When I was five years old, my parents received an unsettling call from my school principal. I had been crying, it was reported, throughout the entire morning—and my kindergarten teacher did not know what to do to quell my uncontrollable tears.
“Could you maybe pick her up and take her home?”
It must have been around noon, and my parents, both caught up at work, sent my grandmother to the school to investigate. When my babushka pulled up in her navy blue sedan, I was still irrevocably in tears, and the teacher was still clueless.
In her broken English, my grandmother asked whether anybody knew what had upset me.
My teacher didn’t know—but the crying had started during that morning’s music lesson, when Ms. Wagner, the elementary school music teacher, had put on Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony.
My grandmother laughed and faced my teacher squarely. “You really don’t know why she’s crying?”
I can’t prove to you that the conversation went exactly like that—I was five years old—but my memory of that day—one of my earliest ever recollections, no doubt—has stayed with me for over two decades now. It was my first ever experience of being profoundly moved—disturbed, even—by a piece of great art.
As a frequent symphony-goer, I still bring tissues with me whenever I find myself face-to-face with an orchestra, and though I don’t cry all the time, you can bet that I’ll be tearing up during the Adagio of any great symphony, especially one from the Romantic era. I’m a sentimentalist at heart, and though I was incessantly told throughout my adolescence that I feel things too deeply, I’ve learned to treat my unique sensitivity to art as my greatest superpower. After all, isn’t that the point of all great art—to arouse our deepest sympathies, to awaken our untapped emotions, and to move us—sometimes even to tears?
The British philosopher Edmund Burke once described our experience of great art through the terms “beauty” and “sublimity.” Beauty, according to Burke, was that which caused “love, or some passion similar to it”; the sublime, on the other hand, was whatever was “fitted… to excite the ideas of pain, and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible.” Taken together, these emotions comprised the Yin and Yang of the aesthetic experience—and defined the essence of great art, which, whether inspiring us to fall in love or to recoil in terror, always made us feel something larger than ourselves.
Art was always supposed to summon great emotions.
Why, then, has it become a sin in our world today to produce art—and especially writing—with a large emotional range?
I heard from an MFA student at Columbia that one of his professors read their class a passage from Cormac McCarthy—and, together with his students, laughed at how “ridiculous” it sounded.
I don’t know what the exact passage was, but I do know that the author is known for his sprawling, often maximalist sentences that capture the grandeur of human existence—and the terrifying immensity of the natural world. In Burkean terms, McCarthy writes in a register that would appeal to the sublime—and this sort of writing, while grandiose at times, accurately captures the full scope of the human experience.
Consider the following passage from Blood Meridian:
They rode through the town with the recruiter splendid on the stockingfooted horse and the kid behind him on the mule like something he’d captured. They rode through narrow lanes where the wattled huts steamed in the heat. Grass and prickly pear grew on the roofs and goats walked about on them and somewhere off in that squalid kingdom of mud the sound of the little deathbells tolled thinly. They turned up Commerce Street through the Main Plaza among rafts of wagons and they crossed another plaza where boys were selling grapes and figs from little trundlecarts.
I’ll admit that I’m not the largest fan of Blood Meridian for its subject matter (I know, shoot me), but I am a great admirer of McCarthy’s prose, which, of course, pays not-so-covert homage to my favorite American author, William Faulkner. Yes—McCarthy’s descriptions are over the top, but that’s what makes them so enticing. The horse is “stockingfooted,” the mud becomes a “squalid kingdom.”
One can imagine, however, that a professor leading a Columbia MFA seminar—a professor who’s been taught to write with emotional restraint and teaches his students the same—would take issue with the description of mud as a “squalid kingdom.”
Yes, it’s absurd. But that’s the point. McCarthy’s writing captures a scene that’s greater than himself—and a world that’s greater than us all.
Today, however, such writing has become an enormous literary faux pas.
Several weeks ago, I argued that our writing has become lobotomized to absurdity, and the more contemporary novels I read, the more convinced I become that something is rotten in the state of literature: because we live in a world that actively scorns both beauty and sublimity, our novels have become flat, disaffected, self-conscious, ironic, and painfully lobotomized.
In a word, we no longer believe that art should summon big emotions.
The majority of our novels—especially those produced by the MFA machine—communicate emotion through clinical, detached language and syntactical restraint rather than just letting go. As a result, we’ve pumped out an entire generation of novels that do not elicit anything—that leave us feeling desensitized and empty.
To illustrate my point, let’s take a look at a few excerpts from contemporary novels—and how they each depict emotion.
The first is from Emma Cline, a 2013 Columbia MFA graduate whose novel, The Guest, opens with her protagonist, Alex, drowning on the beach. Cline describes Alex’s experience in the following terms:
She took a breath, tried again. Her legs kicked hard. Her arms churned. It was impossible to gauge whether the shore was getting any closer. Another attempt to head straight back in, more useless swimming. The sun kept beating down, the horizon line wavered: it was all utterly indifferent.
