Leslie Jamison, Karen Russell, Yiyun Li: reading pain, needing empathy

According to Leslie Jamison, sentimentality resembles an artificial sweetener that offers to "cheat the arithmetic of indulgence and bodily consequence, just like sentimentality offers feeling without the price of complication."

"We think we should have to work in order to feel," she continues; "We want to have our cake resist us; and then we want to eat it, too."

Jamison's examination of our love/hate relationship with sentimentality appears in The Empathy Exams, a collection of essays examining human responses to pain, suffering, and messy emotions. The title essay juxtaposes the performance of artificial suffering (a temp job role-playing as a patient in order to evaluate medical students' expressions of empathy) with actual suffering, asking what the sufferer needs from others. "Trauma bleeds," she writes. "Sadness becomes a seizure. Empathy demands another kind of porousness in response."

The collection oozes with trauma of various types, culminating in Jamison's "Grand Unified Theory of Female Pain," in which she examines the image of the wounded woman in literature and popular culture:

The pain of women turns them into kittens and rabbits and sunsets and sordid red satin goddesses, pales them and bloodies them and starves them, delivers them to death camps and sends locks of their hair to the stars. Men put them on trains and under them. Violence turns them celestial. Age turns them old. We can't look away. We can't stop imagining new ways for them to hurt.

All this wounding adds up to frail victimhood, a role Jamison rejects--and yet even as she critiques the imprisoning power of the wounded woman stereotype, she does not wish to silence or sequester women's cries of pain: 

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 cliche 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.

Jamison's essays tackle sometimes morbid topics, but her prose is lively, edgy, and original enough to make them worth the hurt--even when the hurt is a performance.

Karen Russell's new novella, Sleep Donation, also deals with the performance of pain, but in this case a suffering woman sells (or sells out?) her sister's death to raise money for what appears to be a worthy cause: seeking donations of sleep to counter a national epidemic of insomnia:

According to these professional Cassandras, sleep has been chased off the globe by our twenty-four-hour news cycle, our polluted skies and crops and waterways, the bald eyeballs of our glowing devices. We Americans are sitting in an electric chair that we engineered.

Of course the epidemic eventually goes global, leading to the usual skullduggery in the search for a way to profit from the pain of others. Insomnia, then, is simply the presenting symptom for a more fatal disease--terminal greed. Don't look to Sleep Donation for a cure, though. While her cultural critique is pointed and painful, Russell's characters remain too underdeveloped to engage our empathy for long. 

Yiyun Li's Kinder than Solitude provides a much deeper understanding of human pain, turning the microscope on the lives of three adolescent friends in order to trace the long-term side effects of a single bad act. "Perhaps there is a line in everyone's life that, once crossed, imparts a certain truth that one has not been able to see before, transforming solitude from a choice into the only possible state of existence," suggests one member of the doomed trio, but in this case the characters seem to be thrust across that line involuntarily, as much victim as perpetrator. 

The first chapter reveals the result of the bad act--a woman's long illness and eventual death--but by the time we learn who is responsible hundreds of pages later, it hardly matters any more. The opening line states that "Boyang thought grief would make people less commonplace," but he and his friends Moran and Ruyu discover that nothing is more commonplace than human pain and nothing more mundane than its side effect, solitude. Moran discovers that "her life was only a way of not living, and by doing that, she had taken, here and there, parts of other people's lives and turned them into nothing along with her own."

And yet in the end all three characters end up with lives that add up to more than nothing, although not much more. Flawed as they may be, all three characters find a sort of redemption in the end, suggesting that decades of suffering can be atoned for through proper application of empathy, which, if these authors can be believed, is always kinder than solitude.