Stigma and Genius

Is it just the sheerest romanticism - this old notion that the artist and the stigma go together - that where one finds one, one will soon enough find the other? It is probably just a hallmark of the literature of consolation. But it impresses itself upon the receptive mentality nonetheless. Byron with his clubfoot. Flaubert with his epilepsy. Swift with his mysterious dizzy and giddy spells. And there is if anything the even longer list of those artists whose personal lives marked them out as sexually ambiguous, counter-normative, "queer." Come to think of it, the three just named could be fitted under that heading as well, giving it an expansive reading. Then there is Tchaikovsky, Forster, Gide, Leonardo, Hart Crane, and on and on. And this is not even to mention the list of painters, writers, composers, etc. who have belonged to religious, ethnic, and national minorities within their own society.

I'm sure that counter-examples could be multiplied no less endlessly. One might hunt Ernest Hemingway's whole body without finding a trace of Jake Barnes' war injury, nor any other physical abnormality (unless we are to count wounded vanity). Then there is an obvious tendency toward selection bias, when one is writing on this topic from the perspective of the sexual underdogs. There are in fact plenty of famous writers and artists, it is worth reminding ourselves, who have been healthy, well-off, physically "normal" heterosexuals in stable monogamous pairings—one just happens to find them less interesting, if one is like me, and is inclined to leave them out of the mental tallying. 

Finally, it may in fact be true that a large number of artists and writers have lived with aspects of their identities stigmatized, but this may simply be due to the fact that the vast majority of human beings live with at least one physical, sexual, or personal trait that is judged by their contemporaries to depart from the standard of "normality" of their society. It was Erving Goffman, in his perceptive, ice-cold, and riveting little book Stigma, who observed that: "[E]ven where widely attained norms are involved, their multiplicity has the effect of canceling many persons[.... I]n an important sense there is only one complete unblushing male in America: a young, married, white, urban, northern, heterosexual Protestant father of college education, fully employed, of good complexion, weight, height, and a recent record in sports." 

Goffman's point being that it is actually only a small number of us who will possess all of those traits—and then, not for very long. As Solon told Croesus, in so many words, one shouldn't count oneself lucky till one has reached the end of the story. Every person who has never experienced disability, unemployment, or any other stigma, so far on Earth, may yet live to do so, and every life ends in the ultimate physical malady of death—which, being universal, should cause us to ponder just exactly what we mean when we speak of health and mobility as a physical "norm."

It is probably true, therefore, that "great" artists, writers, etc. have no higher incidence of stigma than any other section of the human population. And unfortunately it's hard to test the matter one way or the other, as there is no final list of "geniuses" that can be statistically surveyed and compared against the generality of humankind. 

Still, though, it is a sticky and appealing notion, that highly talented writers, artists, intellectuals, and creative types are more likely than not to belong to stigmatized groups (no doubt part of the reason the idea attracts is because one is hoping to add "and vice versa" to the end of that sentence). It is a solacing thought, and it has enough anecdotal evidence in its favor that I have allowed myself to cling to it undisturbed all my life. It has, like all the other great myths of literary romanticism, been an article of faith with me since teenagerdom, and is likely to remain such—unfazed by such trifling quibbles as statistical fact. 

Suppose we are allowed for a moment to treat the legend as truth. There are, then, at least two possible explanations for it. The first, which is perhaps the one most commonly put forward, is also the one most favored by the romantic artists themselves. I refer to the thesis that artists and geniuses are of the elect, and so therefore they must be set apart at birth from the great mediocre run of humanity. This is the old Mark of Cain, poète maudit, "born under the sign of Saturn" theory of the case, and it is easy to see why it appeals to artistic "geniuses" and their would-be emulators—it agrees so well with one's vanity!

I wish to propose, however, that actually the opposite is the case. Suppose stigma does not make artists of people because it grants them insight into that which distinguishes them from other people, but precisely because it inspires in them a more intense focus on that which they share in common with other mortals. Perhaps, then, Cesare Lombroso was wrong, as he was in all his other pseudo-scientific maunderings, when he suggested that "genius" is akin to "madness" in obeying a logic inaccessible to all other people. I suggest it is distinguished, to the contrary, by a nearer access to what Martin Amis calls "the universal."

