A cutting account

We have all been there: The outburst that drew unwanted attention, the embarrassing revelation, the shameful joy of schadenfreude, the lash of the cutting remark. "Humiliation is always personal ...," Wayne Koestenbaum writes in Humiliation, his meditation on the subject. "Humiliation's wounds are always intimate, pointed punctures." For Koestenbaum, that is why it appeals and why it discomforts, the way it connects us at the deepest level even as it tears us apart. "‘Humiliation,'" he observes, "means ‘to be made humble'. To be made human? ‘Human' and ‘humiliation' do not share an etymological root, but even in Latin, the two words — humanus and humiliatio — suggestively share a prefix." This sort of interpretive wordplay has long been a hallmark of Koestenbaum's writing, whether as poet, essayist or self-styled social critic. A professor at New York's CUNY Graduate Center and the Yale School of Art, he has written a dozen or so books of poetry and non-fiction, the most trenchant of which explore the connections between our obsessions and how we live. Koestenbaum's perspective is relentlessly personal — which does not mean it is confessional, at least not as we commonly use the word. "Not that I want to reduce every statement to autobiography — that humiliated genre," he explains. "... And yet, I'm writing this book in order to figure out — for my own life's sake — why humiliation is, for me, an engine, a catalyst, a cautionary tale, a numinous scene, producing sparks and showers." Here Koestenbaum articulates the essential tension of Humiliation, which he has constructed as a series of 11 "fugues" that, he notes, are both metaphorical and practical, for "a ‘fugue state' is a mentally imbalanced condition of disassociated wandering away from one's own identity." That description has a lot to do with the way Koestenbaum regards humiliation: as a break, a split, a guilty secret, whether in the public or the private sphere. Throughout the book, he invokes celebrities such as Liza Minnelli and Michael Jackson and politicians such as Bill Clinton and Eliot Spitzer to examine the elusive balance between shame and empathy, between the face we show the world and who we really are. "When I see a public figure humiliated," he writes, "I feel empathy. I imagine: that martyr could be me." It is a radical notion in a culture such as America's, which thrives on blame and recrimination, on the idea that we are better than those we judge. Yet Koestenbaum repeatedly puts the lie to that convenient bit of fiction, implicating us not only in our own mortifications but also those of everyone. "I hate group laughter. It is always smug and certain of its position," he declares, linking the humiliation-as-entertainment aesthetic of a show such as American Idol with the more profound humiliations of an Abu Ghraib. "Lynndie England's smile, and the laughter of the audience at American Idol," he continues, "display a callous, morally deadened joviality" — which is, in turn, representative of a phenomenon he calls "the Jim Crow Gaze", a reference to the inexpressive stares in all those old photographs of lynchings, in which bystanders expose themselves as "archetypes of moral imbecility, of living-deadness" that are fundamentally inhumane. That is terrific stuff, with its expansive vision, its sense that the trivial and the tragic are linked. As Humiliation progresses, however, Koestenbaum falters in places — at times by reaching too far and at others by not reaching far enough. Interestingly, both failings have to do with distance: The more theoretical he gets, the less effective the book becomes. To be fair, all this comes with the territory, for Koestenbaum is after a set of impressions, a series of riffs. -Los Angeles Times Humiliation By Wayne Koestenbaum,Picador, 186 pages, $14