Everyone’s a goddamn phoney

In the course of writing this article, I scoured the internet for a definition of “cringe” that would explain what I mean by it. I didn’t find one—if I understood my VIC163 class (Cultural Forms and Their Meanings), this is unsurprising, because nobody else’s meaning of “cringe” matches mine exactly. This idea in itself is somewhat cringe, because it is existentially unsettling. To me, cringe is nothing less than the unmistakable existential dread that suddenly becomes apparent in one’s daily life. For maximum impact, this should occur unexpectedly, although a slow build-up— complete with an agonizing and prolonged anticipation of the cringeworthy experience—can also produce remarkable results.

Human beings cringe when presented with something frightening, pathetic, embarrassing, or pitiful; we call the object of our cringing “cringeworthy” or simply “cringe.” Cringing is, I think, fundamentally a reaction to a revelation of weakness—haven’t we all cringed upon hearing a parent say something stupid or simply wrong? We cringe when jokes fall flat, when actors forget their lines on stage, when a professor flounders in the middle of a lecture. We cringe because we are forcibly presented with imperfection and failure: our skin crawls; we start biting our lips, nails, and pencils, and we look away.

Let’s take a look at two cringeworthy examples. The Office is a comedy show that, like many comedy shows, consists of a succession of horribly degrading quotidian scenes in which characters mock, humiliate, and torment each other. The show somehow convinces its audience to find all this chaos funny. The reason many people do is because similar things have happened to them in their lives. A second example is The Double, a novella by the great Russian writer Fyodor Dostoevsky. It tells the story of a broke, lonely, and socially inept government clerk who, after gatecrashing a party, has a nervous breakdown, is kicked out into the Petersburg snow, and hallucinates a copy of himself: the Double. The Double usurps his position at his job, befriends him, and then stabs him in the back, gaslights him, and finally drives him insane. The book ends with the unlucky clerk being taken away to an asylum. 

Most people would probably agree that The Office is funny and The Double is sad. Yet if you compare the actual events (a large section of The Double is set in the hero’s office), you find that the content is remarkably similar. Take one particularly cruel moment from Dostoevsky, in which the Double, fawning over a group of office pals, accidentally shakes the protagonist’s hand and then makes an exaggerated show of wiping his own hand clean—it could easily have happened on The Office. It probably has. 

Is cringe funny, then, or is it sad? The Double is sad because it chronicles a man’s horrific mental breakdown, and when people’s lives fall apart it is generally considered unfortunate. I already mentioned that people think The Office is funny—let’s take a closer look at the  reason why. People like The Office because it reminds them of their lives. It reminds me of my elementary school; of my job in the local grocery store; and of the summers I spent working in cornfields. But if we’ve all had mundane experiences like these in our lives—if we all know of unbearable bosses, psychopathic coworkers, and miserable people working horrible jobs for the rest of their lives—if we like The Office because we’ve lived The Office, then we all have some serious issues. So, if you take the comedic cringe and think about it a little bit harder, you’ll find that, at first, it seems funny, but in the end, although the humour is still there, it’s actually appallingly sad. It’s like one of those lavender, nut-free cupcakes that you get at school sometimes when you’re the kid with the allergies: the icing is lavender—that’s “cringe is funny”—and then the cupcake bit is chocolate—that’s “cringe is sad.” They’re both real, and they’re both essential elements of the cupcake. But, unless you eat the cupcake upside down, you’re left, when the icing is gone, to wallow in the chocolatey despair.

The Double is cringe. The Office is cringe. Life in general is cringe. Is death cringe? Is it true, as Charles Stringham says in A Dance to the Music of Time, that it’s awfully chic to be killed? Is everyone dignified when dead? Or is death the thing that we were cringing at this whole time, the thing that scares us and embarrasses us and makes us feel such aching pathos? Is humanity cringe because we’re transient and mortal? Probably, yes. In that case, what isn’t cringe? 

When I don’t know the answer to a question, I usually turn to George Eliot. His 1872 masterpiece Middlemarch recounts the sufferings of the brilliant Dorothea Brooke, whose “spiritual grandeur” is doomed to ignominious failure in her ignorant and bigoted little town. Nothing could be more cringe than the people of Middlemarch, and (spoiler alert) no great destiny awaits Dorothea; however, Eliot’s conclusion is worlds away from despair: “[T]he effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.” 

It can be annoying, after one has gone through a whole philosophical acid trip, to come back yet again to the principle that we should all try to do the right thing. But there’s something comforting about the rules we learn as children, and something true. A few lines from Milton’s Paradise Lost seem apt here:

Abashed the Devil stood

And felt how awful goodness is, and saw

Virtue in her shape how lovely, saw, and pined

His loss…

So, it appears that the opposite of cringe is goodness… as represented by a terrifying gang of exterminator angels. If we take Milton as our guide, the actual definition of cringe is the devil. 

So, the TL;DR is: you’re not really cringe until you’re sitting in somebody’s garden and pretending to be a toad.