Hello friends,
I passed my oral exams yesterday, which means I am officially ABD, or all but dissertation. That’s huge—an accomplishment—but I feel like I got away with something, like I didn’t do the work of writing two nearly 30-page papers, one academic and the other both academic and experimental, each the result of many hours of intensive reading, dozens of journal articles, and hours of sleepless thinking. Maybe it’s just negativity bias (“the propensity to attend to, learn from, and use negative information far more than positive information”) or maybe it’s my perpetual imposter syndrome, or maybe the depression hole I emerged from two and a half months ago is opening up under my feet (I really hope it’s not that…). Whatever it is, I am trying to make space to acknowledge that I did a thing, that I wrote a lot and thought many thoughts and made some interesting arguments that maybe I’ll do something with one day, and if not, that’s also fine.
I’ve been feeling really stuck recently. In my writing, for one, but also in my thinking. I have been extremely anxious over the past couple weeks regarding some of the twitter discourse and the critic discourse going around regarding a multitude of things that seem to center, really, on the idea of pain. What do we do with it when we write about it, when we depict it? How do we lean on it for substance or emotional manipulation in literature? Why do we recoil against it or turn toward it in our choices of fiction or entertainment? When is its depiction exploitative and when is it necessary and how can we tell?
This might not be, mind you, an accurate representation of what other people are actually talking about—mostly, I’ve been seeing the Twitterati talk about the notion of trauma, or the trauma plot, as Parul Seghal put it in a recent essay that sparked a lot of this talk (not that this is the first time we’ve talked about these things in a forum where we’re rarely, actually, talking to anyone but ourselves and the few, rare people who read our words carefully). But where other people put the word “trauma,” whether they were talking about the capital T or lowercase variety (which are somewhat conflated in the essay itself, and, to be fair, by many people discussing the widely-used term), what I sensed was an undercurrent of questions about pain and its depictions: whether personal, cultural, shared, systemic, universal, an/or existential.
This may be totally wrong, though! Maybe nobody is talking about that. Maybe that’s just what I’m thinking about, what I’m projecting onto it all.
I said I was anxious before, and I was, and I am, but I know many people have anxiety, and so I don’t mean to make myself seem special or different by saying this, nor am I asking for any special treatment—I am simply saying that I’ve been anxious, and in my anxiety, I’ve become stuck. I’ve come to feel small and cramped. So this is me trying to unstick, to stretch, to think out loud.
As I write this, I can’t help noticing how often I hedge. How fearful I am of owning my own experience lest someone come along and tell me that it’s wrong or not enough or, worst of all, that it’s taking something away from someone else.
To be clear, no one is actually saying that! I am not being criticized or attacked for having the wrong experience, for saying the wrong thing, for being the wrong kind of person. I am not being attacked, full stop. I know this. I do.
Still, I find myself living my online life in a perpetual cower, as if there is a cudgel being wielded menacingly above my head. There is not, of course. I am safe, sitting in front of my computer in my white, slender body (albeit a disordered body that hurts, and that I most often hate), in my overpriced apartment, with family support nearby, an able-bodied partner who helps caretake my disabled one, enough money at the moment to both support my life and its weird needs and to give some away both regularly and occasionally to causes and organizations and beloveds and strangers I care about. That is a whole lot of safety.
Of course, I’m unsafe in other ways, like many of us are. Climate catastrophes are everywhere. We’re in the midst of an ongoing pandemic. We’re also in the midst of rising authoritarian rule here in the US and a similar turn to authoritarianism and fascism in many other places around the globe. Despite and alongside all the awfulness, people everywhere, in small and large ways, are fighting the literal and metaphorical rising tides of climate change and fascism, the evils of capitalism and sexist and queerphobic and xenophobic violence (whether interpersonal or state), not to mention a thousand and one other injustices.
So why do I cower? Is it TikTok’s favorite answer to almost any uncomfortable behavior—by which I mean, is it a trauma response? Is it a toxic kind of fragility, potentially the familiar white fragility? Is it just how my particular brain processes anxiety? Is it the fault of social media and its ability to foster mob mentality and nuance-less tirades and attacks on individuals rather than the systems enabling or encouraging them? Is it simply the alienated way so many of us exist in online spaces? The normalization of scolding others as a kind of enactment of power and even an act of dissent (that, often, comes at the expense of working on oneself and one’s own issues or trying to make changes in the spheres one can actually control)? Is it that familiar thing I’ve been told since I was a child—I’m just too sensitive? Is it a little bit of all these things?
If it hasn’t yet become clear, my anxiety is expressed in the form of a kind of paranoia. I am like a rabbit in a field when a little girl runs into it to pick flowers. Nothing about the little girl signals “hungry predator” except that she is big and near and human. Even though this particular rabbit has never been hunted by humans, its ancestors somewhere along the way were, and that knowledge may be stored inside its little body, or it might not be. Either way, the instinct to freeze takes over. If the little girl pauses to look at the rabbit (which she might not; the flowers are so red and bright this morning) it’s only because the creature’s sudden stillness has caught her attention. Otherwise, would she even have seen it scurrying through the tall weeds, or would its soft patter have blended into the rest of the field’s ambient buzzing and chirping and rustling?
