Silas Lapham and self-interest (3 November 2006)

I finished reading The Rise of Silas Lapham, which didn't quite deliver on the exploration of "the capitalist ethos of the American Gilded Age" as promised on the back of the Oxford World Classics paperback. The analysis amounted to titular character, a mineral-paint magnate, confronting ruinous competition cheerfully, without holding anything against his rivals -- West Virginian brothers -- who through sheer good fortune will be able to undersell him and reduce him to a niche producer: "A strange, not ignoble friendliness existed between Lapham and the three brothers; they had used him fairly; it was their facilities that had conquered him, not their ill-will; and he recognized in them without enmity the necessity to which he had yielded." It was nothing personal, just capitalism, which is here presented as an indifferent force of nature that uses mere mortals as its playthings.

Lapham had also been victimized by a series of poor investments in "wild-cat stocks" and an unfortunate case of eminent domain in which the railroad seizes his property for a pittance. The justice of this is much questioned; they are just introduced as the workings of malevolent fate, and possibly the nefarious meddling of Rogers, Lapham's onetime financier. Howells wants to stress Lapham's able business capabilities and differentiate them from the issues of finance, which he associates with the scheming Rogers, who is ever on the watch for people to dupe (yet strangely never manages to accumulate anything for his wiles). The inexplicable perplexity of finance does Lapham in, for it's a realm in which his virtues -- diligence, hard work, honesty, genuine enthusiasm for his product -- do him no good.

Much of that story is told belatedly and quickly, in the last few chapters, after Howells apparently grew bored of the romance he meticulously set up between Corey, the wealthy heir, and Lapham's two daughters, one pretty and simple (Irene), the other smart and "dark" (Penelope). Howells invents a book within a book suddenly -- the sentimental "Tears, Idle Tears" -- as the romantic plot comes to a head seemingly in order to mock his own plot line. We are brought to invest ourselves in the outcome of this misbegotten love triangle only to be encouraged to see it as so much foolishness. The Laphams believe Corey wants to marry Irene, and they all encourage her to love him, but then he goes and proposes to Penelope, who has been far more interesting all along. Penelope feels obliged to reject him, for her sister's sake. Silas tells his daughters' trouble to a minister, who then fulminates against the "false ideal of self-sacrifice" and "the novels that befool and debauch almost every intelligence in some degree" -- see, I knew there was a reason I stopped reading them.

But though this rejection of self-sacrifice has to do with the love story, it seems like its really about the economics story, as enlightened self-interest, the opposite of frivolous self-sacrifice and a hallmark capitalist ethic, is presumably the engine that has fueled Lapham's rise, along with the rest of the wealthy Boston society we are shown, and the whole of American industry in general. And yet Lapham himself turns his back on self-interest and refuses to knowingly and legally defraud others to save himself. Presumably he is a model of how capitalists are supposed to behave, even absent any checks to their self-interest. Perhaps Howells lampoons the sentimental novels because he believes more novels should be written like his own, which hurriedly models appropriate ethical behavior for fat cats.

The other aspect of the novel is the conflict between the old money Coreys and the nouveau riche Laphams -- this feels anticlimactic, in that the Coreys simply decide to hold their nose and tolerate the Laphams, not out of economic dependency but out of their pretensions of gentility. So their ability to rise above what might be construed as self-interest (preventing a son from marrying beneath him) seems to be depicted not as noble sacrifice but a warped pride. So I'm tempted to conclude that the novel wants to advocate self-interested behavior across the board and sees Lapham as a hero only ironically -- he's a relic, and in the end Howells devotes a lot of space to describing him as moribund.

The novel ends with the minister saying it's too complicated to figure out what's responsible for "evil" in the moral world, even in that diabolical case of failed businesses. "Its course is often so very obscure; and often it seems to involve, so far as we can see, no penalty whatsoever." Translation: when people get cheated out of money or economic disadvantages are leveraged against the less fortunate, no one is at fault, really. Certainly it's not capitalism's fault anymore than it's nature's fault if your house gets struck by lightning and catches on fire. "Your fear of having possibly behaved selfishly ... kept you on your guard and strengthened you when you were brought face to face with a greater...emergency," the minister suggests to Lapham, in consolation for having lost his riches. Lapham reiterates his inability to be anything but a straight dealer and declares he has no regrets. I can't be the only one to regard this as stubborn pride. We have to wonder, as he struggles in his rural shack with no heat, just how much Howells is endorsing his choices. So either I'm far too cynical (likely) or Howells is being a tad more ironic than you'd think in his title.

