On Performative Vulnerability

for Self and Others

Sometimes it’s hard to tell whether or not I’m lying to myself.

That would make a good opening sentence for a short story.

Sometimes he found it hard to tell whether or not he was lying to himself.

But lots of readers would say, Oh, it’s too clunkily introducing an unreliable narrator.

Maybe so.

Yet what about those moments when one becomes too clunkily unreliable a narrator to and of one’s own self?

Last night, at a Debut Panel of first novelists held in Waterstones, Trafalgar Square, one of the three, Josie Ferguson, mentioned the 2020 discussion around people having or not having internal monologues prompted by @KylePlantEmoji’s post —

One of the main characters in Josie Ferguson’s novel The Silence In Between thinks not in words but in music.

I know I’m very late to this — and have no hot take — but I was as shocked as any of the monologuers to discover the apparent quiet or wordlessness of non-monologuers’ heads.

I became instantly anxious about their existence. Did the absence of an internal monologue make someone more or less likely to read novels, to vote left or right, or commit serious violent crime?

Of course, I thought of it as an absence, but perhaps it’s a perfectly normal state of consciousness — equally functional as, and probably predating, the wordy-rapping-head of I’m doing this and oh look at that and what shall I do next?

For a Buddhist, it’s quite clearly a lot more like the wordless being-present that mindful meditation offers as a possible win; after Monkey Mind has quietened down you’ll get to see the smooth surface of the pool. In fact, it seems very like D. T. Suzuki’s ‘Zen Mind’ to me (from Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind).

The more interesting thought Josie Ferguson’s reference provoked was about whether or not we show off to ourselves, as part of our inner monologue.

We’re all capable of inner swank, I’m sure. That’s our consciousness of pride before a fall. Well, look at me here. As James Brown put it, Jump back, I wanna kiss myself.

But what about performative vulnerability in front of no-one but the observing ‘I’?

(This is partly a continuation of the line of argument about our own work giving us chills.)

Performative vulnerability is a mode that goes down well on TikTok, Instagram and other clippy social media. The sudden video of an unmadeup influencer, weeping over something real and blurting something honest. That’s likely to travel further and faster than another filtered attempt at projecting a near-perfect life of pools, limos, skincare and sushi.

In the knowledge of this likely impact, the people posting — pressing record, pressing share mid crying jag — are more likely to be willing to fit themselves into the established red-eyed genre.

This isn’t new. It is there in the key moment from 1987’s Broadcast News when William Hurt’s character — a cynical TV journalist — squeezes out a tear for a cutaway shot while conducting an interview. Look at how emotional I am, he is saying to the viewer. You’re crying and I’m crying too. Love me for it.

There’s an equivalent to this in words alone. There are blurt-posts. They travel.

I wonder if I’ve written or am writing them.

Yet when we become doubtful of our own emotions, is that a bad thing? Am I really as upset about this as I seem to be? Am I, for reasons I don’t yet understand, styling up my pain?

Many writers have caught this self-ambivalence — Henry James, Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf — and more recently David Foster Wallace, Rachel Cusk, Karl Ove Knausgaard. Self-doubters all, or dramatizers of self-doubt. (I don’t think the one comes without the other.)

If you are writing about characters who dwell on their own motives, you don’t have much space to expand into unless you introduce room for doubt.

When a character simply feels what they honestly feel, and thinks about it hardly at all — and perhaps not via internal monologue — then they are by definition flat. Interest will have to come, for the reader, from the morally complex situation you’ve constructed around them.

A rounded character is capable of believable self-contradiction. That’s what I was taught.

Almost certainly, we all can be insincere and sincere at the same time.

Take the influencer, weeping into their iPhone. Theirs may be performative vulnerability, knowingly hyped up, but beneath that is an anguished need to perform, and to aspire to emotional honesty, and to risk getting called a fake, and that toxic mix could be as grief-stricken a state of mind as you’d like.