Susan Boyle and the power of the moral imagination

Every once in a while great cultural moment happens. Iconic displays of the human imagination seem always to be unpredictable. But when they happen they reveal something about ourselves to ourselves. The Elian Gonzales affair was such a moment. Simply by arriving on the shores of Florida, alone, his mother and others lost at sea as they desperately fled Cuba in a fragile sea craft, Elian provided nothing more than his own presence into which people from many persuasions could invest their opinions about the Cuban question. A child who had essentially nothing to do with it other than his own person, became the focus of an intense public furor. [See Marshall Sahlins, Apologies to Thucydides]

Such a moment has just happened again, only this time it is a little different. A few days ago a 47 year old woman appeared on a talent show in Britain. Someone described her as fumpy. She wore her best dress, something worn earlier to a nephew’s wedding. She had fixed her hair herself. And she came on stage to sing. The hosts and the audience were kind enough, but pervading the whole scenario was a palpable doubt, even condescension, about this woman. She was a pathetic figure, vulnerable. This was an aggressive audience, expressive; they were ready to drive a performer off the stage. The hosts, the talent judges, were clearly dubious. One of the judges asked this woman her name and where she was from. She was Susan Boyle from a small town -- well, a collection of villages, she said. Then he asked what her ambition was. She wanted to be singer. Who would she like to be like?, he asked. Like Elaine Paige. It was easy to regard this woman as tragically unaware of her own limitations, with aspirations that surpassed her ability. And she was now on stage, on TV. Before a huge audience. Here was a disaster in the making. This would be difficult to watch.

She chose to sing Fantine’s song, “I dreamed a dream” from Les Miserables, when Fantine was left alone, unemployed and destitute.

Her first note changed everything. The audience was electrified. As she sang they began to cheer. One of the judges, Amanda Holden [whom I earlier called "a gorgeous blond"; decide for yourself -- certainly not "frumpy" like the woman on stage], folded her hands and held them up to her face, as if hoping desperately, praying, for this woman not to stumble. Everyone seemed to be rooting for her. Some people wept. This is what she sang:

There was a time when men were kind
When their voices were soft
And their words inviting
There was a time when love was blind
And the world was a song
And the song was exciting
There was a time
Then it all went wrong

I dreamed a dream in time gone by
When hope was high
And life worth living
I dreamed that love would never die
I dreamed that God would be forgiving
Then I was young and unafraid
And dreams were made and used and wasted
There was no ransom to be paid
No song unsung, no wine untasted

But the tigers come at night
With their voices soft as thunder
As they tear your hope apart
And they turn your dream to shame

He slept a summer by my side
He filled my days with endless wonder
He took my childhood in his stride
But he was gone when autumn came

And still I dream he'll come to me
That we will live the years together
But there are dreams that cannot be
And there are storms we cannot weather

I had a dream my life would be
So different from this hell I'm living
So different now from what it seemed
Now life has killed the dream I dreamed.

When she was finished the judges were ecstatic. One of them said that at first everyone had been laughing at her but no one was laughing now. Amanda Holden said it was a wonderful moment for her because she knew that everyone there had been against Susan. Susan Boyle was showered with praise.

That was on April 11. On April 15, 2009, when you google “Susan Boyle singer” it gives you 132,000 sites. The clip of her performance, seven minutes, has been watched over 3 ½ million times.

Here is an event that so embodied something profoundly, even personally, gripping for thousands of people that the seven minute clip on UTube is being watched over and over again, by the same people. Susan Boyle’s moment on stage objectifies something buried in the psyche, something in the human moral imagination. The discussion of how and what that could be will be going on for weeks.

Here is one instance:
On popwatch [http://popwatch.ew.com/popwatch/2009/04/susan-boyle-why.html] Lisa Schwarzbaum writes that she is still crying. She plays the YouTube clip over and over again. And she asks herself what every anthropologist should ask: why are you listening again and again? And why are you crying? She proposes an answer, at least for herself: “In our pop-minded culture so slavishly obsessed with packaging -- the right face, the right clothes, the right attitudes, the right Facebook posts -- the unpackaged artistic power of the unstyled, un-hip, un-kissed Ms. Boyle let me feel, for the duration of one blazing showstopping ballad, the meaning of human grace. She pierced my defenses. She reordered the measure of beauty. And I had no idea until tears sprang how desperately I need that corrective . . .”

Buried within the human psyche are feelings, yearnings, anxieties too deep for words, usually. Only sometimes do we see it in ourselves. Always it is something outside ourselves that touches us, somehow, where we feel most deeply. At such moments we remember that we are humans -- not mere living creatures, but human beings, profoundly and deeply shaped by a moral sensibility so powerful that it breaks through our inhibitions; it can burst out, explode into public view, to our own astonishment. And sometimes that objective form -- a person, an event, an object, a song -- embodies deeply felt sensibilities for a lot of us at once, so that we discover how much we share in our private worlds, worlds otherwise inaccessible to anyone one else. It becomes a social event, so we can all rejoice, and weep, together.