Ugly Feelings (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Ugly Feelings Jennifer L. Fleissner Ugly Feelings. Sianne Ngai. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005. Pp. viii + 422. $29.95 (cloth). A disgruntled little creature, jostling amid a swarm of the same, musters a tiny leap forth to clamp its teeth on to the leg of a nearby, and much larger, adversary. As portrayed on the cover of Sianne Ngai's Ugly Feelings, this rodentlike beast, with its alarmingly human visage, embodies the "weaker and nastier" sorts of affect—irritation, envy, paranoia, disgust—which form the book's subject. This focus already sets it apart from the flood of recent scholarly studies of emotions, which tend to favor their grander manifestations (anger, fear) or, at least, their more morally recuperable ones (sympathy, melancholia, or shame). By contrast, the feelings on display here flaunt their impotence, burning on a steadily low flame without the catharsis of effective release. Moreover, we tend to believe they speak far less to a genuine external grievance than to a psychological debility on the part of the envier or paranoiac herself. Against all odds, however, these very seeming limitations help to render Ugly Feelings one of the most intellectually dazzling and wide-ranging critical studies to appear in years. This is, in fact, far more than a book about emotions. Taken chapter by chapter, it is a series of commanding readings of notoriously "unfriendly" texts—whether due to their density (Melville's Confidence-Man, Stein, Heidegger, contemporary language poetry) or an equally off-putting weightlessness (the TV cartoon The PJs, the film Single White Female). Taken as a whole, it is no less than: a broad new interpretation of cultural modernity/postmodernity; a concerted attempt to reinvigorate race/gender analysis by pushing beyond some of its most familiar impasses; and, most impressively—at a moment when the "return to aesthetics" has become a vague rallying cry in much contemporary criticism—a rigorous argument for, and consistent demonstration of, a distinct mode of reading that gives equal weight to formal and cultural/political concerns. What may be most remarkable, however, is the way these features come together, such that each close reading is presented inseparably from a sustained theoretical argument that both stands strongly alone and contributes to the larger project of the book. [End Page 383] At its broadest, that project entails a rejection of Jameson's influential notion of "the 'waning' of negative affect" in late modernity or postmodernity, replaced by a glossily untroubled surface. Instead, Ngai asserts, we should recognize the consistent pockmarking of that surface by ugly feelings. Her guiding spirit is that memorable literary harbinger of what Adorno terms late modernity's "fully 'administered world'": Melville's hapless scrivener, Bartleby. Like so many later "Sub-Subs"—to use Melville's own term for the "mere painstaking burrower[s] and grub-worm[s]" toiling in the ever-enlarging labyrinth of corporate America—Bartleby, with his refrain of "I would prefer not to," chafes continually against his duties without ever offering either a clear protest or a positive alternative. As anyone who has taught the story can attest, the result is a character who annoys as many readers as he fascinates. Despite, or perhaps because of, the similarity of his entrapment to our own, Bartleby in his pure negativity produces a politically and aesthetically "equivocal" experience that is for Ngai typical of our encounter with ugly feelings. The book goes on, then, to find neo-Bartlebys everywhere: in the alienated salesmen of film noir, the tediously taxonomizing narrators of Gertrude Stein, the "envious temp" of Single White Female, and, in one of Ngai's finest chapters, the mixed-race clerical-worker heroine Helga of 1928's Quicksand, her job inspired by that of her creator, Nella Larsen. As Ngai points out, Helga, too, is a character whose own signature "irritation" at most of what she encounters has led less to sympathy than to an answering irritation in readers, both with Helga and often with the novel itself. As with Bartleby, we have trouble getting "inside" Helga; her irritation seems "superficial" whether it is triggered by the absurdly minor (unattractive teacups) or the seriously disturbing—a racist incident on a train—in which...