Miriam Stoney on The Freedom to be Disliked

00:00:00: Hi, my name is Tobias Harbaugh-Kohan.

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00:00:23: Here's a show.

00:00:34: It's getting more difficult to tell a person

00:00:36: from the character.

00:00:38: We narrate our own lives online, cultivate main-character energy and treat being unremarkable as kind of death.

00:00:46: Todays guest has been thinking about characterization.

00:00:49: what happens in fiction & reality once morality & race are folded in?

00:00:55: Miriam Stoney is writer, translator & artist based in Vienna working across sound, sculpture & text.

00:01:01: She also critic who written several pieces for Berlin Review.

00:01:05: This conversation with Miriam was recorded live in front of an audience in Vienna and moderated by Blunderview editor Hannah Sabot.

00:01:13: Together they talk about who, fiction or film gets to be unlikable without being flattened into a stereotype.

00:01:20: They also discuss how Margaret Duraz could write race and desire Without letting either define her characters And what was lost when Emeril Finnell In her two thousand twenty six film Wuthering Heights cast a white Heathcliff.

00:01:36: To begin, Miriam reads from the piece she was developing at as in

00:02:08: therapy or autobiographical writing, have all made a concept like main character energy seem something worth cultivating.

00:02:17: Accordingly to be an non-playable character sounds like fate worse than death.

00:02:24: Literary genealogies of characters are coextensive with the development of written forms that once took for granted essential separation.

00:02:31: life and art even where they might be perceived interact with influence one another from novel to feature film Obviously, many other examples as well.

00:02:41: To consider character was to pay special attention to forms of personhood.

00:02:46: within a singular sketch or study A character could be judged believable sympathetic or unsympathetic even relatable But the incompleteness of their representation made any serious identification not only unlikely but potentially pathological.

00:03:03: Indeed, psychosocial understandings of character take it to be a quantity... ...of attributes.

00:03:11: A pattern of behaviors but not something that equates to whole person or presence.

00:03:17: Character is a moral category too and we should be conscious the fact that morality can only provide an essentially impoverished account for life.

00:03:26: I grew up in twilight years authoritarian parenting education at my now defunct prep school north England.

00:03:33: Pupils were still being slapped for misdemeanors as tragic as wetting themselves when I left in two thousand and five.

00:03:40: I was instilled with an unshakable belief that such forms of suffering, misfortune & toil As we experienced at the nasty little institution Were character building And as brown kids We were advised to endure it.

00:03:52: smiling if you wanted To get on in life.

00:03:55: Perhaps its not surprising then That i refused make do With a character.

00:03:59: To me Character is akin A facade or model not fit to house a whole person or life, but perhaps the idea of one.

00:04:08: Also predictable is my need for characters to persist in their worlds and solely in their world.

00:04:14: The slippage here between character as in traits And A-character As In A Story Is Conscious.

00:04:21: Both Character & Characters Are Essentially Partial A fact that must always be taken into consideration when the figures in question are marked in ways that politicize their otherwise aesthetic judgment as figments of someone's imagination or fantasy, As when say a character is racialized one way another.

00:04:44: Thank you Leaving us on a cliffhanger and really perfect place maybe to jump into discussion.

00:04:51: so I think we want to start our conversation with this slippage you describe, which is also something that... We both noticed as we were in the very early stages of even talking about this idea of likability and dislike ability.

00:05:08: In art at large As we were looking or thinking different likeable characters It seemed like we were inevitably also talking character character as a process that exists actually outside of bounded works, literature or art themselves.

00:05:29: So maybe I want to start by thinking about this construction of character in its various ways and how construction of characters is a process similar to or distinct from the character's self-construction similar or analogous forms of character building and how in one might they come apart?

00:05:55: Yeah, when you first approached this question I was somewhat flummoxed because had become, in my parlance at least something that I spoke about it the same way as a kind of moral or personal form of character building.