Connoisseurs of emotion (27 October 2006)

Via BPS Digest (and Marginal Revolution) comes this report that claims reading novels will make a person more empathetic. In the test the researchers conducted, "The more authors of fiction that a participant recognised, the higher they tended to score on measures of social awareness and tests of empathy – for example being able to recognise a person’s emotions from a picture showing their eyes only, or being able to take another person’s perspective. Recognising more non-fiction authors showed the opposite association."

The BPS Digest also notes of the study: "However, a weakness of the study is that the direction of causation has not been established – it might simply be that more-empathic people prefer reading novels." Having recently turned away from fiction to read nonfiction almost exclusively, I wonder if this means I've become more callous, and my disgruntlement with fiction is indicative of empathy fatigue or something -- novels are a means to try to experience empathy on an artificial, preplanned basis. Or perhaps my turn to nonfiction, if I really thought about it, is a potentially pathological means to blunt emotional connection I'm subconsciously trying to ward off. Maybe I'm using the arid world of facts -- the dry, detached prose of The Economist, for instance -- as a buffer from the warmth of human contact, which, frankly, can often seem like a hassle and a threat and a call to action when I'm much more comfortable planted on my couch reading.

That's not a good thing. So as a therapeutic measure, I've stayed planted on the couch, and started to read The Rise of Silas Lapham by William Dean Howells. Something Walter Benn Michaels wrote about it in The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism stuck with me -- something about how Howells is trying to figure a return to a precapitalist mode of relationships and how the novel delineates zero-sum social status games. (Even when I'm picking novels, I need some hyperpragmatic reason to read them.) I'm about halfway through it, and I can't say I feel any more empathic, but I'm trying to pay special attention to how the novelist wants to keep my attention focused on minute shiftings of his characters' attitude, and the means he uses to describe them. What novels do obviously -- the raison d'etre, probably for the study -- is teach readers ways to think the emotion of others, put it into words that can serve as a comprehensible substitute for something we can never access directly. Our own emotion is often inarticulate, too immediate, and we often don't bother to analyze it and think it rather than experience it. One of the reasons novels of past centuries continue to be read is that they provide tools for verbalizing emotion and for modeling its recognition.

This line of thinking would seem to run counter to the evolutionary psychologists' beliefs that apprehension of emotion is inborn and immediate (a la Darwin's study of facial expressions, for instance). From this point of view emotional comprehension is hard-wired and verges on instinct -- one psychologist even argues that changing your expression can change your mood to suit it. But what novels want to do is slow down the instantaneous instinctual process of reaction to others' emotional expressions and make it a subject for gratifying intellectual mastery. We derive a grammar of emotion and learn to experience tracing its fine movements as a species of pleasure. We are encouraged to become connoisseurs in emotion -- the way Sterne's narrator is in A Sentimental Journey.

Does this then objectify emotion, trivialize it, or commodify it? Is it wrong to perceive the feelings of others as a kind of delicacy, like a rare cheese or bottle of port? Is being overly concerned with the emotions others are experiencing simply a way of consuming other people? Novels serve to commercialize otherwise intangible emotional experiences; in the process they likely make empathy into something more akin to a shopper's discernment.

The question of whether altruism exists comes into play in this as well -- what motives are ultimately served in our efforts to feel another's pain? It seems a pertinent question to ask, because perhaps a deeper empathy can be achieved once the more self-serving level is interrogated a bit. Ultimately, I guess I would need to know more about how the study measure empathy to know whether there might be differences between that kind of empathy and some other preferable kind that isn't instrumentalized through entertainment product. Until then I'll keep reading Howells and hope things work out for "sly" Penelope.