Empathy (23 page)

 

“I mean something different in the World than I mean in my world,” says Anna O., whose fractured identity is scattered in shards throughout the poignant self-analysis that comprises
Empathy
. She seems to exist only in relationship to her surroundings, or other people. Living in a New York City neighborhood left in disarray by the combination of partial gentrification and increasing poverty that overtook it during the Reagan-Bush years, she is acutely aware of herself as a child of middle-class Jews, “the kind that could pass up just as easily as down.” Her word-processing job and visits to her parents help her maintain an illusion of tradition and stability.

 

She is, after all, an American in whom certain advantages are supposed to inhere automatically. But she is also a gay offspring of vaguely gay-baiting parents, and a woman conditioned from childhood to conceive of her beauty, her sensuality, and her intelligence wholly in comparison to men. Furthermore, she is a child of the '60s, raised to believe in a future that has long since passed into history.

 

Wondering “what happened to the world I was promised back in the first grade in 1965,” she describes what she grew up to expect: “successful middle-class romance, the Jetsons, robots and the metric system.” That her life now consists of AIDS, reluctant lovers, crack babies and the homeless is the irony she strives to resolve.

 

Being able to listen to others and identify with their concerns is Schulman's understanding of empathy, an emotional receptivity that provides Anna with the key to the eventual reintegration of her initially fragmented personality.

 

If Schulman's structure is complex and sometimes abstruse, her style is refreshingly colloquial. “Simple words are best,” the narrator notes, and while Schulman is occasionally guilty of oversimplification, she is most often the master of a gorgeous simplicity that is resilient enough to encompass everything from recipes for Three Musketeers Treasure Puffs to lyrical passages and intimate bedroom chatter. Her gift is her characters' capacity for grace under pressure, and her special charm is her generous, sensual and quite exhilarating observations of women. “Her orgasm was square,” Schulman notes, when Anna O. awakes from a sexual dream. “A pink star, a spider web, a dancing star too and a point and a shadow.”

 

Schulman's voice is comic, engaging, alternately hectoring and caressing. It is a New York voice, struggling to liberate itself from received notions about love and identity picked up from Sigmund Freud and Saturday morning cartoons. At times it reminded me of one of Schulman's literary precursors, Delmore Schwartz, a lifelong tortured and effusive New Yorker, a Jewish secular humanist with a broad streak of tenderness beneath his cynicism. “Existentialism means that no one can take a bath for you,” Schwartz famously opined. The cosmic loneliness he suffered, comically expressed, reverberates throughout Schulman's writing. But while Schwartz withdrew from the world,
retreating into madness, Schulman affirms her connectedness to life, stepping gracefully and conscientiously through the great disorder whirling forever around her.

 

 

by Sonya Andermahr, from
‘Romancing the Margins'? Lesbian Writing in the 1990s
, edited by Gabriele Griffin (Harrington Park Press, 2000)

 

Since the advent of the second wave of feminism in the late 1960s, fiction produced by feminist and lesbian writers has provided a powerful engagement with the politics of gender and sexuality. During this period, however, feminist fiction has registered transformations that have affected the theory and practice of feminism more widely. A major shift, dating from the late 1980s, names the theorization of location and the radical rethinking of theories of identity and difference as one of its main concerns. It suggests a reconceptualization of identity, particularly gender identity, from a relatively homogeneous model to a more unstable and heterogeneous conception of what identity means. This requires that feminists take the notion of intrasexual difference - that is difference among women - seriously. All three - theory, politics, fiction - endeavor to offer women ways of simultaneously articulating their differences and challenging inequality. Importantly, they attempt to register both the diversity of women's experiences and the multiplicity of identities within each woman. As a result, the subject fragments, frequently (and sometimes painfully) traversing borders and boundaries, moving across and within culture, history, ‘race' and, sometimes, even gender. In this article I want to examine one example of contemporary lesbian feminist fiction -
Empathy
by the US lesbian writer Sarah Schulman - in light of contemporary feminist debates about the politics of location.

 

In common with much recent feminist fiction by American and British writers such as Jeanette Winterson, Alice Walker, Michele Roberts,
and Angela Carter,
Empathy
employs a number of techniques and devices associated with postmodernist and anti-realist aesthetics in order to explore the politics of gender, sexuality, and identity. These include hybridization or the mixing of genres; metafiction, which comments on its own fictional status; self-reflexivity; intertextuality, in which the text draws on other texts; fantasy; pastiche; and irony. While postmodern devices are not in my view inherently radical, their use by Schulman facilitates the deconstruction of the narratives of (hetero)sexism and imperialism. Like many contemporary feminist novels,
Empathy
combines postmodern stylistics with a feminist critique of postmodernism, sharing its central theme with contemporary feminism: the possibilities of political solidarity and resistance in the postmodern world.

 

Sarah Schulman's
Empathy
gives a fictional treatment to many of these issues. The novel's theme is precisely that of feminism in the 1990s: the possibilities for political resistance across multiple and shifting identities. It asks the question of how we can empathize in a confusing postmodern world in a way that is politically and psychologically enabling. As such, it deals with the so-called big issues, thereby confounding the view that lesbian novels are particularist and lacking in general significance.

