Embarrassment and Shame

Apparently, I had sold the book to Half-Price Books (for much less than half its cost), and so I cannot recover the context from which I have drawn this accusation from Michael Chabon’s novel, Moonglow. I present it here then from a journal entry I had made so I do know the indictment comes from page 241 of the novel. The sentence reads, “This one said that what I knew about shame—what my entire generation with its deployment of confession as a tool for self-aggrandizement, knew about shame—would fit into one half a pistachio shell.” Alas, there is not much space in a half shell. As Chabon writes here, shame, though usually thought of as the fall-out of a difficult and traumatic emotional state, appears to be employed for positive effect. In this case it would seem that one doesn’t experience shame so much as to drape its cloak of inky black about one, and I think that such appearance hardly counts as shame.
           Confession sells but shame doesn’t, and the steady flood of memoirs and memoir-ish articles proves the point. Confession enhances sense of self for both confessant and confessor. Perhaps confessions give the confessor an opportunity to experience schadenfreude, to take pleasure in another’s pain. There is a New Yorker cartoon: portrayed is a four-lane highway separated by some fence-like barrier. On the two left lanes is a seemingly unending line of unmoving traffic. But on the two lanes opposite a solitary car breezes along. On the side of the road a sign reads “Schadenfreude, Next 20 miles.” That speeding single automobile will enjoy open road for that recorded distance while across the highway divide no one moves. Of schadenfreude Gore Vidal says, ‘It’s not enough to succeed. Others must fail.’ So might it be in the confession box and in confessional writing: on one side sits an individual in pain and on the other side another listens in, assuming a virtue one might not actually possess, and by listening the confessor promises absolution. The presumption of this power must offer some satisfaction: I am not like that, the confessor feels, as the confessant narrates their sins. Perhaps one motive for reading confessions is to assert superiority over the confessant. I am speeding along while across the way there isn’t a car in motion. Or there might be some voyeuristic motive to hearing confession, to viewing another’s suffering. I think of Phil Ochs’s song “Crucifixion”, his response to President Kennedy’s assassination. which asks “Tell me every detail, I've got to know it all,/And do you have a picture of the pain?.” Or I remember the enjoyment viewers experienced as women on Queen for a Day narrated the hardships of their dismal lives. Perhaps the confessant experiences aggrandizement by admitting to their numerous ersatz sins. The ladies on Queen for a Day certainly hoped for reward from their plaints. Aren’t I wonderful, they might think, recognizing and admitting my sins so publicly. Isn’t my misery praiseworthy?
           I believe there is a difference between embarrassment and shame. My dictionary of psychology defines shame as an emotion characterized by guilt, embarrassment, and avoidance. But I don’t think that shame is a synonym for embarrassment, nor do I think shame is embarrassment in extremis. Embarrassment occurs when one acts in a way that negatively but temporarily disturbs one’s sense of self: as when one wants to think oneself suave and self-assured but who crossing the room or the street trips over the carpet or an uneven sidewalk and looks hurriedly about to see if anyone has observed; or embarrassment occurs when one wants to appear smart and while pontificating about something mispronounces the word or gets the facts wrong. Embarrassment is a transient emotion. Shame, psychoanalyst Heinz Kohut says, is a disintegration product of pride and healthy assertiveness: shame lingers. Shame is like the radiation that a nuclear fission emits. When pride and self-assertiveness fall apart, then the self has collapsed. Shame is not a blip in sense of self, rather, it is a complete deflation of a sense of that self. With shame, the self disappears. Psychoanalyst W.R.D Fairbairn says that shame is the experience of guilt employed as a defense against the release of bad objects in the unconscious. That is, guilt is a way to keep the world safe from becoming peopled by my bad objects by holding those bad objects within but then feeling self-doubting about their presence within. Shame admits that I am filled with bad objects. 
            I think that Chabon mistakenly conflates embarrassment and shame. The deployment of confession as tool of self-aggrandizement hints not as the collapse of self but as a tool for increasing its presence and power. Confession might recount some awkward moments, but the purpose of confession is not abasement or sorrow. Confession is a strategic boasting: it announces, see what I’ve done!       

            I did publish a memoir in March but I think it was not so much for the purpose of confession as it was for discovery. The motive was not self-aggrandizement but explanation. I felt beset with anxieties and wanted to explain these states to myself (and whoever might read the book) through some narration of my life. I think that I succeeded to define myself to myself and found (at times) I had even produced some notable writing. And that last statement is as close to confession as I will approach. But perhaps explanation in a sense is justification and appears therefore, as an instance of self-aggrandizement. See how cleverly I can explain and justify my behaviors and render them inactive! Anxious Am I? is not the product of either shame or embarrassment though it does record some behaviors of which I am not proud. But in fact, my publication of the memoir seems to me now as the opposite of shame! But perhaps not for the purpose of self-aggrandizement.