On a Different Field

In last week's New York Times Book Review, there was a wonderful essay on memoirists by Benjamin Kunkel. Kunkel begins with a complaint about today's memoirists: they only write a narrative of corruption and redemption, illness and recovery, loss and the bounce-back. Kunkel wonders if there's more to life than the little arc of conflict-resolution packed into every strife. Addicts recover, grievers move on in a way befitting the deceased, terminal diseases may or may not subside but the agony is eventually traded for insight, people seem to lose their way just to better appreciate the well-beaten path. Kunkel criticizes these cycles because, in his mind, returning to "baseline"--be it health, sanity, or peace of mind--is awfully unambitious in itself. What of the Romantic writers, and what of Thoreau? Rather than sanctify personal suffering, these writers tried to address the wider, communal suffering that society inflicts upon its members. For Kunkel, an individual's triumphs over personal circumstance amount to little if one never uses his newfound vigor to tackle the more diffuse, more tenacious suffering of everyday life.


Overcoming the Self and its attending circumstances rather than taking on society is like David battling his insecurity while Goliath goes on his merry way. Kunkel is right in pointing out that few memoirists frame the big struggles in terms of daily life and thought. His reading of this seems to be that most people want to avoid these larger issues, out of cowardice or complicity. That's likely true, but why is this the particular way we avoid it? Why think of your life as an up-down-up cycle, and why make that cycle presentational, in the form of a memoir? One answer might be that personal trauma, being acute, immediate, and readily explainable, is simply more manageable. "I was beaten" is a lot easier to say then "I get a shifting sense that every new big thing in pop-culture is but another harbinger for the void." An end to the beating and appropriate therapy/epiphany would solve the first scenario, while the second is unsolvable. If the end is coming and pop culture seems to be heralding it, what can be done? You could "shoot the messenger" by getting a Phd in Pop-Culture and then make a career out of deconstructing Reality TV and MySpace, but there's no PhD is void avoidance.


The behavior of memoirists is like the behavior of anyone who knows they are trapped. In Beckett's Endgame, the two characters gripe over the condition of their garbage cans because griping is all that can be done. The elderly, often doubly trapped in nursing homes and failing bodies, get "crotchety" and "fussy" because they need more and more solvable problems as the Great Unsolvable moves ever nearer. The draft in the room can be fixed if I just summon Nurse So and So…the tea can be served hotter so it actually is warming…the racket down the hall can be silenced if I complain…Creating (or locating, depending on your view) a million little surmountable problems is a way of boosting morale in the face of death. Likewise, by focusing on immediate, personal problems and presenting their solutions as meaningful, memoirists tacitly admit how insurmountable any challenge is outside the self. The irony is that the language of memoirs is often so "inspiring," but the message-behind-the-message is anything but. The narcissism of memoirists isn't ego, its desperation. All there is that can be redeemed, reworked, and recovered is the self. Anything larger is a lost cause.


If the contemporary memoirs' backdrop of fatalism wasn't bad enough, their endings in trophy epiphanies might be even worse. While many memoirs begin with a bleak sketch of a life terribly derailed , they always end more soundly on track then every before with a cargo of insight for their pains. Self-pity may open the book, but self-esteem uniformly ends it. "Feeling sorry" for oneself is a cue to get motivated and enlightened, and a shameful thing should it last too long. The problem with America's disgust at self-pity--and the accompanying belief that one's problems can be solved--is that feeling sorry for ourselves might actually be the most authentic response to our world. But by showing self-pity as a weakness and a delusion that must be overcome, memoirists recast the universal sense of dissatisfaction with the world as personal failing. In this way, memoirists, although they claim to pride self-searching and clear-headedness, actually do their trade in denial. The book may end with sobriety and success, but it also leaves off where the generalized suffering, as Kunkel puts it, "of being a functional adult in a corrupt society" begins.


