No Free Bread

Certainly, no-one in A Little Life has ever eaten at Olive Garden. Although two main characters are meant to come from outside the novel’s affluent New York social scene, both of them are from specific and dramatic types of poverty. One was, famously, raised in a pederastic monastery, followed by almost literally every other setting for sexual abuse of a boy one could imagine (spoilers for A Little Life). The other was raised on a farm by Danish immigrants; we hear few details except for the template one imagines of what it would be like to be raised on a farm by Danish immigrants. Very few rats appear. I am sympathetic to the romance of the rolling yellow prairie bowed under the weight of a Midwestern snow, but something is funny to me about the fact that nobody in this novel ever smoked pot at a fast food job or watched Naruto in a dilapidated farm house while his single father worked the fields for rent.

Well—you can’t get everything in. What I mean perhaps is that nobody in this novel has bad taste, and it feels that the novel couldn’t stand to be otherwise; it would interfere with the premise that all people, including men raised in extremely traumatic circumstances that shatter them at a profound developmental level, are basically, at the centre of their being, upper-class New York art school students.

(I don’t often insert warnings about content, but self-harm and suicide are discussed at length and in considerable emotional detail in the rest of this essay. I never attempted, myself, and am now many years on from consistent or serious suicidality; allow that to influence my credibility as you like.)

Both times I read the novel I read all 800 pages in under a week. I find Yanagihara’s understated prose style pleasant and the novel has an undeniable propulsion. Nevertheless, I have difficulty with the underlying emotional logic of A Little Life. Some people who like the novel read it as “melodrama…grand opera.” In this reading, A Little Life is a fantasy of over-the-top tragedy that is intended to operate, perhaps, somewhere adjacent to gothic camp. I will say, the irony flies over my little Midwestern head. My sense is that Yanagihara is often sincere, and I think the people I know who love this novel read it as sincere. But I respect the interpretation. Still my question remains: whose fantasy is it?

I don’t even know if upper-class New York art school students like this type of thing. I gather they keep themselves busy competing with each other to rediscover midcentury Greek madwomen diarists. I am also skeptical that kids who turn tricks at truck stops read A Little Life to dream wistfully of the day they too may drink rosewater lemonade on their way to the suitmaker. On the other hand, evidence from my experience being a middle-class young woman with an undefined psychological imbalance suggests that we love this type of thing. It seems to me that the prime audience for A Little Life is young women who don’t actually know off the top of their heads who Meret Oppenheim is, but feel bitterly that if they were born in New York they probably would.

Class—intellectual and economic—is not the only element of fantasy in the novel. There is also an emotional fantasy that a person who has a certain kind of psychological orientation finds very useful. In this fantasy, your pain relieves you of the responsibility to ensure you yourself never cause serious harm to another person. For example, in this fantasy, friends who say truly cruel things to you do so because they are essentially selfish and ignorant. On the other hand, when you yourself say truly cruel things, it is motivated by your incomparable agony. Your loved ones forgive you immediately, because they understand you so well, despite your inability to explain yourself to them.

I wrote in this essay on Misery that one of the purposes a character template might serve for a reader is to enable her to justify feelings she already has about person-types in the world. I don’t mean that anybody would use Annie Wilkes as a rational argument for their hatred of big ugly women. I just mean that one use to which she could be applied is the relief of resolving cognitive dissonance: here is a big ugly woman who gives you a good enough reason to hate her.

I have the sense that the fantasy of A Little Life serves a similar purpose, and I think that the purpose is somewhat irresponsible. In this case, the character template allows the reader to justify feelings she has about herself. The reader may share Jude’s extreme feelings of self-loathing: the sense of being alienated from other human beings in an existential way that is essentially unfixable. (Jude being the character from the monastery above. Without getting into the entire plot of A Little Life, what the reader needs to know is that he is stupendously unlucky.) But in many cases the reader will not have any good reason to feel the way he does. Everyone who experiences these feelings for no reason thinks: “What is wrong with me? Why can’t I get some perspective? I know my life is basically fine; why do I want to die so intensely?” Jude’s despair, on the other hand, is objectively justified. Other than getting better, another temporary relief for this cognitive dissonance is to project imaginatively into the person of Jude, who has great reasons to want to die so intensely, and also enjoys excellent taste in opera.

I fear that discussing this in too much detail will cause people to believe that young middle-class women who have never heard of Meret Oppenheim are all living lives completely unblemished by real danger. In reality, many young women, even of this cohort, are running through gauntlets of often-sexualized aggression and degradation, in the home and the public square. That said, I myself do live a very privileged life and nevertheless went through a long period of inconsolable despair. This is the experience I speak to here.

