The Empathy Exams: Essays

by Leslie Jamison

  The wounded woman gets called a stereotype and sometimes she is. But sometimes she’s just true. I think the possibility of fetishizing pain is no reason to stop representing it. Pain that gets performed is still pain. Pain turned trite is still pain. I think the charges of cliché and performance offer our closed hearts too many alibis, and I want our hearts to be open. I just wrote that. I want our hearts to be open. I mean it.

  Works Consulted

  Books

  Agee, James, and Walker Evans. Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.

  Baxter, Charles. Burning Down the House: Essays on Fiction.

  Bidart, Frank. “Ellen West,” in The Book of the Body.

  Brooks, Peter. Troubling Confessions: Speaking Guilt in Law and Literature.

  Capote, Truman. In Cold Blood.

  Carson, Anne. “The Glass Essay” and “Teresa of God,” in Glass, Irony and God.

  D’Ambrosio, Charles. Orphans.

  De Beauvoir, Simone. The Second Sex.

  Dickens, Charles. David Copperfield.

  ——. Great Expectations.

  Didion, Joan. Salvador.

  ——. Slouching Towards Bethlehem.

  ——. The White Album.

  Dubus, Andre. Meditations from a Movable Chair.

  Flaubert, Gustave. Madame Bovary.

  Grealy, Lucy. Autobiography of a Face.

  Hass, Robert. “Images,” in Twentieth Century Pleasures.

  Hemingway, Ernest. For Whom the Bell Tolls.

  Heti, Sheila. How Should a Person Be?

  Huggan, Graham. The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins.

  Huxley, Thomas, Man’s Place in Nature.

  Kahlo, Frida. Diary.

  Keen, Suzanne. Empathy and the Novel.

  Knapp, Caroline. Drinking: A Love Story.

  ——. Appetites: Why Women Want.

  Kundera, Milan. The Unbearable Lightness of Being.

  Malcolm, Janet. The Journalist and the Murderer.

  Manguso, Sarah. The Two Kinds of Decay.

  Martineau, Harriet. Autobiography.

  Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception.

  Nussbaum, Martha C. Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education.

  ——. Poetic Justice: The Literary Imagination and Public Life.

  Plath, Sylvia. “Cut,” “Ariel,” “Daddy,” in Ariel.

  Pope, Alexander. The Rape of the Lock.

  Propp, Vladimir. Morphology of the Folktale.

  Scarry, Elaine. The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World.

  Schwilling, Taryn. The Anatomist.

  Smith, Adam. Theory of Moral Sentiments.

  Solomon, Robert. In Defense of Sentimentality.

  Sontag, Susan. Illness as Metaphor.

  ——. Regarding the Pain of Others.

  Stevens, Wallace. The Necessary Angel.

  ——. “The Revolutionists Stop for Orangeade” and “The Motive for Metaphor,” in The Palm at the End of the Mind.

  Stoker, Bram. Dracula.

  Tolstoy, Leo. Anna Karenina.

  Vollmann, William T. Poor People.

  Wallace, David Foster. Infinite Jest.

  Wilde, Oscar. De Profundis.

  Yeats, William Butler. “The Circus Animals’ Desertion,” in Last Poems.

  Žižek, Slavoj. First As Tragedy, Then As Farce.

  Essays, Articles, and Stories

  Barthelme, Donald. “Wrack.” New Yorker, October 21, 1972: 36–37.

  Boyle, Molly. “How Murder Ballads Helped.” Hairpin, April 19, 2012. http://thehairpin.com/2012/04/how-murder-ballads-helped-me.

  Browne, Sir Thomas. “Letter to a Friend.”

  Decety, Jean. “The Neurodevelopment of Empathy in Humans.” Developmental Neuroscience 32:4 (2010): 257–267.

  Gawande, Atul. “The Itch.” New Yorker, June 30, 2008: 58–65.

  Hoffmann, Diane E., and Anita J. Tarzian. “The Girl Who Cried Pain: A Bias Against Women in the Treatment of Pain.” Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics 29:1 (Spring 2001): 13–27.

  Hungerford, Amy. “Cold Fiction.” Yale Review 99:1 (January 2011).

  Irving, John. “In Defense of Sentimentality.” New York Times, November 25, 1979.

  Jefferson, Mark. “What Is Wrong with Sentimentality?” Mind 92 (1983): 519–529.

  Johnson, John A., Jonathan M. Cheek, and Robert Smither. “The Structure of Empathy.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 45:6 (1983): 1299–1312.

