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The Book of Form and Emptiness constructs a hallucinatory auditory world, triggered by a traumatic event of a family member's death. Drawing on phenomenological paradigms and psychopathology, further deepened by Ruth Ozeki's grounding in Sōtō Zen Buddhism, this article analyzes the intentional structure of the protagonist Benny Oh's hallucinatory experience by examining the dynamic between the subject that perceives and the objects that are perceived, as revealed in his gradual shiftfrom resisting to embracing auditory hallucinations. This analysis argues that the subjective link between embodied vulnerability and the belief in pain informs one's understanding of impermanence, and, thus, subjectivity and the world. Under this circumstance, Ozeki reconstructs subjectivity through compassionate intersubjective relations, while challenging the epistemological dominance of neoliberal rationality about mental illness.
Abstract
The Book of Form and Emptiness constructs a hallucinatory auditory world, triggered by a traumatic event of a family member's death. Drawing on phenomenological paradigms and psychopathology, further deepened by Ruth Ozeki's grounding in Sōtō Zen Buddhism, this article analyzes the intentional structure of the protagonist Benny Oh's hallucinatory experience by examining the dynamic between the subject that perceives and the objects that are perceived, as revealed in his gradual shift from resisting to embracing auditory hallucinations. This analysis argues that the subjective link between embodied vulnerability and the belief in pain informs one's understanding of impermanence, and, thus, subjectivity and the world. Under this circumstance, Ozeki reconstructs subjectivity through compassionate intersubjective relations, while challenging the epistemological dominance of neoliberal rationality about mental illness.
Introduction
American literature has witnessed a growing engagement with the concept of vulnerability to represent "the anxiety and psychological terror that spread across the Western world after 9/11," "a kind of global confusion and disorientation in the early 21st century" (Yang 8).1 Vulnerability, as zeitgeist-a contemporary "spirit of the time," carries a foundational meaning with broad extensibility, demonstrating interdisciplinary potential in and beyond philosophy, ethics, and social policy. The term vulnerability per se has a long historical origin in the history of thought, which traces back to ancient Greece. In 2006, Bryan S. Turner, in Vulnerability and Human Rights, elevated the notion of vulnerability to an anthropocentric ontological level by defining vulnerability as a universal condition of human existence and providing a systematic exposition (Jiang, "The Vulnerable Subject" 38). This universal condition of human is typically perceived as "a susceptibility to be harmed or wounded" (Boublil, "The Ethics" 185) because etymologically, vulnerability derives from the Latin vulnus, meaning "wound." Hence, the interaction between contemporary literature and this concept in the dimension of harm exposes the limitations of "the disembodied Cartesian subject" (Wolfe 36) in accounting for diffuse and systemic crises, resonating with the collective emotional state since the new century.
However, this negative harm-centered interpretation has been increasingly challenged and expanded particularly by posthumanist thought which underscores the openness and mutual relatedness inherent in vulnerability. The necessity of openness or exposure for vulnerability persists irrespective of anthropocentric or postanthropocentric ontological commitments. As contemporary phenomenological scholar Elodie Boublil expresses, vulnerability intrinsic in the individual condition properly presupposes the "openness and exposure to the world and to others" ("The Ethics" 184). In posthumanism, however, the human subject is no longer that autonomous agent, nor does subjectivity possess permanent boundaries. Thus, this characteristic openness is considered within the context of the "embodied, affective, and social nature" of human existence (Ferrández-Sanmiguel 196), which is why "in its encounter with posthumanist theory, vulnerability emerges as a complex, fluid, relational and meaningful embodied experience" (Ferrández-Sanmiguel et al. 14). Christine Daigle proposes her understanding of vulnerability through contesting Rosalyn Diprose's etymological definition of being "susceptible to physical or emotional injury" (188) and through engaging with Rosi Braidotti's posthumanist perspective. Although Braidotti develops affirmative ethics of the entangled subject (95), she links vulnerability to qualities such as the "shared" (2) and "reactive" (50) bonds tied to extinction negatively, treating the bonds as points of departure for becoming. Instead, Daigle argues in Posthuman Vulnerability that the term is not inherently positive or negative, with its ethical weight dependent on relational dynamics that "can be expressed as either negative or positive depending on how we relate to it," a dynamic determined as "an ontological fact about our beings" (106). After diluting the term's negative connotations and reinforcing its ontological facticity, Daigle continues by clarifying "what renders us vulnerable" is both the "openness of our being" and vitally "the outcome of our porous entanglements" (36).
Within this relational context, vulnerability emerges not merely as a condition of weakness or injury but as an ontological openness, an ever-present exposure that disrupts stable notions of autonomous selfhood. Such openness calls for a reimagining of subjectivity literally in and affected by new forms of crises. As Braidotti suggests, "a more complex and relational subject framed by embodiment, sexuality, affectivity, empathy and desire as core qualities" (26). The response(s) to the diffusive and co-constitutive crises of the new century and the exposed openness of living conditions together characterize a resurgence of vulnerability. Within this context, one notable voice arises: Ruth Ozeki (b. 1956), a Japanese-American writer and Buddhist priest. Her novels tend to portray individuals encountering diverse crises, including war, tsunamis, environmental politics, genetic engineering, modern medicine, and cultural and identity, as well as psychological, struggles, while consistently focusing on how these individuals experience and respond to such challenges. The novel The Book of Form and Emptiness (2021, hereafter cited in text as The Book), alludes to large-scale catastrophes, such as 9/11 and 3/11.2 Besides, The Book precisely and urgently addresses the subtle yet persistent crises of everyday life by examining how objects intrude upon human thought and disrupt the boundaries of subjectivity, thereby refracting and responding to the broader ontological vulnerability that defines 21st-Century life.
