WAYNE KOESTENBAUM is the author of five books of poetry, one novel, and six books of nonfiction. As a cultural critic, he often writes from the perspective of a gay man. Koestenbaum’s subjects include opera, avant-garde artists and writers, and musical and theatrical stars. His best-known critical study, The Queen’s Throat: Opera, Homosexuality, and the Mystery of Desire (1993), examines the affinity of gay men for opera. His most recent book, Humiliation (2011), is part of the Picador Big Ideas//Small Books series. Koestenbaum is a graduate of Harvard College and Princeton University. He is a distinguished professor of English at the CUNY Graduate Center and a visiting professor in the painting department of the Yale School of Art.
This interview was conducted over the telephone late last August.
Daniel Burr: I thought we would start with the title of the book, which I’ve got to say I thoroughly enjoyed, and I hope reaches a wide audience. A passage that struck me reads: “Humiliation is the theater in which shame appears.” So would you like to start by explaining a little about the distinction you make between humiliation and shame?
Wayne Koestenbaum: Yes. I will explain it with a caveat that such distinctions needn’t be hard and fast or absolute, and there’s obviously a spectrum in which many affects swim and collide. I consider humiliation to be an event with some external manifestations and a theatrical temperament.
Humiliation demands an instigator who catalyzes the humiliation, someone who experiences the humiliation, and someone who witnesses the humiliation. So humiliation seems to me a grand life event, something that occurs within a proscenium in the same way that a work of art requires a proscenium in which the artwork occurs, which defines the object or artifact as art, even if it’s simply the perceiver who notices the beautiful object and decides to call it art. There’s some externalization which inscribes the event as art. Similarly, with humiliation there needs to be that amphitheater or stadium surrounding the event.
Shame can be an internal tremor, a palpitation like a blush. It can be merely subjective. Another way to put it would be that shame is an affect and humiliation is an occurrence. Shame may be experienced as humiliation. In the litany of personal humiliations at the end of my book, I realize that many of those really qualify as shame rather than humiliation because nobody witnessed them.
DB: When I read the book, it made me recall vividly a situation where I think I humiliated a student that I was working with. The book brought back that scene and I felt almost a physical reaction of shame to what I had done. So that’s how that distinction comes home to me.
WK: I’m very moved to hear that the book had that effect on you, because I was so aware when writing it that I may come across as somebody with a uniquely intense repertoire of shames and humiliations in my past. And I don’t really think that’s true at all. I don’t think there’s anything extraordinary about my appetite for humiliation or its proliferation in my life. I’m aware that any pedagogical situation, any parental situation, any performance situation brings with it the possibility for intense, lacerating reverberations of these emotions.
DB: Childhood is a theme that recurs through the book—descriptions of childhood encounters with humiliation. Reading the book I relived moments of humiliation in my childhood, and I think every reader will have the same reaction. I’m struck with the scene you describe in detail, the model of all humiliations for you, of the child being beaten in school. Why do childhood humiliations have such a special status?
WK: Well from a Freudian perspective, early scenes of any kind have status, as you put it, or a kind of branding power that perpetually echoes, scenes that never go away. The unconscious is tenacious and lets nothing go; it’s a kind of copying machine extraordinaire, replicating day and night. Also, I think young children live in a land of absolute moments, absolute magnitude, and lack a sense of context or irony. Power for children is absolute, and not merely because of their projections or misunderstandings. As an adult I have imaginative mobility. I have powers of ratiocination and I can do the sort of tricks Jean Genet does in his fiction and autobiography of transvaluing shame into triumph. The power relations in childhood are absolute and monarchical. But children also have more magical thinking, so stains are permanent. And also just when one is a child one is small compared to others, so one is in an intrinsically belittled state.
DB: These childhood scenes stay with us throughout our lives. I don’t know if they’re good or bad, but we can go back to them very quickly it seems to me.
WK: As a writer I find them rich sources; I’ve written about these scenes my entire writing life from my first book of poetry in 1990. In fact, in many of the scenes that I describe in this book I have written about 25 years ago in poetry. So the experience of returning to these scenes is not new for me at all. What’s new is that I’m writing about these experiences in a discursive, expository voice for a wider audience in prose, and under the topic of humiliation. So I’m foregrounding the humiliating aspects of these experiences rather than the other nuances.
