On the morning of July 28th, I finished the first of what will surely become a long succession of self-consciously post-Covid-19 books, Zadie Smith’s slender collection of personal reflections titled Intimations. The early release date (July 28th) surprises me and I find myself involuntarily thinking: but we don’t even know how this will turn out yet, as if Covid-19 is the name of a pandemic-themed disaster flick starring Matt Damon. It’s funny to me that I would instinctively frame Covid-19 as a narrative which follows the arc of a novel and therefore must inevitably lead to a resolution so that I can close the covers and return to my ordinary life. Perhaps more of a realist, Smith understands that there is no good time to publish a self-consciously post-Covid-19 book, especially if one is waiting for all the facts to come in.
In the afternoon, I tried to write a piece on it for my blog but the effort stuttered to a halt. At first, I was inclined to blame my failure on a general and permanent cognitive decline: I’m not as young as I used to be; I’m not sharp-as-a-whip anymore; I’m growing dull and stupid. Getting up from my desk and doing something else for a time, I recognized my thoughts as the creatures of old habits, what I’ve learned to recognize from cognitive behavioural therapy exercises as catastrophising—taking a minor setback (we all have them) and exaggerating its significance and extrapolating to all areas of life.
The solution is to talk to myself—either literally, or using a blog like this, or using a friend or intimate to work things out. First, by identifying the habit of thought. Next, by assigning to it a more reasonable significance in my life—no this does not signal a permanent cognitive decline; I’m just tired. Then, by being gentle to myself—Dave, you’re entitled to an off afternoon; you’ve earned it; after all, these are angst-ridden times; besides, you’ve been doing remarkably well through all of this; who cares if you feel low on a Tuesday afternoon? Finally, by examining the trigger—what was I doing that set me off?
I was reading Zadie Smith’s Intimations when my mood plummeted. That was what set me off. The first draft of my blog post began innocently enough with a statement of the general themes she explores. Then I shared the opening image she presents in her first essay, Peonies: hands gripping the iron bars of the fence around Jefferson Market Garden. An intimation of confinement yet to come. Three women stand at the fence. This sets her to thinking about women’s bodies with the rhythms they impose and the moods they induce and the way they assert themselves as a biological fact. She recalls how, as a kid, she would “rather be a brain in a jar than a ‘natural woman’.” By comparison, male bodies resist their grounding in biology; they seek to impose their will upon the natural world.
Zadie Smith views writing (and presumably all art) as of a piece with the masculine impulse. It resists. It imposes itself by shaping the fictional world according to the author’s will. However, what she calls “the great humbling” which has visited itself upon us is humbling precisely because it undermines our faith in our capacity to assert control over our world and over our personal and collective destinies. We feel this through the challenge to our prevailing notion of masculinity. But perhaps we feel it most acutely through the challenge to our prevailing notion of art. Smith offers the touching image from Nabokov as he describes the inspiration for his novel, Lolita:
As far as I can recall, the initial shiver of inspiration was somehow prompted by a newspaper story about an ape in the Jardin des Plantes, who, after months of coaxing by a scientist, produced the first drawing ever charcoaled by an animal: this sketch showed the bars of the poor creature’s cage.
Nabokov was probably full of shit, but the illustration stands because it raises an important question about the function of the arts in the midst of Covid-19. The year 2020 has sentenced us to a kind of confinement and while, as creatives, we are free to imagine whole worlds beyond our bars, do we merely consign ourselves to the dispiriting task of replicating in our art the conditions of our confinement? So, for example, musicians play and sing in a grid on the computer screen which is reminiscent of Hollywood Squares, but when I squint at my screen and pay attention to the negative space, the space between the squares, I see the bars of a cage and I think of Nabokov’s story.
In Zadie Smith’s terms, the alternative to resistance or control is submission. Personally, I would not choose this word as it calls to my mind the phrase “beat them into submission” which evokes resistance or control. I prefer the word surrender. Can we reconcile ourselves to the fact of our biological limitations? Implicitly, I think she also asks: can our art be an act of surrender rather than a play for control?
The essay, Peonies, was not the trigger; the trigger came in the fourth essay, Suffering Like Mel Gibson. It opens with a litany of the inconveniences that have afflicted us (urbanites in developed countries) since Covid-19 came to town. The litany concludes: Everybody learns the irrelevance of these matters next to “real suffering.” There are those stuck baking banana bread in tiny one bedroom apartments and there are those on ventilators while nurses hold iPads to their faces so they can say good-bye to grieving families. In light of the ventilators, the banana bread bakers are reluctant to complain about their suffering so they downgrade their experience to an inconvenience while acknowledging with lowered heads that they are privileged. And yet Smith places the phrase “real suffering” in scare quotes.
To understand the scare quotes, we have to proceed to her discussion of privilege, a concern she observes was on the rise until the emergence of Covid-19 when it ran headlong into another category of social concern: suffering. To Smith, privilege is malleable. Even if we find ourselves on the “wrong” (i.e. privileged) side of privilege, we can do something about it. And then she writes, and I must warn that this is what triggered my adverse reaction:
Suffering is not like [privilege]. Suffering is not relative; it is absolute. Suffering has an absolute relation to the suffering individual—it cannot be easily mediated by a third term like “privilege.”