Narrated by two alternating narrators-the protagonist Benny Oh and a sentient, metafictional book, The Book centers on Benny's auditory experiences following his father's death. Both the auditory experiences and his father's death are respectively manifestations of vulnerability, affective and embodied. These experiences, though unfolding through Benny's consciousness, emerge from five sources: his deceased father, surrounding objects, robotic commands in his mind, mocking inner voices, and the book that narrates his story. Among the sources, the voices of surrounding objects, ranging from human-made to natural artifacts, appear particularly striking. These objects either emit ambient sounds or directly engage Benny in conversation. Unlike most works that treat sound merely as "soundscape," The Book foregrounds auditory perception as a central epistemological and ontological mechanism. At a clinical level, these auditory hallucinations can be interpreted through the lens of mental illnesses in evidence-based medicine (EBM), particularly as symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder, induced by the crisis created by the protagonist's father's death.
However, The Book resists this psychiatric pathologizing framework. Ozeki's plotting of failed inpatient treatments, combined with her meticulous construction of an evocative atmosphere around the character's hearing ability, unsettles the medicalized reading. Rather than clinically diagnosing these sounds, Ozeki invites readers to inhabit Benny's subjective auditory world, a world that embodies his vulnerability while also functioning as a site for reimagining selfhood. This paper therefore adopts a phenomenological perspective, one that both brackets "natural attitudes" towards that auditory world and resonates with the embodied cognition of the narrative, to examine the subjective reality of auditory experience. Incorporating the author's Zen philosophy, this manuscript further argues that auditory hallucinations are not pathological symptoms, but rather existential signals that invite readers a different attunement to being, vulnerability, and intersubjectivity. Ultimately, The Book reframes auditory hallucinations as a mode of perception where vulnerability emerges not as a deficit to be cured, but as a condition of being that enables the actualization of an alternative subjectivity.
1. Vulnerability in the Construction of Intentional Objects
The encounter with vulnerability is the starting point for all Benny's thoughts and behaviors. The opening death scene in the novel, instead of solely introducing the plot, initiates a sustained inquiry into the ontological and ethical implications of human vulnerability. What emerges first is the persistent condition of embodied presence in a fundamental passivity. This passivity, an essential quality of openness that underpins vulnerability, is not a lack of agency in the empirical sense, but a structural condition of being, prior to and independent from voluntary action. Even at the level of susceptibility to harm in existential vulnerability, this passivity refers not to a behavioral inertia, but to a structural condition in which the subject is exposed to injury, loss, or dependency, often experienced as "victimhood, and lack of sovereignty" (Gámez-Fernández, Fernández-Santiago 3). This passivity means regardless of how actively an individual engages with the world, that one individual is always embedded in a structure of existence marked by openness, dependence, and limitation. The situation of passivity grounds all possible modes of being vulnerable and makes vulnerability possible. As Jiang points out in his genealogical inquiry into the vulnerable subject, "Vulnerability, first of all, has a distinct passivity, which emphasizes that the basic state of human existence is passively exposed to various external forces that are difficult to avoid or even powerless to resist" ("The Vulnerable Subject" 38). This ontological passivity finds its most extreme expression in the moment of death, where the body radically exposed and the existence entirely dependent on forces beyond itself.
In the text, the anthropomorphic, metafictional narrator, "Benny's Book," recalls the death of Benny's father, Kenji, who collapses from exhaustion in the alley outside their home when returning from a party, and is then run over by a chicken truck. Kenji, who is caught off guard, dies in the accident. In Kenji's death scene, his body becomes a pure site of exposure, no longer a vessel of volition, but a vulnerable, perishable form entirely open to external forces. Death, in this sense, reveals the embodied condition of vulnerability in its most absolute form through the body's passivity and reveals that human exists as fundamentally exposed and relational. This radical and sudden manifestation of embodied vulnerability initiates Benny's hallucinatory journey.
Due to the pervasive focus on the embodied dimension of vulnerability, the narrative in The Book emphasizes sensory and bodily experiences, rather than adhering to rationalist, disembodied cognition. Embodied cognition aligns with the "fundamental attitude of phenomenology," namely a return to "the living things themselves," which means "open [one's] own eyes to see, to listen, to intuit, and then derive from these the most original insights" (Zhang Xianglong 5). Phenomenology often brackets/ suspends the belief in the existence of the world or objects and focuses on the eidetic reduction and transcendental reduction of phenomena, aiming to grasp their authenticity. In The Book, the focus on foregrounding sound and auditory perception illustrates this approach through the character Benny, who hears sounds from objects that should not be capable of making noise.
