Empathy

by Sarah Schulman

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Preface

  Introduction

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Appendices

  Copyright Page

  Preface

  Sarah Schulman’s Empathy is a strange, funny, and disquieting book. Said to be lesbian literature’s first foray into postmodernism, it is intentionally structured to be suffering from its own identity crisis. With wit and sophistication, Schulman toys with style in Empathy. Traditional narration and development of both plot and characters are rejected outright by the author, just as she rejects Freud’s most dubious and regrettable theories. But even this rejection of Freud takes place within psychoanalytic sessions - one sweet irony among many. It is a calculated, but ultimately humane book, and Schulman’s fierce intelligence crackles on every page. The critic Sally R. Munt once described the lesbian identity in Empathy as “a traveling implosion,” which may be the simplest summation of this wonderful book.

  Sarah Schulman is a tremendously gifted author whose books deserve regular revisiting, and we are pleased and honored to add Empathy to the Little Sister’s Classics series. This edition includes an insightful and personal introduction by the writer Kevin Killian and in a new afterword, Schulman herself reflects on the impact of Empathy and the changes that have occurred since its release. Also included is a thematically related short story by the author and further complementary writings.

  - Mark Macdonald, 2006

  Introduction

  KEVIN KILLIAN

  “Now we may perhaps to begin?”

  My copy of Empathy is battered, as though it’s been field-kicked a couple of times. I don’t remember kicking it myself, but the purply, green, black, and yellow jacket has lost a bit of its luster, grown faded and bumpy with use. I open it up, and inside the inscription returns, “For Kevin Killian and Dodie Bellamy, all my love, Sarah. December 10, 1992.” That long ago! Dutton’s edition was laid out entirely in boldface type, except the chapter headings, which were gray. Exactly the reverse of conventional printing style. A little disconcerting, as though asking readers, “Is everything backwards? Are the inmates running the asylum?” That Empathy is finally back in print seems to me one of the few just things that have happened in publishing.

  Empathy was Sarah Schulman’s fifth novel, and it delighted us - even those of us who had loved her previous books and wanted her to stay exactly the way she was, by virtue of an unabashed and offbeat formalism. By 1992, she had trained us to expect the unexpected, but still we were unprepared for the gleeful, mordant satire she offered up this time. No two chapters were anything alike, and the writing itself - its syntax, the connections her words make with each other - had undergone a sea change. It’s the “acid test” by which I measure another’s devotion to the art of the novel. Say it’s a guy. He’ll be jawing on about David Foster Wallace and Jonathan Lethem, Margaret Atwood and Orhan Pamuk, and I’ll interject, “Yes, but what did you make of Sarah Schulman’s Empathy?” Should he profess dislike - or worse, indifference, that indifference which must be the opposite of empathy - my mouth will maintain its smile, glinting brittly, but inside my soul coils with contempt, the low-lying radiation which poisons from underneath the skin, so that he moves away changed, an unknowing victim of the harshest test yet devised to separate sheep from goats. I see his innocent back, with my invisible knife in it, and like Marlene Dietrich at the end of Touch of Evil, I’m muttering at his gravesite, “He was some kind of a man. What does it matter what you say about people?”

  I remember meeting Sarah Schulman at the poet Norma Cole’s house, in Noe Valley in San Francisco around 1989 or so. It was just a cocktail party type thing, but as it turned out, became one of the signal events of my life. I had just finished reading After Delores, Schulman’s deconstruction of the hardboiled detective novel, and it had plunged me into the splendors and miseries of New York’s Lower East Side - its complicated women, its harrowing sexuality and pain. I had so recently finished reading it I had it on me at the party, and whipped it out to show everyone around me. You know the crazy things you do when you’re awestruck. Norma said, “Have you met Sarah Schulman?” but I thought she was speaking in general, not in reference to the remarkably composed woman who stood in front of me, a glass of something pale and fizzy in her hand. She looked like a young girl to me. The kiss of youth was on her; it was hard to believe that already she had written The Sophie Horowitz Story (1984), Girls, Visions, and Everything (1986), and of course, my new favorite, After Delores. Maybe it was 1988 because as I say, I was carrying around that book like a badge, reverently, the way Bataille must have carried around the work of Laure.

  When I met her, Sarah was dating the poet and filmmaker Abigail Child, and the two of them were living in San Francisco for a time, shooting a feature-length video they called Swamp. Swamp’s premise is a simple one, though a host of farcical and apocalyptic events give it color and dash: the US has become so obsessed with keeping Mexicans away from its borders that it has turned all of Southern California into an artificial swamp. In an eerie parallel to later developments in so-called “Homeland Security,” borderlands themselves must keep expanding exponentially, and soon San Francisco will be “swamped” over like all of the acreage to the south. George Kuchar plays an agent of the state who informs a bookstore owner that her property has been commandeered for patriotic purposes. “My shop a swamp?” she keeps crying, in shock. Carla Harryman, as the bookstore owner, in a little black dress with prim yellow polka dots, is the heroine of Swamp. When I found out that Sarah Schulman - the Sarah Schulman! - had written the script, I tried to get cast in the video. Why not? Everyone else I knew was getting their face in. I found out the number where Sarah and Abigail were staying and I kept calling, insinuating myself into the rhythms of their days and routines, offering to show them Kevin Killian’s San Francisco, and boasting of my extensive acting career, which pretty much consisted of one-minute cameos in no-budget student films.