  Morens, David. “At the Deathbed of Consumptive Art.” Emerging Infectious Diseases 8:11 (2002): 1353–1358.

  Robbins, Michael. “The Constant Gardener: On Louise Glück.” Los Angeles Review of Books, December 4, 2012.

  Rorty, Richard. “Human Rights, Rationality, and Sentimentality,” in On Human Rights: The Oxford Amnesty Lectures, ed. Stephen Shute and Susan Hurley. New York: Basic Books, 1993.

  Tanner, Michael. “Sentimentality.” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 77 (1976–77): 127–147.

  Tompkins, Jane. “Sentimental Power: Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the Politics of Literary History,” in Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790–1860, 122–146. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985.

  Wallace, David Foster. “The Empty Plenum: David Markson’s Wittgenstein’s Mistress.” Review of Contemporary Fiction 10:2 (Summer 1990).

  Wood, James. “Tides of Treacle.” London Review of Books 27:12 (June 23, 2005).

  Zahavi, Dan, and Soren Overgaard. “Empathy Without Isomorphism: A Phenomenological Account,” in Empathy: From Bench to Bedside. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012.

  Musical and Dramatic Works

  Amos, Tori. “Blood Roses,” “Jackie’s Strength,” “Silent All These Years.”

  Björk. “Bachelorette.”

  Bush, Kate. “Experiment IV,” “Wuthering Heights.”

  DiFranco, Ani. “Buildings and Bridges,” “Independence Day,” “Pixie,” “Pulse,” “Swan Dive.”

  Guns N’ Roses. “Sentimental Movie.”

  Lewis, Leona. “Bleeding Love.”

  Puccini, Giacomo. La Bohème.

  Verdi, Guiseppe. La Traviata.

  Williams, Tennessee. A Streetcar Named Desire.

  Carrie, dir. Brian De Palma. 1976.

  Girls, created by Lena Dunham. 2012–13.

  Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills (1996), Paradise Lost 2: Revelations (2000), Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory (2011). Dir. Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky.

  Women consulted for “Grand Unified Theory of Female Pain”

  Molly Boyle, Lily Brown, Casey Cep, Harriet Clark, Merve Emre, Rachel Fagnant, Miranda Featherstone, Michelle Huneven, Colleen Kinder, Emily Matchar, Kyle McCarthy, Katie Parry, Kiki Petrosino, Nadya Pittendregh, Jaime Powers, Taryn Schwilling, Aria Sloss, Bridget Talone, Moira Weigel, and Jenny Zhang.

  Acknowledgments

  I’m grateful to the journals where these essays first appeared: “The Empathy Exams,” “Immortal Horizon,” and “The Broken Heart of James Agee” in the Believer (“The Broken Heart of James Agee” reprinted in American Writers on Class); “Devil’s Bait” in Harper’s; “Fog Count” in Oxford American; “Grand Unified Theory of Female Pain” in the Virginia Quarterly Review; “Morphology of the Hit,” “La Plata Perdida,” “Lost Boys,” and “Sublime, Revised” in A Public Space; “La Frontera” in VICE; “Indigenous to the Hood” in Los Angeles Review of Books; “Ex-Votos” and “Servicio Supercompleto” in the Paris Review Daily (reprinted in Paper Darts); “In Defense of Saccharin(e)” in Black Warrior Review.

  It was an honor to work with many wonderful editors along the way: Rocco Castoro, Wes Enzinna, Deirdre Foley-Mendelssohn, Olivia Harrington, Roger Hodge, Heidi Julavits, Daniel Levin Becker, James Marcus, Anne McPeak, Andi Mudd, Colin Rafferty, Shelly Reed, Matthew Specktor, Karolina Waclawiak, Allison Wright, and of course Brigid Hughes at A Public Space—who has believed in my work since the very beginning. Much gratitude to
Max Porter at Granta UK, who has promised the title tattooed in Gill Sans across his back.

  Thanks also to my advisors at Yale—Amy Hungerford, Wai Chee Dimock, and Caleb Smith—who have been helpful and gracious as I’ve balanced my critical and creative lives. I feel an abiding and evolving gratitude to Charlie D’Ambrosio, who taught me early that the problem with an essay can eventually become its subject.

  I am lucky to have an incredible agent in Jin Auh, tireless and fearsome champion, and I am genuinely blessed she helped this book find a home at Graywolf. Thank you Katie Dublinski, Erin Kottke, Fiona McCrae, Michael Taeckens, Steve Woodward, and especially Jeff Shotts, who has been a soulmate and stalwart from the first moment he laid his green pen on this manuscript.