After suspending the question "whether these things have the potential to make sound and convey emotion," the phenomenon of Benny hearing sounds is presented as part of Benny's consciousness, where the sounds are inseparable from the perception of pain. In Husserl's phenomenology, consciousness is always directed toward an object, and perception (i.e. seeing, hearing, and imagining) has intentionality. Thus, all objects appear within consciousness, and the meaning of intentional objects is given through the consciousness structure in intentional experiences. For Benny, the sounds from objects are intentional objects of his consciousness, and although hallucinations, remain undeniable facts for him. The fact is undeniable, as Ni claims: "Hallucinations are perceptions when they are not perceived as hallucinations" (393). These sounds are how Benny perceives the world. However, even after acknowledging the protagonist's auditory hallucinations as part of his perceptual experience, significant questions regarding how Ozeki constructs consciousness and why such objects appear necessarily in a painful way within that structure remain.
After portraying the physical vulnerability of Kenji, Ozeki deepens her inquiry into the notion of vulnerability by focusing on Benny's affective dimension in his perceptions. Hallucination, as understood in Max Scheler's framework, is a form of pre-logical perception that relies upon sensory material:
Undoubtedly, both the givenness of hallucinatory content and the process of apperception are grounded in the structure of perception itself. However, a structural analysis conducted solely on the acting side of perception is unlikely to yield any new insights. The distinctiveness of hallucination, rather, lies in the particular mode of apprehension applied to specific sense data. (Qian 98)
In this context, the sensory material refers to the actual objects with which Benny comes into contact in the real world. The painful, emotionally charged voices Benny perceives exceed this sensory material. That excess is Benny's particular mode of apprehension.
Taking delusional hallucination as an example, Qian writes that "delusion initially originates from a set of fundamental propositional beliefs" (105). In irrational states, these beliefs remain unmodified despite contradictions with integrated experience, as other plausible explanations are ignored or assimilated to maintain the coherence of the delusional system. (Qian 105) Within this system, individuals constantly seek confirming evidence, reinforcing the belief and then the delusion through a circular pattern of reasoning. Similarly, Benny's perception of painful emotion in intentional objects is based on a newly constructed cognitive framework in which "pain behind the vulnerability" functions as a central belief.
That affective vulnerability does not refer to some latent sadness stored within Benny's psyche is worth clarifying. Rather, affective vulnerability describes an openness and susceptibility in Benny's affectivity, exposing Benny to affective forces that generate new sensations within specific experiences. In the pivotal event of Kenji's death, Ozeki deliberately omits any emotional or other form of response from Benny. His emotions remain initially unexpressed. In this regard, hallucinatory perception becomes particularly significant in deciphering Benny's affectivity because affective vulnerability here instead manifests through the indeterminate experience of voice-hearing. Discernible emotion first emerges at that moment when Benny experiences his initial auditory hallucination, when he interprets the sounds he heard in the crematorium from his deceased father as "sad" (Ozeki 15). Significantly, this sad voice marks the commencement of affective manifestation and functions as an affective node, establishing the tonal foundation of being harmed for all subsequent hallucinations. Simplified, this "sadness"-rooted in Benny's emotional experience of his father's death-becomes a core belief exceeding the immediate sensory materials within Benny's perceptions. In this way, his affective susceptibility to external triggers manifests as distressing auditory hallucinations. Therefore, these hallucinations cannot be simplistically attributed to posttraumatic stress disorder; rather, the hallucinations constitute a complex perceptual experience through which Benny's affective vulnerability becomes legible as emotions within an ongoing process of being affected by external objects.
As an event, death changes Benny's sensory and cognitive structure when he confronts vulnerability. This encounter, more than signifying suffering, exposes the instability of life and the contingency of human existence. In other words, the encounter with vulnerability opens Benny to the awareness of impermanence. Yet, rather than embracing this awareness, Benny resists and denies impermanence, which is paradoxically repeated and confirmed in his subsequent perceptions. Impermanence, as the core concept of The Book, is hinted at in the book's title. "Form and Emptiness" is taken from a popular sutra in Mahāyāna Buddhism, the Prajñāpāramitāhṛdaya (Heart Sūtra):
Here, O Sâriputra, form is emptiness and the very emptiness is form; emptiness does not differ from form, form does not differ from emptiness; whatever is form, that is emptiness, whatever is emptiness, that is form, the same is true of feelings, perceptions, impulses and consciousness. (Conze 103)3
Ozeki explains "form" and "emptiness" through the novel's fictional character, Zen master Aikon. In Aikon's self-help book Tidy Magic: The Ancient Zen Art of Clearing Your Clutter and Revolutionizing Your Life, the meaning of form and emptiness signifies "the impermanence of form, and the empty nature of all things" (Ozeki 458). The death of Benny's father changes Benny's understanding of individual existence, compelling him to connect his reading of bodily vulnerability and impermanence with the notion of suffering and to extend this basic belief that all entities suffer due to impermanence.
Benny directly senses the embodied fragility of existence and the sense of "being thrown into the world." Human existence is inherently thrown into the world, without choice. Per Heidegger, "The facticity of Dasein is such that Dasein, as long as it is what it is, remains tossed about [im Wurf] and sucked into the turbulence of the they's inauthenticity" (172). The death of his father makes Benny experience the state of being thrown/im Wurf once again. However, after this experience, Benny could not return to the ordinary state of daily life. From then on, Benny begins to hear the suffering of objects.
