quite get round to.
Middlemarch is the only work of hers that I have read, partly because, from what I know of the others, they seem likely to either be pale imitations of it (so to speak) or to be entirely different, with content unlikely to interest me at all. So I am reluctant to read anything of hers other than Middlemarch, which blew me away; it is my favorite novel in English.
Dickens’ remark “all the women in the book are more alive than the men, and more informed from within” certainly rings true for Middlemarch.
The most “masculine” passages in the novel are probably the worst: the extremely lengthy, dry, “scientific” descriptions of a character’s personality and psychology, which accompany the introduction of virtually every major character. These descriptions read as if they were written precisely because of Eliot’s desire not to be a “silly woman novelist”, and the book would be greatly improved by eliminating every single one of them.
@Y: I had always assumed that “to clock” in the sense “to punch” was clipped from the idiom “to clean [someone’s] clock,” which wiktionary glosses as “to defeat someone decisively, in a physical fight or” otherwise.
Somewhat oddly Green’s seems to have the passive version of this (“get one’s clock cleaned”) but not the active.
I had always assumed that “to clock” in the sense “to punch” was clipped from the idiom “to clean [someone’s] clock,” which wiktionary glosses as “to defeat someone decisively, in a physical fight or” otherwise.
Same here.
I’ve long assumed the same thing, and that “clean someone’s clock” refers to hitting someone in the face.
Following on Nat Shockley’s comment, I would assert that one cannot give George Eliot’s writing a fair chance without reading Middlemarch. It seems similar to the situation with Anthony Trollope. There is nothing particularly wrong about either The Mill on the Floss or The Warden as a novel. However, neither is anywhere near the masterpiece that Middlemarch or Barchester Towers is.
Middlemarch is on my list of Best Novels Evah, for sure, and I greatly enjoyed the Palliser series. But I ran out of enthusiasm after embarking on the Barchester books. I can’t remember how far I read, but they abide still on my Kindle waiting for me to take them up again one day. Maybe. I didn’t find church politics as engaging as the real thing.
Middlemarch, which blew me away; it is my favorite novel in English.
Dorothea on honeymoon in Rome:
#
Our moods are apt to bring with them images which succeed each other like the magic-lantern pictures of a doze; and in certain states of dull forlornness Dorothea all her life continued to see the vastness of St. Peter’s, the huge bronze canopy, the excited intention in the attitudes and garments of the prophets and evangelists in the mosaics above, and the red drapery which was being hung for Christmas spreading itself everywhere like a disease of the retina.
#
Evidently I really shall have to get round to Middlemarch.
(I mean, it has retinal diseases and everything.)
I liked Middlemarch a lot and Silas Marner much less, and that completes my current thoughts on George Eliot.
Middlemarch is certainly the masterpiece, but we enjoyed Daniel Deronda quite a bit as well, despite its famous weirdness.
Oh! You don’t want to die without having read Middlemarch. Eliot hit her strange elephantine stride with that one, and it’s really a gorgeous and wonderful book, plodding straight through the Victorian jungle and crushing all in its path.