The Empathy Exams (18 page)

Jim was the one who told me that my emotional life made him dangle his stethoscope like a snake charmer: my moods weren’t hard to see but they were hard to read, and even harder to diagnose. It was ostensibly a complaint, but I think he liked his metaphor, and liked that our moments of distance were subtle enough to require this kind of formulation.

Meaning that I was a complex creature and so was he; that he became even more complex in his attempt to bridge the gap between our complexities; that he could create a complicated image to house this complex of complications. This is how writers fall in love: they feel complicated together and then they talk about it.

Figurative language often delivers us to the saccharine, drawing from its familiar grab-bag of tear-jerker props (“voice like honey,” “porcelain skin,” “waterfall of tears”), but it can also offer an escape hatch out of the predictability of sentiment. Metaphors are tiny saviors leading the way out of sentimentality, small disciples of Pound, urging “Say it new! Say it new!” It’s hard for emotion to feel flat if its language is suitably novel, to feel excessive if its rendering is suitably opaque. Metaphors translate emotion into surprising and sublime language, but they also help us deflect and diffuse the glare of revelation. Stevens describes this shyness: “The motive for metaphor, shrinking from / The weight of primary noon, / The ABC of being.”

Jim was afraid to speak in simple language—the ABC of being—so he spoke about cobras instead. This was not cowardice exactly, but rather a distaste for the bald and unexciting phraseology of relationships: the kind of thing that
anyone
might say to his girlfriend, rather than the particular thing that Jim could say to me.

What do we flee when we retreat into metaphor? What scares us about primary noon? Kundera claims that “kitsch moves us to tears for ourselves, for the banality of what we think and feel,” and I think our fixation with complication and opaque figuration has something to do with an abiding sense of this banality, creeping constantly around the edges of our lives and language. Perhaps if we say it straight, we suspect, if we express our sentiments too excessively or too directly, we’ll find we’re nothing but banal.

There are several fears inscribed in this suspicion: not simply about melodrama or simplicity but about commonality, the fear that our feelings will resemble everyone else’s. This is why we want to dismiss sentimentality, to assert instead that our emotional responses are more sophisticated than other people’s, that our aesthetic sensibilities testify, iceberg style, to an entire landscape of interior depth.

When they released NutraSweet in the 1980s, GD Searle & Co. knew that they needed an icon to assert novelty and familiarity at once. They were thinking basic shapes, vague connotations, comfort colors. In a way, they were looking for the opposite of Stevens’s motivated metaphor. They wanted a symbol that could descend into the belly of the “primary,” eschew complication and mystery in favor of assurance.

Searle hired two people who hadn’t—by their own report—tasted sugar in a decade. They were wary of choosing an image that was too sugary, too obviously rummaged from an old grab bag of tropes. The
New Yorker
quotes one of them on this dilemma:

“We’d have a meeting with the agency people, and someone would say, ‘What about hearts? Hearts are friendly. Hearts are sweet’ … They were talking about things that would have been absolutely saccharine.”

Even here, at its birthplace, saccharin disavows its namesake. It wants to protest the charge of being too much itself.

The Internet is full of saccharin-savvy doomsday prophets. They’ve got the dirt on cancer and FDA cover-ups. Their counterparts are scarcer. Saccharin-nut blogger Katie Kinker has this to say about our modern world:

Without artificial sweeteners, what would life be like today? Would their [
sic
] be tastey [
sic
] diet drinks, fruit juice drinks, chewing gum etc.? There wouldn’t be any pink or blue packets to dump into your iced tea. Things would be bland, and honestly, it is hard to imagine a society without artificial sweeteners. They are everywhere! Thank goodness for serendipity!

Katie achieves an almost perfect apotheosis of poor taste and saccharine attachments. If she ever found a tiny platinum box, she’d be tacky enough to load it up with Sweet’N Low. She probably reads Harlequin romance novels and cries at movies about dogs rescuing their injured owners. She is the quintessential object of a disdain I project onto some faceless saccharin(e)-hating other: she’s got an underdeveloped palate, an overdeveloped appetite, and an oversized heart.

