The Empathy Exams: Essays

by Leslie Jamison

  I know I’d find something to steal from Emma’s sideboard, if given the chance. I’ve always tucked indulgences away from others’ sight. I spent years bending over my lattes so that nobody could see how many packets of aspartame I’d shaken into them.

  I hated Madame Bovary when I was sixteen, and its heroine too. I thought they were too emotional, novel and protagonist alike, too overt with their passions. But I love it now—the book, if not its heroine. I enjoy analyzing her melodrama, even if I haven’t forgiven her for indulging it. I also want it for myself. I always have: those highs and lows of feeling, everything turned superlative. I’ve lifted emotional blueprints from Emma just like she lifted them from books of her own. The same hunger sends us to prayer and sugar and sweetener and text: the rush of comfort that comes from quick taste, the body suddenly filled with a sensation beyond itself—foreign and seductive.

  Sentimentality is an accusation leveled against unearned emotion. Oscar Wilde summed up the indignation: “A sentimentalist is simply one who desires to have the luxury of an emotion without paying for it.” Artificial sweeteners grant the same intensity—sweeter than sugar itself—without the price: no tax of calories. They offer the shell of sugar without its substance; this feels miraculous and hideous at once.

  This isn’t to say that sweeteners are the same as sentimentality—or even a perfect symbol for it—but simply to suggest that a similar fear is operative in these different spheres of taste. Both terms describe sweetness—emotion or taste—that feels shallow, exaggerated or undeserved, ultimately unreal. The gut reacts toward and against, seeking a vocabulary to contain excess, to name and accuse and banish it: too much sentiment, unmediated by nuance; too much sweet, undisciplined by restraint. The hunger for unmitigated and uncomplicated sensation carries on its tongue an unspoken shame. “You are a little soul carrying around a corpse,” Epicetus once said. The body is a monstrous thing that turns the soul grotesque, and that sentimental craving for a quick fix of feeling, or sudden rush of sweet, feels like the emotional equivalent of that cumbersome luggage—corporeal and base—an embarrassing set of desires that our ethereal, higher selves have to lug around. Melodrama is something to binge on: cupcakes in the closet.

  Texts are dispatched by the clean guillotine strokes of these accusatory words: saccharine, syrupy, sentimental. We dismiss sentimentality in order to construct ourselves as arbiters of artistry and subtlety, so sensitive we don’t need the same crude quantities of feeling—those blunt surfaces, baggy corpses. We will subsist more delicately, we say. We will subsist on less.

  In a review called “Tides of Treacle,” James Wood describes the texture of a novelist’s sentimentality: “Again and again, one catches [her] in the process of exaggerating a good idea, of adding sugar to a mixture already sweet enough.” In a song called “Sentimental Movie,” Axl Rose croons: “I’m peeking on for some pain,” watching and addressing a beloved who is shooting up to shut pain down: “put on a pad on your vein.” But even Guns N’ Roses—the band that gave us Slash ripping his ferocious guitar solo on the open plains—shares a disdain for sentimentality, “peeking on” at feelings that are ultimately hollow: “This ain’t no Sentimental Movie / Where dreams collect like dust.” Sentimentality inflates a feeling into something that can’t sustain itself—a dream shape—that ultimately flakes off into dust, grit or gravel, useless remains.

  In “What Is Wrong with Sentimentality?,” philosopher Mark Jefferson describes it as “an emotional indulgence that involves misrepresenting the world,” but also specifies its mode of misrepresentation (“a simplistic appraisal”) and its potential consequences: “a direct impairment to the moral vision taken of its subject.” The danger of sentimentality is that it might distort emotions to excuse or sustain societal evils, and Jefferson stresses that it is “not something that simply befalls people.” He speaks of sentimentalists as “hosts” complicit in harboring their own indulgent feelings: “we don’t know … why it is that certain emotion types are more likely hosts for it than others.” His rhetoric summons the image of a worm coiled in our stomachs, waiting for whatever melodrama we find to feed it. I have recurring dreams about parasites, alien creatures that hatch from eggs beneath my skin, and I imagine Jefferson showing up inside them, shying away as I explain my condition: I’ve got a bad case of the sentimentals.

