The first page of Epstein’s “Is Fiction Necessary?”
|||
"Is Fiction Necessary?" asked critic Joseph Epstein in an essay devoted to lamenting "the strains of literary puerilism" infecting American literature. Epstein hated the fragments, the roman-a-clef is "just an autobiography trying to escape libel laws." He hated how Iowa "ruined" Vance Bourjoily. He detested the absence of point of view, novels that run on stories without "the weight of destiny" and all the modernisms written for the "permanently ageless… who will go to their graves in denim and sideburns, eternally youthful in mind if desiccated in body."
Epstein wanted solubility— a novel with a strong arc and resolution, arousing foreplay that resulted in climax. Like many, Epstein wanted the experience of heteronormative sex from a novel.
Certainly, sexual frustration isn’t the critic’s whole story. Part of Epstein's “unnecessary fiction” fury can be traced to the blurring of genre distinctions. It is easier to critique a novel on the merits you were taught, and the merits you are teaching seem floppy when presented with literature that isn’t interested in them.
|||
Eugenio Montale compared the practice of literature to carving a secret amulet in order to placate the world and the gods of darkness. John Gardner (who died in a motorcycle accident) lamented the US literary scene's immaturity, and added that it was useless to keep on pretending the game wasn't a "killer's baseball." Harold Brodkey said anyone who "spent his life working to become eligible for literary immortality is a fool." — And yet, that's precisely what Brodkey did.
|||
"You never know if you will survive a piece of fiction," Harold Brodkey said, of the danger of writing and touching unbearable, sordid things. Perhaps we read poetry openly, defenses down, because poets are baring themselves on the page, in line with cultural expectations that the poet is one who over-feels things. Perhaps we enter their over-feeling in order to feel relief from our own. On this view, fiction’s difference is related to the reader’s expectations; we come to it with a suspiciousness, a need to be convinced. The fiction writer has to overcome this reticence on the part of the reader (less so in popular, mass-market fiction).
|||
Across the board, whether in fiction, poetry, or talk-shows, we demand miracles from “empathy.” The buy-in is tempting. Certainly, I wanted to believe friends would relinquish their commitment to judging mothers when they, too, became mothers. But more than half those friends greeted new motherhood with an upgraded, uber-muscular judgment. The mommy wars raged through recipes, extracurriculars, and wine clubs. The mommy wars chased outrage through the hi-drama of their own stupidity.
Yes, I used the word stupidity (utter stupidity, I should have hissed).
Yes, I’m talking about your ‘women.’
|||
Verisimilitude is touted as the secret ingredient to the magical power of literature to “create empathy” in the reader. But US crime shows have not made Americans more spiritually or emotionally generous—we are more paranoid, more exhausted, more afraid, more conversant with violence and weapons, more invested in intellectual crime solving as salvation and for our protection. To believe one could predict and therefore avoid one’s rape is a statement of control, not a fact about the world. In this case, a delusion is a belief that grabs the past by its balls and pretends it was otherwise.
[Lo and behold, there I am on a screen: telling audiences, students, friends, strangers, that literature teaches us how to feel for others by imagining them. There I am, lying like my dog Radu in late capitalism.]
|||
How many times has the functional definition of empathy applied to what I believe my writing should be doing? At what point did I begin to believe I had the power to do this? In which instant did I anoint myself with this ‘mission’? How did doing good come to be conflated with the creation of products intended to stimulate empathy in others, as buttressed by the expectation that others would apply what they had learned from art-products in order to make the world a better place?
Elvia Wilk has written about how neoliberal philanthropy instrumentalizes compassion as "a lever to pull for spare change.” When individuals are emotionally taxed for systemic change, capitalist realism laughs.
"The system of empathy-incentivized giving perpetuates itself by creating the world in which it is necessary,” Wilks writes. And she is not lying.
Neoliberal discourse continuously invokes the power of "empathy transplant" as a solution to social problems. Those who labor as writers, artists, or designers are expected to “trigger” empathy. If we have done a good job of "triggering empathy," consumers will say the book changed their lives.
|||
Like other Gen X’ers, I watched Sally Jesse Raphael's “Save the Children” ad featuring the famished bodies of Ethiopian children alongside her sad, Hollywood-tweaked countenance. I remember top pop musicians linking arms to sing "we are the world” across the screens of my teens. My generation was raised on the images of distant suffering experienced by “others.” These images did not prevent the rise of committed xenophobia and racist political platforms eager to keep “others” out.
