From classic novels to current news, the power of sympathy—who gets to have it, and how—drives the stories we tell ourselves.
I suspect that many Americans—and especially American women—will continue to ask each other how we experienced Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony on September 27, 2018, during the hearings that culminated in the appointment of Brett Kavanaugh to the US Supreme Court. Even for the Trump Era, it was an especially grueling day for the emotions, which were further deranged by Kavanaugh’s testimony and the ensuing histrionics of the Senate Judiciary Committee. I remember feeling my cognition hit a limit during Lindsey Graham’s livid rebuke to his Democratic colleagues (“This is going to destroy the ability of good people to come forward because of this crap!”) and in his snarling defense of the nominee (“Are you a gang rapist!? . . . This is not a job interview, this is Hell . . . He’s the nicest person!”). One after another, it seemed, senators stepped up to cover for Kavanaugh’s bilious performance, camouflaging his obvious hostility with their even more splenetic acts of public rage. Adam Smith, Enlightenment herald of so many things American, would have described these men as sympathizing with Kavanaugh’s display of “the Unsocial Passions”—taking on the judge’s peevish indignation and sentimental collapse as their own, “conceiving what we ourselves should feel in the like situation.”
To sympathize with Kavanaugh that day was to buy into his story, to accept—if only for a time—its roots and rewards.
How we analyze emotions, what sympathy is, and what happens when that faculty fails are the focus of my new book, Failures of Feeling: Insensibility and the Novel. One essential premise is that we adopt a situational understanding of emotions. Reinforcing Smith’s claim that to sympathize with someone is to imagine “the like situation," I define feelings as fundamentally narrative phenomena, the circumstances of cause and effect that led to this response, this action. In Failures of Feeling, I turn to early templates in fiction and philosophy, the “mother sauces” of contemporary narrative, to argue for a fundamental albeit unusual connection between storytelling and emotion. Instead of upholding the staple assumption that emotional or psychological richness drives the plot forward, I advance a theory of insensibility, or baffling nonresponsiveness, that provokes the passions of others. In my account, “insensibles” reveal the peculiar pains and pleasures of what we have come to call psychological fiction, a genre that continues to shape so much of our media, whether it comes to us as fantasy or news, art or politics. The recent Senate hearings showcased a classic moment of insensibility, as Kavanaugh deflected Dick Durbin’s probing about a possible investigation into Blasey Ford’s allegations:
KAVANAUGH: I — I welcome whatever the committee wants to do, ‘cause I’m telling the truth.
DURBIN: I want to know what you want to do.
KAVANAUGH: I — I’m telling the truth.
DURBIN: I want to know what you want to do, Judge!
KAVANAUGH: I’m innocent. I’m innocent of this charge.
[….]
DURBIN: Judge Kavanaugh, will you support an FBI investigation right now?
KAVANAUGH: I will do whatever the committee wants to--
DURBIN: Personally, do you think that’s the best thing for us to do?
KAVANAUGH: [Rolls eyes and head. Then clasps hands, stares back, and shuts mouth.]
DURBIN: [Raises eyebrows and lifts hands expressively.]
KAVANAUGH: [Continues staring back with hands folded and mouth firmly shut.]
Although Brett Kavanaugh would go on to break the silence and reassert his innocence, this moment captures the insensible’s maddening refusal to answer, the stance taken of imperviousness and contempt (epitomized by Melville’s Bartleby: “I would prefer not to.”). But Kavanaugh’s brief impassivity was part of a more complex script. In alternating displays of misery and defiance, he told a tale of development, a Bildung of nationalized masculinity: his “decades of very hard work and public service at the highest levels of the American government,” along with “football and school and girls” and, of course, “too many beers.” To sympathize with Kavanaugh that day was to buy into his story, to accept—if only for a time—its roots and rewards.
