On Anger: Race, Cognition, Narrative

Introduction

introduction Anger gets a bad rap. Calling someone “angry” often labels that person as irrational, unstable, and unpredictable. To say “He’s just angry” or “She spoke out of anger” implies something beyond reason , acting as an excuse or an indictment. Regardless of the merits of that person’s reasons for anger, the characterization of “angry” can dismiss not only the content of that person’s thoughts and feelings, but also the entire person, in a sense erasing subjectivity and agency. This sense of anger as pathological is often associated with women and racial-cultural Others. On the other hand, anger is also sometimes equated with violence and aggression, and this kind of anger is often associated with men. Even in these brief mentions of the ways that anger is often implicitly read, we can see the gendering and Othering work also being done. In other words, emotions are culturally and ideologically laden. As psychologist Carol Tavris writes, “Anger . . . is as much a political matter as a biological one” (47). Anger is perhaps not well understood precisely because it is omnipresent ; anger is so familiar that we assume that we know what it is. Yet we still know relatively little about how anger in its various manifestations actually works. Anger may be partly physiological , cognitive, and psychological, yet it is also deeply ideological, inseparable from factors such as race, class, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, nation, and religion. We see cultural and ideological configurations of anger in a variety of ways: People of color are either more or less angry than white people. A man’s anger expresses, while constituting, his masculinity, while a woman’s anger is anti-feminine. The middle class defines and identifies itself through “control” of emotions and against the uncontrolled emotions of both the wealthy and the poor. Americans’ anger is more rational and just, and therefore more valid, than the anger of the rest of the world, particularly the Third World. Kim-final.indb 1 Kim-final.indb 1 7/9/13 2:51 PM 7/9/13 2:51 PM 2 on anger Antiwar demonstrators and foreign policy hawks debate over whose anger is more patriotic. In the West, there is a long history of divorcing anger from reason . Seneca argued that one had to rid oneself of anger to achieve apatheia , or a state of mind not subject to the passions. Both Plato and Aristotle saw the passions as potentially dangerous to the state, although they saw art as playing differing roles vis-à-vis these emotions . Such classical notions of anger as antithetical to reason continue to today. In Anger: The Misunderstood Emotion, Carol Tavris critiques the dominant modern strains of thought that divorce anger from reason and choice. First is the evolutionary view, which sees anger as an instinctual survival response. Second, related to the first, is the view of anger as physiological or neurochemical; in these models , we simply have to identify the hormone or chemical that makes us angry. Third is the Freudian “hydraulic” model of emotions that build up within a person. Leonard Berkowitz “calls advocates of this view ‘ventilationists,’ because they believe it is unhealthy to bottle up feelings” (Tavris 43). Fourth are forms of pop psychology, variously influenced by the Freudian model, that are based on the “principle that anger, aggression’s handmaiden, must not be blocked or silenced,” that one must “let it out” (Tavris 43). Primal scream therapies and the like are examples of this model. In contrast, Tavris argues that cathartic models of anger neither sufficiently explain the causes of anger nor offer productive ways of dealing with anger. She is particularly critical of biological or neurochemical explanations for anger, arguing that anger is fundamentally cultural: “People everywhere get angry, but they get angry in the service of their culture’s rules” (49). I would add to Tavris’s formulation that anger also reflects conflicts within a society. As cultural studies teaches us,1 cultures are not monolithic or homogenous; rather, culture can be the site(s) of ideological contestation, where different value systems, social groups, and material interests vie for dominance. So people may become angry when different rules of different cultural groups conflict with one another, or when cultural rules about fairness or morality contradict with the material limits that society puts on certain individuals. The texts I examine in this book (novels, a film, and a television series) depict situations in which complex social contradictions and conflicts produce anger in characters, authors...