THE WORLD INNER AND OUTER

I was just chatting with a friend about the division of gender and inner and outer space as novels have evolved since the 1970s. She was asking me: DOn't you like Don DeLillo? Didn't you think Underworld was a masterpiece? Not to mention Wiliam Gass, William Gass, and a host of other brilliant men who got out there and completely reflected the distilled flat cultural vaccum that was the 1970s. On the other hand - there are so many other women writers -- Carole Maso, Kate Braverman, Jeannette Winterson, Mary Gaitskill who responded to this by going much more deeply into an internal space of raw emotionality, creating novels that were mythic and absolutely ravishing in their ability to sculp emotional power. I still weep at the end of GhostDance and Lithium for Medea. The question we got at is: Is reflecting the vaccum enough? As brilliant as Gravity's Rainbow is, is it a brilliant mirror of the disturbance of contemporary culture but ultimately, an adolescent work of art, because it only mirrors it without offering an alternative? And why is it that writing perhaps more than film or the visual arts does seem to still (I hate to use this word but there's just no way of getting around it) seem to follow this gender binarism of the male voice going towards the sociological external and the female voice probing further within?