Bad Actors: Trust Exercise by Susan Choi
I’ve been in therapy for a while now, so I’m quite familiar with a vocabulary of “boundaries.” Usually when we discuss it in session, we’re talking about emotional boundaries — self-awareness. How much am I letting my work take over my personal life? How much am I allowing emails, phone calls, and other kinds of ad-hoc concerns to leech into my other relationships? Do work concerns dominate my off-the-clock conversations? That boundary is about deciding, personally, to draw a line, so that when I am on the clock, I am not depleted or frustrated. I work with my therapist to notice the signs that I’ve let too much in — signs that I’m not maintaining enough emotional distance, distance from that boundary line I drew.
There are also ethical boundaries that come with my line of work, and they’re the same ones that come with my therapist’s line of work. The American Psychological Association (APA) defines the therapist’s boundaries in terms of “relationships” and urges therapists not to be in “multiple relationships” with people: “A multiple relationship occurs when a psychologist is in a professional role with a person and at the same time is in another role with the same person” (APA.org). Obviously the same goes for teachers and advisors: we remind students that we are not their friends, because that multiple relationship would confuse the roles and muddle the power relations. Every year in my job we go through “boundaries training,” and unlike nearly all office workplace TV sitcom characters, I believe in them. I think they’re a useful reminder that other people are other people, and that power is power. No matter how anarchist one might be (when you read a lot, it happens), roles exist, power exists. A role inherently creates power — a role inspires trust in someone, imbues them with respectability, and engages them in a set of duties, desired or not. It’s not OK to abuse the power that is built into a role. Period.
We all know, of course, that the reason we need boundaries training on a yearly basis is because people forget this. Caregivers cross boundaries all the time — sometimes unintentionally, but sometimes very intentionally and willfully. I can’t personally speculate as to why, but I think Susan Choi’s novel, Trust Exercise, wants to. It’s a novel that explores what happens when someone with power exercises, as in exerts, employs, trust: exercises it in order to cross a boundary. And it’s also a novel about why, when that boundary gets crossed, it’s so hard for us to talk about it: why, when a trusted figure abuses power, it is so hard for us to hold them accountable.
It’s a novel about why, when boundaries get crossed, it’s so hard for us to talk about it: why, when a trusted figure abuses power, it is so hard for us to hold them accountable.
Most basically, it’s the story of a theatre teacher and his young high school students. We get the same story a few different times — the tale of a teacher who is both charismatic and intimidating; both brilliant and brittle; both unorthodox and ingratiating. He’s a renegade, he’s queer, he’s unusual, he’s an artist. His students worship him, and he knows it. But of course who among us didn’t have a teacher who loomed large like this? This kind of cult of personality is endemic to the profession of teaching. “Cult of personality” involves the creation of “an idealized, heroic, and worshipful image of a leader” through “spectacle,” according to Wikipedia. Education so often requires spectacle — and pupils are so susceptible to idealization and worship within the closed system of their schooling. Now put all that in the context of theatre, where spectacle, dramatics, and romance are not only encouraged, they’re necessary.
Choi’s characters are high school classmates in 1982, in an unnamed Southern city, taking an acting class called “Trust Exercises” with this very special theatre teacher; his name might be Mr. Kingsley. His pedagogy is a fascination for both readers who have been students of the arts (guilty), and for those who haven’t, for he pushes the limits of experiential learning to levels that some could call excellent and others could call disturbing. “Of the Trust Exercises,” we learn, “some involved talking and resembled group therapy. Some required silence, blindfolds, falling backwards off tables or ladders and into the latticework of classmates’ arms.” Then there’s the Trust Exercise that involves the teenagers in the class getting down on all fours in the pitch-dark and crawling. And touching. This is where the love story of two students, David and Sarah, begins: in the dark, running their hands hungrily all over one another. “To David, love meant declaration,” Choi writes. “Wasn’t that the whole point? To Sarah, love meant a shared secret. Wasn’t that the whole point?”
It’s acting class, and acting, as Sarah remembers at one point, is defined as “truthful emotions in false circumstances.” The Trust Exercises are meant to elicit those truthful emotions — to make them comfortable expressing those real things in fictional stories. What do you do with your truthful emotions in truthful circumstances? Can those ever be expressed? Indeed, a different kind of acting is required to navigate the halls of high school -- to feel safe among peers, to look cool while thinking I can’t let anyone really see me, or else they’ll know I don’t belong.
In a way therapy is also “truthful emotions in false circumstances.” It is a space simulated expressly in order to uncover and identify true feelings -- feeling-states, as one character calls them — with the purpose of healing, and of self-knowledge.
And something else that involves truthful emotions in false circumstances: fiction. In this story, Choi takes command of one of the novel’s greatest tools: point-of-view, and the unreliable narrator. There are three parts to the novel, and all three are entitled, “Trust Exercise.” Each has a different narrator. We start in a kind of omniscience, and what seems to be an impartial account of the events of the 1982 school year, centering Sarah and David, and then just Sarah, in the boundary crossings that unfold that year. But then, that account ends abruptly —even anticlimactically — and we begin the second part of the book, the second “Trust Exercise.” Here, we have jumped ahead almost fifteen years. One of the characters from the first part, Karen, is narrating now, and she wants to set the record straight.
“Karen” does this, though, by first putting her own name between quotation marks. She calls into question all that we know, and then she proceeds to tell the story again, adding many details that have transpired since 1982. Karen narrates her version of things by switching between the first-person and third-person: sometimes “Karen” is doing the action, and sometimes “I” am. In fact, in telling moments, the point-of-view shifts in the middle of a scene: “Sitting in the car I was surprised to have no idea what I would do. … Then as if she’d been given a cue, around the time Karen sensed they were finished she got out of the car and walked quickly inside.” She splits in two: the Karen who is “Karen” (perhaps a version of herself as Sarah saw her, or as she seemed to be in high school) and then the intimate me. Her persona, and then just her, addressing us; a narrator, perhaps, whom we can really trust. And that’s the point — she needs us to trust her, and we do. We trust her because she tells us that Sarah is a fraud. We trust her because she tells us that she’s been acting.
Mr. Kingsley tries to comfort Sarah one day in 1982 by telling her, “Honesty is a process. Standing up for your emotions is a process.” He’s talking about the personal issue she’s shared with him after class one day, but he’s also foreshadowing the long, protracted struggle of these characters: the struggle to see, to really see, the events that transpired in 1982 when Sarah and Karen were in tenth grade. Honesty is a process — for them, and for this narrative, whose structure calls on us to exercise trust, only to have it broken, time and again, by unreliable information and partial truths. Who is Mr. Kingsley, really? What happened that year? And who will make it right?
Sometimes the boundaries we cross are as imperceptible as a shift in point-of-view.