In The Book, Ozeki affirms the reality of auditory hallucinations through her detailed rendering of intentional objects, revealing the vulnerability inherent in human existence. This vulnerability is underpinned by the Buddhist-Zen concept of impermanence, which informs the novel's perceptual mode throughout. The belief in impermanence and suffering serves as the foundation for the intentional structure constructed in the text. This belief is continually reinforced in Benny's perception of the world, that is, objects can only appear as intentional objects that emit sounds and convey suffering.
2. Attachment to the Self in a Disrupted Intentional Structure
As discussed in the first section, Ozeki manifests the grand Buddhist concept of impermanence through vulnerability, incorporating both embodied and affective dimensions. Besides, by framing auditory hallucinations as a perceptual form, Ozeki concretizes the affective aspect, rendering it tangible. Ozeki continuously examines the existence of the subject and the establishment of subjectivity when this perception takes effect in the text.
The perceiving subject here is not an abstract consciousness, but rather a dependent-arising body that generates meaning through continuous interaction with the world and within an unfolding structure of dynamic experience. Phrased differently, Ozeki explicitly emphasizes the presence of the body within dependent origination, highlighting its relations and interactions with the world and the ongoing, ever-shifting production of meaning. This understanding of the body, or the term mentioned before, subjectivity, closely resonates with Maurice Merleau- Ponty's conception of the body-subject, that is, the subject is the living body. As Oh notes, "Merleau-Ponty's concept of the 'bodysubject' implies that a human person is an essentially embodied being, who can interact with and find significance in his or her world only because acts of perception arise from the 'body-subject' through the structures of the human body" (10083). This kind of embodied perceptual act depends not only on the body's direct perception of the world but also on the construction of the sensory materials perceived by the body through the consciousness of the intentional subject. In other words, the consciousness of the intentional subject defines and constructs the intentional object and its meaning in the process of perception, during which the body's perceptual experience ensures that the subject can extract and synthesize meaning from the miscellaneous sensory materials.
In this way, the presentation of the objective world is unified through the body's perceptual acts and the meaninggiving acts of consciousness. Therefore, the intentional structure of consciousness points both to the intentional acting side (noetic side) of consciousness and to the intentional object side (noematic side) of it as perceived by the body. The two merge in the intentional structure, dissolving the opposition between the subject and the object and forming an indivisible whole. What Benny enacts, when confronted with his own body continually engaging with external objects, is precisely a strong resistance to the state in which subject and object merge into a whole. In tackling hallucinations, Benny adopts modern psychiatry's typical stance toward such phenomena, that is resisting and rejecting the dependent-arising body behind the voices in attempt to reassert control over a rational, autonomous self. However, through Benny's prolonged and agonizing struggle to try to reclaim this rational subjectivity, Ozeki demonstrates the illusory nature of such an independent self. Specifically, Ozeki creates confusion in meaning-making, demonstrates intensified dominance of the object side once resisting in the auditory hallucination experiences, and thereby highlights the outcomes of the intentional subject's attachment to self-boundaries and to the illusion of an enduring self.
First, Ozeki reverses the intentional structure, transferring the subjectivity/agency of intentional acts from the intentional subject to the intentional object. The body in dependent origination is an open structure oriented toward the world, inherently dynamic and interactive, and not confined by rigid subject-object divisions. However, when the intentional objects are granted excessive ontological weight and become the dominant force, the suppression and retreat of the intentional subject precisely reflect an attachment to the binary opposition between subject and object, even if such attachment manifests in a reversed or projected form. This retreat reveals a refusal to engage with the fluidity and mutual coconstitution of subject and object. In the text, those elements with voices are positioned as emotion-givers/the emitter of affect while Benny becomes the recipient who reacts to and is subordinate to the affect.
Benny's perception interprets his violent act of smashing a store window with a baseball bat as the loss of control over objects. Benny believes he is being controlled by the "furious" bat (Ozeki 438): "Bats want to hit," "Fires want to burn," and "Sneakers want to run" (438). The alarm wails and the shards of glass scream in pain. Benny, as an intentional subject, is emotionally overwhelmed and behaviorally dominated by it. Feeling the pain of the shattered glass, he develops the intention to apologize and kneels down to fulfill this intention. Through a series of intense actions, Ozeki constructs an inverted structure of intention that reveals Benny's distorted attachment to a clear and controlling sense of self-boundaries. Within this attachment, the subject, who is unable to accommodate vulnerability, externalizes suffering and projects it onto the intentional object to reassert control over these boundaries. This attachment, in turn, deepens the subject's isolation and pathologically reinforces the illusion of a permanent self. The illusion about self thereby causes the subject to further reject the fluid interrelation between self and other, the principle of dependent origination, and the Buddhist notion of non-self.
