empathy

It’s the Little Things

Jeff Anderson2 Comments

You know what I didn’t expect to find in the Pellmore-Jason compound? Tenderness. Little moments of genuine kindness. But there are lots of them! We’ve already seen Fondajane being friendly to Belt and trying to put him at ease, and later instantly recognizing that seeing himself in A Fistful of Fists would be hurtful because of what he was going through at the time he was recorded.

Then in this week’s chunk we get a number of displays of empathy and caring from male characters, which to be honest I don’t think I was expecting. Outside of Belt (who’s clearly an outlier from his own society), the men in the novel have tended to be “masculine” in that way that means feelings are for other people to worry about. Whenever we’ve seen people actually trying to treat each other well, it’s been female characters (again, excepting Belt): Belt’s mom. Stevie Strumm. Ms. Clybourn. Maybe Janie Sez and Maggie Mae.

(Please let me know if I’m shortchanging any of the guys. I left the Yachts and their Charity Parties off the list because those are both performative and random, rather than “genuine,” and because I find them ghoulish, even though I know the Yachts themselves don’t.)

For instance, I was genuinely touched during the little exchange between Belt and Jonboat about the box of cereal. Jonboat’s efforts to make Belt feel unstigmatized about whatever meds he may or may not be on was a really sweet effort, but even better was just before that:

“I was saying about your gift,” I said, pointing at the Crunch box. “I brought you a gift.”

“A box of cereal?”

“They really didn’t tell you?”

“They who, Belt?” he said.

“That’s not—never mind. The gift’s under the cereal. Under the bag inside the box, I mean.”

That “they who”/”that’s not—never mind” caught me. What‘s not what? And I thought I realized what it meant, but now as I’m typing another possibility occurs to me. Both are about inans, but the difference is in whether Jonboat knows that Belt converses with them, which I don’t know whether we have evidence about one way or the other! (Belt’s inference that Denise didn’t read the “about the author” blurb on No Please Don’t because it would have raised some questions she would definitely have felt she had to ask suggests that it’s possible Jonboat could know, especially with the fabulous capabilities that come with obscene wealth.)

  • Possible meaning #1: Jonboat knows Belt has conversations with inanimate objects. When Belt asks if “they” told Jonboat about the present Belt brought, Jonboat asks conspicuously neutrally, “They who?” Doesn’t want to upset Belt by sounding judgmental or disparaging, but obviously needs to clarify whether Belt’s operating in a shared reality with him or not. Belt gets the implication and waves it off, starting to say “That’s not what I meant, I was talking about the tribe of he-men you employ whom I had to tell one by one why I brought a partial box of cereal to brunch,” then decides instead to skip the explanation and go right to the giving.
  • Possible meaning #2: Jonboat is actually genuinely just like “wut who? There have been so many people in this compound today, and I just got off the phone with Dubai and then slipped out, I don’t know which ‘they’ you even mean. Why would I be talking to someone about cereal.” Which Belt self-consciously misinterprets as an oblique reference to his condition, and waves it off, starting to say, etc. etc.

I mentioned this moment in the first place because my interpretation on reading it was #1, and I was touched by what I read as Jonboat’s delicacy. But we know Belt’s personalizing really hard in this section, so I may be wrong.

Paul mentioned that Burroughs shot up his list of favorite characters in this section, and I similarly appreciated his quiet, sly solidity. (I’m always a sucker for an invincibly capable body man, even more when he has a fierce, deadpan wit.) His job is security, but he doesn’t take a brute approach to it when he doesn’t have to—he could have just told Belt if he gets a Quill out one more time, he’s on the street, but instead he empathizes over the nicotine craving and gives some down-to-earth advice about riding it out. (Not too far off from how he advises Belt on how to recover from the concussion he was unfortunately forced to administer to Belt.) And Burroughs and Trip double-team Chad-Kyle when he takes Belt to task for not saying hi. Paul called it “jump[ing] to Belt’s defense,” and that’s exactly how it feels. They’re defending him, and they certainly don’t have to.

For that matter, from the moment Trip arrives in the office, it feels like he’s already adopted Belt as one of his crew, down to mouthing his opinion of Chad-Kyle at Belt and serendipitously choosing the same insult Belt came up with back when he had whorehouse pizza with Lotta. (One of the less instantly obvious pleasures of this book: the truly outlandish and totally accurate things you can say in summarizing episodes from it.) Obviously he’s already committed 100,000 of his dad’s dollars to Belt, but it doesn’t feel like a business-relationship kind of closeness, not even a teenager’s idea of a business relationship. It feels like he’s treating Belt as a pal.

