I bought this book on
the same visit to Waterstones as yielded the previous book reviewed here,
Darren McGarvey’s Poverty Safari. I
was looking for short books that would take a few hours to read, having just failed
to get stuck into two very long books which would each take twenty plus hours
of my time.
But their brevity
aside, the two books are chalk and cheese. If McGarvey’s is a working-class
book, this is a middle-class one - very much so. McGarvey tells us about his sharp-edged
anger at the world; Watt Smith about her sharp-elbowed envy and jealousy. It’s
hard not to imagine her as someone who would have voted for David Cameron.
The book aims to be
lightweight and one can imagine a great deal of it emerging from determined
googling, examples and anecdotes - many of them amusing - piled up fairly
haphazardly. Uncertainty about its intended audience gives us “The Genealogy of Morals written by the
German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche” (page 108), a bit odd in the context of
a book which has a title in German, the English sub-title providing the
translation.
More surprisingly, the book is the product of a Wellcome Trust
research fellowship attached to the Centre for the History of the Emotions at
Queen Mary University of London - that bit of the blurb, read in the bookshop, made
me expect some Foucault but he nowhere appears and Watt Smith looks to American
psychologists for inspiration. Those psychologists though themselves mostly
university academics also aim to be popular, the sort of academics who now make
use of the fact that the internet is made of tubes (page 113 for the Schadenfreude
story).
The theme of the book
is the joy we take in the misfortune of others. The author suggests that the
emotion is natural, universal and often desirable despite its poor reputation.
The concept of Schadenfreude has
acquired fresh relevance in a world where social media allows many millions of
people unrestricted access to express their uninhibited joy at the misfortunes
of others, and I can see that there is scope to take that fact seriously and to
seek to understand it, however distasteful the work may be. Fortunately for
Watt Smith, she finds her Twitter feeds and such like exciting. De gustibus non est disputandum.