If we consider Jude’s uses as a figure of projection, we understand why the novel cannot linger too long on any personal quality of his that would make him genuinely unsympathetic. To do so would threaten the imaginative link with the reader. Some details do appear in flickers that I began to anticipate desperately. For example, we learn in a brief sequence in a law class that Jude appears to oppose abortion. This is extremely interesting, but we are not allowed the space to develop any antipathy toward Jude. It is important to the novel that our relationship with Jude himself be straightforward.

Take also the few instants when he is allowed to think critically of his luckier, more privileged peers: “At that moment, he hated all of them.” Shouldn’t he be allowed to hate them? A little longer? In the book as written Jude is only allowed to hate himself.

New York Extremity

The level of abuse visited on Jude ought to provoke hatred in the reader. It ought to provoke incredible horror and anger. Maybe I am only blunted to extremity in fiction; after all, the actual events on the page are obviously abhorrent and disgusting. Yet the understated touch of the prose leaves a strangely prim impression in ways that I don’t think are exactly intended.

In some places the extremity feels nearly tongue-in-cheek. I don’t underestimate the possibility that Yanagihara intends to evoke extremely dark humour, riding the line of bad taste. I am beginning to find brazen bad taste quite interesting, and if the affect were consistent I would respect the approach. For example, the first time Jude’s narration idly drops some mention of the monastery your reaction is inevitably a little chuckle: “What monastery?” Somehow I even had this reaction re-reading the novel for this essay, although by that point I knew perfectly well what monastery. Or: when we smash cut from Jude’s rescue by a kindly lesbian social worker to her death of cancer in a hospital bed. Only four months later! Your reaction is: “Oh, come on, man!”

(By the way, the treatment that the very few lesbian characters get in this book as the ultimate figures of New York satire began to feel a bit much, given that there are no women characters with any interiority. Keep this in mind; we’ll return to it.)

I continue to feel that the novel wants you to treat with the abuse straightforwardly, not ironically. If so, part of the thematic framework is that some people really are incredibly unlucky. The terrible thing is that this is true. The fact that some people in this world are forced to face horrors that would bring anyone to the edge of sanity is fascinating territory for fiction. It offers possibilities for both biblical and Beat-novel resonances. Everyone in Naked Lunch is incredibly unlucky, too.

I want to note as well that Jude is really only uniquely unlucky among upper-class New York art students. In a group of chronically homeless people, foster-system alumni, or refugees, perhaps in a church basement somewhere, in a circle of folding chairs, over a nice plate of cookies and some juice, Jude’s story would not necessarily stand out. For God’s sake, it’s New York. I don’t say this to cheapen his trauma but actually to point out an opportunity for Jude to find solidarity and fellowship which the novel could not accommodate because its imagination of person-types is extremely constrained, and also, to express mild frustration with the sentiment that his history is unrealistically over-the-top or necessarily “camp”.

Overall, the tone and approach of A Little Life somehow saps the powers that might be summoned by the horror of the material. There are single lines in McCarthy that make me physically nauseous. The Xiu Xiu song “Mary Turner Mary Turner” is so intense I nearly can’t listen to it. Recently I heard a CBC podcast on slavery in the fishing industry; there’s a final detail revealed in that investigation which is so horrible that as I walked down a sunlit street I thought to myself in woozy astonishment, I have to kill myself. (Don’t worry, still here.)

Yet despite the continual escalation, nothing in A Little Life provokes the reaction for me that “Mary Turner Mary Turner” does. I desperately wanted it to. (Maybe an abuse scene in the mid-late novel involving a staircase comes close; but honestly, I was distracted by trying to figure out how some of the actions that are supposed to occur in that sequence are physically possible.) The emotional state the reader is asked to maintain is a kind of voyeuristic sadness that will, I would think uncharitably, keep them turning pages to discover further ugly details of Jude’s history.

Hatred is action; hatred is turned outward. You move through the novel in a haze of pity. This emotional state blunts the reader rather than sharpening her. Jude is supposedly a terrifying force at his job as a lawyer, but we never see him in the courtroom. Your haze could not withstand him berating a paralegal to tears. Within actual events, in a pattern that is classically considered feminine, Jude’s extremity is entirely directed inward.