00:06:20: But actually if you think about... The way that i think about it characters and works they characterization in the form of a literary character, is a backwards process.

00:06:33: It's not actually... So usually you have something like Tristram Shandy which is interesting because it starts from beginning and defies that notion.

00:06:44: but ultimately you have story or novel film whatever.

00:06:50: these characters are thrown into the scene and that is usually what we have as a back story, or we have a series of retroactive justifications for why the person is where they are.

00:07:03: As we encounter them now... The point of character building exercises—we refer to it in fact then—is this process looks into the future you project into the action taking place will pay off in the future and construct something.

00:07:24: Yeah, we'll create a sustainable entity with which to live as self.

00:07:29: And I think that conflation or the moment of stuckness is actually what interests me precisely about this topic especially because... ...I can't quite figure out and will become patently obvious throughout this talk.

00:07:46: I am stuck at many different points in this question the idea, or how do you say?

00:08:00: The conceptualization of yourself as a character.

00:08:03: Whether that is still malleable in this same way because it sounds to me extremely fixed and I think we've been kind of dabbling in discourses for decades now which were talking about the fragmented self... ...the essential malleability.

00:08:24: The body at least is changeable or we can adapt that in certain ways and yet there seems to be a moment of characterization Of the self as though.

00:08:34: That was something given And I think that's odd, and i'm kind of interested In that

00:08:41: great thank you yeah?

00:08:42: and um I guess I want too You know in the direction that your cliffhanger proverbially Is leading us.

00:08:50: I want to think about the way character, both judgment of character and also formation of character interacts with morality.

00:09:01: So I would love to hear you speak a little bit more on this process of characterization and the place that artists or creator in building characters fit into our trouble conceptions.

00:09:22: What kind of leads you from the starting point on to this question... ...of good and bad characters in both the moral, perhaps other senses as well?

00:09:32: To start with I think that a good or bad character is not necessary.

00:09:37: In a novel at least stick with novels.

00:09:40: it's not necessarily the same kind of moral-good and the moral-bad.

00:09:43: so usually we don't talk about characters being... Not these days but past morality stories way back when.

00:09:52: But I think it's not really what the kind of state of criticism is pointed at, like are these good or bad people?

00:10:01: On a moral level.

00:10:03: The criteria with which we judge characters and stories generally whether they're relatable, sympathetic... ...whether they are interesting in that notion of interest also kinda spongy.

00:10:20: And ultimately, although I would also argue that the way in which literature is being discussed as of late... ...I think there's a re-emergence where good and bad doesn't necessarily become an aesthetic or formal question.

00:10:39: But actually talks about how these people might exist within our own worlds.

00:10:45: How their values align with what the critic or not want for the world in which they live.

00:10:52: And oftentimes, akin to original character studies of I guess like the sixteenth century we are starting to see a kind... Starting to see whether that's historically accurate.

00:11:08: but we're definitely seeing profusion of archetypes and would argue on some level these also racialized.

00:11:18: and yeah, I guess we'll go through some of the examples.

00:11:22: And still looking to substantiate this argument but... This was also one thing that sparked my interest in this question or at least it's personal vested interests were like what are possibilities being a racialized character beyond good or bad?

00:11:40: Because most of time racialize characters in novels not kind of quantify this too much, but my feeling is that racialized characters tend to be good.

00:11:56: Which is obviously different from a time when racialized character were all bad.

00:12:00: But... This something I'm trying map out through select examples.

00:12:07: Yeah and in the broad literary history you're charting This gets us to this interesting question or perhaps conundrum of contemporary writing, which is that we're both in a moment where literary tastes are oriented towards some sort of perhaps cultive authenticity of the character and an interest in presenting.

00:12:33: We're reading about characters who are not just kind of moral parables of pure goodness and pure evil but also at the same time you know contemporary writers quite aware that they possibly can't entirely escape archetypes, especially racialized stereotypical archetypes of character.

