Fedwa Malti-Douglas holds an endowed professorship at Indiana University, where she practices feminist criticism in the departments of gender studies and comparative literature. Judging from the big-name blurbs on the jacket of her latest book, she is a well-known and admired figure in American academe. And given what’s inside the book, it would be odd if that were not the case. She is a remarkably inventive woman. And she has pluck. Ten thousand professional journalists and politicians have already excavated their way through the enormous documentary record of the Monica Lewinsky scandal. No matter: Malti-Douglas has lately plunged into the very same maze, improbably confident that she — a foreign visitor to the science of government — might yet find brand-new treasures. Damned if she hasn’t succeeded.
For instance. The Starr Report Disrobed makes meticulous reinspection of Lewinsky’s December 19, 1997, meeting with Vernon Jordan. That’s the one where Monica arrives at Jordan’s office weeping over the subpoena she’s just been served by Paula Jones’s attorneys. The president’s best friend is right away uneasy. Then, more alarming still, his visitor asks what chance he thinks there is that Bill and Hillary will get a divorce once their eight years in the White House are done. Next, even worse, Lewinsky wonders whether Jordan won’t please soon give the president a great big hug for her. “I don’t hug men,” the by-now thoroughly nonplussed superlawyer responds. After which he pats the youngster on the fanny and ushers her off the premises, fast as he can.
This would seem a quite familiar episode, and you would therefore think it the unlikeliest of sources for fresh, grand insight into the Meaning of Monica. But, then, how dull you are, when it comes right down to it. And how sharper than a faculty feud is Fedwa Malti-Douglas, Ph.D., who now guides us step by step through a second and altogether revelatory examination of the evidence. The gravest issue raised by Lewinsky’s interview with Jordan, The Starr Report Disrobed informs us, is also the most obvious one. No, no, not perjury and witness tampering — please try to keep up, won’t you? — but “gender articulation.” In other words, that business about hugging.
Lewinsky proposes that Jordan engage Clinton in a physical “bonding” ritual. Jordan demurs, apparently because he believes himself obliged to offer the “traditionally American” response and thereby pay tribute to the “corporal limits of masculinity” in our culture. Here, Malti-Douglas points out, Jordan falls prey to a central confusion. The bourgeois taboo against explicit “homosocial” activity among heterosexual males is not at all what prevents these two powerful friends from hugging each other as they might secretly wish to. Instead, Clinton and Jordan cannot perform a man-to-man embrace for the elemental reason that . . . neither of them is a man. I will not spoil it for you by fully recounting the tour de force of critical inquiry by which Malti-Douglas establishes the pivotal role of “heteronormal emasculation” in the Monica Lewinsky drama. Suffice it to say that The Starr Report Disrobed more than proves this case. By the time the young woman shows up in Jordan’s office, and by the inexorable turn of preceding events, “he and the president have already been transformed into females.”
No question about it: Bill Clinton is a woman. How on earth could Mike Isikoff have failed to report this news three years ago? And how could anyone resist the dazzling book that reports it now?
Well, all right, some people could conceivably resist it. Readers of an especially fuddy-duddy temperament may be distracted from the enormous pleasures of The Starr Report Disrobed by certain curious things its author has done. First, Malti-Douglas has liberally fertilized her book with what earlier generations of scholars quaintly referred to as “factual errors.” She says the Starr Report “requests future action from the United States Congress.” It requests nothing. She says that Clinton and Lewinsky, as documented in that report, engaged in “anal sex.” They did not — at least no one has ever said they did. She says that before September 1998, “few people outside Washington had ever heard of Judge Kenneth Starr.” Sorry: He had been world famous since the previous January and had enjoyed an enviable national reputation for years before that. And so on. My list is very long.
Problem number two: Malti-Douglas has made herself personally unattractive — with her screeching portrayal of Starr as some kind of psychological gestapo agent, her series of bitterly mocking asides about what she takes to be Starr’s intended audience of “red-blooded” yokels, and her eagerness to entertain even the most ludicrous anti-anti-Clinton fantasies about what “really” happened (e.g., Lewinsky was a blackmailer who deliberately manipulated the president into staining her dress).