As a writer I perversely keep returning perpetually to these fructifying scenes and sources. I can’t exactly call the power they have to engender writing redemptive, but they’re magical scenes. For example, the scene of the kid being paddled in class, when I decide again to write about that and—with a certain shame that I’m repeating myself and should grow up and get over it—the scene is still there for me. It’s like a brand new 35 millimeter print of a classic film sparkling without static or flaw. I can replay it. I can see it, smell it, hear it. And I can enter into the crevices and interstices of the incident with a new acuity, maybe with a greater acuity and tenderness each time I return, so that these scenes in a kind of Proustian way are precious to me and my material.
DB: The power of that scene for the adult reader is that you realize everyone present was humiliated, the child, the other students in the room and to my mind particularly the teacher.
WK: What I remember significantly from that scene is that the teacher gave the kid an option to pull down his pants in the class or to go outside and do it there, but outside there were older kids playing sports. It was like recess or after school. And I remember vividly that sense of dilemma which would be more shameful and more humiliating to pull down his pants in front of kids his own age or go outside.
DB: I’m familiar with some of your other books, and when I began this book I wondered, when’s he going to get around to sexuality here? I like the fact that you don’t dwell on being gay as necessarily any potential source of humiliation. You talk about many things—being Jewish, being short, not having big muscles when you were a kid—that might have caused humiliation, but not just being gay per se. Have we moved beyond thinking that homosexuality has any necessary connection to humiliation?
WK: Well, it would be lovely if that were the case. But I don’t think it can be, given the wide variety of historical and social circumstances in which homosexuality occurs. I talk frequently about the fact that I felt not sufficiently legible as a boy. I knew I was a boy, but I didn’t always think I came across as a boy. That seemed to be long before I was aware of homosexual feelings. I was aware of the shakiness of my boy identity. And that was deeply humiliating. I write throughout the book about unwanted erections and things like that, the notion that I had a kind of quick-trigger physiological reaction to naked boys and men before I even understood that this was a very dangerous and possibly humiliating tendency. And I don’t think I even put it together that, oh, if you get hard in front of other boys they will know that you’re a fag. I kind of knew that, but it was more just a sense of physical shame that my body could speak without my permission.
DB: On another subject, your take on the media: you call television the manure pond of humiliation, and you call YouTube a manure rivulet. Some of the passages in the book made me wonder, have shows like American Idol, which is seen everywhere, affected our collective consciousness about enjoying the humiliation? I worry that this is doing permanent damage to the human psyche.
WK: I wouldn’t go as far as that, but I would say something about the tone of media speech—I’ve done a lot publicity for this book—I was on a national TV show. And I realized after about thirty seconds that to enter into the sphere of TV-speak, I had to shout. I had to overemphasize. I had to affect a kind of belligerence even to participate. There’s a kind of forcefulness, even if the views being espoused are the liberal ones that I hold, there’s a kind of hectoring insistence that I find physically distasteful in the same way that I find overt displays of machismo (unless it’s deeply ironized) to be distasteful. So what feels to me coarsened is that belittling others, a kind of dude humor, seems to be taken as normal. And that is troubling and it’s also antipathetic. I turn away from it the way I would turn away from a bad smell.
DB: Many famous—and expected—names appear in your accounts of humiliated celebrities: stars like Judy Garland, her daughter Liza Minnelli, Michael Jackson; the political bad boys, from Richard Nixon to Ted Kennedy to Bill Clinton, more recently Eliot Spitzer and Larry Craig. You make distinctions about the humiliation experienced by these people, but in most cases, in your descriptions of them, you show how humiliation can elicit sympathy and even give a person some kind of power. When a performer like Liza Minnelli or Judy Garland performs badly, when they get on stage and do something humiliating, you describe it as their way of taking revenge on the star system.
WK: I believe strongly that it was, and it connects to classical music as well. There’s an assumption in performance culture that the role of a performer is to display a talent flawlessly. Even if the talent is for loud, raucous singing, there’s still a certain thing needs to be sold to the audience. In classical music there are very exacting standards of perfection. So there’s this demand that the performers give it and there’s the assumption that the spectators are going to just greedily receive it, but when the performer abstains from giving conventional pleasure, the performer is critiquing the supply and demand assumption.
