Books, Arts & Manners: The Uses of Abuse

IMAGINARY lives, considered as a social sub-class, have always had a much higher incidence of deviancy than you would expect to find in the population at large. This is readily understandable: if the problems of the Oedipus family were everyday occurrences, why would anybody bother to write a play about them? But Oedipus was an ordinary guy who made what Aristotle called a “tragic mistake” (hamartia): that is, the kind of mistake that other ordinary guys—we, for instance—might make. That is why his plight inspires in the audience, says Aristotle, pity and terror. King Lear, Hamlet, Macbeth, and Othello all experience episodes of madness, obsession, or delusion in the plays that bear their names, but none of them is a mad, obsessive, or delusional personality. Their essential normality is what makes an essentially normal audience sympathize with them.

The therapy craze has changed all this. Now deviancy is taken to be the norm and everybody is a case history, or aspires to be. People carry, as if strapped to their backs, sacks full of traumas that they can take out and compare with those of their acquaintances. It is our equivalent of the eighteenth-century fad of carrying around snuff boxes. And so great is the craving for traumas and histories of abuse that literature has taken up the challenge of helping supply it. Ours is a more unhealthy habit than snuff-taking. For the thrill that we get from sniffing around child abuse, drunkenness, domestic violence, and so forth has an extra kick to it because so much of modern art and literature has taught us to see these things as the “reality” which all the amenities of life only serve to mask.

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James Bowman

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IMAGINARY lives, considered as a social sub-class, have always had a much higher incidence of deviancy than you would expect to find in the population at large. This is readily understandable: if the problems of the Oedipus family were everyday occurrences, why would anybody bother to write a play about them? But Oedipus was an ordinary guy who made what Aristotle called a “tragic mistake” (hamartia): that is, the kind of mistake that other ordinary guys—we, for instance—might make. That is why his plight inspires in the audience, says Aristotle, pity and terror. King Lear, Hamlet, Macbeth, and Othello all experience episodes of madness, obsession, or delusion in the plays that bear their names, but none of them is a mad, obsessive, or delusional personality. Their essential normality is what makes an essentially normal audience sympathize with them.

The therapy craze has changed all this. Now deviancy is taken to be the norm and everybody is a case history, or aspires to be. People carry, as if strapped to their backs, sacks full of traumas that they can take out and compare with those of their acquaintances. It is our equivalent of the eighteenth-century fad of carrying around snuff boxes. And so great is the craving for traumas and histories of abuse that literature has taken up the challenge of helping supply it. Ours is a more unhealthy habit than snuff-taking. For the thrill that we get from sniffing around child abuse, drunkenness, domestic violence, and so forth has an extra kick to it because so much of modern art and literature has taught us to see these things as the “reality” which all the amenities of life only serve to mask.