Second, Ozeki further positions silence (opposed to sound/ language) as a crucial element in reinforcing self-isolation and attachment. At first, the sounds and the expressed wills emanating from the intentional objects prove overwhelmingly powerful for Benny, leading him to try to reject the reception of sound and separate the intentional subject from the intentional object. However, the belief of perception remains unchanged, and the stability and rigidity inherent in the intentional structure further prevent the individual's ability to separate the stable intentional object within this integrated structure. As a result, to isolate the painful sounds emitted by perceived objects during the act of perception becomes impossible. At this point, Benny shifts strategies, aiming to avoid any intentional act or perception of objects, thereby shutting down the perceiving subject. He discovers that if he refrains from thinking or speaking, he can avoid disturbing the objects. The hospital is quiet: "The voices [are] quiet, too, and talking could remind them. Talking could set things off, start them all going again, and so he use[s] his eyes instead" (Ozeki 520). Although Merleau-Ponty, stemming from his distrust of language, advocates a return, for the perceiver, to a pre-linguistic, pre-conscious, and silent perceptual world to engage with the world, Benny's actions, described by Dr. Melanie as selective mutism, suggest not such a return but rather a deliberate closure of his perceptual processes. This intentional severance of perception lacks the active engagement of the body-subject within the pre-linguistic world that Merleau-Ponty envisions.
Eleanor Reeds, in her analysis of the practice of silence in literary texts, notes that in novels, "A crucial issue in these novels is whether speakers choose silence or have silence forced upon them" (430). Lauren Espinoza similarly identifies two primary functions of silence in poetics: "one is empowering... The other function of silence is to mute: this is a disenfranchising act of violence against poetic possibility" (81-82). Clearly, in the former situation, "Silence exists as a decision" (Sontag 9), highlighting the postmodern spirit of rebellion that manifests as an intentional rupture or gap brimming with potential, while the latter "exists as a punishment" (Sontag 9). When silence operates as punishment, whether self-imposed or externally enforced, silence ceases to be a gesture of agency and instead becomes a disciplinary mechanism that enacts negative violence, dismantling linguistic capacity and eroding the intersubjective ground of subjectivity.
In the novel, Benny's selective mutism originates from a "decision" yet ends in the collapse of the perceptual field. Ozeki's construction of these disrupted intentional structures helps her precisely and ultimately interrogate the perceiving subject's attitudes toward boundaries of subjectivity. Selective mutism means the subject attempts reclaim the self-boundaries through a conscious and intentional withdrawal of the empirical, outwardly observable self in certain social contexts. As the split between the self and the world deepens, Benny gradually moves from actively choosing silence to discovering his voice no more works when he wants to speak. After losing control over his voice, Benny's control over his body further diminishes. He finds the various parts of his body have lost their coordination in movement and seem to have their own wills. He is "docile and cooperative, allowing himself to be fed and wheeled around to meals, to group, to school, to art, to exercise, and to all the variously scheduled therapeutic activities in which young mental patients [are] expected to engage" (Ozeki 509). The doctor ultimately diagnoses Benny as having a "psychogenic" "motor dysfunction" (532). Benny's body is not "an indivisible possession" anymore but "an assemblage of organs juxtaposed in space" (Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology 100), and does not function as "a manner of expressing that my body is in and toward the world" (Phenomenology 103). Following the selective mutism and motor dysfunction, Benny's body cannot play an "intervening and situated" (Zhang Yaojun 55) role and has lost its capacity to serve as the ground for situating the self in relation to the world.4 This disjunction amounts to a collapse of the mediating function of the body-subject, which bears a strong relation to Benny's attachment toward the transcendental subject and the autonomous self.
Because of the complexity and confusion of sensory activities, Merleau-Ponty believes an irreducible and ambiguous relationship exists between objects and the perceiving body. One side of this relationship gestures to the subject and the other side points to the world: "[This relationship] is what produces the buzzing of appearances, it is also what silences them and casts me fully into the world" (Merleau-Ponty, The Visible 8). This buzzing is both a prerequisite for perception and a passage for the emitter of perceptual activities to enter the real world. However, this process does not lead to the real world in Benny's perception process. Benny even deliberately traps his own consciousness on the day of the demonstration. During his second hospitalization, his body has almost lost all functions related to speech and movement. Only when the local news is broadcast at five o'clock every afternoon does Benny push himself to the front of the TV screen in the lounge and stare with tears in his eyes at the monitor that once showed the news of the street demonstration. Benny's sentient book perceives that there are always some fragmented voices present in Benny's consciousness, including sirens, cries, footsteps, and screams. These sounds emerge from Benny's recollections and reenactments of the demonstration event. Benny's intentional structure of consciousness, in directing itself toward past memories, entraps the body, unified with consciousness, within these memories. Benny, in his insistence on maintaining a bounded subjectivity, loses any sense of meaning of perceiving body in existence through complete non-interaction with the outside world.
Benny has no opportunity to vent and digest the pain brought by Kenji's death; instead, in his daily interactions with his mother and classmates, through continuous perceptual activities, Benny constantly deepens the belief the sensory materials experience pain, which is the reason why Benny fails to enter the real world from the buzzing of appearances. The deepening of pain compels Benny to venture psychiatric repudiation of the object, to return to a subject impermeable by external voices. Yet, in the act of fortifying self-boundaries and deliberately severing from his own perceptions, what Benny ultimately experiences are intentional objects becoming increasingly louder in his subjective experience, which in turn inflicts greater pain onto Benny in a vicious cycle. Benny exists as a distant bystander of the world rather than a participant. A split exists between Benny and the world. The world is no longer unified with the living perceiving subject but keeps receding.
