L'Ecriture Humaine: What is it?

The stories we tell have implications for the lives we lead. What kind of stories are we telling as a culture? Are they humane or inhumane? Do they lead us toward or away from compassion? With critically acclaimed stories or films that may be troubling or violent, how do we tell if they are humane or not?

 I will point to five ways to identify a l'ecriture humaine or humane writing. Humane writing is both a political and an ethical act.

The humane is found in moments of quiet contemplation or creativity, in domestic spaces where the interior life can be nurtured.

First, l'ecriture humaine shines a light on personal domestic spaces, the spaces often overlooked by the dominant discourse. These spaces depict small scale community, class differences or solidarity, and sociality. They are where human relationships can be nurtured or exposed.  

 “The house shelters day­ dreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace. The values that belong to daydreaming mark humanity at its deepest." Bachelard,  The Poetics of Space

A less domestic story might focus on “great feats” in government, on the battlefield, in the marketplace, among kings and important people doing important things. In 1981, Diana Trilling , author of Death of a Scarsdale Diet Doctor was accused on William Buckley’s Firing Line of confusing the “aesthetic with the ethical” when she focused on the “cruelty” of Scarsdale’s living space, including animal heads in the dining room. Did she get confused? Probably not. 

An illustration of a battle scene from War and Peace. The human individual is reduced to a mass in this image. 

The TV series West World revels in showing gigantic and monumental structures that radiate power, spaces reminiscent of a totalitarian architecture that dwarves and diminishes human life. 

Thinkers such as Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Thomas Kelly, and Audre Lorde saw small spaces as crucial for developing the deeply spiritual or erotic—deeply felt—community that could become political and fight oppression, be it sexism, racism or fascism.

Second, l'ecriture humaine is circular not linear. Life is not progress towards a defined end goal that ends in triumph or defeat  but a series of reiterative relationships, a return to the same ground in order to deepen it. Circularity is often associated with women or the subaltern. We circle through the repetitive tasks that keep life going for the great ones, and when we can, circle back to those activities that give life it greatest meaning, either creative or social. In Saving Paradise,  Brock and Parker show that early Christian art is not a linear heroic narrative focused on a single experience of crucifixion, but a physically circular paradise that shows the reiterative work of shepherding and welcomes us to join in.

The labyrinth represents the reiterative journey

Third, l'ecriture humaine rejects or critiques ritual humiliation, which is an exercise of the power of hierarchy. Movies or series in the last quarter century often include a scene where a lead woman is humiliated so that she can learn her place in the social order, be punished for transgression, or become an acceptable subordinate partner to the dominant male. In 1998's You’ve Got Mail, for example, lead Meg Ryan is ritually humiliated. 

L'ecriture humaine, however, treats women and  other subaltern peoples with dignity and nuance. The far more recent  Man in the High Castle is an example of l'ecriture humaine. It does not ritually humiliate  Juliana Crain, the lead female character, who is accorded dignity and agency. Her humanity saves humanity. She treats all people, even a young Nazi, as worthy of life. In 1940’s Shop Around the Corner, the inspiration for You’ve Got Mail, the lead female, Margaret Sullivan, also is not ritually humiliated. 

Game of Thrones involves a long drawn-out scene of ritual humiliation of a strong woman. 

Juliana Crane is not ritually humiliated for exercising power. 

Shop Around the Corner shows a strong woman in 1940 without having to humiliate her. Why does the 1998 remake insist on ritual humiliation?  

Fourth, l'ecriture humaine is a poetics of empathy. Feelings matter. They are not subordinated to action or inviolable principle. They bring us face-to-face with the particular and the vulnerable. 

In contrast, other kinds of narratives emphasize “strength” as the ability to shut off emotions. In I Claudius, Antonia, Claudius’s mother, locks her daughter in a closet to starve, because she is unchaste and sits in front of the closet as she screams, waiting for her to die. Antonia sees her action as old-time Roman virtue and strength. 

Marx’s Capital  shows, however, a sentiment that pulls us towards a politics of empathy.  Marx writes “Children of nine or ten are dragged from their squalid beds at four a.m. and compelled to work until ten, eleven, or twelve at night, their limbs wearing away, their frames dwindling, their faces whitening, ...” Famous biblical narratives are l'ecriture humaine, such as  the Good Samaritan and the Prodigal Son. In The Levite’s Concubine, in which a man throws his concubine out to be gang raped, the initial story ends on a note of l'ecriture humaine: the pathos of her corpse’s hand reaching for the door. The outcome  leads us, however, away from l'ecriture humaine into warfare and retribution,  as the tribes of Israel take violent revenge on the concubine’s death. This leads ironically to mass violence against women as the Israelite tribes kidnap women from non-Israelite communities to replace those they killed. This kind of social breakdown leads to the installation of a king, against the advice of God, who tells them the Jews they will be oppressed. 

Cold-bloodedly murdering one's daughter is not humane nor "strong." It might, however, be sociopathic.

Children toil in factories. It is worth noting that two books that led to social change were unabashedly novels of sentiment: Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin and Sinclair Lewis' The Jungle. 

The Levite's concubine loses her life due to lack of empathy. 

Fifth, a l'ecriture humaine flattens or undermines notions of hierarchy. 

A humane literature shines a light on the subaltern. 

The horizontal qualities of this  painting reinforce the idea of women in equalitarian community

These five attributes of l'ecriture humaine—foregrounding of the domestic space, circularity, rejection of humiliation, an emphasis on empathy, and flattening of hierarchy-- can point us towards a literature, and especially filmed media, that is humane and away from that which is not. We perhaps have an urgent need to create and support a l'ecriture humaine as both a humane and a political act. This is always a literature of truth, not lies, of sentiment, not sentimentality, of telling difficult stories with an ethical compass pointing at empathy, compassion and generosity.