00:12:53: That would pair racial identities or other external or bodily or situated identity markers with inner moral senses.

00:13:04: portion of the panel is called The Freedom to be Disliked.

00:13:07: So I would want to ask you next who in your mind, and this kind of contemporary literary milieu?

00:13:13: And then we can also move into film as well.

00:13:16: but Who gets to be unlikable particularly in like unlikeable and interesting ways To inhabit an unlikeability or act in Unlikeable Or perhaps We might Also add morally opaque or ambiguous Ways without being reduced by it Without Being Kind Of forced to re-embodied harmful or outdated, are simply just flat and boring stereotypes.

00:13:38: And what do you kind of see as being the tension in a way that this is being dealt with now?

00:13:46: I think they would preface my answer to this question... ...with a personal distinction that I make between being disliked and being hated.. ..and actually I was sent a piece of writing today from Art & Order, an organization, does anyone know?

00:14:05: Art and order.

00:14:08: Thank you, art an order journal on hatred in criticism that kind of threw out a lot definitions of hatred I was toying with but my understanding especially in relation to racial hate speech is it's dehumanizing the point i'm trying.

00:14:30: insist upon being disliked necessarily nice, but it's not dehumanizing.

00:14:36: And if in any sense is actually maybe more humanizing because I think the kind of relativity of it and the partiality as well are at least akin to some form of relation whereas from my understanding of hatred its like a destructive annihilatory gesture or an affect which is wish for that thing be gone.

00:15:01: The question of who is allowed to be disliked, I think it's often times the people that are granted nuance.

00:15:07: And they're often people who are granted a place in conflict which isn't necessarily human and not necessarily class conflicts or racialized conflicts within them.

00:15:19: It is a conflict between persons.

00:15:22: In order for you to be permitted with this category You have to step out from certain Class of identification and certainly enter into the human which is also not given for a lot of characters.

00:15:37: And so, I mean there are obviously writers who have been doing this even with racialized figures for a long time Some with more nuance some with more sensibility For the humanity of their characters than others?

00:15:53: was actually, in my opinion extremely good at writing what we would now maybe call intersectional novels.

00:16:05: Because while people are defined racially and they may be their characters especially the lover or sea wall this kind of recurring tale which she is a young lower class French colonial subject in French Indochina.

00:16:21: She falls in love with rich Chinese industrialist property owner in French Indochina, where he's also a kind of foreign other.

00:16:31: All the kinds of racial sexual gendered class differences are not necessarily definitive if they're characters but put to use that can become part of narrative with some flexibility within them.

00:16:48: so I think it is positive example.

00:16:52: and we obviously have like whole plethora racist depictions black, brown like queer Etc characters which usually leads to them dying.

00:17:05: Usually the point is that they exist in a narrative In order to die and I think there's something also very affirmative about having a character who's disliked or unlikable Because usually in order to be unlikeable They have to persist throughout their narratives who enters into problems.

00:17:30: Yeah, and Miriam just lent me a Margaret DeRos novel so you're really an advocate which I'm very much looking forward to reading.

00:17:38: but yeah on that note perhaps why don't we maybe test out one or some of the particular characters you are thinking through at the moment?

00:17:51: Maybe it would be great too have you know, we can crack open the spine of one these books and look through something together.

00:18:00: But yeah maybe let's think though on this together?

00:18:04: Well actually in spite all I've talked about kind novels or what not The thing that got me into writing it now was actually Wuthering Heights.

00:18:13: The Emerald Fennell I think is a very white upper class British film director.

00:18:24: Here We Go.

00:18:27: When criticised for the whitewashing of Heathcliff in her adaptation of Emily Bronte's eighteen forty-seven novel Wuthering Heights, director Emerald Finnell justified her decision to cast Jacob Elordi For The Role on the basis of a solipsistic erotics quote.

00:18:44: It is very personal material for everyone.

