The Masters of the Emotionless

How no feeling makes you feel

In an interview with BAFTA, writer/director Quentin Tarantino compared his relationship to his audience’s emotions to an orchestra. He is the conductor, the audience are his instruments, and his movies — every scene, beat, and shot within them — make the instruments sound different. It is a profoundly difficult thing to do. But at least when Tarantino does it, you know what song the orchestra is playing — you know what emotion you’re supposed to feel. With some writers, however, it is as if the orchestra is largely silent. You catch a few hints and a few spare notes, and from those, you must fill in the gaps.

One of the best examples of this is the American short story writer and poet, Raymond Carver. Quite the opposite of Tarantino, Carver’s narratives are of a quiet sort. His style is sharp and minimalist, and his stories centre on the subtle complexities of working-class lives. They are deceivingly simple, and it is that which gives them power.

Take the first lines of Fat, a short story in his 1976 collection Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?: “I am sitting over coffee and cigarettes at my friend Rita’s and I am telling her about it,” it reads. “Here is what I tell her.” Flat and stiff, these lines do not quite possess the quotability of “to be, or not to be.” But for many, that is part of their appeal. His style reflects the subject matter, and his subject matter reflects life. There are unsaid words, unresolved endings, and a sense of underlying tension driving the project forward; but there are no bangs, no shootouts, and the prospect of a grand romantic gesture seems never to have crossed his mind. Even so, far from making them boring, their lack of spectacle makes Carver’s stories addictive in a way that is often confusing. You know you like the story, you know you felt something, but you don’t know why you like it, and you don’t have a clue what it is you just felt. 

I had the same experience reading Kazuo Ishiguro’s 1989 novel The Remains of the Day. A winner of the  Booker Prize, later adapted into a film starring Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson, follows the story of Stevens, the butler at Darlington Hall, as he recalls his decades of service. It is written in the first person, and reads exactly as you would expect an English butler to speak. 

Yet, despite the formality of its style and the boringness of its subject matter, I was hooked. As I turned page after page, I wondered how Stevens could have taken me in. There must have been something in the novel’s substance to counter the banality of its words. In the end, however, I realised there was nothing. The novel’s substance is incredible, no doubt, but the words did not need to be countered; for it was their very detachedness that made them powerful.

But how is that possible?

My answer here can only be speculation. Who knows what will elicit which emotion in an audience? Emotions are individual and, as such they are variable, but it seems to me that the acclaim of the Carvers and Ishiguros of the world is evidence enough to suggest emotionlessness is a potent weapon in the arsenal of the artist. And I think it has something to do with a piece of acting advice from Michael Caine: “Men will do anything but cry,” he said. “And so […] when you cry, you must fight the tears. And if you fight the tears, the audience will cry for you.”

In other words, when you restrain emotion in your art, the audience is forced to fill it with their own. As I said at the beginning of the article, some orchestras will only play a few notes — some writers will only give hints — but if you’re paying attention, you’ll be able to fill in the gaps and play the whole song for yourself. And it is in playing for yourself, in projecting your own emotions onto the page, where the power of emotionlessness lies.

Illustration by Marios Diakourtis