  I feel gratitude for the friendship, support, and guidance of so many people, especially Aria Sloss, Colleen Kinder, Harriet Clark, Rachel Fagnant, Kyle McCarthy, and Nam Le; Rebecaa Buckwalter-Poza, Chelsea Catalanotto, Casey Cep, Alexis Chema, Liz Cunningham, Charlotte Douglas, Merve Emre, Miranda Featherstone, Micah Fitzerman-Blue, Norm, Amy, Andrew, and Will Gorin, Michelle Huneven, Margot Kaminski, Elyssa Kilman, Lindsay Levine, Jess Marsh, Emily Matchar, Amalia McGibbon, Tara Menon, Cat Moore, Max Nicholas, Ben Nugent, Katie Parry, Jen Percy, Eve Peters, Kiki Petrosino, Caitlin Pilla, Nadya Pittendrigh, Jamie Powers, Amber Qureshi, Jeremy Reff, Liba Rubenstein, Jake Rubin, Taryn Schwilling, Sabrina Serrantino, Nina Siegal, Mary Simmons, Aria Sloss, Meg Swertlow, Susan Szmyt, Robin Wasserman, Julia Whicker, Abby Wild, and Jenny Zhang.

  To Dave, finally, thank you: This book wouldn’t be, without you.

  I’m grateful to my entire family—tangled and wonderful—and in particular to my courageous and compassionate mother, Joanne, to whom this book is dedicated with admiration and love.

  Judge’s Afterword

  Masters in the art of thinking against oneself, Nietzsche, Baudelaire, and Dostoevsky have taught us to side with our dangers, to broaden the sphere of our diseases, to acquire existence by division from our being.

  —E. M. CIORAN

  The fate of our insights is often perilous, as though even our most elementary thinking were a resistant signal only transmittable through static, or disappearing ink. Many have sought to operate along the borders of the body, pain, shame, defiance, vision, and doubt without double-crossing those insights with ready-made glamour, whether charm or scorn. Near the conclusion of her own magnificent 1994 reconnaissance of those elusive psychic perimeters, Autobiography of a Face, Lucy Grealy wrote:

  I used to think truth was eternal, that once I knew, once I saw, it would be with me forever, a constant by which everything else could be measured. I know now that this isn’t so, that most truths are inherently unretainable, that we have to work all our lives to remember the most basic things.

  Grealy is one of the provisional guides Leslie Jamison invokes in The Empathy Exams, along with Caroline Knapp, James Agee, Frida Kahlo, Joan Didion, Anne Carson, Susan Sontag, Elaine Scarry, and Vladimir Propp, among others, and something of Grealy’s canniness and persistence spurs Jamison. As readers (maybe also authors) we are so acclimated to reductive and tidy literary niches, enclosures, and genres—can the book in our hands safely be branded a memoir, a collection of essays, reportage, science, anthropology, cultural criticism, theory?—that when we chance upon a work and a writer who summons and dares the full tilt of all her volatile resources, intellectual and emotional, personal and historical, the effect is, well, disorienting, astonishing. “We crash into wonder,” as she says, and the span of topics Jamison tosses up is correspondingly smashing and wondrous: medical actors, sentimentality, violence, plastic surgery, guilt, diseases, the Barkley Marathons, stylish “ex-votos” for exemplary artists, incarceration, wounds, scars, fear, yearning, community, and the mutations of physical pain.

  Veering from anatomy into argument, thinking itself—articulation, representation—proves the provocation and ultimate subject of The Empathy Exams. “I had to write these essays,” she recounts, “to discover the questions they were asking.”

  Decades ago, for another context, E. M. Cioran once dubbed Jamison’s rare and beautiful mode “thinking against oneself,” and her formal embodiments of her self-suspicion are as dazzling as tough-minded—her casually bravura recital of a random street attack via Propp’s Morphology of the Folktale, the infinite regressions of her medical acting, where “Leslie Jamison” is another case study, the collage and crowdsourcing of her “Grand Unified Theory of Female Pain,” and the contrapuntal staccato inside her lyricism. “I kept running into an opacity at the core of bodily experience,” she says, “a resistance to language, an empty center: how can pain mean? … The essays in this book were memoir until they couldn’t stand to be memoir anymore.”

  Robert Polito

  May 2013

  A Conversation with Leslie Jamison

  This interview between Leslie Jamison and Merve Emre originally appeared in Paris Review Daily and is reprinted here with permission.