00:18:47: it Is very illicit!

00:18:53: Doesn't this sound like a millennial's justification of blasé racial exclusions on her dating app profile?

00:19:01: No X, no Y, no Z. Heathliff is a character defined by Bronte through a number of traits woven into a novel world that relies on those characteristics as a way of undergirding the machinations of its narrative.

00:19:17: at The start of the book he Is described by the narrator mr.. Lockwood as quote a dark-skinned gypsy in aspect, in dress and manners.

00:19:27: A

00:19:27: gentleman.".

00:19:29: Once his racial otherness has been established Heathcliff is immediately portrayed by Lockwood as being unameenable, unapproachable... ...and basically unlikeable.

00:19:40: He comes across slovenly And his reserve springs from an aversion to showy displays of affection He's said to growl, climbing the cellar steps with vexatious phlegm and eyeing Lockwood in a manner he could ill endure after this inhospitable

00:20:02: treatment.".

00:20:05: Among these descriptions however is another.

00:20:08: Quote... The criticism of Elordi's casting does not really lament a missed opportunity for the representation.

00:20:22: There are other actors of colour in the film playing traditionally white though supporting roles, a point to which I'll return.

00:20:30: Fennel's assertion that the casting of a white cis man in The Role Of Heathcliff is a private matter her very own erotic fantasy can be perceived as weirdly candid admission into the fact she does not desire racialised men.

00:20:45: That says this is private elides ideological transmission of desire within societies where race is folded into sexuality as a means of feminizing all forms of difference and deviation from the Western patriarchal ideal.

00:21:02: I do suspect, however that Finnell was also just not up to the task presenting Heathcliff.

00:21:11: The complexity of the character at once dark-skinned and slovenly, erect and handsome produces a naughtiness that would require keen eye for purely racist details within the infinite nuances of human fallibility.

00:21:26: Hence it might seem easier to cast Chazard Latif as an unerotic Edgar Linton which is to say nothing of the actor's physical attractiveness but rather Linton's characterization.

00:21:41: With its plainly annoying scare quotes in the title, Wuthering Heights engenders a mere paraphrasing of the novel.

00:21:49: But it does so and a kind of Klingon of a racially randomized society which only happens to look but not sound like West Yorkshire in the mid-nineteenth century The irony being that the number of racial stereotypes that abound in this sad representation never ever tarnished That image that Latif's Linton is basically a pretty decent guy.

00:22:14: Wonderful, I love this part...I know you're not on Instagram but there's been so much Instagram and elsewhere discourse about the film And i think your perspective is a sorely needed intervention here because in light of what becomes clear when we look at is that we're not only, as you said kind of losing a opportunity to cast the talented actor-of-color in a lead role.

00:22:46: And we are not only missing a lot... As the scare quotes suggest there's plot and development character otherwise of the original novel but also loosing some complex interesting questions and topics of the novel ones that are inextricably tied up with Questions Of Identity, of Race And Of Empire.

00:23:09: That I think is perhaps unspeakably part what made The Film fall flat for so many people.

00:23:15: So...I'm very excited For this to appear.

00:23:22: Be out In The World!

00:23:23: For all fans of Weathering Heights or fans of bashing Emerald Fanel To read.

00:23:29: But yeah on this note, maybe we can kind of think a little bit more about these randomized character casting choices as I think you mentioned it.

00:23:40: Or the swap out or risk aversion that is happening here.

00:23:45: and I'm wondering what do you think particularly being evaded by a swap-out choice of Jacob Elordi, many his fans which attempted to redeem him.

00:23:57: Redeem the choice by pointing out his bass heritage I believe but on this note particularly role of protagonist even more so in film adaptation than original novel.

00:24:09: perhaps there are at least attempts to do some fleshing out of Jacob elordis character whereas Shazad Latif's figure is as you said quite a caricature and one who's morally good in a kind of flat way, but not either literally or metaphorically on center stage.

