The Empathy Exams

by Leslie Jamison

What good is this tour except that it offers an afterward? You’re just a tourist inside someone else’s suffering until you can’t get it out of your head; until you take it home with you—across a freeway, or a country, or an ocean. No bail to post: everything lingers. Puppet lingers. Those clapping seventh graders linger. Your own embarrassment lingers. Maybe moral outrage is just the culmination of an insoluble lingering. So prepare yourself to live in it for a while. Hydrate for the ride. The great shame of your privilege is a hot blush the whole time. The truth of this place is infinite and irreducible, and self-reflexive anguish might feel like the only thing you can offer in return. It might be hard to hear anything above the clattering machinery of your guilt. Try to listen anyway.

It’s as if the thought of the “full weight of loneliness” has inspired an urge toward companionship back here, the same way Julian’s hunger—when he stops for aid—makes me feel hungry, though I have done little to earn it. Another person’s pain registers as an experience in the perceiver: empathy as forced symmetry, a bodily echo.

There is a gracefully frustrating tautology to this embodied testimony: Why do I do it? I do it because it hurts so much and I’m still willing to do it. The sheer ferocity of the effort implies that the effort is somehow worth it. This is purpose by implication rather than direct articulation. Laz says: “No one has to ask them why they’re out here; they all know.”

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.”

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.

We like who we become in response to injustice: it makes it easy to choose a side. Our capacity to care, to get angry, is called forth like some muscle we weren’t entirely aware we had.

Google search for the phrase “Stop hating on cutters” yields only one result, a posting on a message board called Things You Wish People Would Stop Hating On. Seriously the least they need is some idiotic troll calling them emo for cutting/burning etc. “Emo” being code for affect as performance: the sad show. People say cutters are just doing it for the attention, but why does “just” apply? A cry for attention is positioned as the ultimate crime, clutching or trivial—as if “attention” were inherently a selfish thing to want. But isn’t wanting attention one of the most fundamental traits of being human—and isn’t granting it one of the most important gifts we can ever give?

These are the dangers of a wound: that the self will be subsumed by it (“personal vanishing point”) or unable to see outside its gravity (“everything led to it”). The wound can sculpt selfhood in a way that limits identity rather than expanding it—that obstructs vision (of other people’s suffering, say) rather than sharpening empathic acuity.

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.