I think it may be a stretch to ally Gertrude Stein and Liza Minnelli in this way, but I think Gertrude Stein or Antonin Artaud [20th-century French writer who suffered from mental illness], whom I talk about in the book, are examples of artists who refused to perform conventionally, who seized control of the system of performance to render it a more habitable space for errant and eccentric styles or embodiment of feelings. So when Liza sings “New York, New York” and totally blows it, and reveals that she’s a has-been, at that moment you could say she’s getting a kind of revenge on behalf of Judy, and a revenge on 20th-century American star lovers, a revenge on them for eating Judy alive. It’s a complicated point, but I do feel as a writer that the expectation that writing readily greets and pleases the reader is an assumption that I’ve always found repressive. That’s why I’m a poet and why I’m drawn to a lot of so-called avant-garde or experimental literature, because it interrogates and plays with the notion that a performance or a text should readily and transparently divulge its message. I like artists who mess up the system a bit.
DB: Early in the book you make a striking connection between writing and bodily purging, literally vomiting to produce work of writing. And later you talk about writing as torture, a process of being humiliated by language or of the writer trying to humiliate language. Those are strong words, and I’m wondering whether this extends to all the writing you’ve done. Is it different with poetry, say, than with prose?
WK: It’s all the same. Admittedly when I write poetry I’m physically more relaxed and excited than when I write prose because when I write poetry I don’t have to have a point. I don’t have to marshal examples toward a conclusion. I don’t have to line things up for an argument, and I can move in a more free associative way. And I try to do that in my prose as well.
But just take this conversation, which is a very pleasant one, it’s what’s happening between us, you and me, and this is a scene of utterance in which I’m putting forward words that will be read by others. I’m putting them forward supposedly because I have certain ideas and wishes that I want to get across, but it takes physical work that I can’t exactly call pleasure.
I’m not saying I feel humiliated in the least by this conversation. If anything I feel deeply gratified, but I also am aware, in terms of purgation, I’m aware of a kind of mental and physical strain that articulation puts on me that reminds me a little bit of what it was like to write this book. I have to dwell in an uncomfortable place, the subject of humiliation, and I have to produce decent words out of it.
It’s what I imagine a singer feels. It’s a physical exertion, and so is everything in life in a way. So is sex. But when I ally writing to purgation it’s because so often I do just want to stop and shut up and say nothing, say I don’t understand. I don’t have anything to say, or what I have to say is gibberish and slobber. I feel as if I’m two years old again and I need to compose that gibberish into comprehensible, socialized shapes.
And so when I refer in the book to [Ludwig] Wittgenstein, who describes the enormously complicated adjustments required to understand colloquial language, I really agree with him that even a very civil, genial, and mutually respectful conversation—like the one we’re having for an audience of gay and lesbian, or gay and lesbian friendly readers—takes me back to a very early childhood sense of needing to translate my gibberish into a palatable form that will serve as my passport into decency, and that if that fail in this task I will be, if not punished, seen to be the slobberer and stammerer that I really am.
I am aware of both the excitement and the risk each time I stare within and try to compose a sentence. I’m aware of needing to fight against shame and dance in a very complicated way between a wish to expose myself, to speak the truth, to divulge, and a sense of the possible humiliation of doing so.
DB: Do you think you ever perform perfectly with words?
WK: There are certain sentences that I really like, but they’re not necessarily the sentences that other people like. I think in terms of sentences as fetish objects in that my writing is consciously fragmented and aphoristic. I think of the sentence as a musical and expressive unit. There are certain sentences that I really like, but they’re hardly perfect. They’re in fact very idiosyncratic, but I like a sentence that feels jammed with idiosyncrasy. And if the jamming happens at a particular frequency and speed and with sufficient turns of the screw, I can feel very happy at the result.
DB: You call the chapters in your book “fugues.” Your writing does resemble music. I read the book in one long single sitting. The book is like a musical composition that you need to hear from start to finish for it to have its full impact.
WK: If I had any conscious intention, it was not to write musically, but to work within a form like late romantic music, a one-movement sonata like Liszt’s B Minor Sonata. It’s a certain kind of organic form where most of the material derives from one compositional unit or module and everything else is a variation on it. By using the term fugue, I don’t mean that I am rigidly contrapuntal. Fugues are very specifically structured compositions. The essays are fugue-like only in a loosely analogous way, but the basic rhythm of approach and avoid, of flirt with and then flee from, dominated when I was writing. I approach the subject of humiliation. I approach a scene and then I turn away from it and look elsewhere. And the movement back and forth between looking, looking away, looking again, and then fleeing was very conscious. I also like the word fugue because it applies to the psychological term “fugue state,” which is a state of dissociation.
