On shame and reissue

Feb 7, 2010 books
Posted by Mary Borsellino

I’m reading a fantastic book of essays called Gay Shame at the moment, and just finished one by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick called “Shame, Theatricality and Queer Performativity” about Henry James.

The essay looks at the depression James went through after the New York edition of his collected works was met with a “total failure to sell and its apparently terminal failure to evoke any recognition from any readership”. Sedgwick compares the devastating melancholia James went through to the very earliest shame-responses seen in infants sometime between the third and seventh month of life — that’s the age when babies start responding with recognisable shame-postures and expressions to stimuli.

And what stimuli causes that reaction? It happens when the baby smiles at a caregiver, and the caregiver fails to return that smile.

It sounds like such a simple comparison, but it’s pretty revelatory to me. It explains so much about the tangled emotional mess of my relationship to my writing, and it does it so clearly and cleanly that it’s a little bit mind-blowing. Writing novels, submitting stories to anthologies, posting fanfic on lj — they’re all different manifestations of the same basic thing: I’m offering a smile at the reader, hoping for a smile in return. And when the smile doesn’t come, bam! I’m just like the babies. Shame response a-go-go.

I don’t know what this new self-knowledge will mean in terms of my relationships with future writings and readers, but it’ll be interesting to find out.

The other thing I wanted to quote from Sedgwick’s essay is about the introductions James put on the stories in the New York edition, because it is exactly, perfectly, how I feel about Ophelia’s Salvation, and about writing the foreword to the 10th anniversary edition of that book:

The speaking self of the preface does not attempt to merge with the potentially shaming or shamed figurations of its younger self, younger fictions, younger heroes; its attempt is to love them. That love is shown to occur both in spite of shame and, more remarkably, through it.