One might even argue that Americans cannot stand seeing suffering—they feel it as a personal violation of their Thanksgiving turkey-massacres. One might argue, for example, that we pay therapists to help us create “boundaries” against the suffering of others, and these boundaries are instrumental in fashioning new markets for exclusion, new weapons for protection, new lists of ‘trauma-prevention’ strategies that double as superstitions.
Every image of suffering is deployed doubly, and thrown back against those depicted as a form of “weakness” or failure. Antiabortion activists assail communities with the images of terminated fetuses. They call it ‘murde’r and then put the photo of murder on a T-shirt in order to demonstrate their sensitivity, or their heart for, unborn life. But it is gruesome really, this “heart for unborn life.” It is as gruesome as the countless boundaries we’ve erected in order to protect the lies from which we fashion our own victimhood.
|||
“Suspicion” is the belief that one is being lied to or secretly manipulated. The suspicious demand physical evidence and photographs of the gang rape. The demand to see in order to believe is generated, nourished, and developed daily by media.
"The empathy machine…works insofar as it is a trauma machine," Wilk writes. Virtual reality aims to cure trauma through exposure and desensitization. Rather than integrating trauma into life, virtual reality sets it apart and focuses on its eradication.
|||
My friend told me the hardest part of the Iraq war was the video games he had to play back in the US, as part of his training, prior to being sent abroad. The desensitization to shooting, and the continuous game of it. "Something in me broke,” he said. "I can't talk about killing or what it means—all of that feels so surreal to me."
The words surreal comes up again and I am thinking about tripping.
“It’s comforting for me to play those games,” my friend adds. “It’s the closet I can come to feeling innocent again, or remembering a self before any of it was real.”
|||
Not everyone who drinks will become an alcoholic. Not everyone who plays intense first person shooter games will lose the connection between reality and fantasy and become desensitized to human lives. But some will. Some will become alcoholics. Some will become addicted to violence and endorphins. Some will become mass shooters. Some will become better soldiers. Perhaps we waffle on acknowledging this because we want to protect our own access to pleasurable diversion. One suspects we already know the blatantly obvious, namely, the alcoholic abuse and video game abuse are stories of relationships, stories about time, frequency, duration, and investment. Someone who drinks on Saturdays (like someone who games on Saturdays) doesn't have the time to develop an unhealthy relationship with their entertainment. Even if Saturdays are desensitized, six other days of the week draw them back into life among feeling persons, among the suffering and reality.
Yes, I suggested that playing video games is not comparable to the difficult banality of caring for living, breathing humans with complicated needs in a culture that monetizes demands. No, I did not make an argument capable of proving this.
|||
I’m drawn to how Elvia Wilk outlines the grotesque "relationship between individual suffering and the systems that create it – between the personal story and the statistic." Empathy isn't a crowd behavior, it is an internal feeling that varies across minds, cultures, genders and languages. The “identifiable victim effect” demonstrates that people are more likely to help others when they have a face and a name, but the face and the name also matter. People are more likely to donate money to someone who looks like them or meets their aesthetic standards of attractiveness.
When people use the phrase “Pain Olympics”, I think of the word pageant, that noun for the competition of peacockery in which the most charismatic and beautiful human “wins”. Neoliberalism assumes people will do good if they see the light, get wild, or have a transformational event. There are multiple industries, workshops, retreats, consultants, modules which can lead to those transformational events if one has enough money to afford the transaction. But how much pixelated suffering does it take to create a feeling that leads to action?
Once again, we return to the trauma machine, the goal of causing hurt in order to make others feel ethically. Susan Sontag wrote about this, her writings on pain flatten talk about how pain flattens and ruins humans. I'll abstracted pain create a sort of attic aesthetic of misery in which the view were takes all the experiences of child abuse to be mirrored in that one iconic celebrity image. "To speak of reality becoming a spectacle," Sontag writes, "universalizes the viewing habits of a small, educated population living in the rich part of the world, when use has been converted into entertainment."
Granted, she wrote this before it major news venues like Fox and CNN officially became infotainment.
"There are hundreds of millions of television watchers who are far from inured to what they see on television,” Sontag snaps, “They do not have the luxury of patronizing reality.”