Sequelae and Sensibility
From classic novels to current news, the power of sympathy—who gets to have it, and how—drives the stories we tell ourselves.
I suspect that many Americans—and especially American women—will continue to ask each other how we experienced Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony on September 27, 2018, during the hearings that culminated in the appointment of Brett Kavanaugh to the US Supreme Court. Even for the Trump Era, it was an especially grueling day for the emotions, which were further deranged by Kavanaugh’s testimony and the ensuing histrionics of the Senate Judiciary Committee. I remember feeling my cognition hit a limit during Lindsey Graham’s livid rebuke to his Democratic colleagues (“This is going to destroy the ability of good people to come forward because of this crap!”) and in his snarling defense of the nominee (“Are you a gang rapist!? . . . This is not a job interview, this is Hell . . . He’s the nicest person!”). One after another, it seemed, senators stepped up to cover for Kavanaugh’s bilious performance, camouflaging his obvious hostility with their even more splenetic acts of public rage. Adam Smith, Enlightenment herald of so many things American, would have described these men as sympathizing with Kavanaugh’s display of “the Unsocial Passions”—taking on the judge’s peevish indignation and sentimental collapse as their own, “conceiving what we ourselves should feel in the like situation.”
To sympathize with Kavanaugh that day was to buy into his story, to accept—if only for a time—its roots and rewards.
How we analyze emotions, what sympathy is, and what happens when that faculty fails are the focus of my new book, Failures of Feeling: Insensibility and the Novel. One essential premise is that we adopt a situational understanding of emotions. Reinforcing Smith’s claim that to sympathize with someone is to imagine “the like situation,” I define feelings as fundamentally narrative phenomena, the circumstances of cause and effect that led to this response, this action. In Failures of Feeling, I turn to early templates in fiction and philosophy, the “mother sauces” of contemporary narrative, to argue for a fundamental albeit unusual connection between storytelling and emotion. Instead of upholding the staple assumption that emotional or psychological richness drives the plot forward, I advance a theory of insensibility, or baffling nonresponsiveness, that provokes the passions of others. In my account, “insensibles” reveal the peculiar pains and pleasures of what we have come to call psychological fiction, a genre that continues to shape so much of our media, whether it comes to us as fantasy or news, art or politics. The recent Senate hearings showcased a classic moment of insensibility, as Kavanaugh deflected Dick Durbin’s probing about a possible investigation into Blasey Ford’s allegations:
KAVANAUGH: I — I welcome whatever the committee wants to do, ‘cause I’m telling the truth.
DURBIN: I want to know what you want to do.
KAVANAUGH: I — I’m telling the truth.
DURBIN: I want to know what you want to do, Judge!
KAVANAUGH: I’m innocent. I’m innocent of this charge.
[….]
DURBIN: Judge Kavanaugh, will you support an FBI investigation right now?
KAVANAUGH: I will do whatever the committee wants to–
DURBIN: Personally, do you think that’s the best thing for us to do?
KAVANAUGH: [Rolls eyes and head. Then clasps hands, stares back, and shuts mouth.]
DURBIN: [Raises eyebrows and lifts hands expressively.]
KAVANAUGH: [Continues staring back with hands folded and mouth firmly shut.]
Although Brett Kavanaugh would go on to break the silence and reassert his innocence, this moment captures the insensible’s maddening refusal to answer, the stance taken of imperviousness and contempt (epitomized by Melville’s Bartleby: “I would prefer not to.”). But Kavanaugh’s brief impassivity was part of a more complex script. In alternating displays of misery and defiance, he told a tale of development, a Bildung of nationalized masculinity: his “decades of very hard work and public service at the highest levels of the American government,” along with “football and school and girls” and, of course, “too many beers.” To sympathize with Kavanaugh that day was to buy into his story, to accept—if only for a time—its roots and rewards.
