Enjoy these excerpts from the discussion, offered by one of the top-ranked English and creative writing departments in the nation:<\/strong><\/p>\n Many of the major figures of the period were very concerned, and perhaps with good reason, that the domain of culture was becoming more and more filled up with morons, with stupid people who seemed to be asserting themselves in the cultural realm in ways that some people found very disturbing.\u00a0 So in a sense, Loos wrote this book for her friend, H.L. Mencken \u2013 clearly the most important relationship hovering in the background of this novel \u2013 as a kind of rebuke. He was a big intellectual, but he seemed to like dumb girls, which frustrated her very much as an intelligent girl. He coined the famous term “booboisie,” for a whole class of people that he saw running rampant in early 20th<\/sup> century American culture \u2013 and here in the person of Lorelei was one of the booboisie, someone Loos would describe as representing the “lowest possible mentality of the nation.”<\/p>\n If that\u2019s what she wanted to represent, why did she choose to write in first person? This seems to me to be a crucially interesting choice.\u00a0 It produces this whole familiar problematic of the \u201cunreliable narrator.\u201d Didn\u2019t this complicate the distance Loos apparently wanted to create between herself as author, and Lorelei as character? There is meant to be maximum distance between the two \u2013 Loos smart; Lorelei dumb.\u00a0 But when you launch off into a first person narration, hour after hour as you\u2019re writing this you\u2019re saying “I… I… I… I… I…”\u00a0 In the process of writing this novel, the project of distancing herself clearly got complicated.\u00a0 So much so that it\u2019s \u00a0just not clear that Lorelei is in any way a successful representation the “lowest possible mentality of our nation.”<\/p>\n Sure, she\u2019s a poor speller, that\u2019s unambiguous, but even her bad spellings have this genius to them on occasion. She\u2019s smart in a curious way, very canny in getting what she wants.\u00a0 But there\u2019s something stranger, a double-voicedness in this narrator.\u00a0 Anita Loos and her character share one voice, but if you look at it closely, these voices combine and intertwine in a way that makes them very difficult to separate.\u00a0 The effect is fascinating, interesting in the same way that high modernist experiments are also interesting.<\/strong><\/p>\n The men she communicates with most openly are men who, like her, are grifters \u2013 men who are in dire straits, who need to shift for themselves. She interacts with two other groups of men, besides these comrades-in-arms: One is the men who are who are rich. Then we get the sexual threats, men who are rich, but not rich enough for Lorelei.\u00a0 She is wary of these men, because they can\u2019t give her anything \u2013 they can\u2019t give her any money, they can only ruin her. Lorelei doesn\u2019t care about ruination when it\u2019s for money.\u00a0 She just doesn\u2019t want to do it for free.<\/p>\n Loos makes a great alteration in what is actually very old plot \u2013 the courtesan’s diary.\u00a0 Think of characters like the 19th-century Harriette Wilson; there are tons of others. What a courtesan\u2019s diary would do is name names. It could be used for two purposes. One, if you lost favor with the mark, you could exploit the connection with these wealthy men to get blackmail money.\u00a0 Two, if the man passed away, you could sell it on the open market. The courtesan\u2019s diary was a canny way of turning personal information into money. This is a fictional version of that.<\/p>\n By introducing the scenario writer at the end of the novel, right when as Lorelei \u00a0marries, she allows this courtesan to have a marriage and still be a mistress.\u00a0 She is able to be a wife and, it turns out, a mother, and still maintain her connection to the demimonde. This is Loos\u2019s great achievement in fiction. In most of the history of the novel, you could\u00a0 go \u00a0one or the other. You couldn\u2019t have both.<\/p>\n [Question from audience: “Do you think she\u2019s a psychopath or a sociopath?”<\/em>]<\/p>\n I think she\u2019s just a path. You have to be shifty in a new country. Before the civil war, in the Southwest Literature \u2013 meaning Alabama, Mississippi, the old Southwest \u2013 a character named Captain Simon Suggs said, “You have to be shifty in a new country.” That’s what it meant to be conning your way through. She\u2019s just doing what she has to do in order to survive. If she didn\u2019t, she would have simply been raped in Little Rock \u2013 and who knows what would have happened then. She would have gone to jail for murder \u2013 and who knows what would have happened then.