Although I previously characterized Lorrie Moore's Self-Help as a "wasteland of ideas," in fact one of the stories contains one idea. The story is "Go Like This," and the idea is the disturbing concept of "aesthetic suicide" (p. 73).
The story's protagonist, Liz, has breast cancer that has spread. Although her doctor advises her that "women have survived much greater damage than you have suffered, much worse odds, worse pain than this" (p. 68), Liz decides to kill herself on Bastille Day with an overdose of Seconal. "[S]uicide [is] the most rational and humane alternative to my cancer, an act not so much of self-sacrifice as of beauty, of sparing" (p. 71), she tells her friends.
Some of her friends protest, but her husband, Elliot - who won't sleep with her after her mastectomies, despite her continuing sexual desire for him - thinks that "[suicide] will possibly be the most creative act Liz has ever accomplished," and adds, "I think it is beautiful she is doing this for me" (p. 73).
Elliot's attitude is a pity because his stance deprives the story of an opportunity to explore seriously the idea it raises. Despite the fact that luminaries like Martha Gellhorn have agreed with Liz's assertion that "intelligent suicide is almost always preferable to the stupid lingering of a graceless death" (p. 72), "Go Like This" reduces Liz's thinking to a pathetic rationalization. With her husband rebuffing her sexual desires, masturbating after she goes to sleep and expressing relief and gratitude for her exit strategy, Liz's suicide cannot be "the culmination of a life philosophy, the triumph of the artist over the mortal, physical world" (p. 72-73); rather, it is a demoralized accession to her husband's will.
In "Go Like This," Moore does more than "focus[] on the visceral." Whether consciously or not, she seems to cast aspersions on the cerebral. Not content to ignore ideas completely, in "Go Like This," Moore suggests that ideas - "big ideas," "existential" ideas ("It's Hemingway" (p. 69)) - are devices for self-deceit.
Of course, Moore's suspicion of "big ideas," and her insistence on the primacy of the visceral, emotional and irrational in women's lives, is itself a big idea - and not a new one: it's the idea that when women try to think, they get themselves into a muddle.
Far from condemning this message as sexist, Moore's stories seem to argue that this banishment of women to the Irrationality Reserve is true-to-life and aesthetically-liberating. My own perspective is that this argument is no less deceptive than Liz's contorted rationalizing and no less of an amputation than Liz's mastectomies.
An aesthetic without ideas is not "female": it's amoral. And glorifying such an approach as essentially female isn't "women's art": it's aesthetic suicide.
Although I previously characterized Lorrie Moore's Self-Help as a "wasteland of ideas," in fact one of the stories contains one idea. The story is "Go Like This," and the idea is the disturbing concept of "aesthetic suicide" (p. 73).
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