Finally, there is Malti-Douglas’s prose. A fair bit of it is devoted to eye-glazing trivia — page after page, for example, on the graphic design of various for-profit paperback editions of Starr’s impeachment referral to Congress: “The blue letters on the white background are a reverse image of the white letters on the blue background of the bottom stripe.” Unfortunately, this last is one of the few sentences in the book you don’t have to read twice to figure out. Most of the rest are virtually incoherent. There are verbs that don’t agree with their subjects — or that change tense, sometimes more than once, in the course of a single thought. There are words and phrases, oh so many of them, that do not appear in nature, at least the way she uses them: overcoding, culpabalizes, the ludic, the intertext, cigars as a privileged item, Betty Currie as a verificatory instrument who embodies reverse spatial power configurations.
Perhaps Malti-Douglas has gunked up her book on purpose. Perhaps she intends the gunk to reassure her fellow academicians that, notwithstanding her current engagement with the Lewinsky scandal, the most impossibly bohunk and vulgar of American spectacles, she remains one of them, a tenured intellectual. Which is to say: a barky, self-satisfied misanthrope who writes very, very badly and hasn’t the foggiest idea what she’s talking about. Perhaps, in other words, it is all a trick — and she isn’t such a person.
But perhaps she is, though I would rather not believe it, and perhaps it makes no difference. For despite itself, and whatever the conscious intentions of its author, The Starr Report Disrobed serves a serious purpose.
With amazing consistency throughout the book, Malti-Douglas treats the personalities, events, and testimony of the Lewinsky affair as if they exist only in the realm of imagination. There is a world called “the Starr Report,” separate from our own. Within this world, Kenneth Starr is a scary god, a Zeus-like figure who plays with the quasi-mortal characters in his dominion as if they were toys, moving them through scenes he has scripted solely for the purpose of rewarding those he arbitrarily favors and punishing those he just as arbitrarily scorns.
Then, when he is done with the game, Starr writes the whole thing up and presents his account to us. At which point we get to play Zeus: free to accept or reject Starr’s text, alter its plot and themes, swap around its heroes and villains, turn its meaning upside down, even reassign its authorship — anything we want.
Watch Malti-Douglas in action. In her retelling, the independent counsel’s office “brings in” former White House chief of staff Leon Panetta and has him testify that there are procedures employed by West Wing staffers to prevent Clinton from compromising himself in private meetings with single women. By this testimony Starr is able to signal his “inherent heterosexist assumption that sexual danger comes from women.” Similarly, the Starr Report must have Betty Currie hide Lewinsky’s gifts from Clinton nowhere but under her bed . . . because it’s a bed: “a place where people have sex.” The iconographic garment Starr has chosen for Monica is not a pants-suit but a dress, Malti-Douglas concludes, because “it feminizes her.” Monica is made to mistake the splotch on that dress for spinach dip because, alone among vegetables, spinach “calls up that popular comic-strip character Pop-eye, whose consumption of spinach was linked to his muscle mass and his masculinity.” And masculinity equals semen. And semen equals Clinton. Thus are the “gendered sexual conceptions and fascinations of the Office of Independent Counsel” revealed.
On the face of it, this is the purest insanity. None of these people was collaborating with Kenneth Starr so that he might better express his own psychosexual hang-ups in the literary form of an impeachment referral. They did what they did and said what they said because they chose to, on their own. Malti-Douglas cannot believe otherwise. She is merely showing off, performing the same byzantine interpretive tap dance on the Starr Report that hack academics everywhere routinely perform on works of fiction.
And yet, by this otherwise dreary and meaningless exercise, has she not also, whether she realizes it or not, stumbled upon something almost profound? She has handled the vital document in a great controversy of our nation’s public life as if it were a work of fiction. Put another way: Fedwa Malti-Douglas has announced that the material of our politics is now the equivalent of a fictional text. Nothing more important. Nothing to be more respectfully practiced or scrupulously studied. And nothing any less appropriate for her special brand of infantile frivolity.
Is she wrong about that? Malti-Douglas has written a book-length treatise on the Lewinsky scandal which somehow manages entirely to ignore the law as both an idea and a reality.
But then, the president of the United States himself ignored the law — and the executive branch of government defended him for it, and the caucus of Senate Democrats who guaranteed his impeachment acquittal effectively closed their eyes.
Ordinary citizens, come to think of it, were generally Malti-Douglasoid about the whole thing, too. They saw it as an absorbing story for a time, rather like a blockbuster development in some daytime soap: The lead character may have cheated on his wife and committed a crime! But the country grew quickly tired of this plot, and never saw how it might implicate anything truly consequential (like the integrity of the constitutional system), and . . . c’mon already, give that Clinton guy a break. Translated from the graduate-seminar jargonese, these are The Starr Report Disrobed’s conclusions, as well.
Spooky, isn’t it?
David Tell is opinion editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