There’s more kindness in this week’s chunk of reading—the lengths Herb goes to to make Belt feel better about Stevie’s being married, and then his frank vulnerability to Jill about fearing “the chickens of his own irregular flossing habit one day coming home to roost,” are especially sweet. But I really wanted to highlight the welcome Belt received at the Compound. It took me totally by surprise.

Of course he repaid it by trying to beat someone to death with a souvenir of his host’s and former best friend’s space travels… But still.

Take n+1

Jeff Anderson4 Comments

Oh man, y’all, I have been through so many false starts on this post. Did you know that when you’re only about 10% of the way through a book for the first time, it can be tough to corral your provisional assumptions and early observations into a proper argument?

Daryl and Paul took a much more sensible first-timer’s path, paying attention instead to what latched onto their reading experience like burrs on their socks and collecting the signals that suggested the future importance of marks and names. I’ma do that too, because the bell that keeps ringing in the back of my mind throughout this first week’s reading is empathy.

And listen, I know it’s thoroughly trodden ground to suggest that a novel might be concerned with empathy. That’s one of the original functions of fiction, right? Inviting empathy is one of the signature strengths especially of the novel as a form, with drama as the nearest competitor. There’s a lot that’s tedious about Percy Shelley, but this part of his Defence of Poetry has stuck with me for decades:

The great secret of morals is love; or a going out of our nature, and an identification of ourselves with the beautiful which exists in thought, action, or person, not our own. A man, to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he must put himself in the place of another and of many others; the pains and pleasure of his species must become his own. The great instrument of moral good is the imagination.

Of course, he’s talking specifically about poetry (and, gross, specifically about men), but to Percy Shelley literally almost any creative expression of the will counted as one of “the kindred expressions of the poetical faculty”: “architecture, painting, music, the dance, sculpture, philosophy, and, we may add, the forms of civil life.” The point stands well enough, I hope.

(It looks like a scholar by the name of Suzanne Keen has done a lot of work in this field, which I’d love to read.)

But in Bubblegum it’s more explicit than that. Belt withholds from his readers the datum of his diagnosis out of a concern that it will make us unable to empathize with him. He’s afraid that instead of seeing him as a whole person, with varied motivations and experiences (y’all, I wanna quote my Whitman motto so bad right now), we’d only be able to think of him as a psychological disorder taking shape through time. The narrator of our book doesn’t trust us to extend him the empathy he deserves as a fellow human being—and (sad thought) that’s probably a conditioned distrust.

Speaking of conditioning! The cures are another site of empathy as a theme in this book, the way I see them. They were originally designed as therapy animals for children with psychotic disorders—am I remembering correctly that it was called the Friends Study?—who have to learn to understand their needs and care for them. And of course Belt appears to be unique in thinking of Blank as a pet and even a sibling. But “flesh-and-bone robot” is in the blurb we’ve all seen for the novel, right? So we already knew empathy was going to be an issue, specifically the question of who/what deserves it—because that’s why you put a robot in a story. Whatever your personal threshold is, whether it’s sentience or altruistic behavior or being alive or anything else, a story with a robot in it is intended to destabilize your certainty in that threshold.

(Briefly on sentience: The Turing test is our famous benchmark for identifying “intelligent” behavior indistinguishable from that of a human being. But note the formulation there. It’s not for measuring when a machine has become intelligent, it’s when that machine has become capable of behaviors that are consistent with intelligence such that a human observer infers the one from the other. This is a behaviorist test, right? Commonly, inaccurately used to “prove” the existence of something interior, which behaviorism would reject either the existence or the knowability of. Hence the excursus in Bubblegum on training your cure with conditioning methods, and all the documentation on cures that rigidly refuses to accord them any status but machines that produce outputs based on inputs.)

Belt’s threshold, it appears, is much lower than those of the people in the society around him. Much lower, we learn, because it’s not just other people he goes out of his nature into. It’s not just Blank and other cures. It’s…most things. When an inan may strike up a conversation with him at any moment, without warning or even previous identification as an inan rather than an inert object, it seems like there’s very little room for him to draw that circle that contains the empathizable-with and excludes the things that are beneath empathy. His swingset murders are mercy killings, specifically prompted by connecting to the suffering he perceives in the swingsets and their desire to be released from it.

On the other hand, he doesn’t really have any compunction about gaslighting his horrible racist grandmother into thinking she’s having dementia, so. Complicated subject. And I can tell I’m going to be thinking about it a lot!