00:24:30: And I don't know.

00:24:31: do you have more sense what she was trying to evade here?

00:24:34: Or what is lost?

00:24:37: I

00:24:41: would hesitate to say that she was trying do anything.

00:24:43: A lot of these things happen somewhat unconsciously, and especially when you ingest a diversity discourse which is not actually tied the questions of actual situated liberation and emancipation.

00:25:04: so i think Essentially, yeah as this is the point of it being like a randomized racialized society because if you just cast an actor of color to be some other character obviously You change the whole dynamics of the film but the film doesn't go into that.

00:25:19: The film Doesn't actually make a point Of them...of anybody being racialized in any particular way.

00:25:24: we also talked about what Is the maid's name?

00:25:28: Nelly.

00:25:28: I believe

00:25:29: Yes.

00:25:30: Nelly has also cast Hong

00:25:33: Chua as the actress

00:25:35: here.

00:25:35: Thankyou very much.

00:25:36: Next

00:25:36: to my notes.

00:25:40: And in many ways, I think what happens is that actually this more dangerous because she does reproduce stereotypes of particularly Asian characters and the idea That would be in any way affirmative Of opportunity or representation Is just a bit dumb like.

00:26:03: i don't really want Read into anything more than that.

00:26:08: Actually, I think it's just a thoughtlessness and I think this is kind of where I Start to Because they think the like.

00:26:17: I don't necessarily deny The fact that certain forms of racialization within society will have an impact on one character And I think its also too.

00:26:26: It's also fine or it's potentially even advantageous all interesting To bring in two a character's kind of life world, the influence that they probably experience... ...of being racialized in a certain way.

00:26:41: And I think so.

00:26:42: the other book that i'm thinking about discussing this is an anthology short stories called Rejection by Tony to Latimute which-I mean This has been interesting read and actually have been listening it as audio book Which was horrible!

00:26:56: They're all very abhorrent mostly kind of incel adjacent figures or people who especially feel somehow slighted, or wronged by... Especially feminist discourse.

00:27:09: By I guess wokism generally speaking.

00:27:11: but the majority of characters in this anthology are actually racialized figures Mostly Thai relating also to the author's own background and it has been quite interesting seeing how he very deftly just feeds into aspects of that lived experience as something which actually makes them more unlikable, it makes them in many ways kind of pathetic but make some actually distinctly aware.

00:27:40: Of their racialization in relation to the terrible people they've become.

00:27:45: and I think maybe there's a question who is able to write those characters?

00:27:50: because i don't necessarily thing that emerald for now would be able to craft that kind of complexity.

00:27:56: I mean, she's obviously we're talking different media and there is a kind of interiority goes on in the anthology cannot be replicated in film in same way but i know it was possible happening.

00:28:07: just few examples are far between.

00:28:10: they also not fun to read or rejections hilarious in parts but its horrible.

00:28:15: you now

00:28:17: really yeah it's gorgeously written exactly difficult.

00:28:24: This is also what I realized as I was preparing for this talk, because that I evade these books.

00:28:28: Like they don't necessarily want to read them... ...I actually haven't read Wuthering Heights but i'm English so like respect!

00:28:36: And then from the Yorkshire.

00:28:37: So Heathcliff was a kind of recurring figure But an important figure insofar as Heathcliffe Was a brown guy and he was a Brown Guy From Yorkshire.

00:28:47: Jacob Bellordi does his best To do a Yorkshire accent ,but it's not good enough.

00:28:54: deeply disappointed just by that fact, not because I necessarily need that one-to-one kind of representational logic to fulfill my personal fantasies about what Heathcliff could be.

00:29:06: But i think more along the lines.

00:29:09: this was once interesting for me and it's not interesting anymore.

00:29:12: maybe its interested in people like Emeril Fanel.

00:29:18: yeah...and we're getting such a great chance to hear your own critical voice, and perhaps persona in this conversation.

