beyond relatability
art as signposts
When you see things over and over again in the world, it feels natural to imagine them as significant. So when my social media feeds kept showing me the same James Baldwin quote over and over again, I started to reflect on it a little bit more.
“You read something which you thought only happened to you, and you discover that it happened 100 years ago to Dostoyevsky. This is a very great liberation for the suffering, struggling person, who always thinks that he is alone. This is why art is important.”
I adore this quote and think it’s completely true — art has the immense capability to capture and represent feeling across centuries. It lets us feel seen and validated in ways we never thought possible. Yet, as I read this quote repeatedly, I felt like the final sentence seemed limited. It’s not wrong to state that this is a reason that we need art (and I would never say that James Baldwin is wrong anyway), but that isn’t the only reason that art is important.
When we connect to a feeling represented in art, we do so in a high-level sense. We may not understand what it’s like for our father to be murdered by our scheming uncle, but Hamlet’s confusion over how to navigate his situation and the complexity of his feelings toward his father feel like they map to our own complex emotions about people in our lives. But how far can we take this? When we uncover a character that is so fully outside of our experience, when the relatability of that character diminishes in the face of the unfamiliarity, what happens then? Is art like this still important in the same way?
Rebecca Mead of the New Yorker took on this topic ten years ago in an article called “The Scourge of Relatability.” Mead brings up that our contemporary use of the word “relatable” as “something one can relate to” didn’t appear until the late 90s, compared to its earlier definition of “something that could be connected to another thing.” Ever since, Mead observed that reviews of music, film, novels, and more have overused this word as an indicator of the value of a work of art. For something to be relatable was for it to be worth your time, regardless of the quality of the storytelling, or the acting, or craft in general.
If we ask for the art and media we consume to be relatable, Mead suggests we’ve created an expectation that the work of engaging with the art should be done for us. A film universally lauded as relatable may just be a surface-level engagement with a shared memory, rather than a piece attempting to push an audience into a new experience. And if we continuously engage with only work that reflects our faces, what happens to art that doesn’t match what we know? Do we lose the capability to consume and learn from art that doesn’t have characters that we can see ourselves in?
I think about some of the best art that I’ve consumed this year (Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things, Mieko Kawakami’s Breasts and Eggs, Madeline Miller’s The Song of Achilles) and relatability barely seems to factor into what made these books incredible. In each of these cases, the sheer unfamiliarity of the characters and settings was what fascinated me. I wasn’t simply seeing a reflection of myself in the work; I was having my world expanded. In Roy’s work, I learned about 1960s India, a place that seemed more foreign than any setting I’d ever read before. In Breasts and Eggs, I read about a woman’s desire to become pregnant and how modern Japan made it difficult for a single woman. In Miller’s work, I experienced a beautiful love between a demigod and an ordinary man. I didn’t find them relatable, but when I finished them, I felt the emptiness in my stomach that I always feel whenever something incredible has ended. I didn’t find them relatable, but I loved these novels dearly.
Rather than searching for ways to connect with these characters or settings, I found these works and so many others to be like signposts: signals of what else living can look like. My personal life experience is limited, it always will be. However, the perspectives and experiences outlined in books, in film, hint at what else a life can look like or feel like. How many experiences did I learn about from a book or a movie before I ever felt them in my body?
I went to Las Vegas for the first time this weekend, and it was familiar from the movies, yet an entirely singular experience. The movies never tell you how dry the heat is, how you always feel dehydrated, how much you can feel your own eyes thirst for liquid, how much fun you can have sharing a house with friends in the desert. The movies and books always have some tragedy or inciting incident, but real life is never so clear-cut. Hence, the signposts, allowing the reality of experience to unfold from the high-level direction. In this way, life doesn’t imitate art; life is inspired by art, is directed by art, expanded by art. The perfect novel or film reminds you that there’s more to life than what you currently have — that there is much more to experience. This is why art is important.
We must do what we can to push back against the genocide in Gaza. Consider calling your US representatives to support de-escalation and a ceasefire, donating to Care for Gaza (a grassroots organization delivering food to Palestinians), directly to families or by buying e-SIMs to keep folks connected to their families.
💧 Drops of the Week 💧
PLAYLIST - rise and fall - made a new playlist: jazz, synthpop, electronic across a few different languages
POEM - “Winter Love” by Linda Gregg - I would like to decorate this silence, / but my house grows only cleaner / and more plain.