I am trying to remember how I first learned that sentimentality was something I should be running away from. Even the end of the world starts with a saccharine text. Witness the Book of Revelation, where John is warned of an apocalyptic book. He is told: “It will be as sweet as honey in your mouth.” He is told: “It will make your stomach bitter.”

I think my fear might trace back to the
Harvard Advocate
, a literary magazine whose clapboard house was my nursery through most of college. I spent countless nights smoking cigarettes in a wood-paneled sanctum and bantering with other smokers about the terrible clichés we found in our submissions, about half of which we’d written ourselves.

Last night, I sat at my computer and Googled “Harvard Advocate + melodrama,” thinking I would find some collection of scathing reviews we’d published in the magazine, accusations steeped in irony and leveled against art that dared to feel anything too unabashedly. I’d find some record of our collective taste proclaiming itself, a dismissal of shameless sentiment.

In the end, I found only one entry. It was a quote from one of my own stories:

She imagined him as an executioner during childhood, probably only of bugs, possibly a few small or particularly deserving mammals. She guessed that he still lay awake some nights, haunted by the memory of these acts. He would never say haunted, though, she was sure of that. He seemed like the type to find that kind of melodrama unseemly.

Turns out
I
was the one preoccupied with the unseemliness of melodrama. I was just like the woman I’d written: always imagining that others had a problem with sentimentality because I couldn’t figure out the problem I had with it myself.

When I packed off for the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, I had a set of vague ideas about what I wanted to be writing. I wanted to write stories that were smart and funny and ruthless but I had no idea what they’d be about. I knew I didn’t want to write anything sentimental. My primary rudder was a morbid fear of anything too tender, too touchy-feely. So I created characters who hated themselves and disavowed pretty much everything around them. One of the first stories I wrote at the Workshop was about a girl named Sophie, whom I’d bequeathed with abysmal self-esteem and a slew of circumstances to justify it.

In response to my piece, one guy wrote: “I know someone’s going to want to kick me in the balls for saying this, but there are times when it seems like the author is just lining up Sophie’s misfortunes. She has a facial deformity that has crippled her self-esteem, she is sexually assaulted, guys don’t like her, she may have an eating disorder, and she’s a transfer student. Does anything ever go right for Sophie?”

It was a fair point. Sophie hated herself because I hated her too. I resented her for coaxing me into writing such a melodramatic story. I hated myself for making her hate herself so much.

I wasn’t the only one who felt this way. Another guy’s critique began like this: “I should start by saying that I did not find any of the characters likable at all … I had to follow characters I had trouble caring about while they did things I had trouble believing they cared about.” It was true: I’d been wary of giving Sophie much agency or investment. I knew the events of her story hovered at the brink of melodrama, and I feared that if I let her do anything, she might fling herself over the edge. So I wrote her tale in language described as a “passive voice epidemic”—an accusation I still describe passively, even in retrospect.

My fear of too much emotion—and my secondary fear of this fear—had joined forces to yield an embittered hybrid. I had somehow managed to weave the failures of sentimentality and anti-sentimentality into a single story, summoned an exaggerated string of tragedies and used them to make sure everybody felt nothing.

The line between pathos and melodrama becomes a question of mechanism: If the tropes are too easy, the narrative too predictably mannered, the sentiments exaggerated for the sake of emotional manipulation, the language cloying rather than fresh—all these cheapen the eliciting of emotion. Sentimentality describes the moment when emotion becomes a prop to bolster the affective egos of everyone involved. “Kitsch causes two tears to flow in quick succession,” Kundera observes. “The first tear says: how nice to see children running on the grass! The second tear says: How nice to be moved, together with all mankind, by children running on the grass.”

This is truly the obsequious fruit of child-sized pastorals—an image offering itself too effusively, charming us into submission by coaxing out the vision of ourselves we’d most like to see. Our tears become trophies and emblems of our compassion.

