Scott Stephens

My first encounter with the writing of Anne Manne was ten years ago when I read The Life of I, her incomparable treatment of the various expressions of what she calls ‘the new culture of narcissism’. Some of the examples she adduces in that book are singularly monstrous – like the grandiose bloodlust of Anders Breivik or the sexual malevolence of Ariel Castro – while others are more like expressions of a dominant cultural logic, such as neoliberalism’s valorisation of self-sufficiency and the penalties it accordingly inflicts on both the vulnerable and those who care for them. But in each case she identifies a conspicuous failure of empathy, an incapacity (or perhaps unwillingness) to regard the moral reality of others such that it might present some constraint on the imposition of one’s will, some limit to the realisation of one’s designs.

There is a moment early on in Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 (1953) – think of it as the novel’s opening gambit, the disturbance which sets its plot in motion – when the impish Clarisse McClellan attempts to rouse the book’s stolid and otherwise self-possessed protagonist, Guy Montag, from the partial oblivion in which he lives his life. She shadows him on his walk home from work one evening, verbally prodding him in the hope of puncturing what is evidently less a form of sincere conviction than it is a state of unthinkingness. After Montag rebuffs her questions one time too many, Clarisse finally complains, ‘You never stop to think what I’ve asked you.’