The Shame of Being a Man: Humiliation and/as Heroism

Abstract

Chapter 4 discusses recent fiction and autofiction by canonical male authors, considering the relationship between masculinity and shame, and highlighting the persistent association between shame and femininity in works by male authors. The textual analyses of Philip Roth’s The Dying Animal (2001), Martin Amis’s The Pregnant Widow (2010), and Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle II: A Man in Love (2009/2014) suggest that, too often, men’s writing of and on shame seeks to disavow that shame, to project it onto female bodies, and/or to make of its confession a kind of heroism. The Roth and Amis novels are read as displacing male shamefulness (particularly, but not only, sexual shame) onto vulnerable female bodies – bodies that are sometimes also racially othered. The reading of Knausgaard then shows how that text, despite evincing an unusual perspicacity on the subject of masculine shame, ultimately transforms its ‘struggle’ with shame into a literary struggle for ‘authenticity’ and leaves intact the association of shamefulness and the feminine. An analysis of Knausgaard’s critical reception considers also how his positioning as (exceptional, paradigmatic, Proustian) Author counters his narrative of shame and failure with one of literary ‘greatness’, remasculinising him in the process.