I reacted immediately and viscerally to this statement. How could she say such a thing? We have observed in the news every night the inverse relationship between suffering and privilege. Marginalized people are succumbing to Covid-19 at twice the rate of everyone else. And the secondary impacts, like unemployment, homelessness, and food insecurity, likewise strike at marginalized people with a disproportionate ferocity. These are facts she herself acknowledges elsewhere. So what is she on about?
I got up from my desk and walked away. I cracked open another book—the letters of Martha Gellhorn. Right now it’s 1937 and she’s in Madrid as mortar shells rock her hotel. It’s almost as bad as Portland. Positively thick with militant fascists.
I have not suffered during Covid-19 nor do I expect to. The reason for this is that I have a toolbox full of handy gadgets to help me manage loneliness, boredom, strained relationships, shifting moods, anxiety, media nonsense, nasty self-talk, stupid people, Zoom chats, the loss of beloved activities, the looming threat to an entire way of life. I have spent the last 25 years equipping my toolbox for just such a moment as this.
It began when I woke up in an intensive observation unit (the psychiatric equivalent of an ICU) after an unruly series of ECT treatments and couldn’t remember my own name. It’s not that I couldn’t say who I was; it’s that I couldn’t even say if I was. From there, my caregivers handed me one of those red metal toolboxes you can buy in a hardware store, only it was empty, and they told me I had to fill it with gadgets suited to my emotional and psychic needs. It has taken me years to fill my toolbox. Even today I discover new gadgets and hone those I’ve had since the beginning.
By coincidence, I acquired two of those gadgets during another pandemic. During the 2002/03 winter, I went every week to CAMH at College and Spadina for cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) and guided meditation and began each session with a squirt of hand sanitizer and an acknowledgment that I didn’t have any sniffles or coughs. It was a simpler time back in the days of SARS. The upshot of all this is that Covid-19 has not presented to me as a crisis; it has presented to me as a series of stressors and for each of these I have an appropriate psychic gadget in my toolbox.
And what do I get for this little testimony of mine? Does a declaration of how I once suffered earn me any points? Returning to Zadie Smith’s statement about suffering, I realize that my little testimony gets me absolutely nothing. And that is what has set me off. I need my suffering. I need it the way a vet needs his scars. How else will I get people to buy me drinks at the Legion Hall?
Popular discourse has thought closely about privilege, but is utterly vapid when it comes to suffering. While it’s true that writers almost universally address suffering as an experience, almost none address it as a discursive category. The only exception which comes to mind is David Foster Wallace. Unfortunately, he approaches suffering through satire so most people dismiss him. When you read his novella, The Suffering Channel, it’s easy to see why. A lifestyle magazine with headquarters in the World Trade Center sends a journalist on assignment to a small mid-Western town. The deadline for the piece is September 10th, 2001. The reader witnesses the journalist struggling to get the story in on time knowing full well that it will never make it into print. 9/11. What could be weightier? What experience could be more evocative of American suffering? Yet this is David Foster Wallace, executioner of sacred cows. The lead that takes the journalist to a small mid-Western town is the story of a man who can shit perfectly formed miniature replicas of major works of art. Never has a writer so wonderfully scorned the application of American exceptionalism to human suffering.
Contemporary popular discourse manipulates the idea of suffering, perhaps more so in 2020. In strict legal terms, speech is free, but as a matter of social fact, speech has a price and that price is suffering. The validity and weight of my words is contingent upon whether I can root them in painful experience, the more excruciating the better. If I were a sociologist, I might investigate whether this demand has its roots in the religious history of the American south, with tent revivals and testimony and witnessing and the social cohesion these practices produced. I might also investigate whether it found its way into mainstream US media through the Oprah Show and cannibalized therapeutic practice through Dr. Phil. I expect there’s even a hint of Tony Robbins lurking in the background of cognitive behavioural therapy. If a person can’t or won’t testify as to their suffering, their punishment is to be presumed privileged, a fact which gets disseminated to the four corners of the social media universe and results in a shaming as vicious as anything ever inflicted by the Puritans of New England.
Zadie Smith punches a hole through this framework. She observes that suffering is absolute and bears no relation to the category we call privilege. Suffering is a wholly subjective experience. Since nobody else has access to it, nobody else can pronounce upon it. To borrow from another religious tradition of the American south: “Nobody knows the trouble I’ve seen.” Anybody who claims they do is setting themselves up as a rival to Jesus. I don’t know if Zadie Smith is a religious woman, but I think it’s worth pointing out that her assertion dovetails nicely with a theology of grace: suffering merits us nothing; whatever we merit comes to us not because we suffer but because we exist. The simple fact that we are human is all it should take to merit our entitlements, including the entitlement to have suffering taken seriously.