The end—here it was.
This was punishment, she was certain of it.
Strange, though, how this terror didn’t last. It only passed through her, appearing and disappearing almost instantly.
Something else took its place, a kind of reptile curiosity.
She considered the distance, considered her heart rate, made a calm assessment of the elements in play. Hadn’t she always been good at seeing things clearly?
Time to change course. She swam parallel to the shore. Her body took over, remembering the strokes. She didn’t allow for any hesitation. At some point, the water started resisting her with less force, and then she was moving along, getting closer to shore, and then close enough that her feet touched the sand.
She was out of breath, yes. Her arms were sore, her heartbeat juddered out of sync. She was much farther down the beach.
But fine—she was fine.
The fear was already forgotten.
Throughout this passage, we cycle through what would, in a human rather than a robot writer (these passages all convincingly resemble the latter), produce a rollercoaster of emotions—and a corresponding shift in diction, pace, syntax, and tone. Alex first struggles to stay afloat then comes face to face with death; in another instant, she decides to accept her fate before realizing that not all is lost—that she can, indeed, make it back to the shore.
A talented author would paint each of these emotions with a distinct literary texture: we might experience the sentences quickening their pace as Alex begins to drown or witness a flashback or two as she realizes that “the end” is upon her. Instead, we don’t care a thing for our protagonist because we’re not given a single detail about her inner world—we’re force-fed information without being invited on her journey as fellow travelers. And though Cline’s diction is supposedly dramatic—“the end,” “punishment,” “terror”—as readers, we don’t experience any of these charged emotions because we’re simply told that they exist—and then made to continue reading without receiving any justification for their placement.
You might claim, perhaps, that the point is that Alex is so detached from the universe that she’s fundamentally incapable of feeling anything—and that therefore we shouldn’t be feeling anything with her—but as we’ll see momentarily, if virtually every contemporary author purposefully writes in this detached, lobotomized style, then a disturbing pattern emerges: contemporary authors have become so obsessed with detached, emotionally absent characters that they’ve forgotten that they’re writing about humans.
Take, for instance, this example from The School for Good Mothers by Jessamine Chan, another Columbia University MFA grad. At this stage in her dystopian novel about workaholic mothers unfairly punished for neglecting their children (what has our world come to??), the protagonist Frida has just been told that her daughter Harriet is being taken away from her by Child Protective Services:
She remembers giving Harriet her morning bottle, feeding her yogurt and a banana, reading to her from a Berenstain Bears book, the one about a sleepover.
They’d been up off and on since 4:00 a.m. Frida’s article was due last week. All morning, she went back and forth between Harriet’s play corner and back to the living room sofa, where she had her notes spread out on the coffee table. She wrote the same paragraph over and over, trying to explain Bayesian modeling in layman’s terms. Harriet kept screaming. She wanted to climb onto Frida’s lap. She wanted to be held. She grabbed Frida’s papers and threw them on the floor. She kept touching the keyboard.
Frida should have put on a show for Harriet to watch. She remembers thinking that if she couldn’t finish the article, couldn’t keep up, her boss would rescind work-from-home privileges and Harriet would have to go to day care, something Frida hoped to avoid.
I don’t know about you, but if I just learned that my child was going to be taken from me by Child Protective Services, my thoughts would not be wandering to Bayesian modeling.
Again, one can argue that the point of this sort of passage is to portray a mother so absorbed by her work that she fails in her role as a caretaker, but even with such a goal in mind, one might expect at least a sliver of humanity to shine through the clouds of Frida’s anesthetized horizon. Perhaps we’d hear her heartbeat or experience her face turning purple—we might even expect a series of disordered sentences to mimic the disorientation in Frida’s mind. Instead, we’re fed elementary phrases in the exact same style as the passage from Emma Cline. In fact, if I hadn’t told you upfront that we were reading two different passages from two completely different authors, you might have concluded that these two excerpts came from the same novel. Both authors rely on simple declarative sentences to portray a series of physical actions: where Cline has, for instance, “Her legs kicked hard. Her arms churned,” Chan writes, “Harriet kept screaming. She wanted to climb onto Frida’s lap. She wanted to be held.” Both passages repeatedly employ the same basic structure—subject + verb + predicate—with little to no variation, taking us through a series of discrete observations rather than bothering to develop their characters’ inner worlds.
The effect is almost reportorial: we feel like we’re reading a docket of clinical notes rather than a novel about people. When read out loud, both of these passages sound eerily metronomic—hypnotizing, even—and not in a good way. One is reminded of the mechanical cadence of Big Brother’s propaganda broadcasts in Orwell’s 1984.
