Empathy (20 page)

Why?

For the sake of affection and mutual knowledge. For the sake of a fearful future and the little “ooh” that pops in her chest when Anna sees this woman's real face and not that strange memory of some empress, flushed. And two breasts in the process of being made love to, pulled freely out of a torn striped shirt. These torn stripes light up the whole picture and give some geometry to an otherwise experiential image.

Eyes that were full of trains. Hair that was full of trains. Air travel is meaningless, merits no comparisons but these women had trains
for veins. Clacking late nights, passing bright lights, and cigarettes out the windows of strangers' compartments. Anna came out of the movie and found it had rained. The sidewalk was wet.

What I've learned about
Empathy
by Sarah Schulman

 

 

I'm trying to remember when I first got interested in juxtaposition, which is the experience at the core of this novel: relations between ideas, word fragments, genres, lovers, and relational existence as a fallback position for people whose reality is not acknowledged. Homosexually, it probably began in my 1962 nursery school class. Our young teacher was getting married, and she organized us into a mass mock wedding. The four-year-olds had to couple up boy/girl, boy/ girl and march down the aisle. I refused. I said I would be the photographer, and ran around with an invisible camera, snapping nonexistent pictures. I existed, in that moment as a lesbian and an artist, relationally. There was no girlfriend and no apparatus, yet I survived as myself, a not-bride.

 

Artistically, Jean Genet and Joni Mitchell, who I adored all through high school, modeled the strength of unusual word relationships creating a third space of depth. In college it was Sun Ra, and the Art Ensemble of Chicago. They helped me grasp and romance the work of Patti Smith when I returned to New York. There was Robert Altman's
Nashville
which I've seen fifteen times. It taught me the excitement of a story you can't understand until you've finished it. Then, suddenly, you need to go back and read/see it again. In the early 1980s, I was a waitress at Leroy's Restaurant, the only coffee shop in the still-industrial Tribeca. Meredith Monk lived across the street and she used to come in for breakfast. Meredith decided to do her new piece,
Turtle Dreams
(still available on CD) cabaret style, so she hired a bunch of us to serve drinks to the audience. I had never seen a work of art like this one before. I recall it as a hopeful, optimistic collection of syllables (my favorite song had the refrain “Wella Kalay, Wella Kalay”) accompanied by precise arm and leg
movements similar to Charlie Chaplin's factory gestures in
Modern Times
delivered with panache. Although this was a new language for me, after waitressing many performances, the ordered sounds crept into my heart. When my first novel,
The Sophie Horowitz Story
, was published by Naiad Press in 1984, an interviewer asked about my use of “pastiche.” I didn't know what that word meant. I guess I had already learned postmodernism organically.

 

Sex also brought me fragments. A relationship with choreographer Susan Seizer (who I met in bed with a third party in 1979), introduced me to postmodern dance. I also had a simultaneous relationship with filmmaker Abigail Child, who introduced me to experimental film in an intense and intimate way. The lesbian culture of this era was very rich sexually, and as I re-read
Empathy
, I see evidence of many different kinds of sexual experiences I had with a wide range of women. The three-way in the opening pages is absolutely accurate. An alcoholic cowgirl (who I had sex with) said the words, “the subway makes speeches under our feet.” My girlfriend while I was writing this book (who I met on the subway), Debby Karpel, a singer, was the lovely office temp whose co-worker complained to her about a gay man sitting too close to him. “How would you like it if some butchy woman was in your face all night long?” Anna O.'s femininity was partially hers.

 

I was working, on a daily basis, interdisciplinarily with composers, dancers, filmmakers, choreographers, designers, performance artists. From 1979 to 1994, I was involved in fifteen collaborative shows as part of the Downtown Arts Movement located in the East Village. In 1986, Jim Hubbard and I founded the New York Lesbian and Gay Experimental Film Festival (now called
Mix
), so I spent many years watching gay artists express their realities far from the world of realism. There I found a deeper, truer story than anything available on television or in the movies. As the AIDS crisis crashed into our world,
fragments became more and more the only authentic conveyor of lived experience.