An Aside on the Feminized Young Man

When a novel could be described as “fanficish” often one of these young men appears. Patroclus in Miller’s Song of Achilles is probably the closest example to hand. Because of this he may be seen as a modern trend and dismissed. But I’ve found a handful of these young men in Iris Murdoch, for example.

Jude is one of these; he is at various points described outright as “feminine” or “androgynous”. His beauty is emphasized, he is assumed to be gay by many other characters, he has feminized talents like singing and cooking, and his maladaptive behaviours are feminized, like cutting and starving himself. But most centrally, like other examples of his template, he is sex-differentiated from other men by his status as a “licit” subject for sexual abuse. I mean in the sense that men who would be prone to commit sexualized violence see a target in him where they don’t in his male friends.

The presence of this figure can feel irritating or too-telling or fetishistic somehow, particularly for those of us struggling to escape personal ghettos of taste where this young man resides. However, I have come to feel that there is something revealing about the internal experience of gender in the way that this figure reappears so persistently in the fantasy writing of women.

I can only speak from my own experience, but I have no sense of myself as “a woman”; I think of myself as a default person. I suspect this is true of many women, but especially those who are somewhat interior and have skipped out on certain rituals of sex socialization that occur through heterosexuality, whether because they prefer women or because they don’t garner the attention of men. Women, one suspects, who are especially prone to become fiction writers.

The feminized young man, being male, is also a default person. He is not a target of sexualized and sex-differentiated treatment because of any intrinsic sex trait of his, but by some shocking and perhaps unnatural mis-interpretation by other men, typically men who are bigger, crueler, meaner, older than he is. (Ignore the homophobia for a second. Stay with me.)

Contrast this with the image of a fictional woman; as soon as she enters, we all comprehend that she could potentially be a subject of sexual violence. This would be horrible, but it would be according to type. Nobody is confused about why it would happen; nobody says, “I don’t get it, why would he do that to her?” From the time she appears she is a sex-differentiated image upon which certain acts can be visited.

Sex-differentiation occurs from the outside to the feminized young man. It is a process that is inflicted on him. This is how sex-differentiation feels to a certain kind of woman. It is confusing. It is intermittent. It makes no sense. It feels shocking and unnatural to be reminded all of a sudden that there is some ontological difference in the eyes of your male friends between yourself and them.

So, when female writers are working through issues of sexual differentiation and sexual violence, it shouldn’t surprise us that they project these issues onto a man (a default person) who has particular traits (smaller, more androgynous, gentler) that for some bizarre reason make him a target for certain types of treatment, certain types of violence, from other certain types of men. This topsy-turvy world is actually exactly the world experienced by women. And if a woman has difficulty writing about women, it is natural for her to gravitate to this figure, and to express through him her perplexity and shame. Since, after all, if there is no good reason that all this humiliation is happening, the natural deduction is that it must be a personal failing of yours.

Strange Loop

Self-hatred consists of many layers, each of which intensifies the overall complex. For example, at one level you hate yourself; at the next level you know that there is no real reason to hate yourself, and you hate yourself even more; at the next level you are forced to resort to various types of social delusions to soothe the ego-wound of self-hatred; at the next level you recognize your delusions and hate yourself for them; and so on.

Self-hatred tends toward narcissism. The emotion is so extreme that it prevents you from responding to the world and regulating your actions in a wise way. Somebody once told me that in Alcoholics Anonymous this phenomenon is referred to as “feeling like the asshole at the centre of the universe”.

Jude is an ideal figure of fantasy for sufferers of this affliction for a number of reasons. His self-loathing is consistently shown to be irrational, for example. He thinks of himself as having a monstrous appearance, but everyone around him can see that he is actually uncommonly beautiful. This is a comforting template for the person who thinks of herself as having a monstrous appearance but is basically average-looking. In a way, it is more exciting to imagine that you are secretly beautiful, but too depressed and alienated to recognize your beauty, than it is to face up to mediocrity.

Jude also never asks for the help he needs; he is too traumatized to even realize he is traumatized. If you spend a lot of time castigating yourself that your strange or extreme behaviours are “cries for attention”, it is attractive to imagine that you could wipe the idea of a “cry for attention” out of your mind. Then you could be sure your symptoms were pure, which would earn you that mystical panacea: therapy, or something.