But doesn’t anti-sentimentality simply offer an inversion of that same affective ego boost? We reject sentimentality to sharpen a sense of ourselves as True Feelers, arbiters of complication and actual emotion. The anti-sentimental stance is still a mode of identity ratification, arrows flying instead of tears flowing, still a way to make a point about perceptive capacity: an assertion about discernment rather than empathy. It’s self-righteousness by way of dismissal: a kind of masturbatory double negative.

Even if there’s nothing aesthetically redeemable in the eliciting of the prepackaged double-tiered (teared) response that Kundrea describes, does it have some other value? How do we account for the pleasure people take in trashy romances or tearjerker films? What good is this mass eliciting of feeling? If it causes pleasure, isn’t there something to respect in that—or do we plead false consciousness and argue otherwise? Do we insist that better artwork can elicit a better kind of feeling—more expansive, supple, ethical?

Even melodrama can carry someone across the gulf between his life and the lives of others. A terrible TV movie about addiction can still make someone feel for the addict—no matter how general this addict, how archetypal or paradigmatic, no mater how trite the plot twists, how shameful the puppetry of heart strings. Bad movies and bad writing and easy clichés still manage to make us feel things toward each other. Part of me is disgusted by this. Part of me celebrates it.

I once spent an hour and a half listening to Buffy Sainte-Marie on repeat: “For better your pain, than be caught on Co’dine … An’ it’s real, an’ it’s real, one more time.” Co’dine puts a pad on the vein, and the song rips it off—
peeking on for some pain
instead of gauzing over it. It’s a familiar tension between feeling something and repressing it; facing it, or refusing to. But listening to the song on repeat—me with my cigarettes, with my parasitic sorrow—dissolves that familiar binary. Indulging in the sadness of that song became an anesthetic in its own right, sentiment absorbed like a drug, a way to feel one simple note over and over again—instead of whatever mess was waiting for me once the music had quieted.

Now Jim and I are running through the cobblestone alleys of the French Quarter. Pastel paint peeling off walls shows the pastel snake-skins of older walls beneath. I’m riding piggyback. We’re both screaming, because we are alive and in New Orleans and incredibly drunk and also—though we wear this knowledge lightly—in love with the person we’re riding (in my case) or the person who is riding us (in his). We might have had different ideas about
how
to get drunk, but now there’s nothing left to dispute. This is sweet. It asks no questions of us. We ask no questions in reply.

After breaking my heart, a poet (another poet!) wrote in one of his poems: “We drank coffee with so much cream we tasted only cream.” I wondered if that had been our downfall. Maybe it has always been my downfall: too much cream; too much sweetener in my coffee.

Perhaps I let myself believe too easily or fully in the surface of joy without attending to the complications of its underbelly. Perhaps this is why I’ve broken up with so many men after the initial flush of love gives way to something else. Perhaps I’ve committed myself too absolutely to honeymoons to reckon with their aftermath. I have never been “sweetie” or “honey” to anyone. Whenever some boyfriend called me “sweet,” it made me nervous: was I nothing more? It seemed so limited, seemed to state conclusively that something was lacking or wrong.

Honeymoon
means days that are too sweet to last, to be real or deep in the ways we are accustomed to understanding depth or reality—in terms of nuance and continuity, the inevitable chiaroscuro of highs and lows. The state of being intoxicated by the taste of honey—cloying, consuming—is juxtaposed as innocence against the harder task of lasting human relation. But is this the whole sad truth of sweetness? Its saturation point? Its ceiling?

How can I express my faith that there is something profound in the single note of honey itself? In our uncomplicated capacity for rapture, the ability to find our whole selves moved by something infinitely simple? I’m not sure how to say it right, with the kind of language that would be sentimental enough to support its point but not too sentimental to damn it.

Maybe I’m still talking to the poet, long after he stopped talking to me. Maybe I’m writing to justify myself, or else surrender completely:
I could make you another cup of coffee, I swear! I could make this one without so much cream—or else we could keep on drinking cream forever!
Maybe that poet wasn’t even writing about me at all.

“You’re so vain,” sang Carly Simon. “You probably think this song is about you.”