 

Yet, in the late eighties, when I started to write
People in Trouble
(Dutton, 1990), I chose classic realism. I remember this process very clearly. I was embarking on what I thought would be a new kind of American literature: witness fiction. The AIDS crisis had been in full force since 1981, and had produced shocked, desperate, half-baked books by grasping, dying people, or shattered lovers of the dying anticipating their own inevitable demise. I was none of the above, and yet lived in the eye of the hurricane, and I wanted to write a book that would explain the disease in dynamic relationship to the political movement it spawned. Strangely, the subsequent AIDS works that have become iconic in our culture rarely mention the movement, or the engaged community of lovers, but both formations were inseparable from the crisis itself. Now, looking back, I fear that the story of the isolated helpless homosexual was one far more palatable to the corporations who control the reward system in the arts. The more truthful story of the American mass - abandoning families, criminal governments, indifferent neighbors - is too uncomfortable and inconvenient to recall. The story of how gay people who were despised, had no rights, and carried the burden of a terrible disease came together to force the country to change against its will, is apparently too implicating to tell. Fake tales of individual heterosexuals heroically overcoming their prejudices to rescue helpless dying men with AIDS was a lot more appealing to the powers that be, but not at all true.

 

I had a complex moment to convey. I remember re-reading Zola's
Germinal
, and realizing that my story, too, needed a flat surface texture to be understood. So I wrote clear, distinct sentences. Crafted a conventional narrative structure. I cleanly divided the novel into three characters' individual points of view, neatly indicated by whichever
name appeared at the top of each chapter. It was an exercise in restraint towards a larger goal. That novel did its job (for a lot more juicy information about the fate of
People in Trouble
see
Stagestruck: Theater, AIDS, and the Marketing of Gay America
, Duke University Press, 1998), but I was very unsatisfied artistically. The book was effective in its moment, and I know that I made the only choice I could make. But by the time
Empathy
came around, I was exploding with impulse towards the mysteries that experimentation can express, which are often lost in the conventions of naturalism.

 

Now for the materialist side of this story.

 

I probably started writing
Empathy
in 1989, a good time for me professionally. I had had a great victory with my 1988 novel
After Delores
(Dutton), the first modern lesbian novel to be published by a mainstream press and gloriously received on its own terms in the
New York Times
.
People in Trouble
was also treated with respect and decency, and artistically I was feeling quite confident. So confident, in fact, that when my editor for both novels, Carole DeSanti, was temporarily fired from my publisher, Dutton, I was able to get in my contract for
Empathy
that she was to be hired on a freelance basis to edit the book.

 

The earliest piece of
Empathy
was a term paper I wrote for Professor Bert Cohler at the University of Chicago in 1976, where I used Freud's
Interpretation of Dreams
to show that I was a lesbian. He gave me an A-. It was a brave thing to do on my part, and an extraordinary act of kindness on his. Homosexuality, especially one's own, was considered inappropriate classroom subject matter at that time and place. I had no openly gay teachers, only a handful of openly gay students on the entire campus, and a great books curriculum that included only one woman, Sappho. This was why many people of my generation who wanted to be out in their work left the academy. Many of
those who stayed often had to do closeted dissertations or first books in order to get jobs and/or tenure, and then were able to come out in their scholarly endeavors. Ironically, that same semester, I took a course called “Images of Women in French Literature,” in which the female professor said that “whether a writer is a lesbian or not is as important as if she's right-handed or left-handed.” I also had a course on “Freud and Literary Criticism” in which the professor said, “We all know that female students contribute nothing to a classroom situation,” and forbade us to write papers on feminism. Cohler's decency was so unusual, and so enormously helpful in allowing me to become myself. I dropped out of that school and went to Hunter College to study with Audre Lorde. But thirty years later, I returned to the Chicago campus and actually saw Professor Cohler, now elderly and emeritus. I was able to tell him how much he had helped me, and thank him. He told me that he himself was now openly gay, and that his gay students now have much more freedom to discuss their truths in the classroom. He was concerned about their difficulties with relationships, and how much pain that causes them. I was moved again by his compassionate heart.