Indeed, mechanical cadence is the name of the game, such as in this passage from Columbia MFA professor Sophie Dess’s debut novel What You Make of Me:
Nati and I were on the phone recently, and with her typical coldness she said I was the one who killed Demetri. “You’re the reason he’ll die.” Not that you care about her yet, but I’d like you to know that that’s the kind of person we’re dealing with. Alas.
They’ll really kill him now (though they like to say they’re letting him go, releasing him—which is to say, restricting him from air and feed). It’s happening in two weeks at 3:00 p.m. By some accounts—those of certain doctors or philosophers—he is already dead. He has what is called a depressed consciousness. A tumor is sitting squat on his meninges. And now his brain stem has turned inward, become a stubborn child with its arms crossed refusing to liaison properly between the spinal cord and cerebrum.
Still, as he dies his pride only seems to grow. I go to his little sickroom to visit him. He’s arranged it so that the Replacements and Pharoah Sanders are playing through his speakers on rotation. He is lying in bed, silent. His face stares up at nothing and is dry, glowing. His smile—which I’m always reminded is not actually a smile, only an involuntary twitch of the zygomaticus minor—has been suggesting all these very bad jokes which are all really true. I wish I could think of one now. I’ll have my own when I die. I know this because the nurse told me, with her scrub authority, that death is always attended by bad jokes and basic truths, unlike life where everyone’s hilarious and lying all the time. She was serious.
Anyway, he is there, and soon the doctors will enter his room, and they will call me, and I will stay here, writing.
Dess is more talented as a writer than Cline and Chan—there’s some level of sentence variation here, and some of her metaphors are mildly inventive—but the emotional effect is overwhelmingly the same: we receive a deluge of information without once being made to experience our narrator’s emotions. In this particular passage, the narrator’s brother is about to die, and all the narrator can tell us is when he’s slated to die and why. Worse still—she’s literally blamed at the beginning of the passage for her brother’s death and has no reaction whatsoever to the accusation. One could imagine a real human getting sad or defensive—probably angry—but instead, Dess completely glosses over this episode and gives us nothing more than a half-hearted “Alas.” The language remains clinical throughout, with even the figurative language hiding behind medical jargon. One is reminded of Eliot’s patient etherized upon a table—without the ensuing surge of emotion that floods Prufrock’s narrative.
A Dess supporter might argue that the point of this passage is that our narrator feels detached—perhaps it’s a defense mechanism of sorts—but I’ve now pulled up no fewer than three novels that all employ the same narrative techniques and all feature the same sort of characters who purposely (?) don’t feel anything. That’s all well and good, but what if I want to read about a character who does feel something—and deeply, at that? Is there any room for that sort of writing in contemporary fiction?
It seems not. A passage from Elif Batuman’s The Idiot demonstrates as much. At this juncture in the novel, our narrator, Selin, piles into a canoe with her crush Ivan:
I stepped first into the canoe, which was shaking and felt like life.
Ivan waded into the water, pushed the canoe off the shore, and climbed in behind me. He demonstrated how to hold the paddle, the angle to put it in the water. Because I was in the front, I didn’t have to steer, or set the rhythm. I just had to row at the pace that he set, to keep us from going in circles. As he spoke, I felt how I liked following instructions, and it made me ashamed. Following instructions was what had led to the Holocaust. And yet it turned out that shame was a separate thing. If you enjoyed something, you enjoyed it, whether or not you were also ashamed.
At first it bothered me that I couldn’t see Ivan. But gradually he felt more and more present to me, just as if I were facing him. It was amazing to be so close to the water, to see the world rising up all around us like some crazy plant. Sixteen-wheel trucks glided by on barges, looming over us, temporarily blocking the sun. Ivan explained that trucks weren’t allowed on the streets on Sundays, and so were transported by barge. We bobbed in the wake of a motorboat, gently but vigorously, and all at once.
Batuman opens this passage with a description comparing Selin’s canoe to life! The irony, however, is that the remainder of her observations are lifeless and empty. One is told that Selin is supposed to feel invigorated, but one is not made to feel invigorated. Sitting in a canoe with a man she’s supposedly in love with, Selin can do nothing but intellectualize—and, apparently, remember the Holocaust. And while Batuman’s writing admittedly has more personality than Cline’s, Chan’s, or Dess’s, the effect is largely identical: we receive a total of zero emotions.
Now, having (unfortunately) read this entire novel, I’ll tell you that the point here is supposed to be that when Selin is in person with Ivan (rather than writing emails to him), it’s not butterflies and rainbows but awkwardness and detachment. Again, there’s nothing wrong with using flat language to portray this sort of emotional bankruptcy, but the greater issue is that this sort of prose—and these sorts of detached characters—is pretty much the only mode of narration we ever encounter in contemporary literary fiction.