So. What am I more afraid of? Not being noticed at all? Or being noticed only when deserving of the cudgel? Is this about attention? Is this about wanting more of it? Less of it? I don’t have answers, at least not yet. But I am practicing being curious about my least comfortable feelings rather than judgmental of them. I am practicing asking questions of them rather than begging them to go away or berating myself for having them.
But I will say I hate that I read so much of the world in this paranoid fashion. I don’t want to assume that the worst will be assumed of me. I want to control that, although, of course, I can’t. In the process, I suspect I end up being even more obnoxious, trying to hew to a particular way of being—a performance I don’t even register as one anymore—that will prove that I am trying my hardest, doing my best, to be a person who puts comfort, interest, art, joy, and compassion into the world. I can’t prove anything. I can only do what I do and live how I live and hope that the people I come in contact with will see that and, if they don’t, that’s all right. It has to be all right.
In his recent newsletter, Brandon Taylor wrote that he’s been thinking about “The way that people read fiction these days, on the hunt.” He continued:
One of my creative writing teachers used to describe the kind of attention he wanted us to bring to workshop stories as reading like a prosecutor. This strikes me as a form of paranoid reading in which the reader approaches a text from the defensive supposition that the author is out to deceive and beguile and misdirect. You look for holes in the author’s defense through which the poorly disguised light of biography shines.
Taylor easily puts this form of reading, or critiquing, to rest: “I think it’s very boring, personally.” This is one of the things I admire about him; his ability to dismiss this sort of reading, not by calling it wrong or amoral or foolish, but simply recognizing how utterly boring it is, for him. (Of course, even this is an oversimplification. He wrote a whole essay about Seghal’s aforementioned essay and paranoid reading and trauma and its plottiness or lack thereof and you should read it.)
I often feel very crazy when I try to describe these kinds of ambient forces in ~the culture~, in part because I don’t know if it’s in ~the culture~ at large or if it’s just on twitter. I suspect that at this point, it’s broader than just being on twitter, even if some of this particular kind of paranoid reading is influenced by the platform and by social media at large. I know some of my students have certainly read this way, and many of them were on social media platforms besides twitter. And some critics are writing this way, too, on the hunt, as it were, preemptively punching in the direction they perceive as up (although, is it, always, really?).
Oddly, while I spend my time online harrowingly anxious (and before you ask—yes, I also enjoy aspects of it, or I’d have left already), I don’t write criticism from a paranoid perspective. At least, I don’t think I do. I’ve never wanted to, and I still don’t. It is boring. But I can see how and why it isn’t for the people who write that way. I can understand their motivations. I can often even understand and respect their viewpoint, even if I don’t agree with it. What I don’t trust is that I will be extended the same generosity, although, once again, I’m not sure where I learned to think this way. I fear that if someone thinks I am wrong in my opinions about aesthetic or emotional concerns in a piece of literature, then they’ll think that I am wrong in every possible way. That my ethics are wrong, that my attitude is wrong, that my very self and being are wrong.
And, at the moment, that fear of where I am “wrong” is focused on the idea that I am a “bad person” (not that I even know what that means) because I find deep comfort in art’s ability to give voice to pain and transform it into something like beauty.
I suspect that this reaction of mine is, in part, related to the way that I exist in my body. Which is to say, as little as possible. I prefer being a mind, and am largely just grossed out and embarrassed by my body’s needs, disgusted by its internal and external anatomy, itchy in its confines and increasing limitations.
For years, I was basically told that my body was absolutely fine and that it was my mind that was diseased, or that, if there was something wrong with my body, it was because of that old nutty brain. While I have long been safe, or safe-ish, I did grow up in a country that indoctrinated me to believe that not only was I not safe but I never would be (while my parents never espoused this rhetoric or position, there’s only so much a child can do about what she absorbs at school, on TV, at her friends’ houses, etc.). While my mind may be able to say “I’m over it,” my body remembers. Then, too, there’s the whole intergenerational trauma thing; while I may not be hunted, my grandparents were. Their families were. Hunted and largely annihilated. Some part of my body remembers that as well.
So. Nearly half my life has been spent in pain: both physical and psychic. Some of it has been in my control. Some of it has been self-inflicted. But much of it hasn’t. So I have long been drawn to literature that manages to depict pain well, in one way or another. I have found very little fiction that is about people with bodies like mine, disordered and painful. Pain is actually pretty difficult to write about well and is, I suspect, dull for most people to read about, especially when it’s chronic, constant, and mysterious. Yes, of course, there’s all the wilting becouched heroes and heroines of various classics, swooning with some wasting disease or another, delicately coughing up blood or bravely lying in bed all day with stern smiles and encouragements to those around them to live, live! But descriptions of their daily experiences seem rare.