What would be more of an accomplishment, in life and in writing, would be to find an eloquent mode of self-pity. Not the self-pity borne of extraordinary trauma, but self-pity as a reaction to the overall plight of humankind. Although Oscar Wilde's De Profoundis came out of his imprisonment, his sorrow at himself isn't something to be gotten over. Wilde sees his former life as remarkably colorless, even with its gaiety, exuberance and wit, in comparison with the heightening effects of self-pity. He's sorry for himself, but also sorry for the universal: the inevitability of the end of play, the limits of wit, the fact that mirth only comes in fits and starts, and will never steady into a way of being. The insight Wilde finds is not a way out of self-pity but a realization that self-pity is a more authentic--and braver--response to the world then a willed jauntiness.


Kunkel mentions that one of the appeals of memoirs is that "everyone suffers" and that we "pretend to curious democracy of trauma." While this may be true about our rhetoric about suffering, the lived reality that memoirs leave out is that our suffering, because it has become so particular to the individual, is actually more isolating then ever before. If each of us is born with a task list of thing to overcome (divorce, loss, drugs, whatever), our life must necessarily be a lonely act of checking off plights, one by one. Not matter how deep our support group, the "overcoming" is ultimately a solitary act, simply because no one else is assigned our same difficulty. This certainly explains the memoirists compulsive need to disclose, confess, air the dirty laundry and lay it all on the table. This isn't just a gesture to bring the audience closer, or a flashy show of candor. It also serves to show the deep loneliness and sense of unreality that suffering brings. We wouldn't talk so obsessively about personal suffering and trauma if there weren't some sense that our suffering isn't shared or even quite real.


This need to announce our suffering, and lovingly recount all its dark details, is a way of calling out across the expanse of the self and hoping to hear a "I feel that too" echoing back. But there wouldn't be so much urgency to trot out our personal pain if an acknowledgement of universal suffering were part of the way we interact with each other. Instead, we're always "doing well" we're always "getting over the divorce," "getting clean," "recovering slowly but surely" and remembering, above all, that it’s a "process." What we studiously avoid saying is that even after we've checked off everything on a tribulation checklist, we still suffer. Whatever the cause of that is--be it an ill set-up government, an unimaginative pop-culture, or just the omnipresence of death--we can't ever be sure, because we're always trying to fix the self, just in case that's the problem (it would be like a mechanic only checking the carburetor when a car won't start. Even when he's sure the carburetor's not the problem, he'd convince himself that there was still something wrong with it to prolong his tinkering.) The denial of self-pity is also a barrier to our empathy. If we refuse to believe in the reality of our own day-to-day suffering, if we choose to believe that the self can be manhandled into not only sobriety, health and clarity but into happiness as well, then we choose not to believe that there might be larger reasons to suffer. And if we look upon ourselves with disdain for our own unresolved suffering, then we can't help but look at others that way as well. Another person's unhappiness will always seem just a little weak, just a little indulgent, no matter how much we claim to empathize with them.


In American underdog sports films, especially in scenarios where the team is going to lose (but still battle gamely for the sake of pride, or to honor a newly dead coach, or whatever) the shots of the game are so exhilarating. Rather then the grim, un-evocative look of the "game face," the look on face of these losers is one of wildness, of mirth, of the abandon and risk that comes from losing without shame. And as the game unfolds, the losing team's plays become bolder, more foolhardily, perhaps, but more spectacular as well. The camera then pans over to the dominant, winning team, who, while still sure of their win, is thrown off by a losing team who acts so little like losers. Rather then denying that they're losing and deludedly trying to win, or knowing that they're losing and just going through the motions, this team seems to take the fact of their predetermined loss as cause to cavort. Perhaps someone on the winning team would grunt, through his mouthguard, that they seemed to "be playing on a different field, a different game. And by the looks of it they're winning." But I doubt, in this whole scene, that anybody on the losing team would call attention to his personal weakness in the game-play. "I'm just a little hesitant on defense; I need to work on that." Wouldn't that interrupt the rhythm of the joyous rally-for-rallying sake? Wouldn't that personalizing of the loss be counter to the communal spirit of the thing? I'd like to read a memoir in that spirit--a chronicling of the euphoria and pathos that might come from a shared acknowledgment of a fixed suffering, and a somewhat fixed world.