When We “See Ourselves”—and Recoil

A little self-knowledge goes a long way

This past week saw a mini-brouhaha in the literary world, when readers expressed outrage at an essay, The Smoker, by Ottessa Moshfegh in The Paris Review. (If you’re wondering—yes, it’s worth reading the essay.) “This one time, my dad bought me a house in Providence, Rhode Island,” she begins, and anyone who has been on Twitter for upwards of a day can guess what happened next. Here was an admission of privilege; worse yet, the house was in foreclosure, and the essay ultimately concerns the heartbroken reaction of the man who was dispossessed of his home.

Moshfegh first lingers on the ways she benefited from the incident: She loved the house, wrote her first major work while living there, and even the act of repairing the house, together with her father, was a meaningful phase of their relationship. If she had left it there, that is what the essay would have been about. But she does not leave it there. The end of the essay is when the titular smoker enters, the man who was once the owner of the house; and the image of his heartbroken weeping, at the sight of his life in ruins, is what we are left with. The subtext of the essay seems more or less clear: That the society in which we live is structured so when we experience the highest points of our lives, it may well be at someone else’s expense. This seems totally in line with the denouncements of “late-stage capitalism” that are par for the course on Twitter; yet, because Moshfegh committed this act—buying a house in foreclosure—and perhaps because she doesn’t openly berate herself in a gesture of pre-emptive self-criticism (“As a cishet white woman of immense privilege,” etc.) she is taken for a monster without a heart.

Here is the ritual moment in which I dutifully note that Moshfegh’s career will be fine. Everything is fine and no one was hurt. The reason this incident bothered me was the inescapable impression that this is how too many people interpret art. When people talk about “seeing themselves” in a work, they are usually talking about seeing their own identity category reflected back. But there seems to be another way in which people want to see themselves: They want the protagonist to reflect their ideals. Any sign of being flawed, or maybe even in the wrong sometimes, is nothing less than an attack on those ideals.

Yet what is “seeing ourselves,” if it is not seeing who we really are? What if art is about holding up a mirror—not to make us feel good, or morally superior, or even affirmed—but to reveal a truth? Moshfegh was willing to make herself look bad to make a larger point about the world in which we live. That seems to me more honorable than a self-flattering, disingenuously self-flagellating depiction.

Really, is there anything more dishonest, and less enlightening, than the pristine, morally irreproachable protagonist? On the flip side: Is there anything more dishonest than art which parades flawed characters for our self-righteous contempt? If your response to a work of art is to feel smugly superior, I submit that the work has failed. (See: Season two of White Lotus.)  

I’m reminded of when people talk about why they hate Seinfeld. It’s because the characters are jerks, is the common line. And of course they are. But that’s entirely the point. If you’re watching the show to find out who marries who, as in Friends, you will, of course, be disappointed. The characters in Seinfeld never grow or change. Instead they articulate, and enact, the impulses we suppress. By depicting those impulses in art, in a context that evokes laughter—laughter which in itself is born of self-recognition—the show delivers catharsis. When we laugh at George and Jerry and Elaine, we are more often than not laughing at what is most ridiculous in ourselves. Which, given the humorless hectoring of much of the current discourse, feels more necessary than ever.

There’s a profound irony here, in a discussion where the end goal purports to be moral perfection. We identify with the perfect hero, and revile the flawed as a distinct other, at our peril. People who believe in their own perfection are quite terrifying. If we see ourselves, in all honesty, we know we have work to do.