  At the time, Sarah was hard at work on People in Trouble, the caustic, challenging ACT UP novel that was to change my life. For me, she came to embody the spirit of social change. “You must change your life,” she said, like Rilke. It was a vision of reform, of revival, a wind of hope in a time of complicated misery. I had thought of postmodernism as a stateless thing, divorced from the political, and after reading her books I was never able to be so willfully innocent again. Swamp was made at the height of the AIDS epidemic, when ACT UP was still going strong, and though I think some of us saw it then as a bit of a relief from AIDS politics, when I saw it again recently I was struck by how fragile the city looks in it, how febrile and shakey. The poet and activist Tede Mathews, soon to be dead himself from AIDS, has a startling role as Steve Benson’s mother, and w
hen he’s on the screen I have this weird sentimental attachment to him I didn’t have in “real life.” I finally landed a role in Swamp; I was Tom, an acclaimed, self-absorbed conceptual artist in the Vito Acconci/Matthew Barney mold. I sprang to fame with my expensive-to-stage, dazzling coups de societé; in one project, I suspended large girders from the ceiling of New York’s Grand Central Station, and when a critical mass of homeless people had gathered beneath them, my computerized eye would release the beams and voilà! Instant fame, and I didn’t even have to be there.

  As Empathy begins, Anna is a young Manhattan office worker (temp division) having the sort of breakdown that leads to a total disarray of syntax. Doc, a street corner psychiatrist, lacks a diploma but works cheap and guarantees a cure within three sessions (just like latter-day HMO coverage). Anna’s been rejected by a “handsome and wicked” woman who dismisses lesbianism as, if not pathological, then lacking the “fun” factor she can find with a man. Devastated, Anna plunges into her sessions with Doc, and eventually each winds up utterly changed by the other. American literature has had its “shrink” novels before, and to an extent Empathy depends on our vague knowledge of them, as we bounce Doc’s apercus off similar doctors from the past. Dick Diver cures then marries Nicole in Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night. In Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar, Esther Greenwood succumbs to shock treatments. The narrator of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man is tossed into a mental home for being a troublemaker. Most salient of all, in Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint, Portnoy tells his whole story to a silent psychiatrist, a tale so lengthy many readers forget that the psychiatrist is there. Dr. Spielvogel has only one line of dialogue, the last line in the book, so pointedly ironic it amounts to a shock ending: “Now we may perhaps to begin?” It seems to me that I remember Sarah asking Philip Roth to write a blurb for Empathy. Portnoy’s Complaint is one of the books that Anna remembers from her parents’ bookshelf.

  Do those who write about psychoanalysis, even in disbelief, share a belief in the utopian world? If it’s all about clearing away the underbrush so we can begin, what are we beginning? In Steinbeck’s novels Cannery Row and Sweet Thursday, “Doc” is the helpful, thuggish scientist with the sweet side, who helps the down and outs manage their moonshine. Steinbeck’s character is said to be based on his reallife pal, the marine biologist “Doc” Ricketts, who was married to a woman called Anna.… Reading Empathy, I also ponder the similarity between the shrink novel and the vampire novel. Anne Rice is always about the vamp’s search for, and final encounter with, the older vampire who “sired” him. Here in Empathy, Doc’s voyage leads him, finally, to Herr K., the analyst who “created” him - an eternally old Nosferatu of a doctor, more dead than alive, yet capable of a beautiful, unearthly wisdom and candor. “The sad reality is that people do not listen and do not take responsibility,” the Doktor proclaims. “A lifetime in the office and in the laboratory have not revealed a way to change all that.”

  Empathy’s thirty chapters alternate between Anna’s point of view and Doc’s complementary narrative. Our patient seems to draw strength as the analyst loses his perspective, indeed his connection to reality. This simple, effective structure is drawn from the plot E.M. Forster labelled (in his handbook Aspects of the Novel) the Thais plot, after Anatole France’s creation. She, Thais the courtesan, becomes empowered as her protector loses his mind and soul to her. (I would call it the Star Is Born plot). One goes up as the other goes down: the oldest story in the world. In psychoanalytic terms, what happens is transference, then countertransference. At a certain point, the individual story of Anna becomes secondary, in Doc’s mind, to his idea of her as a patient, then, as a woman.

