THE DOCTOR IS IN

WHAT’S AGE GROUP GOT TO DO WITH IT?

I inadvertently derailed my own post last week, by mentioning what another writer had said about Madame Bovary’s chances of being published today. I’m glad I did, though, because the comments were interesting in themselves and made me think more about what appear to be temporally-based differences in sensibility.

Each of us brings our own history and temperament to any work of art, and these influence our understanding and appreciation. This is true of “ordinary” readers, and I think it’s reasonable to assume that it’s true of agents and editors as well. So it might be interesting to unpack some of the elements that can influence our responses, both individually and as group members.

The first element that stands out for me is reactions to depictions of violence, and I want to look at this today. Others include ability to handle multiple simultaneous stimuli and tolerance for digression. I hope to explore these and other issues in later posts.

I would probably have been considered oversensitive to violence in any era. I hated most cartoons when I was a child, because the characters were always punching, exploding, or mutilating one another. Other kids my age loved “The Three Stooges,” while I hid behind a book when they were on. And the book was never by the brothers Grimm.

But I think there is an age component, too. The fictional depictions of violence I was exposed to when young tended to be either wildly unrealistic (monster movies, cartoons and fairy tales) or muted (bloodless deaths, mostly off-camera, of villains in westerns and costume dramas).  I may be blocking something, but I really can’t recall anything comparable to the police and war video games that seem to be commonplace in malls and movie theaters now.

The only violent acts I was exposed to in media were all too real. I was eleven when JFK’s assassination was announced and described on TV. A few days later we watched Jack Ruby shoot and kill Lee Harvey Oswald in real time. I was sixteen when footage of RFK’s assassination was televised, and when graphic images of the Tet offensive were shown on the nightly news. These images were burned indelibly into my brain, and those of many of my peers, and, I think, shaped the ways we react to depictions of violence and the ways we choose to deal with it in our own art. Some of us, I think, have chosen to immerse ourselves in violent imagery in order to explore and come to terms with its meaning. Others, including me, tended to escape into the literature of times that, while not actually gentler, were depicted in more indirect ways. (People in my age group will recognize the distinction between Weathermen and flower children—same stimulus; similar revulsion; radically different response set.)

As a therapist, I have worked with victims (and sometimes perpetrators) of extreme violence: hospital rehab patients whose limbs were mutilated or hacked off in drug deals and extortion schemes that went bad; survivors of childhood sexual abuse and domestic violence; and individuals seeking asylum in the US on the grounds of torture in their home countries. I can’t claim to ever have come to terms with the horrors that humans inflict on each other, but I am fairly competent at assessing and addressing their sequelae. Very little surprises or shocks me in real life.

What I can’t deal with is what I have come to call “recreational violence”—graphic depictions of cruelty or brutality in media intended for entertainment. This is not a value judgment: I know that this aversion has kept me from appreciating a number of serious, important works of art, as well as many popular pursuits that others find cathartic. For me, though, it all feels too real, and, as in real life, my response is to try to intervene—to stop the violence, and aid the victims. If I can’t do that, passively watching feels unbearable. And it’s hard not to think that my history, and that of my age cohort, contributes to that reaction. 

(And, yes, Emma’s spoiler spoiler is certainly depicted with some violence—but the violence is mainly emotional; compared to what happens in real life when people spoiler, the physical descriptions are mild and fairly benign.)

As always, I welcome your thoughtful responses and descriptions of your own experiences.

Susan O'Doherty, Ph.D., is a clinical psychologist with a New York City-based practice. A fiction writer herself, she specializes in issues affecting writers and other creative artists. She is the author of Getting Unstuck without Coming Unglued: A Woman's Guide to Unblocking Creativity (Seal, 2007). Her Career Coach column appears every Monday on Inside Higher Ed's Mama, Ph.D. blog , and she is a regular monthly panelist on Litopia After Dark. Send your questions to her at Dr.Sue at mindspring dot com.

Comments

[katharine weber]

The casual violence of another era, like the casual racism of another era, can be startling when one revisits novels or films or television programs that are pleasantly familiar until that unpleasant clash and shock of past/present ways of seeing. Why was it ever okay, let alone funny, when Jackie Gleason threatened his wife with his habitual "One of these days, Alice, pow, right in the kisser!" lines? (I despised that show, for that reason among many.)

In the present moment, we are on the one hand far more alert to racism and sexism, but on the other hand we are entertaining ourselves with more and more extraordinary depictions of violence. There is surely a correlation, with violence spicing up everything because it's a cheap thrill, harder to define and limit and sanction, and so it's a less problematic stimulant.