The hideous-men cycle as the primary fiction of the wallace-misogyny crux
echoes
From: Brief Interviews with Hideous Men (the title-story cycle)
- Early text: B.I. #20's reduction of the woman to appetite:
"The fact is that she had a body that my body found sexually attractive and
wanted to have intercourse with and it was not really any more noble or
complicated than that."; the on-sight typing ("I classified her as a
strictly one-night objective"). B.I. #20's terminal eruption at the
silenced interviewer: "Judge me, you chilly cunt." (followed by a string of
gendered slurs) — the interview's last movement. B.I. #46's rape-apologia
escalating to threat: "who are we to say getting incested or abused or
violated or whatever or any of those things can’t also have their positive
aspects for a human being in the long run"; "What if I did it to you? Right
here? Raped you with a bottle?"
- IJ echo: Whether IJ (Orin's conquests, Avril's over-sexualization, the
treatment of Joelle) is misogynist or anatomizes misogyny is the live IJ
reception question — in the archive's theory record the anchor is
ij-boys-book, with wallace-misogyny (the fear-not-triumph reading;
gc-ep021-CHB [S]) and silenced-feminine (CHB [S]) alongside. The BI cycle
is Wallace doing the same maneuver at maximum concentration — giving
hideous men the whole floor. Read as critique, it supports the
anatomizes-misogyny side; read as indulgence, the other. The cycle does not
settle IJ, but it is the control text for the argument.
- Weight: primary-exhibit (oeuvre-scoped)