 

The novel operates a double gesture, deconstructing and simultaneously inscribing the political meanings of identities. It does this not in the ‘add-on' manner of identity politics, but in a radically intersectional way, recognizing the ‘multiple locations' of contemporary subjects. In the rest of the article, I want to discuss
Empathy'
s treatment of postmodernism and diversity in terms of four major critiques that it undertakes: a critique of the psychoanalytic theory of sexual difference; of heterosexism as implicated in women's subordination; of the politics of representation; and of ethnocentrism and American imperialism.

 

The themes of psychoanalysis - sexuality, identity, the unconscious, and psychic pain - are central to
Empathy
. The novel represents the psychoanalytic view of ‘identity' as a kind of psychic violence which is based on the repression of unconscious desire. The aim of psychoanalysis, the novel reminds us, is to help people who suffer by listening to them through a form of empathy. The concept of transference, the psychoanalytic term for this, is integral to the cure. However, the novel highlights the historical role of psychoanalysis as a regulatory and normalizing technique with the aim of reconciling subjects to their ‘correct' gender identity. It explores the psychoanalytic account of the acquisition of femininity which constructs female identity as lack, and asks ‘how can I be a woman and still be happy?' Moreover, in focusing on lesbian identity,
Empathy
foregrounds the double erasure of the lesbian subject within a heterosexist society.

 

The novel's central tragi-comic conceit is that its lesbian protagonist Anna has never slept with another lesbian but always falls for ambivalent bisexuals. She can't understand why and so goes to Doc, apparently a pavement psychoanalyst who offers counseling sessions. In engaging psychoanalysis the text foregrounds its Jewish identity. It invokes and plays on notions of Jewishness, for example the stereotype that all New York Jews are in analysis or are themselves analysts or the children of analysts. Both Anna and Doc are the children of Jewish psychoanalysts, and therefore ‘born' Freudians. There are obvious echoes of Sigmund Freud's (himself, of course, a Jew) relation to his female patients. Indeed, the novel represents a radical intertextual reworking of Freud's female case studies: Anna's lover in the novel is called Dora. Anna O. was Freud's first patient, Bertha Pappenheim, who with Breuer, invented the talking cure. Dora, whose real name was Ida Bauer, a resistant heroine for feminism, refused to name her desire for another woman and famously sacked Freud. There is also a character called Herr K, Dora's seducer in the Freudian case study,
who Schulman rewrites as Doc's mentor and as ‘a pioneer in the field of interruption theory.'

 

The novel's epigraph comes from Freud's 1920 essay ‘The Psychogenesis of a Case of Homosexuality in a Woman' which defines female homosexuality as a combination of masculinity complex and frustrated desire to have a child by one's father. Freud states: ‘She changed into a man and took her mother in place of her father as the object of her love.' This misogynistic and homophobic construction is internalized by the protagonist. As a result, Anna experiences extreme alienation from her body and sexuality and becomes a disembodied, dysphoric subject. Schulman represents her subjectivity through a correspondingly fragmented and discontinuous narrative style, split between the two protagonists, Anna and Doc. However, Doc rejects the sexism and heterosexism that inform psychoanalytic theory and, unlike Freud, he deconstructs the power relations of the analytical scene. He is aware both of the value of listening and the power it confers on the listener. Paradoxically, he himself has never been in therapy because he sees its potential for exploitation:

The novel undertakes a critique of the psychoanalytic theory of sexual difference, describing it as shoring up heterosexuality as a political institution. It articulates the lesbian feminist view that women's oppression is constructed in and through heterosexuality as well as gender. The text negotiates two main theories of lesbian identity,
associated with the work of Monique Wittig and Judith Butler, two of the most influential theorists for lesbian feminism in the 1980s and 1990s.

 

In exploring the relationship between heterosexual women and lesbians, the novel addresses the issue of diversity within the women's movement. Despite the centrality of lesbians to so-called first and second wave feminism, lesbianism is commonly articulated as threat. The preferred feminist narrative of female solidarity is a non-sexual sisters-in-arms affair. Lesbians, as the novel shows, pose a challenging question: what happens when you eroticize relations between women? The sign lesbian works to detach gender from its assumed connection to heterosexuality. Lesbian difference thus complicates the concept of female identity. The novel uses this insight as a source of humor. At one point Anna remarks:

It should be clear that
Empathy
articulates a postmodern politics of location, recognizing the fact that ‘a person positions herself on quicksand.' In the course of the novel, Anna acknowledges the need for a new ethics, distinguishable both from the old overarching metanarratives and from politically quiescent models of postmodernity. She recognizes:

In subscribing to an ethical postmodernism, the novel rejects the politically disengaging mode of postmodernism, refusing the simulacrum, and insisting on the political meanings of identity and desire. It articulates a critique of postmodern relativism, of a world without depth, meaning, or value and demonstrates that postmodernism is a heterogeneous phenomenon, containing ‘worlds of difference.' Schulman's text represents a symbolic exploration of women's unequal differences as articulated in contemporary feminist theory and in the process exhorts feminists to take seriously the possibilities for empathy as a political stance in a postmodern world of shifting locations.

EMPATHY

Copyright © 1992 by Sarah Schulman

Preface, introduction, and afterword copyright © 2006 by the authors

First Arsenal Pulp Press edition: 2006

 

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or used in any form by any means — graphic, electronic or mechanical — without the prior written permission of the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may use brief excerpts in a review.

 

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