The Review

In a 1908 essay called “Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming,” Freud explores the alchemy whereby personal fantasies — erotic reveries, self-aggrandizing ego trips, and so on — are transmuted, by creative writers, into fiction. “The author,” Freud writes, “softens the character of his egoistic day-dreams by altering and disguising it, and he bribes us by the purely formal — that is, aesthetic — yield of pleasure which he offers us in the presentation of his fantasies.” There’s a mystery here, Freud says. Regular people cannot disclose their fantasy life without arousing “repulsion” in the listener or reader. But when the successful author “presents his plays to us or tells us what we are inclined to take to be his personal day-dreams, we experience a great pleasure.”

The truth of Freud’s model of authorship, in which narrative art involves the aesthetic laundering — the sublimation — of otherwise repellent fantasy material, is well attested by the novelist Mary Gaitskill’s bruising new essay in our pages, which draws on her three decades of teaching creative writing to paint a bleak picture of the unsettled minds of students now. The workshop, as Freud would have known if it had existed in his time, is not just any classroom: It is a laboratory where students are trained to operate upon their own neuroses, turning them into story. While what Gaitskill calls a “quivering apparatus” of therapeutic concern now has its tentacles in every area of campus life, the workshop comes by its therapeutic orientation organically. “People can let it all hang out in writing classes,” Gaitskill writes, “and sometimes ‘it’ is very unpleasant.”

She recalls two particularly unpleasant episodes, one in the 1990s and one last year. In each case, a male student wrote — graphically, at length, with an unhinged intensity — about murder, rape, dismemberment. Alerted about the more recent case, an administrator “asked me if I thought the student was presenting a ‘safety issue’ for the class; I said I was not a hundred percent sure — you can’t be these days! — but he probably wasn’t going to come to class with an assault rifle and start shooting.” Meanwhile, the other students kept writing, compulsively and maybe as a cry for help, about suicide. “Almost half the class had spent time in a mental institution.”

In diagnosing the causes of her students’ psychic struggles, Gaitskill invokes what she acknowledges are the “usual suspects": the personality-dissolving agents of social media and the addictive pull of the smartphone. “It is harder than it seems to accurately and evocatively ‘see’ the world through a character’s eyes. It is even harder if your own eyes are so often fixed on a tiny screen that you barely register what is actually happening in front of you.” Nor does Gaitskill (who is 68 and so, unlike her students, hardly born digital) exempt herself from the charge of technologically induced existential distraction:

Fifteen years ago, even 10 years ago, when I took a long walk, either in the city or in the natural world, it was a kind of meditation that happened without my trying. I became wholly absorbed in what was around me, in textures and shapes, in the human imprint of buildings, sidewalks, backyards, grasses, trees, fungus, worn roads, crushed leaves. It was a profoundly calming and rejuvenating reminder of the greater world and my own animal connection with it. When I go for a walk now, it is different: Even if I look at my phone only once or twice, the experience, while still soothing, is not as deep. My consciousness is kept from full absorption in the physical world by its neurological attunement to the electronic portal in my pocket — or back in my house, even if I didn’t bring the thing with me.

There is strong evidence linking rising rates of adolescent and young-adult mental-health problems to social media and digital technology, although determining causality is challenging and some critics are skeptical. And as Caleb Smith reminds readers in his recent Review essay, Americans have been fretting over the spiritually corrosive consequences of technological modernity for a very long time. Smith offers the example of the Presbyterian minister J.H. McIlvaine, whose 1840 polemic against trashy novels might sound, save for the archaic language, like any recent op-ed about TikTok: “Attention veers from point to point, under these influences, as the weathercock obeys the varying wind. Nor do [readers] seem to feel any sense of degradation in being compelled to follow whatever thus most powerfully solicits them, as if they were led by a chain.”

The rhetorical continuity between the concerns of McIlvaine’s day and our own, though, doesn’t mean real transformations in human cognition and experience aren’t underway. “The earlier situation,” Smith acknowledges, “was not identical to ours, of course. Nineteenth-century Americans were not expected to be available to their bosses 24 hours a day via digital communications, and no social-media algorithms ensnared them into constant loops of virtual interaction.” Smith’s historicization of what he calls “disciplines of attention” offers a useful check on reactionary nostalgia. Taking the measure of the distractions of the digital present requires caution.

But something is changing somewhere. It’s undeniable that suicide rates among the young are rising — steeply. Gaitskill knows that things have gone badly wrong for her students. She suspects it’s the phones, yes, but not just the phones. “Young children are being slaughtered in schools, and mass shootings of all description take place weekly for weeks at a stretch, while congressional leaders treat gun ownership as sacred; Black people — actually, white people too — are being murdered by the police; white nationalists are plotting a race war; lies and disinformation are everywhere; nuclear war in Europe suddenly looks possible.…" Her essay is about what happens to the creative-writing workshop when the students in it have become so spiritually unwell that the cultivated introspection and the controlled fantasy on which art depends are impossible or dangerous. It is a hellish vision, a dispatch from the nightmare terrain in which the time between the last school shooting and the next seems ever shorter.

Read Mary Gaitskill’s “The Trials of the Young” and Caleb Smith’s “We’re Distracted. That’s Nothing New.”

Recommended

• “‘Attention’ seems to occupy the space that ‘empathy’ once did, when President Obama warned of an ‘empathy deficit’ and critics made fervent claims about reading novels as a way to understand other points of view.” In The New Yorker, Parul Sehgal on Jenny Odell’s new book.
• “Whereas humans are limited in the kinds of explanations we can rationally conjecture, machine-learning systems can learn both that the earth is flat and that the earth is round. They trade merely in probabilities that change over time.” In The New York Times, Noam Chomsky and co-authors on the disappointments of ChatGPT.
• “Rather than help ease students’ cost burdens, the growing hedge-fund-like nature of endowments has actually made affordability worse.” In Business Insider, Catherine Liu on the universities attached to hedge funds.

Write to me at len.gutkin@chronicle.com.

Yours,

Len Gutkin