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Yet Aubry insists that the six books have something deeper in common: The novels Americans read most, and how they read them, now inevitably reflect the triumph of the therapeutic.
According to many critics, this paradigm allowed people who might otherwise be seen as privileged to claim that they, too, experienced the kind of suffering that built character, but through psychological, rather than material, deprivation. U of Iowa P, In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: There are easy and cynical answers to such questions. Just as important is what he does not say. However, the capital sin of the therapeutic—and more in general of the middlebrow culture it is bound up with—is the lack of political and social engagement, as if the American middle class has absolved itself from collective responsibilities in order to attend exclusively to its own precarious well-being—hence the downpour of discourse about our anxieties, psychological wounds, and thwarted desires.
In chapter after chapter, Aubry shows the therapeutic model at work through his sensitive readings, not only of the novels themselves, but also of data—TV interviews with authors, Amazon. But the interaction works the other way as well. According to Aubry, the episode is also a testament to the way difficult fiction justifies itself to therapeutic culture.
The point is crystallized when an audience member questions the artistic value of Paradise, on account of its difficulty: I was lost because I came into—I really wanted to read the book and love it and learn some life lessons; and when I got into it, it was so confusing I questioned the value of a book that is that hard to understand. Their comments imply a critique of the elitism and exclusiveness that characterize the entire world of so-called high culture along with the academic institutions, such as Princeton [where Morrison teaches], that support, celebrate, and embody this world.
And it is symptomatic that the author, aided by Winfrey, responds to the complaint, and others like it, by stressing that the difficulty of the book has a therapeutic purpose—namely, to help the reader deal with disorientation, and confusion, in life. Just as important is what he does not say.
We get to watch as a critically acclaimed contemporary writer attempts to justify her practice to precisely the kind of readers she claims to be writing for. Can she do it? It will depend, Aubry implies, on whether she can make the case to such a reader that the novel, including its difficult or experimental elements, has therapeutic value.
Of course, empathy is a long way from political action, and left-wing commentators beginning back with Benjamin and Brecht, and continuing now with Fredric Jameson and nearly everyone with a PhD in English , have long criticized sentimental art for promoting the illusion that strong feelings constitute an adequate response to suffering and injustice.
In his conclusion, Aubry asks two questions which he pretends are really one: What novels accomplish for their individual readers, on the other hand, seems the question Aubry has spent the book answering in therapeutic—which is to say primarily private—terms. Aubry's attitude toward this picture of Jamesonian derivation remains somewhat ambiguous: In the conclusion, for example, he argues that the emotional reactions and empathic engagements of middle-class readers, far from being apolitical, can actually serve to respectfully bridge cultural differences and "promote forms of recognition, identification, and sympathy among strangers living without the support of stable local communities" Along similar lines, Aubry pleads for a fuller acknowledgment of affect as a legitimate and highly complex form of interpretation that complements— rather than replaces—academic interpretive practices.
These are reasonable conclusions reached through perceptive readings, but they look slightly conservative in today's shifting literary-theoretical landscape.
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