A little help for those who just can't find the right words ...

Emotional illiteracy

It was reported the other day that Hallmark have plans to issue a card intended for those bereaved by a recent suicide. I suppose this could be an urban myth - the sort of viral folk belief for which hurried journalism is a kind of nutritious agar jelly, the perfect growth medium. And, as I'm writing this on Sunday and don't have three hours to spend chasing down the home number for Hallmark's Head of Product Development (nor, to be perfectly honest, any thing like the necessary investigative zeal), I can't categorically confirm or deny the report. But when you think about it for a moment it seems a little fishy. Are we really to believe that Hallmark's financial planners have stared into their demographic spreadsheets and spotted an unconquered pinnacle among the bar charts and graphs? And if they have how would they set about reaching the summit?

The marketing of such a product presents some obvious problems. It would, I assume, be racked in the Speciality section of the average card shop but, unless there has been a sudden boom in do-it-yourself annihilation, projected sales could hardly justify the creation of a formal category, with its own official Hallmark tag (Anniversaries, Retirement, Valentine's Day, Self-slaughter). Out there in the market place the suicide commiseration card would have to nestle alongside Sorry to Hear You've Been Sacked and Thinking Of You After Your Biopsy. Nor is it easy to think of how it could be advertised in any way consistent with good taste - the company would have to rely on word of mouth to build sales (and if the story is true, of course, this article has just become an unwitting part of that campaign).

What's more, it is difficult to think of what such a card would contain. All suicides point a finger, it's true, and it is a gesture that (like the eyes in certain portraits) may feel as it is directed at any bystander, whatever the angle at which they stand to the event. So presumably these cards contain some variation on the theme of You Mustn't Blame Yourself. Then again, however desperate you were for some assistance in this situation, you might hesitate over a message that contained an explicit reference to culpability. What if you were to send one to somebody who had never imagined that they might be responsible for such an extreme of despair? One would hardly want to put such ideas in a relative's head.

On the other hand the notion of the suicide card seems entirely consistent with the increasing specialisation of the greetings card industry - their profitable realisation that "not knowing quite what to say" is an inexhaustible emotional oil-field, replenished by every successive generation. We have already come to terms with specialist cards for redundancy (voluntary and involuntary) so, given that the profit margin on greetings cards must be almost as great as those for cinema popcorn, why not expand operations to cover all possible occasions of sentimental inarticulacy, all the moments when the gap between feeling and expression leave us uncertain and awkward?

There have been other recent advances in this field of human experience, not least the growing acceptability of gallery postcards as an element of stationary. A fine art postcard usefully limits the amount of sincere expression you have to generate on any particular occasion and though it has introduced us to an entirely novel form of social anxiety - that the illustration on the verso will somehow be interpreted as inappropriate to the sentiments expressed on the recto - the increased safety of less space in which to put a foot wrong greatly outweighs that minimal hazard. But even the blank space on a postcard can seem immense, when you haven't the faintest idea what to put on it.

It's not inconceivable that the story is true, then. But if it is a myth, it is easy to see why it has been promulgated so successfully; it satisfies a feeling that we live in world of declining authenticity. The arrival of a pre-printed expression of empathy, which only requires us to append our signature to render it "personal", seems to represent a peculiarly modern corruption - it is the sympathetic equivalent of the pre-cooked meal, with all its associations of diminished solicitude and effort. The expression "heartfelt", which used to be common in greetings card prose, is rather like the use of the word "home-cooked" on pub menus (meaning "re-heated in our microwave") - a hollow bid for the qualities the object so conspicuously lacks. How can a sentiment be heartfelt if it has been pounded out at a rate of 6,000 units an hour from a printing press the size of a three-story house? Surely here technology has stamped all the validating uniqueness out of the expression?

But in another sense the growth of pre-packaged sentiments, cellophane wrapped with a perfectly sized envelope, is not a departure from tradition but a return to it. In Sincerity and Authenticity, the American critic Lionel Trilling described the historical ascendancy of the two qualities described in his title. Sincerity, he argued, was a kind of moral invention - and authenticity a later refinement of the prototype. Neither should be taken as eternal verities because they displaced much more formal codes of behaviour - in which private feelings were irrelevant to proper social performance. In such a culture formulaic expression could hardly be regarded as a devalued currency - the done thing was to do the done thing, and all the better if it had been done by countless people before you. (Trilling also notes the fanciful etymology of "sincere", from the latin words sine cera, meaning "without wax", in other words an object that had not been deceptively filled out to look sound and undamaged. Sincere, like many of our emotional adjectives, initially referred to things rather than feelings. To talk of a sincere wine was not to indulge in pretentious wine-talk, simply to say that it was pure and unadulterated.)

And in a culture where the personal touch is less important - or where widespread illiteracy makes it impossible to achieve anyway - proficient expressers can usually make a good living. Customers went to a professional letter-writer not because they wanted to dictate their own faltering words but because they wanted to draw on his experience of the correct and appropriate forms. They wanted to pour their feelings into a receptacle that had been certified as acceptable. Trilling doesn't mention the nice irony that one of the great driving forces for the promotion of emotional authenticity, the modern English novel, has a direct connection with such practices. Samuel Richardson's first book - before the huge success of Pamela and Clarissa had been a "little volume of letters, in a common style, on such subjects as might be of use to country readers who are unable to indite for themselves". In other words those early achievements of psychological intimacy (and unique identity) had emerged from an exercise which effectively said that the expression of individual feelings wasn't essential - as long as the letter was sent it didn't matter too much where the sentiments had been borrowed from.

Perhaps, rather than providing evidence of widespread emotional illiteracy, the expansion of the greetings card industry suggests that we are beginning to relinquish our belief in the importance of emotional authenticity. It should only take a few centuries to find out and in the meantime I would suggest the card manufacturers turn their efforts to more obviously practical gaps in the market. Right now, for example, I'd pay good money for a convincing I'm Sorry I Didn't Take Valentine's Day More Seriously card, but I suspect I'm going to have to write my own.