Buddhism and Zen emphasize non-attachment, a principle closely related to the core notions of form and emptiness. "'Form' refers to the illusion arising from dependent origination (pratītyasamutpāda), while 'emptiness' refers to the absence of inherent nature in such conditional arising" (Diamond Sutra Heart Sutra 128). All phenomena come into being through interdependent conditions, lacking any fixed or unchanging essence: "If one regards them as possessing a real, self-existent nature (s vabhāva), then such a view is nothing but a deluded conceptual fabrication" (Diamond Sutra Heart Sutra 128). Rather than being an isolated or self-existing occurrence, death both arises due to the convergence of numerous interdependent causes and conditions and lacks inherent existence. However, Benny has no way to dissolve the pain from losing his father and has to be overly attached to the inherent existence of death and pain. Perceptual activities based on this belief could only enhance this belief in any case, thus, giving rise to a painful journey of auditory hallucinations.
Deeply troubled by the intentional objects in his consciousness, Benny tries to separate the subject and object poles of the intentional structure, aiming to change how objects appear in his consciousness. The methods Benny adopts are to make the intentional objects keep silent, to close himself off and not produce conscious behaviors, and even to dissolve the identity between the self and his body. While silence can signify postmodern agency as an intentional rupture filled with potentiality in some other particular situations, Benny's selective mutism resists such a liberatory reading. Benny's mutism appears to operate as a strategic rupture against the diffusive force of external objects, but its logic is disciplinary rather than emancipatory. By doing so, Benny tries to reconstitute a bounded, autonomous self. Yet all of Benny's actions rest on a failure to grasp vulnerability and impermanence, a failure firmly rooted in his insistence on preserving the impermeable boundaries of a rational self, culminating in his agonizing experience of hallucinatory perception. In choosing to mute perception and language, Benny enacts what Reeds terms "a disenfranchising act of violence" (81), one that disassembles the very structures of relational and open subjectivity. In isolating himself from the affective circulations under the guise of autonomy, Benny inaugurates a process where the effort to avoid exposure ultimately collapses into self-erasure.
3. Compassion in Vulnerability: Undoing the Rational Subject and Constructing Buddhist Subjectivity
Ozeki's depiction of Benny's loss of mobility following psychiatric hospitalization directly challenges the psychiatric definition and treatment of auditory hallucinations. Benny, as an individual grappling with personal trauma, faces typical EBM therapeutic approaches. Physicians trained in EBM confine the natural attitude within a scientific and rational framework, treating psychological distress as a challenge requiring individual self-management, relying on positivism and pharmacotherapy, reducing trauma to a pathological condition necessitating swift biomedical correction, and denying the emotional depth of it. Within this framework, Benny's heightened sensitivity to pain and auditory hallucinations following his father's death are reductively diagnosed as symptoms of schizoaffective disorder. Dr. Melanie, embodying this paradigm, categorizes Benny's symptoms under standardized diagnostic labels and prescribes Ritalin for his ADHD, an antidepressant for the mood disorder in his prodromal phase of schizoaffective disorder, and an antipsychotic for hallucinations. However, Benny's symptoms progressively worsen under treatment. Dr. Melanie attributes his exacerbated symptoms to "pharmacological" (336), never considering that "they might be the side effects not of his medication but of school, itself" (Ozeki 336). Dr. Melanie clinically dissects Benny's behavior and its underlying mechanisms, but she fails to truly engage with his narrative, even cognitively dismissing his emotions and consciousness. While she superficially recognizes his projections of inner pain, she neither validates his grief nor offers meaningful psychological support, instead insisting on pharmaceutical suppression of symptoms. Benny, initially compliant, eventually withdraws into silence with his unresolved grief and lacking empathetic validation after repeated hospitalization, as Dr. Melanie systematically invalidates his emotional reality.
Ozeki's critique of psychiatric treatment methods points to a more fundamental issue, that is the questioning of psychiatry's foundational premise, known as the original autonomous rational subject. EBM's approach to psychological trauma is largely governed by a symptom-focused and efficiency-oriented logic. The reason is that this framework inherently privileges rationalist supremacy. In this discourse, mental illness patients are often positioned as the antithesis of rationality, subjected to stigmatization, isolation, exclusion, and persecution. Although ancient Greek mythology, philosophical discourses of that time, and Renaissance literature contain some free expressions of mental illness, the general Western narratives around it have long been plagued by prejudice and misunderstanding. For instance, the Middle Ages linked mental illness to the doctrine of original sin, and the Classical Age (17th-18th centuries), as examined by Foucault, witnessed a significant shift in the discourse, namely the society's outright rejection of mental illness in the name of rationality, which was manifested in France in 1657 through both the establishment of Hôpital Général and the "Great Confinement" of the poor (xii).