Let me explain. Erving Goffman notes in his essay mentioned above that a person living with a stigma is conscious of—and outraged by—their treatment at the hands of "normal" society precisely because there are other aspects of their identity that are not so stigmatized. In the complex dialectic of disability that Goffman ultimately constructs, therefore, in the course of his little book, we are all alleged to be both stigmatizer and stigmatized—operating always with an uneasy consciousness of our dual role. As Goffman frames the fundamental problem of the stigmatized individual, writing with his usual brutality of candor, this person finds that "[t]hose who have dealings with him fail to accord him the respect and regard which the uncontaminated aspects of his social identity have led them to anticipate extending, and have led him to anticipate receiving." 

It is perhaps for this reason that, when people wish to defend themselves or others from a stigma, they often reach rhetorically for those aspects of their identity that they share in common with their accusers. Shylock famously argues in his trial that his blood bleeds as well as any others. People when framing a case for tolerance for other human groups often resort to similar measures, speaking of families, children, loved ones, and other human near-universals, which they hope they can count on as familiar and shared experiences to their audience. 

The person living with a stigma, therefore, becomes unusually attuned not only to the existence of the stigma that sets them apart, but to the presence of commonalities between themselves and others. The great Quentin Crisp, one of the wittiest analysts of stigma ever to write on the subject, observed that he was always enthralled by listening to the small talk of other people, even—or perhaps especially—when it was on dull and quotidian affairs. He explained this as a product of the continual astonishment he felt upon realizing that, even bearing as he did the great stigma of his sexuality, he was nonetheless able to discover experiences he shared in common with other mortals. 

As he puts it, generalizing shamelessly from his own case; "If by some chance an hour of pointless gossip makes fleeting reference to some foible, some odd superstition, some illogical preference that they find they share with the speaker, homosexuals are as amazed and delighted as an Earthman would be on learning that Martians cook by gas."

In my own experience, I note that when it came time for me in divinity school to start writing sermons, what always emerged for me was a personal essay. But more than this, it was usually a self-deprecating autobiographical account of some episode of daily living. One in which I described my own widely-shared foibles, and sketched out in mock-heroic terms my tragicomic entanglements with ordinary existence. There's been the sermon on getting lost in a strange city; the sermon on finding a place to live; the sermon on dealing with flooding in the basement; the sermon on embarrassing myself; the sermon on throwing up. You get the idea.

At the church where I did my student ministry, a congregant once commended me for what she called my willingness to show my humanity, in all its dimensions, from the pulpit. It occurs to me on reading Crisp, however, that the reason for my obsession with finding common quotidian experiences—my endless harping on the foibles and disappointments and heartbreaks we all have in common—is that what is for many people the Big Universal is for me a blank. Romance, marriage, childrearing are for me a big nada. And because I cannot find common ground on which to relate to people on the subject that is—to many—the most important one in life, I am fascinated by those areas in which we can discover we nonetheless share an experience. I, too, am like Crisp's Martian. 

It is this outside observer status, surely—this Martian quality—that often distinguishes writers and artists and sets them on their commission in life. And no doubt for many it is living with a stigma that gives to them this status. This, if any empirical basis for it can be found, no doubt accounts for the observation with which we began: the frequency with which the artist and the stigma go together. My point, however, is that it is not the greater awareness of difference that the stigma grants, which makes it conducive to artistic production. It is the heightened sensitivity to that which is held in common among human beings. 

Because living with a stigma marks one out by a particular, it inspires in one a drive to discover that which in human beings is universal. And it has been proposed by at least a few theorists of aesthetics that it is the pursuit of this quality that defines art in any form. Art is that which speaks to us in our bare humanness, stripped of all the particularities and trappings of ourselves. And it is for precisely this reason, rather than in spite of it, that those marked out as "different" have such a calling for it.