Many of the characters in the novel are troubled over the decision of whether to intervene in Jude’s harmful behaviours. Jude himself only considers actually asking for help very rarely. But miraculously, on several occasions, this decision is taken out of his hands. He cuts himself so deeply that he absolutely must be rushed to the doctor. Or else his doctor sees some new evidence of pain and is so overcome by sympathy that he nearly begins to weep. For a certain type of sufferer this fantasy is so typical that seeing it on the page feels almost like case study. The fantasy is that if you were to harm yourself to such an extreme, nobody around you could deny your pain. If you were to ask for help you would risk rejection. You want help to be foisted on you despite your virtuous stoicism. Discourses on online communities for eating disorder support, for example, quickly demonstrate that for many sufferers their lethal illness is not about becoming thinner in the pursuit of beauty, exactly, in the way beauty is conventionally understood; rather a central fantasy is becoming so thin that even strangers will say, “Something must definitely be wrong with her.” People with this fantasy chase the type of obvious, inarguable evidence of pain that would prove without a doubt not only that you need help, but that you deserve to be helped.

I am not implying that people who have this fantasy are not really suffering. Just the opposite, in fact. The impulse in the public world to frame self-harming young women as whiny or attention-seeking is exactly the framing that drives those women into increasingly extreme forms of self-harm. These framings produce the spectre of the undeserving sufferer against whom the young woman must react in increasingly extreme ways to prove how she is different.

The extreme endpoint of the urge to harm yourself, of course, is to kill yourself. Only people who really, really need help wind up killing themselves. If you kill yourself, the validity of your pain is no longer up for debate. The key problem with this desire is that you never really get to experience the emotional catharsis you might fantasize about after you kill yourself, due to BEING DEAD.

The mind has difficulty assessing scale in a rational manner. We can react, for example, to an awkward conversation as if it were a life-altering disaster. Similarly, the mind has difficulty comprehending the completeness of BEING DEAD.

Particularly for people with a certain type of suicidal ideation, the urge to become dead is like an urge to enter a quiet room and sleep for a long time, or the urge to do something that will finally release the unbearable tension inside you, or the urge to demonstrate to everyone how brave you are for withstanding all these slings and arrows. But BEING DEAD is not at all like any of these things. It is like nothing at all. It will not be a relief. You will not exist to experience relief.

The comparison is unflattering, but A Little Life occurs in a suicidal’s dreamworld adjacent to that teen Netflix show Thirteen Reasons Why. Of course, decisions were made in the latter project less for artistic purposes and more to generate controversial thinkpieces, and I don’t suspect Yanagihara of that level of cynicism. In Thirteen, after the sufferer kills herself all the grudges of her life are resolved; unsympathetic parents discover and sob over her corpse, finally understanding the depth of her pain; she is beatified and looks over the lives of her survivors; her voice will live on through recorded tapes; her suicide rights the wrongs she endured. All this makes it difficult for the viewer to recall that Sarah herself, the suicide, if she were real, would literally not experience any of this catharsis, because she would be LITERALLY DEAD.

For the record, I didn’t actually finish Thirteen Reasons Why. I was too angry. Once, while meeting a friend’s mother at a wine tasting, somebody foolishly spoke the name, and I responded at volume for at least five minutes, disclosing many intimate details about my mental health in the process. Five minutes is actually a very long time when you are talking about your suicidal ideation to a friend’s mother at a wine tasting. This is yet another situation that Jude St. Francis never has to deal with.

Ode to Jean-Baptiste

In a sequence early on, Jude visits his friend Jean-Baptiste, who has a minor illness. Jean-Baptiste is a middle-class Black classmate who will be treated with an unfortunate lack of charity throughout the novel even in sections nominally interior to his perspective. For example, in this sequence, the sick Jean-Baptiste makes a “hubbub” and moans “theatrically”. Jude visits his bedside and smiles, totally innocent of hate. We are intended to see bitter irony in Jude’s uncomplaining support for his undeserving friend. Jude’s pain is of a different caliber. Obviously, this is grounded and fair given the literal circumstances of the novel. Jude suffers from torturous, incessant chronic pain as a consequence of victimizations in his childhood. Passages describing the alienation this pain causes him, the ways the pain limits him daily, are undeniably moving, if romantically rendered. Unlike for JB, Jude’s pain will require the novel to call on words like “hummingbird”, “ocean-green” and “apricot”—the last to describe a smear of vomit.

JB is the character who ultimately dissolves the novel’s initial group of friends by dealing Jude an insult that he can’t recover from. Despite JB’s ascendant career as a painter, he becomes addicted to methamphetamines, which he himself explains as a desire to experience New York edge that will enhance his brand as an artist. A classic “addicted to methamphetamines for attention” scenario. In withdrawal, manic, irrational, JB imitates Jude’s limp during an instant of horrible cruelty. This shatters their relationship forever, except for a later terminal detour when he forces a kiss on Jude, who rightfully flees.