  Fellow philosopher Michael Tanner also frames sentimentality in terms of contagion. He called it a “disease of the feelings,” as if we could find its ungainly tumors of excess inside of us, metastasizing like cells inside a lab rat’s bladder. Susan Sontag talks about sentimentality like internal machinery: “You can’t imagine how tiring it is. That double-membraned organ of nostalgia, pumping the tears in. Pumping them out.”

  In a 1979 op-ed called “In Defense of Sentimentality,” John Irving examines the legacy of Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, stressing the importance of what he calls “Christmas risks”: earnest attempts to articulate pathos without cloaking it in cleverness or wit.

  In another “In Defense of Sentimentality,” philosopher Robert Solomon responds to thinkers like Jefferson and Tanner, teasing out the differences between distinct critiques of sentimentality that often get lumped into a single campaign. Is the problem of sentimentality primarily ethical or aesthetic? Solomon paraphrases Tanner’s argument that “sentimental people indulge their feelings instead of doing what should be done” and cites the example of Nazi commander Rudolf Hoess, who wept at an opera staged by concentration camp prisoners. Perhaps this wasn’t simply ironic but actually causal: His sentimental experience was an escape valve releasing pressure that should have been troubling his conscience.

  While its moral critics attack sentimentality because it accords an undue agency to emotions—distracting us from conceptually rigorous or logistically tenable ethics—its aesthetic opponents attack sentimentality from another direction, claiming it does our emotions a disservice by flattening them into hyperbole or simplicity. Wallace Stevens called sentimentality a “failure of feeling,” but his syntax is ambiguous: does he mean that we’ve failed our feelings or that they’ve failed us?

  This ambiguity seems to circle back to Solomon’s distinction. Is the idea that feelings are not enough, that they will fail us if we rely on them too exclusively (for ethical decisions) or milk their excessive impact too shamelessly (for aesthetic value)? Or is the idea that our language is often not enough for feelings themselves, that sentimentality forces them into artificial vessels or cheap bulk-good volumes? Are there right and wrong ways to experience emotion in response to aesthetic work? On the one hand, an overly simple response that can be ethically problematic; and on the other hand, a more nuanced response—more attentive to the world outside the text—that can be ethically productive?

  If these are the array of charges implicitly being leveled each time somebody uses the word sentimentality as a derogatory shortcut, then it seems they need to be specified: At what volume does feeling become sentimental? How obliquely does feeling need to be rendered so it can be saved from itself? How do we distinguish between pathos and melodrama? Too often, I think, there is the sense that we just know. Well I don’t.

  In Stevens’s poem “The Revolutionists Stop for Orangeade,” a group of guerrilla soldiers stand “flat-ribbed and big-bagged” in the glare of noon. Their captains tell them not to sing in the sun, but they imagine singing anyway: “a song of serpent-kin, / Necks among the thousand leaves, / Tongues around the fruit.” The poem imagines trivial aesthetics amid wreckage, the taste of something simple and sweet asserting itself into a complicated history. This taste is delivered by a serpent—the original agent of the fall, the first sweet fruit—but one senses also a relishing, a celebration. First the orangeade, then the rebellion. First the bad singing, then the good fight. And what if the flavor of orange is mimicry? What if the tongues have found false fruit? What if the words of the song aren’t true? The poem dares to make a case for the refuge of artificiality: “There i
s no pith in music / Except in something false.”

  A memory: I’m drinking Jim Beam in a bar three blocks off Bourbon Street. I’m drinking this whiskey because I’d like to become a different version of myself. This desire is directed toward the poet I’ve recently fallen in love with, who is drinking his own tumbler of the same brand. Jim shares its name and we joke about what this means for his destiny. When he isn’t making jokes, he’s talking about the role of the epic in our time. He talks about wanting poetry to tackle the grand sweep of human events. He also sometimes talks about living in purgatory, inside the curse of his life. He tells me he used to know a serial killer.

  “I mean,” he says, “it’s not like I knew him that well.”