DB: In addition to discussing stars and political figures who have found sympathy through their public humiliation, you tell stories of humiliation that lack any kind of redemption. I’m thinking of the story of the tortured girl, which is wrenching, or the concentration camps, or the lynchings of black Americans. Are there realms of humiliation where there’s just nothing redeeming to be found?
WK: Oh, absolutely. And I hope I’ve made that clear in the book. I think I did so when talking about the so-called Venus Hottentot [an African woman enslaved and exhibited as a circus curiosity in Europe]. There’s a passage where I was aware of making perhaps the most dangerous of juxtapositions: of talking about Sylvia Plath’s poetry and then the Venus Hottentot, Sarah Baartman. I am certainly not suggesting that Sarah Baartman was in a position to experience anything redemptive in being put on exhibition in that way. I say that Sylvia Plath as a poet was in control of her performance. There are the atrocities that I talk about, and I do mean for there to be a pretty absolute line between a lynching and something like Liza Minnelli performing “New York, New York” badly. There’s just no comparison. I say in the book too that each of us has one body and one mind, and experiences dwell at once in our one body, one mind. It may be my obligation as a writer to entertain these kinds of juxtapositions, such as when writing about Artaud made me think of Abner Louima [a Hatitian man sodomized with a broomstick by a New York policeman]. I can censor the thought and say I’m not going to talk about Abner Louima. It’s not my place to do so. Or I can admit that I am aware of both Artaud and Abner Louima in my one consciousness. What am I supposed to do about that fact?
DB: Humiliation is universal. There can’t be a person who has ever lived who hasn’t experienced humiliation.
WK: Right. And whatever happens, whether it’s a minor humiliation or a major one it’s still happening to a human body. I also think that there are certain kinds of experience that Georgio Agamben refers to as “de-subjectification” that I would say are extremes in the same way that there’s regular warfare and there’s extreme warfare. It’s the difference between an old-style battle and Hiroshima. There are these kinds of just exponential crimes. I don’t know what the phrase would be. So that there are experiences of humiliation that aim to and succeed in actually destroying the subject who might experience the humiliation. There’s a radical destruction of the subject experiencing the humiliation. That’s what I think distinguishes an atrocity from a social humiliation, that the subject who experiences the humiliation has been effectively destroyed. There’s also physical pain in these cases, while many of the social humiliations that I describe don’t involve physical pain.
DB: I want to ask one more question as a summing up of the book. I was very moved by the final fugue, which you call a litany of your own small humiliations. When I was done with this section I was flooded by the feeling that this is one of the most powerful arguments I’ve ever read for people to be kind to each other, to try not to humiliate each other.
WK: That was certainly my intention. It was certainly my hope. When I describe the scene with which I chose to end the book of watching a father kick his daughter’s ass in the airport on Easter Sunday, certainly the feeling I had is that our first and only obligation as human beings is not to harm each other, and that that’s an absolute moral imperative. I have written about opera and I love opera, which is usually tragic. And when I go to the opera or hear an opera, I also have the same feeling that you had reading my book, or that I had watching this scene of punishment in the airport, that here is somebody onstage, suffering. The reason that we watch this spectacle of suffering should be to learn never to inflict that on anyone else. And that is always the message of any tragic performance. Don’t ever make that happen to somebody.
DB: Or lose the ability to see suffering. You can become closed off to human suffering, which I think is a great danger.
WK: And I think that the difference between certain kinds of art and just spectatorial, voyeuristic cruelty is the hope—it sounds terribly corny, but I really do believe it—that art, tragic art of some kind, refines and intensifies the viewer’s or the reader’s empathy, and that it teaches us to identify with the victim rather than to enjoy sadistically the victim’s suffering. I think opera is filled with scenes of victimization, but in the best operas its function is to intensify our sympathy, our capacity for vibrating with another human being.
DB: I think that’s an excellent description of what you’ve done in this book. You’ve intensified our capacities for sympathy. And I think it’s just a remarkable achievement.
WK: Thank you. I’m very moved that was your response, really, truly because writing does sometimes feel like torture. It isn’t torture. It’s a privilege and something I love to do, but it’s also extremely isolating. And the experience of publishing a book is usually just one of waiting around for a response, and the response is often just zero, no response. Or the response is negative. That’s just what life as a writer is like. Mostly you struggle to get published. It’s very hard to get published. And then the publication is greeted by silence, indifference or rejection. And so to hear what you said is a kind of really deep reward.
Daniel Burr is an assistant dean at the Univ. of Cincinnati College of Medicine, where he also teaches courses on literature and medicine.