 

I suppose the original study for
Empathy
was my one and only published short story, “The Penis Story” (which is anthologized in
Chloe Plus Olivia,
edited by Lillian Faderman), in which a sexually seductive but withholding straight woman does so much psychic damage to a lesbian that she wakes up one morning with a penis. This puts her in high demand sexually with other women, but the way they make love is called “glancing.” The story was written in 1979, but rejected by literary magazines for years. In fact, I received rejection letters signed by Adrienne Rich for
Sinister Wisdom
, and Dorothy Allison for
Conditions
. It was eventually published by Susie Bright in
on our backs
, which was an odd trajectory for me because I've never been this supersexy or sexually performative person; that is not my way of being outrageous. This story just came a bit too early for the zeitgeist, three
years before the infamous Barnard College Scholar and the Feminist Conference where the internal pornography debates exploded and fractured the community into warring factions for decades. I was very much on the outside of those battles, not identifying with either position. I've always been turned off by the various “sex radical” factions that have waxed and waned over the years. They often seemed rather grim, and weirdly repressed. We all have sex, after all.

 

I started writing this novel from a very deep place of authority within myself. I did not know what the book was about, I did not “know” what I was grappling with. I just really believed in myself and with this, my fifth novel, felt very comfortable writing. In fact, I was the freest I have ever been as a writer, in that I was able to write without needing to predetermine the script. The discovery was, literally, in the writing. To help the book I read transformative literature: two
Metamorphoses
are cited, those of Ovid and Kafka, who wrote “Gregor Samsa awoke from unsettling dreams,” and who gave me the existence of Herr K. I looked at Georgia O'Keefe (“A red mask. A red egg. A moonscape made of glass.” - which I used again in
Rat Bohemia
). Other influences I can see as I re-read: James Schuyler (“boxy trucks”) and Wilhelm Reich (“the basic function of all living creatures is to expand and contract”).

 

I did twelve drafts of
Empathy
. The book contains, I believe, eight different forms: screenplay, short story, play, recipe, personal ad, advertisements, term paper, poem (my first of only two). I did not realize that the collection of multiple forms was, itself, part of the statement of the novel about the state of lesbian existence. And I can honestly say that I did not know that the book was about the desire to exist until the tenth draft. I wrote for at least two years, just trusting myself. And then the revelation was unveiled. The “secret,” or narrative twist revealed near the end of the novel, was something I myself only learned on draft ten. Then I suddenly realized that I had been
writing in a deeply truthful way, directly from my unconscious, facing issues that I was personally not ready to grapple with consciously. Only by giving myself enormous permission to not have clarity in the piece for so long, was the ultimate clarity able to be achieved.

 

I was very excited by the book. I felt that there was a new maturity of voice that could only have been realized as a consequence of having written so much already. At that point, with five novels, several plays, and many journalistic works, I probably had invented more lesbian characters than any writer in the history of the world, and had more experience with lesbian representation than any of my predecessors. I had a deep knowledge of the mechanics of that representation and I felt it was flourishing into an exciting new sophistication both literary and social. Pre-publication was interesting as well. The original title,
Empathy, The Cheapest of Emotions
had to be changed because the marketing department at Dutton felt that it sounded like a selfhelp book. The cover was my first computer-generated graphic, and I loved that. The blurbs started to come in, interesting comments from interesting people. Kate Millet called this stylization an “American thought sentence,” which I loved, not only because she correctly identified that third place between speech and feeling, but because she called my writing “American,” taking it out of the second-class position of being considered special interest. Fay Weldon sent in her blurb, “The lesbian novel comes of age.” I hoped that this revelation, of gender position as a state of mind, would begin a whole new discourse, an exciting conversation in which we would have some control of the ways we understood ourselves. I wanted formal authority. My dear friend Rachel Pollack, a novelist, tarot card master, and transsexual heroine, loved the book. And her praise meant so much to me. She particularly responded to the words “a lesbian trapped in a woman's body” as both a statement of truth and a refutation of the reductionist phrase “woman trapped in a man's body” that transsexuals had had to endure. But she also knew that it was a response, as well,
to the provocative statement of genius Monique Wittig: “I am not a woman, I'm a lesbian.” The future seemed full of promise.