To summarize, the guy is messy. I wouldn’t want to be his friend. In fact, these characters give him more forgiveness than he earns on the page. It isn’t made exactly clear how they all became such good pals. JB’s behaviour from the beginning is unrelentingly annoying. He quibbles about money although his friends are poorer, he gives Jude a callous nickname, et cetera.

(The nickname is “The Postman”, referring to the fact that Jude is “post-sexual” because his trauma has prevented him from discovering his sexual orientation, and “post-racial” because he appears mixed-race without knowledge of his ethnic origins. JB doesn’t have all the history here, to be fair. It does sit strangely with me how, even in the superficially race-indifferent social world of the novel, the two non-Black characters are very noticeably preferred as narrative channels and figures of romantic projection, and the darker-skinned Black character from an immigrant family is a particular scapegoat. Jude, although he is meant to be noticeably non-white, has no consciousness of himself as socially differentiated on the basis of colour or race from his white lover, mentors, or perpetrators. Obviously this is his business, but it makes the dynamic between himself and JB feel even more fraught.)

Despite all of JB’s demonstrable flaws, as I revisited the novel for this essay I came to feel protective, and even defensive, about JB. Is it his fault that the worst episode of his life made him unlikeable? Isn’t that what happens to most of us? Most of us are somewhat unlikeable from time to time. We are annoying, thoughtless, impulsive, condescending, entitled. Even without the meth.

Jude is a fantasy of gorgeous self-abnegation, a perfect victim with an unimpeachable history of trauma. JB is his counterpoint: a risible overgrown infant with an inflated ego. Chubby to boot. The undeserving victim is contrasted with the deserving victim, the whiner prince with the virtuous pauper. (But not, like, a tacky pauper.) In the most literal sense, A Little Life is an exercise in splitting.

I have no more interest than Yanagihara does in the novel as a site for paint-by-numbers psychosocial modelling. But if a novel has any slim advantage over a cut-up, surely it is in the complex exegesis of the social-emotional world which can provoke us to new instants of trouble and awareness. A Little Life has extremity painted on the surface but the effect of its underlying structure soothes and settles. The epic dichotomy organizes the impulses of blame we might feel toward the imagined figures into two neat lines.

To repudiate this dichotomy, we would have to confront the terrifying lawlessness of the lived social world. There would be nobody left whose pain is obviously legitimate, whose insecurities are obviously nonsense, and whose enemies are obviously inexcusable. Very few people believe sincerely in such a figure for any considered length of time, but he can be a comforting position to pass through briefly. Even more often, we can distinguish ourselves from, or punish ourselves with, the position of his opposite. This is the central opportunity which A Little Life affords.

I like camp gothic. I like extremity. I like bad taste. I love the scene in The Vampire Lestat in which fledgeling Lestat descends into the dungeon of the pederastic baron guy who turned him into a vampire and finds a pile of a hundred corpses that look exactly like him and pukes up blood on the floor and then gets down on his knees and licks it up. I obviously don’t love the scenes (??) in Naked Lunch which come down to long descriptions of boys from subaltern countries raping and killing each other, but I think they have potential to be productively unsettling.

A Little Life‘s atrocities don’t feel so grim as Burroughs’s or so ecstatic as Rice’s or so terrible as either, and they even begin to feel gratuitous and unearned, because they don’t serve to create dissonance, but to resolve it. Naked Lunch is automatic writing; A Little Life is calculated, with none of the sense of hysteria at its own imagination that characterizes real confrontation with the extreme. We feel pity for Jude; we feel disgust for JB. Everything that happens to Jude merely serves to increase his moral distance from his counterpart. It does not happen for its own sake. The fact that atrocity happens so often for its own sake is an intrinsic part of its atrociousness. Without it all tragedy is just Beth dying prettily in Little Women.

Most of us are more like JB than Jude, at least in the sense that we are capable of hurting others, and of being unlikeable, and that we certainly will do both throughout our lives, and that we must learn to live wisely with these eventualities. I wish that Yanagihara, and the imagined reader, would show herself-in-JB more sympathy. But I recognize, in myself too, that it is comfortable in a miserable way to fix the imagination on the distant mirage of total blamelessness, even if it requires us to castigate and deny all error in ourselves. Perhaps the urge is messianic; we would feel relieved if we learned that even one of us were Jude and could extend his blamelessness in the smallest way to us.