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LA Times Reviews Wayne Koestenbaum's Humiliation

Originally Published: September 02, 2011

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David Ulin of the Los Angeles Times takes a look at poet and essayist Wayne Kostenbaum's new book, Humiliation, which came out recently from Picador. The New York Times reviewed it a few weeks ago as well, wherein critic Dwight Garner notably matched the book to a 1972 performance piece in which Vito Acconci squatted "under a gallery ramp and masturbated while gallerygoers walked above him, listening to his amplified dirty whispers." Ulin doesn't experience the text quite as viscerally:

"When I see a public figure humiliated," [Koestenbaum] writes, "I feel empathy. I imagine: that martyr could be me."

It's a radical notion in a culture such as ours, 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 "archetype[s] of moral imbecility, of living-deadness" that are fundamentally inhumane.

That's 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. This emerges most vividly in his discussion of art and writing as a process that relies on humiliation: the humiliation of language, the humiliation of self-exposure, the humiliation of not being able to communicate exactly what you feel.

There's a valid argument to be made to this effect, although Koestenbaum overstates the case when he invokes literacy as a humiliating process, in which the alphabet is first and foremost a controlling structure. . . .

Read the entire review here.