  You have to understand a few things about my relationship with Jim. He was darkness and I was light. I was innocence and he was experience. (He was big-time into Blake.) I wrote fiction and he wrote poetry. I lived in what he called “the real world” and he didn’t, quite. I was younger than I’d told him. He wasn’t exactly old, but he was just coming out of a relationship with a woman who’d gotten cervical cancer that he hadn’t been able to cure. This added years. The woman was also vaguely superhuman, or so he claimed. She made him feel a kind of “total emotion” he hadn’t felt since. She’d once channeled the spirit of James Merrill outside a donut shop in rural Wyoming. She was lots of things I’d never be.

  So this serial killer worked the after-party hours at a pizza place near Jim’s college. He was a big black guy, a real whiz with the rolling slicer and a friendly face to all. He kept working his shift right up until they found a body on his property, and then another, and then a third.

  “It’s just strange to know you were that close to total evil,” Jim says.

  I think about that for a moment: Jim’s pride at brushing against darkness, my pride at sleeping with someone who’d brushed against darkness like that.

  Then I think about this: how I’d like a different drink than what I’m drinking. I am one of the revolutionists, thirsty for orangeade by the side of the road. I want one of those bright plastic mugs they drink from on Bourbon Street, full of frozen daiquiris that taste like they’re trying to trump their namesake fruits. My sister-in-law calls these artificial flavors “Obsequious Watermelon,” “Obsequious Apple,” “Obsequious Banana.” These drinks are working overtime to grant their favors.

  Obsequious seems right: attempting to win favor by flattery. Isn’t this the problem of saccharine literature? That it strokes the ego of our sentimental selves? That we’re flattered when something illuminates our capacity to feel? That this satisfaction replaces genuine emotional response?

  I turn to Jim, find a way to phrase my desire: “I want to drink something sweet.”

  We go in search of drinks called Twisters and Hurricanes. Their ridiculous names will feel like ghosts, years later, once the levees break and the city floods.

  It matters to me that New Orleans no longer exists as it once did, when I shared it with a man who no longer exists to me as he used to. Perhaps this is nothing more than a pathetic fallacy: the loss of love writ large, demanding the submersion of an entire city. But why is it that my memories offer me back to myself in my most trivial moments? Why do I hunger for significant barometers but find myself tethered to banality instead?

  I remember demanding a Hurricane and feeling ashamed for wanting one. I remember talking about drinks rather than serial killers. I remember secretly dismissing phrases like “total evil” and “grand sweep of human events” and “total emotion,” because I felt they were too large and too vague to do much good. But I was also afraid of those phrases. I remember that too.

  In a reconstructed laboratory somewhere in downtown Baltimore, two mannequins are having an argument: “It makes my blood boil to see the lies of that scoundrel Fahlberg!” one says, then interrupts his own recorded self: “Pardon my outburst. I am Dr. Ira Remsen.”

  The stiff-limbed figure of Constantin Fahlberg defends himself quickly, a taped voice clogged with heavy Russian inflections: “He didn’t have anything to do with the manufacturing process!” He jerks his arm to signify emotion.

  These automatons are fighting about the origins of Sweet’N Low. It’s fitting that their feelings have been rendered with such robotic strokes, imitating the discovery of an imitation: saccharin (né cameorthobezoyl sulfamide.) They both discovered the thing, or think they did. It happened in Remsen’s lab, but it was Fahlberg’s sleuth-work. Remsen took the credit for the paper. Fahlberg took the profits on the patent. It was like this:

  One day Fahlberg was working with coal tar and got some chemicals on his sleeve. That night, his bread tasted sweeter than usual. He got curious. He went back to the lab and started tasting residues on white coats, sampling chemicals straight from their tubes. These were unsafe lab practices, made possible by unsanitary conditions. But he managed to discover a kind of sugar the body refused to metabolize. At last, we would be able to glut ourselves on pleasure without finding its residue lodged in our expanding girth.

  This is part of what we disdain about sweeteners, the fact that we can taste without consequences. Our capitalist ethos loves a certain kind of inscription—insisting we can read tallies of sloth and discipline inscribed across the body itself—and artificial sweeteners threaten this legibility. They offer a way to cheat the arithmetic of indulgence and bodily consequence, just like sentimentality offers feeling without the price of complication. As Wilde said: the luxury of an emotion without paying for it. It’s a kind of Horatio Alger–bootstrap ethos in our aesthetic economy: you need to earn your reactions to art, not simply collect easy sentiment handed out like welfare.