This epistemology of Western rationality, "inherited from Renaissance humanism and the Enlightenment" (Wolfe XIII), dominates mental illness discourse. During the neoliberal era in the U.S. post-1980s, rational analysis reached its zenith, emphasizing emotional self-control and individual responsibility. As Byung- Chul Han argues, neoliberalism constructs and disciplines the performance subject through "psychological optimization" (11), for instance, by negating, "medicalizing" (12), "privatizing" (12), and depoliticizing pain, and fostering expectations of happiness through self-motivation and self-improvement. This logic presumes a rational, self-regulating subject, an Enlightenment construct rooted in Renaissance humanism, who manages emotions and behaviors through rational decision-making, achieving selfresponsibility and self-optimization. Such a framework parallels a medical practice in which physicians frequently disregard the emotional and existential dimensions of suffering, favoring quick and standardized pharmacological interventions. As a result, forms of pain that are deeply entangled with social and relational contexts are pathologized as merely neurochemical dysfunctions.
However, apart from Ozeki's deliberate plotting of therapeutic outcomes of hospitalization, her emotional disposition toward Benny clearly rejects Dr. Melanie's clinical approach. Attributing the voices heard by Benny entirely to the distorted perception of a psychiatric patient reflects an implicit devaluation of the voices described in the novel and a dismissive attitude toward Benny's capacities. In contrast, Ozeki attributes her protagonist's auditory hallucinations to the qualities of sensitivity and creativity typically associated with poets and philosophers. As the fictional poet Slavoj asserts, "only poets and prophets, saints and philosophers who hef ze ears to hear" (Ozeki 230). Slavoj's assertion suggests that only such figures are capable of hearing these voices. He cites a long list of examples: Moses, Abraham, Isaiah, Socrates, Joan of Arc, Milton, Blake, Rilke, Freud, Jung, Gandhi, and Martin Luther King. This elder poet encourages Benny to write down the voices and turn them into literary creations, prompting him to reflect on genuine philosophical questions. Undoubtedly, readers are inclined to side with the poet rather than the psychiatrist. Here, the auditory hallucinations triggering philosophical reflections as depicted by Ozeki are by no means reducible to the "optimizable" components of affective discipline under the neoliberal framework. Through this contrast, Ozeki critiques the neoliberal discourse's repression of trauma, affirms Benny's intentional structure, and elicits empathetic identification between the reader and Benny.
This narration aligns with the perspective of phenomenological psychopathology. Phenomenological psychopathology emphasizes that trauma and psychological distress are not merely medical or biological disorders, but expressions of an individual's lived experience and existential condition. One of its phenomenological psychopathy's proponents, Matthew Ratcliffe, contrasts two approaches to understanding auditory verbal hallucinations (AVH). The first, rooted in EBM, interprets AVH as a symptom of schizophrenia caused by selfdisorders. The second, advanced by Marius Romme and Sandra Escher, rejects the classification of AVH as a pathological symptom. Instead, the approach views hallucinations as responses to trauma and interpersonal disconnection, asserting that "'voices' originate in unresolved trauma and are essentially relational in nature" (Ratcliffe 798). Regardless of whether hallucinated voices are directly linked to trauma, this perspective exemplifies a central phenomenological concern: privileging the subjective experience and meaning-making of the perceiving self. In terms of treatment, phenomenological psychopathology prioritizes patient subjectivity, emotional engagement, and empathetic dialogue, approaching mental illness as an expression of being rather than a mere pathology conceived under the premise of a rational subject.
Treating Benny's hallucinations as "expressions of being" and meaningful experiences is achieved by Ozeki's reference to Zen Buddhist thought. Specifically, she infuses these hallucinatory episodes with compassion (karunā), thereby romanticizing the susceptibility to suffering in vulnerability and resisting the reductive framework of biomedical psychiatry. Notably, in the context, all the auditory hallucinations are associated with pain: Benny hears the cries following a bird's accidental death against the window, the pain accumulated within the dolls' bodies from their former owners in the psychotherapy room, and the struggle of letters trapped within books. Thus, compassion runs throughout. Ozeki directly highlights Benny's compassion through Aikon's metaphor, that is the similarity between Benny to Kannon, the Bodhisattva of Compassion, who hears the world's pitiful cries and sufferings.
Hearing and perceiving suffering in vulnerability should not lead to its avoidance, but rather to ethical responsibility toward others, which is the philosophy Ozeki trying to convey. Whether Benny tries to silence objects or numb himself through not thinking, not speaking, or exiling the body-subject, Benny's efforts to avoid suffering make no contribution to reducing his illusory belief in inevitable pain as the second part of this paper has analyzed, as avoidance never addresses the root of Benny's suffering, namely the attachment to the autonomous and eternal self. Ozeki, therefore, invokes the teaching of Dōgen to counter Benny's attachment.5
In this point, "Dōgen does not suggest that we overcome attachment by retreating from the world and worldly relations" (Kalmanson 202). Bender echoes further that even "the desire to 'leave home life' (i.e., the purposiveness and the 'seeking' beyond the present experience)" as an extreme form of retreat "is just another aspect of the unenlightened disposition" (56). Instead, according to Kalmanson, Dōgen's non-self inevitably leads to "a conception of ethical responsibility that is non-reciprocal" (195) due to the nature of "the relationally constituted self" (202). Because "the self is interdependence" (Kuperus 224) and "contextualized" (Kuperus 222), assuming non-reciprocal ethical responsibility for others is inherent in the nature of the self.