00:29:29: And you do kind of occupy a particular voice... ...in writing or criticism particularly I guess i want think about the actual place-of-the-critic and both critic as character.. ..and writing criticism as process of character construction a bit together about the obvious example here of Andrea Long Chu, who has very much built a particular critical voice that is also in some way dealing both in her own criticism and with other writings.

00:30:05: With these questions like ability or character and critic and obligations along this.

00:30:15: so I guess we can turn to Andrea Long Chiu.

00:30:19: also think about your own role as critic, and the ways you think about these questions in critical voice.

00:30:28: And the question of likability or dislike ability of criticism?

00:30:34: With pleasure I just wanted to find this one little wee quote by Andrea Longchoo which is perplexed me because it kind of rocks my moral world ready for when I read it.

00:30:51: If everybody knows Andrea Longchoo, she is an Asian-American trans woman critic who's very well known by now for what are called takedowns of mostly... And I think that she talks about the fact that the writers that she takes down chosen intentionally because they need to be taken down, or that they kind of pose a problem within the discourse which is maybe overlooked in the sense it's taking for granted.

00:31:23: And I just wanted to read this short paragraph very shortly.

00:31:26: It's about Joey Soloway's memoir She Wants It Desire Power and toppling The Patriarchy.

00:31:32: So she writes... These are the afterwards postscripts added into some these essays volume authority that came out, I think last year.

00:31:44: This essay was the first of what is sometimes referred to as my takedowns are famous writers and its untidiness in generally jeering tone reflect this.

00:31:53: In truth it wasn't about Soloway at all.

00:31:56: It's a similarly irritating person who was not famous enough to be worth writing about.

00:32:03: It strikes me today as a vicious piece but not very cruel one.

00:32:07: Viciousness is the attack dog who has not eaten in three days.

00:32:11: Cruelty is a person calmly holding the leash, these days I aim for

00:32:16: cruelty.".

00:32:18: Yeah...I don't know whether I aimed for cruelty or if you do think so?

00:32:25: I have been really perplexed by this statement and there's a kind of characterisation of the critic obviously even like me sitting here as well which is also something that comes out in the writing, and of course they have attempted at least to develop a style of writing.

00:32:44: Which isn't necessarily people-pleasing but maybe tries to be likeable.

00:32:53: I think it's hard for me to move on with this desire To Be Likeed.

00:32:57: For Me there was a sense of camaraderie.

00:33:00: Why don't we all laugh about this?

00:33:03: But I don't think that kind of standalone fuck you all, I'm going to say this.

00:33:11: That Andrea Longchou has just yet.

00:33:13: but it's also something that comes through a certain set of material circumstances and she writes at length about the fact that she is paid for research and write maybe two pieces per year which what she lives on Which i think most critics can not expect from experience.

00:33:33: If anything, the material aspect is one thing that impedes criticality criticism critique.

00:33:44: But on the other side, criticism especially where in Vienna it's also very hard to sustain Especially when you're in contact with people whose works You might be criticising and I mean for me like i'm not gonna beat in touch With emerald finnell anytime soon but I mean, they also write art criticism and it would actually be quite nice for people to understand or for us to be in a consensus that one maybe does put like develop a persona character as a critic as well.

00:34:14: And I think I've always... Like.

00:34:16: I believe this notion of all writing being a form of fictionalization Or at least having a form mediation.

00:34:25: In that sense it's never personal and I think that kind of differentiation between the character in The Person is something i would like to hold onto quite steadfastly.

00:34:55: There you'll also find all of Miriam's other essays as well as reviews, podcasts and stories from writers around the world.

00:35:10: And As I mentioned at the top we have a reader-funded magazine.

00:35:13: your subscription literally allows us to keep doing this work So please consider subscribing.

00:35:20: This episode was edited by Kate & Roberts.

00:35:22: i'm Tobias Haberkon editor for Billion Review until next time.