What it meant to sympathize with Dr. Blasey Ford’s testimony was perhaps more relative and thus more complicated, since it involved intimate sensory details (specific sounds, spatial memories, the press of physical weight) rather than abstractions like “common sense,” “bust[ing] my butt in school,” and the implied excesses of “Beach Week.” (Maureen McLane conveys such minute and material impressions in the haunting mosaic of a one-piece bathing suit, a suburban house, and “a hand over her mouth” in her poem “The Second Front Door,” which evokes the no-exit horror of Blasey Ford’s narrative.) What initially struck me on the day of the psychologist’s testimony was the high, thin pitch of her voice and her dazed sweetness as she mouthed “Thank you” to Senator Grassley and then looked confusedly to her lawyer for how to turn on the microphone. An object of instant pity (wide eyes blinking through large lenses; hesitant but trusting smiles; polite appeals for any form of caffeinated beverage), she radiated the kind of innocence also featured in the history of the novel and—particularly, grimly—the rape novel. In keeping with how female veracity is so often adjudicated, Blasey Ford’s fragility gave credence to her statements, and her open timidity stood in compelling contrast to the steadiness of her account.
Watching her testimony and tuning in afterward to coverage of her broadly perceived truthfulness (including the reaction that even if, in her poor addled mind, she was mistaken about Kavanaugh’s identity, she clearly had been assaulted by someone), I kept thinking of Frances Ferguson’s 1987 landmark essay, “Rape and the Rise of the Novel.” The article is a touchstone for my book and remains the subject of continuing conversations, including at a daylong forum at Princeton University last fall honoring the 30th anniversary of its publication. “Rape and the Rise of the Novel” is a complex essay that ties the history of sexual consent to the tradition of the English novel, beginning with Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa (1747-48), that several-hundred-page rape narrative that—for better or for worse—proved pivotal to the shaping of Western literature.
What I kept recalling during Blasey Ford’s hearing was Ferguson’s specific observation of early rape law’s “equation of women’s truthfulness and their weakness,” the idea that the weaker an alleged rape victim seems, the more credible her testimony becomes. According to this logic, the woman on the stand is only believable to the extent that she has nothing at stake, no more to lose by giving her account. I am here today not because I want to be. The victim is already, in effect, the loser. I am terrified. And thus, as Ferguson writes, “her very lack of power guarantees her truthfulness; her not counting makes her words count.” I am here because I believe it is my civic duty.
Ferguson’s stunning formulation, at once fascinating and devastating, of “an economy between the reality of the story and the relative unreality of the victim before society or the world” seems to bear on experiences of marginality that have become so striking today. “Unreality” resonates across all aspects of our global, digital, and spectral age—the layers of infrastructure that make it increasingly difficult to assert, I know what’s real. In the Kavanaugh hearings, “unreality” continued to resonate with me in a psychoanalytic register. In his writings, the child analyst D. W. Winnicott described a state of feeling more or less real, as lacking a sense of shared reality, and experiencing an “unintegration” of mental life and bodily existence. The concept of insensibility that I feature in my book takes a hard look at this pressure point of experience versus expectation, when the feeling of mind becomes unhinged from the sensation of body—a coming apart that is in every way endemic to a deep cultural history of misogyny and the stories that it can, must tell.
Last semester, a student came to my office to ask for a paper extension. She explained apologetically that someone had recently been raped in her apartment during a party and that she had been trying with difficulty to move to a new place ever since. When I suggested that she also seek extensions for her other work to clear time to relocate, she hesitated and said, “Well, you know, I feel embarrassed. It’s not like it happened to me.” In other words, the student assumed that she was not personally weak enough, could not present her situation of powerlessness directly or vividly enough, to make a credible appeal.
In many ways, what I keep mulling over in Failures of Feeling is the idea that “the power of the story” is premised on “the weakness of the storyteller.” What explains this ever-stronger logic of public speech and collective sympathy, whether in the novel or the hashtag? My book keeps at the question of what animates so much popular entertainment and public narrative, what perverse economy binds the “reality of the story” to the “unreality of the victim.” Blasey Ford’s testimony offered a new look at that binding—not only in its twisted relation to history, but in its weaving of protest and solidarity within the course of that history. As Ferguson writes elsewhere, “culture does not produce unequivocal winners.” The troubled contours of its stories do not just designate winners and losers but show their deep codependencies: of shame with arrogance, grief with glory, silencing with entitlement. These narratives, of a weaponized insensibility, are, as in Blasey Ford’s words, seared into memory, indelible in the hippocampus.