  ME: While many of your readers know you primarily as a creative writer, you also have a career in academia, pursuing a doctoral degree in English at Yale. I’ve been thinking about how these various professional roles inflect your essays. Do you think your life in academia has encouraged you to anticipate potential arguments against what you’re doing? You’re often so meticulously, beautifully self-reflexive in deconstructing your own position as an observer and a creator, the kinds of privilege those positions entail.

  LJ: There’s a part of me that has always felt more comfortable arguing in writing than in person because I get to control all the puppets. I get the satisfaction of argument because I can always lift or project voices of disagreement, but I also get to construct and control the entire theater in which that disagreement is happening. That means there are probably whole layers of disagreement that I don’t anticipate. But there’s something compulsive to me about imagining the critique of what I’ve just said. And that compulsion is so structurally resonant with what’s embedded in the feeling of shame. Shame doesn’t exist as an emotion without the projected or perceived sense of judgment coming from somewhere else.

  ME: This is what Eve Sedgwick writes on shame. I’m ashamed to paraphrase, but the performative utterance “Shame on you!” transforms and intensifies the relationship between the “you” that’s being addressed and the “I” that’s doing the shaming.

  LJ: There always have to be two different consciousnesses at work for shame to get any traction. Even if one consciousness is hypothetical. That tension is where the heat of an essay lives. I was talking to a friend of mine recently, a filmmaker, telling her about someone who’d made fun of me for constantly taking recourse in the language of “heat” when I talk about essays: “I just try to follow where the heat is.” We were talking about what that phrase means, or what I mean when I say it. There are certain emotions that feel to me like signposts, pointing at something important happening under the surface, and shame is one of those. Whenever we feel shame it’s a mark of some deep investment or deep internal struggle. But the shame is also pointing to some kind of conversation, an argument that’s happening.

  ME: Who are your projected interlocutors? Who’s on the other side of the conversation, shaming you?

  LJ: That was actually something I struggled with during different revisions of “Grand Unified Theory”—the question of who I was arguing against, and the fear that I was building and attacking nameless straw men. It gets recursive: I started fearing that someone might critique the essay by saying, “Whose critiques are you responding to? Who are you arguing against?” Because I was responding to something very ambient, an energy in the atmosphere, something I believed in because so many other women felt it too. I was afraid I was looking for scapegoats, voices saying don’t play victim. Sometimes the mouthpieces I found were women who had already internalized the imperative. When two girls accuse each other of being wounds—“No, you’re the wound!”—they’re quoting this ambient judgmen
t all around them. The medical study I cite, “The Girl Who Cried Pain,” felt like proof that this nebulous effect is actually manifest in palpable ways.

  Months after I wrote that essay, one of my best friends had an experience where she was in a serious amount of pain that wasn’t taken seriously at the ER for about 10 hours—and that to me felt like this deeply personal and deeply upsetting embodiment of what was at stake. Not just on the side of the medical establishment—where female pain might be perceived as constructed or exaggerated—but on the side of the woman herself: my friend has been reckoning in a sustained way with her own fears about coming across as melodramatic. That’s the sense of urgency beneath the essay: I want to make a case for some world in which that fear is of being melodramatic is dissolved.

  That’s one of the ways “Grand Unified Theory” connects to the sentimentality essay. It’s another example of an emotion as signpost—fear, in this case. Our fear of melodrama, what’s that about? You follow the feeling to a set of questions. On an aesthetic level, it’s a fear of crudeness or lack of subtlety, and on a personal level, it’s a fear of being selfish or demanding too much. Confessing pain starts to feel like an ask: I’m not just saying something about myself. I’m demanding something from you.

  ME: But have you ever had that moment of frustration with a friend where you think they’re talking too much about their woundedness? Is your empathy limitless?

  LJ: [Laughs]. Yes, I’ve felt that. But I think my greatest moments of frustration are produced by the refusal to own certain emotions rather than requests for emotional response. The moments that really frustrate me are the moments where people seem to be asking for sympathy in this very coded—not quite passive-aggressive, more like passive-confessional way—when they suggest that something has been hard but refuse to outright say it. One version of this is talking about a really difficult experience in an intentionally coy or jaded way—where there’s not just a plea for sympathy but also a plea for some kind of credit: admire my stoicism. Sometimes, of course, there’s a genuine crust or brittleness there—and I get the ways that jadedness or coyness can function as protective callouses, produced by need. But this affect can be frustrating, like wanting to have your pain-cake and eat it too—wanting to have that pain and deny it too.