On “Relatability”

Thus we have the apparently paradoxical situation in which the reader is forced to reveal aspects of himself in order to experience a reality which is different from his own. – Wolfgang Iser

I’ve been thinking recently about the word “relatable” (noun: “relatability”), a term which comes up a lot these days in discussions of texts and creative writing workshops (“the characters / events / dilemmas / emotions in this work are so relatable…”). The idiom is almost always used in an approbatory sense, as in “this text is good, because it reflects me in some way – my concerns, my feelings, my life.” “The literary text acts as a kind of mirror,” as Wolfgang Iser puts it – and, indeed, it should do so, if it is to be classed an aesthetic success.

But where does that leave genres where the mirror is cracked, or distorted, or shattered? Where does that leave, say, the grotesque hall of mirrors that is satire? “Satire,” claims Swift, “is a sort of glass wherein beholders do generally discover everybody’s face but their own.” So presumably it is not “relatable,” at least not in an egocentric sense.

Swift’s view of satire always reminds me of Orwell’s critique of Dickens: ‘Dickens attacked English institutions with a ferocity that has never since been approached. Yet he managed to do it without making himself hated, and, more than this, the very people he attacked have swallowed him so completely that he has become a national institution himself… Before I was ten years old I was having Dickens ladled down my throat by schoolmasters in whom even at that age I could see a strong resemblance to Mr. Creakle, and one knows without needing to be told that lawyers delight in Sergeant Buzfuz and that Little Dorrit is a favourite in the Home Office. Dickens seems to have succeeded in attacking everybody and antagonizing nobody.’ As Swift would expect, it seems no-one – cruel teachers, corrupt lawyers, do-nothing bureaucrats – seems to recognise themselves in Dickens’s ferocious satire. Satire makes nothing happen, as Auden might have said.

No doubt there is some truth in this. After all, one of the most well-known philosophies of laughter is the so-called “superiority theory,” which suggests that we laugh out of a sudden feeling of superiority. We laugh at someone slipping on a banana skin because it is not ourselves who slipped. We laugh at satirised characters because they behave stupidly, grotesquely, bizarrely, and we do not. This is the opposite of “relatability”: pleasure at (an apparent) absolute, hierarchical difference between ourselves and the subject of our laughter.

And yet underlying that absolute difference is sometimes a hidden, perhaps unconscious, sense of identification: it might have been us behaving absurdly; it might have been us slipping on the banana skin. If we had done so, we would have looked ridiculous too. Responding to Bergson’s vitalistic version of the “superiority theory,” Wyndham Lewis puts it like this:

‘“Men” are undoubtedly, to a greater or less extent, machines... Men are sometimes so palpably machines, their machination is so transparent, that they are comic... If one of us exposes too much his “works,” and we start seeing him as a thing, then – in subconsciously referring this back to ourselves – we are astonished and shocked, and we bark at him – we laugh – in order to relieve our emotion’ [my italics].

Laughter, according to Lewis, arises from a “subconscious” self-identification with the comic “machine man.” Using slightly different language, critic Alexander Kozintsev claims something similar, when he suggests that “laughter is a mirror for Homo Sapiens… We are all equal participants in a single comic performance, laughing at ourselves and looking at others as if they were fun-house mirror images of ourselves.”

Comic performance, on this definition, somehow simultaneously encodes otherness and sameness, superiority and equality, difference and “relatability.” Consciously speaking, we might not recognise ourselves in the subjects of comedy or satire – but unconsciously we see these “others as if they were fun-house images of ourselves.”

Perhaps all this might be understood by reference to a very famous example of “satire” – or, at least, what I always think of as satire. It certainly has its exaggerated, comic elements, and is at one point called a “poison in jest.” This is The Mousetrap, the play-within-a-play in Hamlet.

Hamlet declares of The Mousetrap that “’tis a knavish piece of work: but what o’ that? Your majesty, and we that have free souls, it touches us not.” On the surface, there is nothing “of offence” in the play – it seems to depict something very distant from the world of Elsinore. And yet, of course, secreted within the text is a hidden “relatability,” whereby the King’s own murderous actions are reflected back to him. Lewis’s claims notwithstanding, Claudius doesn’t greet this moment of self-recognition with laughter (though arguably Hamlet does, with his triumphant “Ah, ha!”). Instead, he jumps up in fright and leaves. As Hamlet intended, the play-within-a-play has caught “the conscience of the King.”

In this case, “relatability” has nothing to do with reassurance, comfort, let alone a narcissistic reinforcing of the ego. Yes, The Mousetrap succeeds in “hold[ing] … the mirror

up to nature,” but the nature it exposes is deeply uncomfortable, one that Claudius has tried to keep hidden. It reflects a self that he doesn’t want to be confronted with, and definitely doesn’t want revealed on stage.

So when we use the word “relatable” as a value judgement in literary discussions or writing workshops (and I acknowledge, reluctantly, that the term is here to stay), perhaps we should bear this in mind: that there are lots of different kinds of textual “relatability.” The concept works on many levels. Certainly, texts can often help us “to know we’re not alone” (as C. S. Lewis says in William Nicholson’s play Shadowlands): they can mirror our emotions, dilemmas, losses and laughter back to us, through others’ experiences. But they can also mirror our hidden selves, our repressed consciences, our secret desires, the monsters lurking in our ids (to paraphrase Forbidden Planet).

This is the dark side of “relatability”: in Shakespeare’s play, for instance, it’s not just Hamlet who is “relatable,” but Claudius, Gertrude, Polonius, Horatio, Rosencrantz and Gildenstern and, for that matter, the players-within-the-play, too. To be “relatable” may be an aesthetic judgement, but it is not necessarily a moral one, as Orwell’s teachers, lawyers and bureaucrats might have understood.

– Jonathan Taylor is an author, editor, lecturer and critic. His most recent books are the short story collection Scablands and Other Stories (Salt, 2023) and the memoir A Physical Education: On Bullying, Discipline & Other Lessons (Goldsmiths, 2024). He directs the MA in Creative Writing at the University of Leicester. His website is www.jonathanptaylor.co.uk.

Works cited

W. H. Auden, “In Memory of W. B. Yeats,” in Collected Poems, ed. Edward Mendelson (London: Faber, 1994). Henri Bergson, “Laughter”, in Comedy, ed. Wylie Sypher (Baltimore and London: John Hopkins University Press, 1980). Wolfgang Iser, “The Reading Process: A Phenomenological Approach,” New Literary History, 3:2 (1972), 279-299. Alexander Kozintsev, The Mirror of Laughter, trans. Richard P. Martin (Abingdon: Routledge, 2017). Wyndham Lewis, Men Without Art (New York: Russell and Russell, 1964). William Nicholson, Shadowlands (London: Penguin, 1990).

George Orwell, “Charles Dickens,” in Selected Essays, ed. Stefan Collini (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021). William Shakespeare, Hamlet, ed. G. R. Hibbard (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). Jonathan Swift, “The Battle of the Books,” in Major Works, ed. Angus Ross and David Woolley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). Fred M. Wilcox (dir.), Forbidden Planet (MGM, 1956).