  How do we earn? By parsing figurative opacity, close-reading metaphor, tracking nuances of character, historicizing in terms of print history and social history and institutional history and trans-oceanic history and every other kind of history we can think of. We think we should have to work in order to feel. We want to have our cake resist us; and then we want to eat it, too.

  We’re disgusted when anything comes too easily. But also greedy. Some women describe heaven as a place where food doesn’t have calories. Frank Bidart’s poem “Ellen West” begins with an anorexic woman confessing “heaven / would be dying on a bed of vanilla ice cream.” She’d get the exquisite freedom of indulgence without bodily consequence—no price to pay in fat or weight or presence because she’d already be dead. And now we have this heaven here on earth, death in life: sweeteners liberate our bodies from the sins of our mouths.

  Some Important Dates in the History of Artificial Sugar:

  1879—In Remsen’s Baltimore lab, Constantin Fahlberg forgets to wash his hands. He finds saccharin.

  1937—Michael Sveda tastes something sweet on the end of his cigarette at the University of Illinois. This is cyclamate.

  1965—James Schlatter licks some amino acids off his fingertips. Aspartame!

  1976—An assistant researcher at the Tate & Lyle sugar company misunderstands directions, tastes instead of tests, discovers sucralose.

  The scientists behind our major artificial sweeteners compose a motley crew of dilettantes, a catalog of Ways-to-Fuck-Up-in-the-Lab. These aren’t the Alexander Flemings of our scientific mythologies, our accidental heroes. They stumble onto things we’re not sure we wanted found. They aren’t the guys we’re proud of.

  So many times during the course of this essay I have risen from my computer to dump small blue packets of Equal into a fresh cup of tea. The residue of their powder makes a fine silt over my counters. I am like Fahlberg or Sveda, always tasting sweet where I don’t expect to find it: on my wine glasses and my vegetable knives, the edges of my ballpoint pens.

  Donald Barthelme’s story “Wrack” is about a man who disavows everything he owns: a dressing gown, a woman’s shoe, a single slice of salami sandwiched by two fat mattresses. “You mean to say that you think I would own a bonbon dish?” he asks an undisclosed appraiser. “A sterling-silver or wha
tever it is bonbon dish? You’re mad.”

  One item that he doesn’t immediately disavow is this: a hundred-pound sack of saccharin. I was delighted to read this. Finally! An owning. But the defense is abandoned almost immediately: the man explains his sack by way of a “condition” that forbids the intake of sugar. He backs away from the specter of the sweet sack: “I just remember, I put sugar in my coffee, at breakfast … it was definitely sugar. Granulated. So the sack of saccharin is definitely not mine.” We watch a character define himself entirely through what he will not claim.

  If I could choose one item from my entire apartment, what would I disown? It might be my trash can full of ripped paper packets, which might mean that this pile of packets is my most honest expression of self.

  Saccharin manages to function as a pretty ubiquitous locus of disavowal. A New Yorker “Talk of the Town” from 1937 describes a woman who finds a tiny platinum box at Saks but can’t figure out its purpose:

  “That?” the [sales]girl said. “Why, that’s used for saccharin. Or for birdseed.” She thought for a moment or so, seemingly a little startled by her own explanation, then repeated, more firmly, “Or for birdseed.”

  It’s okay to feed the birds but not to glut ourselves, at least on something so tacky. One imagines the box as a secret tool of indulgence: a kind of culinary vessel for slumming it or else the deliciously clandestine machinery of classier mischief, some high-society debutante sniffing Sweet’N Low like coke. What’s sketched by these other lines of clean white powder? The shamefully legible notes of our least complicated desires.

  Jim and I relocate to Bourbon Street, where we don’t drink whiskey. We take bright pink shots from test tubes while middle-aged revelers dance through our peripheral vision. I pull out some praline I bought that afternoon while he walked along the river alone. He needed a break from me, he said, but not unkindly.