Empathy (2 page)

 

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.

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 hold 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:

I wonder if this meditation could have come from a wish to expand on the enormously effective, yet somehow strangely prescriptive, slogan we then lived by, that “SILENCE = DEATH”? In another passage, Anna reflects that while “SILENCE = DEATH” may be true, “Voice does not necessarily equal Life.”

 

Schulman's other forte is trendspotting. Born in the wrong era, she would have been an excellent practitioner of Mass Observation. “Doc's focus moved away from the hopeful and on to the fact that more and more people on the street were opting for nonfunction at an increasingly early age. So many men and women stick needles in their arms.” These aren't facts per se, since they're reported from Doc's point of view, but they feel as though they've been observed. Anna considers options for success in 1991: HIV counseling, hospice work, teaching English to Russians. Trendspotting is Sarah Schulman's fingerprint, and you can see it running right through all her work. If, as has been suggested, Jonathan Larson was influenced by
People in Trouble
while writing his musical
Rent,
for me the smoking gun is the detail about all the people synchronizing their watches to take their meds all at the same time. Nobody but Sarah Schulman would have commented on this, or even noticed the beautiful heartbreak of it. One might disagree with her social analysis, or marvel at how different life is on the Lower East Side than here in San Francisco, but like most people, I only notice trends when they jump up and kick me in the face. But just because she covers the big picture doesn't mean she has no eye for the telling human detail, the particulars. Indeed, the tension in her writing derives largely from her ability to sort of play each vision off of the other. Anna mourns the future that never came, the tomorrow promised by yesterday's futurologists. “The
Weekly Reader
had said that by 1990 she'd be flying around with jet packs. People would speak Esperanto and wear high-topped sneakers as they suited up for lift-off.” Variants of these predictions do transpire in
Empathy
, but with significant differences. If not by jet pack, Anna does fly around, most notably on a nightmarish holiday to Djakarta, which she recalls in a soliloquy to Doc halfway through the book; it is
Empathy
's single longest setpiece and, I think, the emotional crux of the novel. It's not just the East Village, or New York, or North America, that our lack of empathy has distorted to the point of madness; the divorce from feeling has infected even the most faraway, nearly “innocent” places. Anna's journey, accompanied by a thoughtless girlfriend, Lucy, comes in the middle of the book because, in classical epic, that's where the voyage down to Hell traditionally appears. “At the next table was a fashionable, clean-cut Japanese man dressed exactly like a fashionable clean-cut American man circa 1962. Only now that look has come back. You know, the nerd look. Tortoiseshell eyeglasses, khaki bermuda shorts, and white sneakers.” It's so hot that sand stings through her shoes. “Kids were following us the whole time and I could smell my own flesh broiling.” And everywhere they go, people tell them that Bali is “baguse,” meaning cool. It's an Orwellian vision of language turned
inward to fertilize a lie. In a world without connection, there's no in, and no out. There's no more there, thus there's no more here.

I've had the strangest experience re-reading
Empathy
for the purposes of writing this essay. All kinds of feelings are returning, like the pins and needles feeling you get in your extremities after a long stillness. “Déjà vu” doesn't cover it. Late in the novel, two of Doc's patients, Jo and Sam, rehearse their
Virginia Woolf
neurosis in playlet form. “You're a hundred percent wrong, a hundred percent wrong, a hundred percent wrong.” Reading this passage, I flashed on an evening fifteen years ago, when I created the part of Jo on stage in a bookstore in San Francisco during an evening of “Poets' Theater.” This was the very same bookstore that was turned into a swamp by US federal agents in
Swamp.
Christian Huygen played Sam and I was Jo, and as you'll see, the play “Failure” begins with us kissing in the last minutes of bliss before a decisive argument. Our kiss lasted long enough for me to feel aroused and heady. We were directed to stay kissing until it became uncomfortable. And when “Sam” laid into me with his repeated, ever more vicious declarations that I was “one hundred percent wrong,” tears stung my eyelids; I felt my face grow red in front of the whole room. I knew I was “acting,” that Christian wasn't really my boyfriend, that he didn't hate me, and yet physics reached in and grabbed my ankles, knocking me on my ass. As the play reached its climax, I was shaking with grief, flayed. People in the audience clapped and cheered, but I only caught that on tape, much later; in the heat of the moment I kept quaking and blinking, my whole world torn out beneath me. And thus this little playlet might serve as emblematic of the apparently loose, baggy structure of the novel it wound up in. As you'll find out sooner or later,
Empathy
is in
portmanteau
form and contains everything but the kitchen sink (and
in fact it does have a kitchen sink in it too). Is it a miscellany, pure and simple? If so, in this book (and in its equally excellent successor,
Rat Bohemia),
Schulman found a way to bring life back to the novel, which in effect is the same as bringing life back to, well, life. Now we may perhaps to begin?