This sense of responsibility restores Benny's agency and draws him back into "an intersubjective world/mitweltbezogen" (Ratcliffe 799). Phenomenological psychiatrist Wolfgang Blankenburg holds that schizophrenia primarily concerns the intersubjective world-what Husserl refers to as the World of Life (Lebenswelt), the foundation of meaning in everyday experience, imbued with pre-predicative, intuitive, and pre-scientific elements; akin to Heidegger's world of Being-with-others (Mitsein). Benny's return to speech is triggered by his anger at the book for doing nothing when his mother is in trouble. The book, possessing the ability to engage in thought and influence events as the intentional object, responds to Benny's anger:
Blame is just another way of refusing to take responsibility for your life, and when you blame us, you give up your own power and agency. Don't you see? It makes you into a victim, Benny-poor little crazy victim boy and you don't like that, remember? And we don't like it, either. (Ozeki 528)
Upon hearing this rebuttal, and learning of his mother's plight, Benny immediately regains his ability to speak and act in order to ensure his discharge so he may help her. Benny responds, "I was the one in charge of my life, and blaming the voices only gave them more power" (533). His mother also affirms this change by saying he "seems so much more grown up, taking responsibility for things and being so helpful. We can have real conversations again" (Ozeki 543).
The world of being-with-others and open subjectivity still requires the body as its medium. Benny regains his body schema, the mode through which his body signifies its presence in the world, and thereby recovers both language competence and the capacity for action. After embracing the pervasive vulnerability, Benny's auditory hallucinations gradually fade. Emotional selfregulation returns: "[E]ven though things still chatter and make noise, it's kind of random and impersonal, like background noise. Most of the really evil voices are gone now, and the only one [Benny] can still hear is [his] Book" (535). Eventually, even the voice of the book disappears; only in dreams can the book access Benny's thoughts now. Benny's subjectivity from the starting point of body schema has fully returned. Notably, the final chapter of The Book narrated through the voice of the book, presents Benny's dream: a grand scene in which Benny remains a sensitive and compassionate youth, suggesting that Benny's openness has not vanished alongside the hallucinations. Benny can coexist with those voices.
Conclusion
In the post-humanist era, the vulnerability of individuals is a recurring theme in the literary works of many contemporary American writers. In The Book, Ozeki reconstructs the reader's intuitive understanding of human embodied vulnerability, impermanence, and existential thrownness through the motif of death. Specifically, she constructs a protagonist whose perception is dominated by auditory hallucinations and presents a world saturated with pain caused by vulnerability and with attachment both to that pain and to the notion of a permanent, unchanging subjectivity. Her writing, foregrounding and normalizing embodied auditory experience, emphasizes compassion in the dependent arising presence of the character, thus resisting the longstanding Western stigmatization of mental illness in the name of rationality. This representation resonates with the phenomenological psychopathology that values patients' subjectivity and affective experiences, offering a critique of neoliberal emotional discourse. Against this backdrop of Zen epistemology, Ozeki, after normalizing, legitimizing, and even romanticizing auditory hallucinations, addresses the crisis of subjectivity caused by vulnerability by proposing an alternative model of subjectivity grounded in dependent origination and compassion.
In A Tale for the Time Being, Ozeki portrays two quantumentangled worlds, presenting a substitute epistemology of time and space beyond the framework of modern Western physics. Likewise, in The Book, Ozeki's reframing of auditory hallucinations challenges the humanist, rationalist definition of "normality." As Helen Shaw notes in a feature article about The Book for New York Magazine, quoting Ozeki from their inperson meeting, "We have a very narrow bandwidth [around] whatever it is that we call 'normal.' But that's a construct! I have a sense of normal being, you know, vast -vast and all inclusive." Twenty-first-century American literature often centers on ordinary individuals and reflects prevailing emotional undercurrents of the time. This literature encourages readers to reflect on the limits of individual experience in the lifeworld while opening human existence to broader possibilities. In doing so, The Book affirms a capacious and inclusive vision of being, showcasing Ozeki's distinctive humanistic concern as a contemporary writer.
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Notes
1. According to Wolfe, vulnerability, along with the transhuman, entanglement (as theorized by Rosi Braidotti), and the inhuman, together constitutes the fourfold configuration of the posthuman condition (see Wolfe Posthumous Life: Theorizing Beyond the Posthuman).
2. Brown 371-372; Boublil "Critical Phenomenology" 276.
3. Following the 3/11 disaster, Ozeki even partially rewrote her earlier novel A Tale for the Time Being.
4. "The Heart Sutra" was originally written in Sanskrit and has no official English translation. Numerous translations and commentaries exist today. The version used here is translated by Edward Conze (1904-1979), a German-British scholar and one of the most important researchers of Prajñāpāramitā literature. His translation is based directly on the original Sanskrit text.
5. Selective mutism should not be confused with ableist perspectives that might perceive the condition as deficits.
6. There are differences between Merleau-Ponty and Husserl in their attitudes towards consciousness. The latter attributes consciousness to the transcendental subject, while the former regards consciousness and the body as a unified whole, highlighting the embodiment of consciousness.
7. Dōgen Zenji (1200-1253) founded the Sōtō school of Zen Buddhism in 13th-century Japan, the very tradition in which the novelist Ruth Ozeki practices.
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