I was playing around with writing a piece for today on James Tiptree, Jr., and ethical literary fabrications, in response to a certain hoax I really don’t care to name. Instead, I woke up this morning to see that Benjamin Rosenbaum has written a post on the same theme over at Liz Henry’s place.
There are ways of doing fiction and writing fictive lives that can emerge in, as Ursula Le Guin said to and of Tiptree, ‘so immense, so funny, so effective and fantastic, and ETHICAL, a put on’. And that was Tiptree to a T. James Tiptree, Jr., the rising star of the 1970s US science fiction scene, was a pseudonym of Dr. Alice B. Sheldon. When the news broke that it was a lady writing, there was a lot of embarrassment on the part of people who had been insisting that only a man could write that kind of “masculine” science fiction.
I’d like to say that Sheldon played them all beautifully, but I don’t think she was playing around. This was a person who never felt that womanhood sat quite right, and was exploring an identity that might have been. This was someone who had lived an unconventional life for an upper middle class white woman of her day – in the CIA and the army as well as expeditions to Africa and debutante balls – and didn’t change any of the facts but her signature in her correspondence with the science fiction community.
The Tiptree persona allowed Sheldon to be herself, to access what she ought to have been able to access were the world a nicer place. As I said in my review of “The Women Men Don’t See”:
Tip was deftly throwing all these experiential truths about women I had innately known but had never heard anyone express, the habits of movement, thought and relating you adopt to live as a woman.
Tiptree wrote like the world was about to end. She wrote funny, fast, and heartbreaking. You can smell the confusion and desire, the worldliness of Tip and the ruthless brilliance of Alli Sheldon reaching you from a typewriter in 1973. There’s no writer I would have wanted to meet more. And whether she was writing as Alli Sheldon, or James Tiptree, or Raccoona Sheldon, it was all her except in name. And maybe even then.
From her 1985 essay “Zero at the Bone,” in which she speculates as to what life might have been like had she been a boy:
At bottom is always the bitter knowledge that all else is boys’ play – and that this boys’ play rules the world.
How I long, how I long to be free of this knowledge!
As Tiptree, this understanding was “insight.” As Alli Sheldon, it is merely the heavy centre of my soul.
Fictive lives and personae can be powerful and healing, for the writer and the world. Done ethically, they are no fiction at all.
I want to close with another quote from Le Guin, from a page on her website called “A Few Words to a Young Writer”:
Socrates said, “The misuse of language induces evil in the soul.” He wasn’t talking about grammar. [...] A writer is a person who cares what words mean, what they say, how they say it. Writers know words are their way towards truth and freedom, and so they use them with care, with thought, with fear, with delight.
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What do you mean by ethics in this context? I’m really curious. I think I agree with you, but I’m not sure I have a sense of what ethical guidelines you would expect of a person who is trying to write this way.
The context for this post is a hoax covered in Rosenbaum’s post, which I was too disgusted to address directly. Edit: the hoax, that is, not his post!
I’m having trouble parsing his post because of all the references. I also find some of his statements to be very vague, such as: Part of the deal is simply that if you can pull things off, you can pull them off; you just can’t be disingenuous that you’re taking a risk. Sometimes you can kiss people out of the blue and it will work out well, because you have read the situation right. Other times it will work out very, very badly. In those latter times you are not less at fault because you didn’t understand.
I understand that you don’t want to discuss it further, though I’ll stay subscribed in case you decide that you do.
Okay, so the difference for me is that Sheldon used Tiptree to work out her own discomfort with her gender, to explode myths about the kind of writing women could do, and that she faked nothing about herself but her gender and signature, mostly letting people draw their own conclusions. This other person appropriated a socially marginalised position, manipulated a whole bunch of people, and so forth. Tiptree had a social point that was beautifully executed. This other person was upset that people wouldn’t take a white dude seriously (!), and decided to slobber over lesbian sexuality in the guise of a lesbian’s own sexual awakening, and take attention from real Arab women, and ugh.