\u00a0 Every step of the way is simply an act of survival, with a great deal of shrewdness.\u00a0 Now the society, and the way it\u2019s depicted, is completely whacked out. There are very few genuinely serious people who are not after money. You don\u2019t have characters who really want to discover the truth about the world, or dismiss all of this money-grubbing stuff, or say “I will marry for love.\u201d\u00a0 You have a completely different universe here.\u00a0 And she\u2019s trying to survive in that universe.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A few months ago, the Another Look Book Club event discussed Anita Loos’s Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.\u00a0 The May 28 event was moderated by the English department\u2019s\u00a0Hilton Obenzinger, well known for his \u201cHow I Write\u201d series of conversations with authors (available … Continue reading ![\"\"](\"http:\/\/anotherlook.stanford.edu\/\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/10\/obenzinger.jpg\" "\\"obenzinger\\"")
<\/a>HILTON OBENZINGER\u00a0<\/strong> When Gentlemen Prefer Blondes<\/em> came out in 1925, it was a complete sensation. High modernist authors like William Faulkner loved it. Some loved it with a little bit of condemnation mixed in:\u00a0 Wyndham Lewis criticized the book \u2013 and then compared it to Gertrude Stein a few years later. This was the first time a book featured a vernacular female voice that seemed to ramble on.\u00a0 Some people thought it was a parody of stream-of-consciousness writing. That\u2019s why it electrified some of the modernist scene. Here was this completely na\u00efve-sounding voice, uneducated Lorelei from Arkansas, who had all kinds of incredible insights into the world through her na\u00efvet\u00e9.\u00a0 This is part of a long tradition in American literature going back before Huckleberry Finn<\/em>, as well as part of the tradition of the confidence game, which is what she is playing. She is playing it in order to fool men out of their money.\u00a0 The men she meets have enough money so that they can lose it and still have plenty. There\u2019s no crime here, even though there\u2019s plenty of criminal activity.\u00a0 She is a swindler.\u00a0 A swindler through sex.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"http:\/\/anotherlook.stanford.edu\/\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/10\/mark_mcgurl.jpg\" "\\"mark_mcgurl\\"")
<\/a>MARK MCGURL<\/strong> Probably the first thing we say about the modernist novel is that it is interested in the representation of consciousness of thought through a stream-of-consciousness narrative, which is more or less original to the period.\u00a0 Loos’s particular use of the diary form seemed to be sharing that fascination. As Lorelei says, \u201cI mean I seem to be thinking practically all the time.\u201d Loos\u2019s novel is clearly annexing that fascination with the mind, with consciousness, with broader questions about the status of the intellect in the early 20th<\/sup> century.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"http:\/\/anotherlook.stanford.edu\/\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/05\/jarvis.jpg\" "\\"jarvis\\"")
<\/a>CLAIRE JARVIS<\/strong>\u00a0 If you were to refer to a \u201cgentlemen\u201d in the 19th<\/sup> century novel, you would be mean a man with a specific social status, someone of the gentry, someone who owned land and had property. When Lorelei uses the word, she means \u201cman.\u201d\u00a0 She doesn\u2019t mean anything about status.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"http:\/\/anotherlook.stanford.edu\/\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/05\/loos-book2.jpg\" "\\"loos-book2\\"")
<\/a>HILTON OBENZINGER\u00a0 <\/strong>Lorelei knew how to play it one way or the other; she’s quite shrewd.\u00a0 What actually is of value? If you think<\/em> it\u2019s pearl, if you think <\/em>it\u2019s diamond \u2013 well, then it is. That’s how the commercial commodity exchange works.\u00a0 Remember the pet rock? It was a joke. \u201cHere\u2019s a rock, here\u2019s your instructions for the care and handling of the rock.\u201d And it sold!\u00a0 People knew it was a joke, but they still bought it.\u00a0 That\u2019s hearkens back to a lot in American culture about the con game.<\/p>\n