  Behind all this allegory stands the neo-Expressionist nightmare of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, or the harrowing rack of Ingmar Bergman’s Face to Face, in which Liv Ullmann plays an analyst who descends into a madness queerly akin to sanctity. Empathy recalls the themes of several of Ingmar Bergman’s films, and if you ever see Persona, themes of abandonment and defracted personalities will echo with your experience of this novel. If you name a character “Anna,” is she bound by the code of narrative to become an analysand? In the post-Freudian age, there may be some readers who don’t get Schulman’s allusion to one of Freud’s most famous early works, the Studies in Hysteria (1895), which he wrote with Josef Breuer, in which Breuer attempted to treat the “female hysteric” Anna O. The original Anna, strictly speaking, was never a patient of Freud’s, but she has come down to us as shorthand for the way he (mis)analyzed women patients and chalked up whatever difficulties they were having in the world to repression of childhood sexuality. A few years before Empathy, British novelist D.M. Thomas restaged the Anna-Freud story in his 1982 bestseller The White Hotel, making them characters in a vast historical panorama in which, after Freud releases her to live a normal life, “Anna” gets caught up in the Holocaust and winds up a victim of the Babi Yar massacre. Applying a consonant strategy, Schulman is constantly moving her narrative out of the page, recontextualizing history, the very moment we live in now, so that her readers are snapped out of solipsism, and even the particular pleasures of reading a novel, to wake up and smell the brimstone.

  “Now we may perhaps to begin?”

  In Schulman’s writing, behavior creates character. In Empathy, Anna says she has sought out Doc because she’s never had sex with any lesbians, only with straight women and the curious. She’s “never had a lover who let [her] meet her parents.” Anna, like her palindromatic name, looks both ways, like Janus, at the horrid past and the impossible, burning future. She has a chance for happiness, but will she take it? Schulman’s affection for and loving rebuke of Anna is typical of her character work. I now see that the character I played in Swamp foreshadowed one in Empathy - another of Doc’s patients, the selfobsessed artist Doc calls “Cro-Mag.” It’s as if this particular character type was burnishing itself on Schulman’s mind throughout this period, for he makes an appearance in People in Trouble as well. Cro-Mag’s a real pig; he doesn’t kill any homeless people in the name of art, but he would if he could figure out how to make a buck doing so. His gender - my gender - protects me as it does Cro-Mag from selfcriticism, and indeed, neither of us will ever suffer from empathy.

  Schulman’s forte is language, I think more so than most novelists. She claims to have written only a handful of poems, if that, and yet poetry haunts the world of Empathy, like the modernist novel it most resembles, Djuna Barnes’ Nightwood. Anna’s abandon, as I have said earlier, leaves her vulnerable to sentences in a particularly lyric way, plunging the reader into a Baudelairean assault from page one. “Anna sat in the dark as the radio crackled like one emotion too many.” Fine - I can almost see that; the static on the radio might resemble the mix of emotions she’s feeling, although if she’s in the dark she’s not seeing, she’s feeling, smelling, sensing. Next sentence: “Her passion was like sweat without the sweat.” It’s our job to picture this: is it a visual image, a tactile one, both or neither? It’s an intellectual image which recapitulates Empathy’s larger strategies, calling into being a thing (“sweat”) then withdrawing it and leaving behind the obverse of the image (“sweat without the sweat”). Meanwhile, as readers we’re still grappling with the problem of how to reconcile the radio static sentence with this one. Reading makes a fetish of linearity, so basically we expect every succeeding sentence to modify the previous one. “It had no idea.” What is “it” here - the radio? Anna’s passion? The “sweat without the sweat”? In a conventional narrative, the notion of any of these potential referents lacking an idea would never arise. “It had no idea. No idea of what clarity is.” That’s a little different, a bit softer, not so black and white. Then metaphor arrives in a burst of brilliant lights, a series of stabs into the dark world. “It was two holes burned in the sheet. It was one long neck from lip to chest.” Is it one, or two? Again, canny readers will realize at the end of the book that conventional number systems, the binary, no longer ho
ld sway in Empathy’s expanded, hallucinatory landscapes. “It was one long neck from lip to chest, as long as a highway.” I’m holding one finger to my lip, another to my chest, and trying to measure the space between them: it’s nowhere as long as a highway, but that slash might feel endless to the person wounded. “Hot black tar, even at night.” That’s the metaphorical highway - or is it? It might be the roof of Anna’s crumbling East Village building, where “a guy spits in the next apartment. There’s a dog on the roof.” The entire paragraph is only seventy-three words, yet it feels denser, more compressed, as though every word is being used at least twice, once for meaning, and again, for a higher, or lower, meaning; a meaning of a different register. So many have stressed Schulman’s political and radical involvements that I think it worthwhile to note an equal or greater commitment to poetry, to evocation, to the domain of the word.

  In another chapter, Schulman names the many varieties of silence in a bravura display of - well, it’s the good old-fashioned Walt Whitman /Frank O’Hara “list poem.” As I say, every chapter takes a different format, but in all of them I rock back and forth on my heels marvelling at Schulman’s imagination, and her keen insight into every weird form of human interaction:When the phone stopped ringing she perceived a peculiar silence. One of many. Which one? There is a silence of perception. It wasn’t that. Thoughtless silence? Forced silence? Chosen silence? Silence because you’re listening. Fearful silence. Because the radio’s broken. Hesitation. When you don’t say it because you don’t want to hurt the other person. Enraged silence. When you don’t say it because it’s not going to do any good. Waiting. Thinking. Not wanting to be misunderstood. Refusing to participate. Self-absorption. When a loud sound is over. Shame.