Each of the passages above supplies us with repeated observations about a character’s experience rather than presenting us with experience itself. As a result, this sort of writing introduces a layer of separation between the reader and protagonist—almost as if we’re watching aerial footage of a scene rather than an intense close-up. The analogy is apt—while there’s nothing wrong with the occasional aerial shot, no sane human being would want to watch an entire film shot intentionally at a distance.
Why, then, do so many contemporary authors insist on making us experience their characters’ worlds through the same detached lenses—and where are the characters who surrender themselves to their emotions?
Show me a Dmitri Karamazov in contemporary fiction! You won’t find him—because he doesn’t exist, and if he does exist, then you can be positive that the narrator will mock him through her detached irony because such characters are no longer taken seriously.
Contemporary authors all want to prove to you that the point of literature is to use emotional restraint to communicate big emotions, but the problem is that big emotions should be communicated… through big emotions—and commensurately elevated prose.
Art should move us. It should make us cry, laugh, suffer, and rejoice with its characters—and these big emotions not only warrant but often require over-the-top descriptions. Sure, there’s room for the occasional exercise in emotional restraint, but not when you’re falling in love—and certainly not when you’re about to die. These experiences represent the height of emotional intensity—and should be relayed through appropriate stylistic exuberance.
The great novelists knew that sometimes, characters are prone to losing themselves—and there’s nothing wrong with that! It’s all a part of being human, after all—and there’s no shame in letting us feel these emotions with our characters. If I’m reading about a character who’s drowning, I want to feel a pit in my own stomach! If I’m reading about a character who’s falling in love, I want to feel my cheeks grow rosy. I want to be immersed in a scene rather than just being told what to think—and that’s exactly what contemporary literature lacks: that feeling I felt when I was five years old, hearing Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony for the first time, reacting in a way that I could neither rationalize nor understand. That was the feeling of being ineffably moved by art—and that’s the feeling we need to bring back to our literature.
I leave you with the following passage from Wuthering Heights—a beautiful example of how powerful literature can be when it allows itself to just let go.
‘It is not,’ retorted she; ‘it is the best! The others were the satisfaction of my whims: and for Edgar’s sake, too, to satisfy him. This is for the sake of one who comprehends in his person my feelings to Edgar and myself. I cannot express it; but surely you and everybody have a notion that there is or should be an existence of yours beyond you. What were the use of my creation, if I were entirely contained here? My great miseries in this world have been Heathcliff’s miseries, and I watched and felt each from the beginning: my great thought in living is himself. If all else perished, and HE remained, I should still continue to be; and if all else remained, and he were annihilated, the universe would turn to a mighty stranger: I should not seem a part of it. — My love for Linton is like the foliage in the woods: time will change it, I’m well aware, as winter changes the trees. My love for Heathcliff resembles the eternal rocks beneath: a source of little visible delight, but necessary. Nelly, I AM Heathcliff! He’s always, always in my mind: not as a pleasure, any more than I am always a pleasure to myself, but as my own being. So don’t talk of our separation again: it is impracticable; and—’
She paused, and hid her face in the folds of my gown; but I jerked it forcibly away. I was out of patience with her folly!
Yes, Catherine is impractical. Yes, she’s obsessed, and yes, she’s foolish—as Nelly reminds us in the line following her outburst. But what makes this passage so beautiful is that Brontë doesn’t hold back—we experience Catherine’s burning desire for Heathcliff in nearly cosmic terms, and we’re made to suffer with her because her emotions become nearly metaphysical: if Heathcliff were annihilated, “the universe would turn to a mighty stranger.” As Brontë’s diction soars to nearly absurd heights—“I AM Heathcliff!”—we as readers grow convinced that there’s something there between Catherine and Heathcliff—and feel something there with them.
So take out your maximalist pens. Write those long sentences and over-the-top metaphors. The literary world needs them.
(At the very least, I definitely need them after reading so much contemporary garbage for this essay.)
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Emotions are a reaction to closely held values. I don't write novels but I do write scripts and study film. What you're describing sounds to me like what I see from the left. The left is now fully nihilist. That is, the left rejects all facts which clash with their ideology and all human values, honesty, competence, integrity, excellence, beauty, justice etc. as such. (If you doubt my assertion, just spend some time watching contemporary films from leftie film makers.) So true emotion will not appear in the work of writers to the degree that they hold leftist ideology. (There are certainly serious problems with the right but at least they embrace values.)
I suspect that this is why so many modern novels leave me cold. If the primary characters seem to have no feelings, how can I ?
Now, full disclosure, I don’t care deeply about the characters in every old book. I’m not interested in Sherlock Holmes inner life and emotional state. I am not weeping over the fate of Bertie Wooster. But those are characters in books written with a different purpose. Give me a puzzle, or humor or some reason to care. I don’t expect all three, but I need one.