So, instead, I find myself drawn to those characters in other kinds of physical and psychic pain. Which means, often, characters who have some kind of trauma. I can’t relate to them necessarily, because their pain is not my pain and mine is not theirs, but that’s not what I read literature for, nor why I’m drawn to them. I’m drawn to them because the ability of art to depict pain awes and moves me. It makes me feel and helps me access my own feelings around my own pain. Not as parallel or comparable, but simply as allowed, as existing.
As I said before, I’ve been very anxious, and I wrote to a former teacher of mine about it, and he wrote back very reassuringly, and then in my response to him I was able to articulate some of this:
it's as if, and maybe I'm off-base here, but as if we're especially suspicious of depictions of pain. This has been conflated with trauma, recently, which I think isn't quite the same thing. It feels as if there's this paradigm that says: if you don't disclose how your pain is exactly like your characters' pain then you are a fraud and how dare you depict this kind of pain, clearly you're reveling in trauma porn. And, too, there's a suspicion of those who, like me, find holiness and beauty in depictions of pain. Not in pain, per se--because pain in real life, as it were, in one's own experience, is never pleasant (unless it's deliberately sought out, which I'm putting in a slightly different category). Pain inflicted by others in life is not beautiful; it's ugly and uncomfortable and scary and complicated. But pain depicted in art can be incredibly beautiful, and I've heard so many critiques of this mere idea, that it's somehow indicative of a poor soul indeed if one is able to deliciously revel inside the horrible, distressing beauty that is the depiction of pain. It's not that reading about pain makes me feel good. But it makes me feel and that feels as if it's taboo all on its own. I don't know--maybe this is all muddled at this point. I suppose I don't want to put pain on a literary pedestal, but I also don't know how to live in a world that is so full of pain (alongside and in the midst of love and joy and wonder!!) without having found the beauty that can be found in writing about it. If there is so much pain I can't control out there, and can't fix, then at least I do appreciate that artists can do something with it, make people feel, make people think, even just make people recognize that pain is one facet of the continuum of human emotion that we don't always have to run from, despite the American urge toward happy-happy-good-things-happy. Does that make sense?
Does it? I still don’t know. I’m still thinking about it. I think, like all things, it depends. It depends on the context, on the artists, on the effect, occasionally on the intention (though often not; the author is dead, etc. etc.).
One of Seghal’s conclusions in her essay is that “[s]tories are full of our fingerprints and our old coats; we co-create them. Hence, perhaps, that feeling of deflation at the heavily determined backstory, that feeling of our own redundancy, the squandering of our intuition.” With this, I most certainly agree. Being a co-creator of these stories is perhaps why I often find them so moving, so resonant. I am adding my story, my pain, subconsciously. I think, though, that Seghal gives readers too little credit; even with a full backstory, we can and do insert ourselves into characters’ minds and psyches. It is, I suspect, one of the reasons so many people dislike “unlikeable” narrators or characters these days; they are required, in the process of reading, to insert themselves into the mind of someone with problematic opinions, or selfishness, or ugly and uncomfortable feelings. Personally, I find that freeing and also fascinating, a way of expanding myself. But I can also understand why individuals turn away from this, especially in an atmosphere that conflates one’s entertainment of choice, one’s morals, one’s personhood, and one’s politics into a single, unnuanced receptacle marked “good” or “bad”.
Anyway. I’ll be over here, continuing to read my “depressing” books. I also read books that aren’t depressing at all, although the current one, which is not depressing, also happens to be about a 19th century surgeon-in-training and a boy who digs up bodies to sell to scientists… So maybe I’m just morbid. Maybe it’s just my preferences run to where they run, and maybe it’s not that deep at all.
Yours, etc.,
Ilana
I like this and how you expand on a Brandon Taylor's essay and your own feelings of anxiety. Which are valid and familiar.
It becomes impossible to write if you let your inner critic read over your shoulder, and worrying that you will be perceived from that prosecutorial view has our inner critics on high alert. Editing our work with empathy for others is critical, but you are not alone in worrying that everything you write will be assumed to be hurtful and voices with malice, or worse, indifference or ignorance to the experiences of others. I think this kind of prosecutorial reading has been weaponized with the intent of making valid criticism irrelevant.
Really enjoyed this Ilana. Thank you! And congrats on passing your oral exams.
Sorry you've been feeling anxious. I think we all do. It's a pretty fraught atmosphere online and in the twitterverse - there's a real 'gotcha' vibe at the moment in the way that people take joy in / pile on to people saying the wrong thing or expressing themselves clumsily. I've really felt sad about the lack of generosity in how we interpret each other's comments. No wonder we're all cowering a bit. I mean, even when I send a text message to a friend with a joke or some kind of acerbic remark, I kind of have to give myself a pep talk along the lines of 'this person knows you to be a friendly well-meaning person; he/she will interpret what you've said in the spirit it was intended; no need to apologise and over-explain yourself' etc etc. Ergh!
Thanks and look forward to hearing about what books you're reading :)