Bisexual Novels

I had occasion today to think a bit about one of my recent Splash du Jour morning quotations.
It was the one from yesterday. Milan Kundera’s words:
All great novels, all true novels, are bisexual.

It’s so succinct. So uniquely put. So much more can be said about it.
Admittedly, (a truly and I mean truly) UN-literate person, albeit nice and wise and lovable in every other way (like my mother, for instance) would read that sentence and say, “What? The only books that are great books are books about bisexual people?”
Or (again, I’m going to the extreme here with the unliterate thing).... “What? He thinks that a book has to have a bisexual theme for it to be good?”
But we know that this is not at all what Kundera is saying.
He is saying that for a novel to be truly “great” it should appeal equally to both male and female readers. It should be so great in scope, so fair in its treatment of ideas, so unbiased in its assessment of what makes humanity human, that it can be received equally by male or female readers.
A novel that sets out to be (or somehow ends up being) one that only a man would read.... a book that would never capture the interest of a woman, cannot be said to be truly “great.”
Similarly, a book that only appeals to women may in many ways be a good and enjoyable book, but can it truly be considered “great” if no man on earth would read it?
The question may then be raised.... “Which books are which?”
What is the criteria? Who decides?
I don’t know.
But can you imagine if books, like Olympic sports, had to be constantly separated into male and female? Can you imagine if we had to award authors in this way?
We’d have what? The Man Booker Prize and the Woman Booker Prize?
Some guy might say at this point, “Yes, that’s all fine and well, but when I read, I want to read a MANLY book. A book that is talking about MAN-type stuff, and doing so in a manly way!”
Hmmm. From a literary standpoint, I worry about that guy, to tell you the truth.
Does the above hypothetical scenario mean that the man is unliterary?
I guess I would venture to say..... “Probably yes!”
In my humble opinion, if a man seeks out only the type of novel that he supposes a man ought to read, he cannot possibly be involved in the honest quest of great literature.
Why?
Because great literature is never written in order to exclusively appeal to either of the sexes, be the proposed reader male or female.
Truly great novels transcend this limitating factor, and in so doing, can be described as bisexual.
I think that this is the kind of thing that Kundera is getting at, with his succint and more-than-meets-the-eye phrasing.

Now, here is why I had occasion to think of these matters today.
I began reading a new book, having just finished the [excellent] Kundera one.
This new one is called Life Mask, and it’s by Irish-Canadian author Emma Donoghue. I have read two others by her and I find her to be a FABULOUS writer.
But there is the little matter of the COVER of the book. [And it can be seen in my “Currently Reading” sidebar to the left, but I will also place it directly here in this blog, in case this particular entry is one day being read from the Archives section by aliens who are interested in investigating the blog-lives of the earthlings that they have long since abducted and taken to their own planet to be housed in cylindrical cold-storage containers labelled Humansicles: “Male” and “Female”.]
Anyhoo... here is the cover of my current novel in progress:

As you can see, it is not exactly, umm.... manly-ish.
It’s not exactly.... The Hunt For Red October.
Nor is it anything like the covers of the Sackett series, by Louis L’Amour.
There is nothing even remotely Zane Grey-ish about this cover.
And so today at lunch, I retreated to the Board room where I love to put my feet up, digest, and read for a bit.
But I was not alone.
My co-worker Kevin was in there.
He was reading John Grisham’s The House of Torts.
Damn good cover.
As I retrieved this Donoghue book of mine and set it on the table, I actually found myself making several attempts to hide the cover of the thing, and I tried to also be very quiet and invisible-ish, so that Kevin would not ask me what I was reading.
And he never did. All went well.
My point in all of the above is to show that there is a subtle (and I guess sometimes not so subtle) IDEA of what we should be reading, and often the lines of demarcation are drawn along gender-laden presuppositions. As in, this book is for women. That one is for men.
But the really great authors, like Kundera, Donoghue, Saramago, Atwood, Tolstoy, Nabokov... these people are, (or were) writing for a much larger audience.
Humans in general.
All great novels, all true novels, are bisexual.
You can’t tell a book by its cover.