Once we’ve seen a stereotypical scene, it’s impossible to unsee it. And I can’t think of a scene more stereotypical in contemporary Anglophone literature than one where an older and wealthier man talks too much in the direction of a younger and poorer woman who pretends to listen while silently laughing at him. I don’t know when the first time was that a writer tried this scene, but it’s already fully formed in a well-known essay by Rebecca Solnit, “Men Explain Things to Me.” The plot is simple: The author goes with a friend to a party in the mansion of “an imposing man who’d made a lot of money.” This man, not realizing that Solnit has just published a book on Eadweard Muybridge, tells her “about the very important book [her own]–with that smug look I know so well in a man holding forth, eyes fixed on the fuzzy far horizon of his own authority.” He is as lost in his own discourse that fails to notice when the friend reveals that the book (which the man hasn’t read) was written by the very woman who he’s talking to. “Being women, we were politely out of earshot before we started laughing, and we’ve never really stopped.”
The entire work of Rachel Cusk may be read as an expansion of the scene, but you can find a compact version at the beginning of Outline. A billionaire invites her to lunch. This man “had been keen to give me the outline of his life story, which had begun unprepossessingly and ended—obviously—with him being the relaxed, well-heeled man who sat across the table from me today.” She’s under the impression that he wants to be a writer and suspects that he will try to buy recognition by editing a literary magazine. He can’t stop enumerating his achievements while oysters and wine keep arriving at the table. Between one thing and the other, he is “easily distracted, like a child with too many Christmas presents.” The ceremony abruptly ends, and she leaves for the airport to take an airplane to Athens, where she will encounter another fatuous gentleman who courts her. When this man (that the text presents as a physically repulsive, reptilian creature) declares in formal words his attraction to her, “he spoke so momentously that I couldn’t help laughing out loud.”
In The Flamethrowers, by Rachel Kushner, elements of the scene appear a little bit everywhere, but perhaps its most complete rendering appears midway through the book. The narrator has traveled with her boyfriend to his family’s palatial home in Italy. There, she interacts with several older, wealthy men. One of them is the pompous novelist Chesil Jones, who pontificates at the dinner table. One day, his subject is the inability of women to ski. The narrator’s boyfriend (another self-satisfied rich man) “didn’t understand why I let this old man go on as long as if I’d never been on skis [when in reality she was an expert skier], but my experience had nothing to do with Chesil Jones. It wouldn’t have interested him one bit. He didn’t bring up skiing to have a conversation, but to lecture and instruct. I’d seen right away he was the type of person who grows deadly bored if disrupted from his plan to talk about himself, and I had no desire to waste my time and energy forcing on him what he would only will away in yawns and distracted looks.” “Trapped in his own long-winded narcissism, a burning need for others to listen,” he doesn’t realize that people laugh at his back.
The scene doesn’t just occur in books written by women. At the beginning of Ben Lerner’s The Topeka School, the narrator’s girlfriend talks about her stepfather. “My stepdad used to give these like endless speeches at dinner.” “He would make dinners into these fucking long discussions, except not really, because nobody discussed anything; he just talked in our direction.” One evening, the girlfriend is alone with the stepfather and, sick of him, she does “this stupid also kind of awesome thing. Really, really slowly I started lowering myself in my chair, like sliding down out of it, while he was eating his ravioli talking about whatever.” She slides down under the table while he continues his dissertation, “trying hard not to laugh.”
“It serves as a way of establishing the writer’s membership in a moral community.”
The scene appears in the most diverse contexts with the regularity of a symptom. One apparent reason is that it serves as a way of establishing the writer’s membership in a moral community, one from which the Man Who Talks Too Much is permanently banned. The conditions for being an author in America today are extremely fraught: A poorly chosen metaphor or an opinion that challenges consensus can destroy a career. The restrictions on what can be said are based on authors’ social identities, identities to which they must respond. The result is that black authors tend to make explicit their blackness; queer authors their queerness; men the fact that they are men; and women that they are women. For writers with currently prestigious identities (e.g., BIPOC, queer, female), the mode is often affirmative: They celebrate their community and affirm its virtue. For writers with tainted identities (e.g., straight, white, male), the mode is disavowal: They distance themselves from those who embody the worst characteristic attributed to their group.
The Man Who Talks Too Much offers a way for them all to claim they belong to the community of the righteous, a community extremely varied, made of many groups sometimes in conflict amongst them (trans activists and feminists, Asians and blacks). The figure in question serves as a common object of aversion to members of all of them. In the intersectional pyramid, he occupies the top, which is, from the perspective of the literary world, the bottom. It’s not surprising that the figure recurs with a mechanical regularity in texts otherwise so different: It offers the ritualized rejection of that Other whose abjection assures a common point of reference to an otherwise disparate society. And it offers something else: the vicarious experience of a bloodless and secret but obvious violence (as expressed by the narrator’s laughing).
But the stereotype I’m referring to is not simply a character, but a scene. The Old Rich White Man has been an object of condemnation and derision in literary writing for the longest time, and we find him in poems, narratives, and plays since antiquity. The tradition has usually presented him under the guise of the scrooge or the glutton. In contemporary literature, however, his bestiality is shown in his discourse. His loquacity is as the expression of unearned arrogance; his financial success closes his eyes to the dimness of his intelligence. His verbal performance is designed to impress, and the interlocutor is nothing more than the accidental target for his vanity. He pretends to communicate with his female counterpart, but the woman in front of him (invariably younger and brighter) remains invisible to him, so much that she could disappear under the table without him noticing it.
We could expect the woman to confront the man, trying to wake him up from his self-satisfied slumber. But that’s not what she does. She withdraws, laughing and leaving him talking to the air. Ennui, amusement, and disdain, rather than open fury, is the emotional tone of her response. The man is so far out in his cloud of unknowing that any attempt to engage in a debate, not to speak of dialogue, would be foolish. He is truly unsalvageable. As the repugnant element who cannot be included in the community of the decent, he doesn’t even receive the recognition of a common humanity that would be implied in the attempt to contradict him.
And so the scene where a Man Who Talks Too Much interacts with a representative of the moral community (female, poorer, and younger) is a scene of lack of communication: reflexive in one case; deliberate in the other. The symbolic violence of the man (expressed in voluble, empty discourse) is repaid by the symbolic violence of the woman (in the form of silence or laughter). And what this double violence suggests is that between one and the other, there isn’t any common ground. This is of course, the situation that we have been deploring in our political life for so long: one where each camp assumes such vast perversity in the other, that it finds it so lacking in basic humanity, that any attempt to communicate is pointless, and the only gesture that makes sense is safely retreating to one’s base. I’d say that the scene is one of the main symptoms in literature of this age of political polarization. As (and if) polarization diminishes, the Rich Man Who Talks Too Much will probably retreat from the scene (he’s perhaps being retired as I write this), waiting for the next occasion to come back in a different guise.