Writers as double-agents: On fiction and empathy
Miguel Conde*
Writers and intellectuals are perhaps no different from other people in their
need to justify what they do through some reason other than the fact of their
personal attachment to it. Nonetheless, literature does differ from most
other human occupations in that it apparently lacks a clear practical
purpose. In this regard, people who dedicate their lives to civil engineering
or ornithology, for example, may have it easier than writers. The social
relevance of what they do (build things, study nature) is more easily
explained and acknowledged. When it comes to presenting the case for
literature, to arguing that stories and poems can, at least potentially, offer us
something more than the commoditized entertainment duly provided by the
culture industry, things may at first appear to be less self-evident.
In recent debates about the value and purposes of literature, however, a
recurring argument has proven quite persuasive in connecting literature to
something arguably more fundamental for human existence than bridges or
woodpeckers. One might call it "the empathy argument". Its bottom line is
the idea that fiction can allow us to exercise the capacity to see the world
from different perspectives, and thus help us become more understanding
and tolerant. Anyone who's been in a steady diet of book reviews or literary
festivals over the past few years has likely been exposed to one or more
versions of such reasoning, often delivered by otherwise cranky authors in a
spirit of self-congratulatory benevolence. Its current popularity can be
plausibly related to its effectiveness in convincing people that they should
really care about literature, which instead of a declining cultural form now
comes to be regarded, for everyone's relief, as a crucial meeting point
*
Originally published at the Literary Hub website, August 4 2016, with the title “Does fiction
actually make us more empathetic?”: http://lithub.com/does-fiction-actually-make-us-more-
empathetic/.
between art, psychology and democracy. Such is the apparent cogency of
these exhortations that empathy and related notions (such as "moral
imagination") have come to constitute, I would contend, the main tropes of
contemporary liberal answers to the question of the relevance of literature.
Although such an argument may assume many different forms, its basic
point is that empathy entails an essential link between the imagination,
emotions and morality. As a capacity to understand other people's feelings
and reasons, empathy involves a certain exercise of the imagination, the
ability to momentarily, as it were, step out from one's personal perspective
on things and consider them from a different standpoint. What would I do,
or how would I feel, if I were in his or her place? This kind of "what if"
question already demands some degree of narrative articulation, and could
be taken to be a fictional gesture in itself. On the other hand, reading a work
of fiction – or at lest a certain type of fiction – can be said to engage us in
precisely this sort of imaginative displacement, exercising and (so goes the
argument) expanding our faculty of empathy. In short, literature would be
justified as a practical lesson in morality, teaching us to look beyond our
own interests, and providing an understanding of the moral implications of
our decisions which would be at once more concrete and nuanced than any
set of general values or rules.
Two fairly recent examples of "the empathy argument" may give a better
idea of the kind of conceptual crossroads implied in current discourses
about literature and empathy. The first one comes from a conversation
between best-selling psychologist Andrew Solomon and Paul Holdengraber,
published on this website a couple of months ago: "Literature is a means of
putting yourself in other, often uncomfortable shoes", Solomon said. "You
can’t, in any ordinary life, experience all of what the world has to offer. If
you lived a thousand years you wouldn’t do it. But if you read, you can
expand your education so hugely and so vastly, by thinking, Oh, well that’s a
way of thinking about that." The second example clearly draws out the
political implications of Solomon's remarks. It is a passage from Barack
Obama's long, and in many ways fascinating, dialogue with novelist
Marilynne Robinson published last November by "The New York Review of
Books". In what was perhaps the most discussed moment of their
conversation, Obama directly connects the reading of novels to his
education as a citizen: "When I think about how I understand my role as
citizen, setting aside being president, and the most important set of
understandings that I bring to that position of citizen, the most important
stuff I’ve learned I think I’ve learned from novels. It has to do with empathy.
It has to do with being comfortable with the notion that the world is
complicated and full of grays, but there’s still truth there to be found, and
that you have to strive for that and work for that. And the notion that it’s
possible to connect with some[one] else even though they’re very different
from you."
The idea that the significance of literature "has to do with empathy" and
some sort of political education is not entirely new, to be sure. In his Poetics,
a work on drama which remains to this day the major philosophical
reference for Western discussions of narrative fiction in general, Aristotle
argued that the ultimate effect of a tragical play was catharsis, the purging of
passions, which depended on some sort of identification between the
audience and the tragic hero. In modern times, Friedrich Schiller's On the
Aesthetic Education of Man (1794) is probably the most influential defense of
art's formative role in the political education of free citizens. If we had to
look for a recent work where all of these threads (empathy, fiction and
democracy) are closely sewn together, however, it would probably have to be
Harper Lee's classic novel To Kill a Mockingbird. It is hard to think of any
other modern literary work which so explicitly sets out to defend the
relevance of empathy for democracy (in the admonishing words of lawyer
and model citizen Atticus Finch: "You never really understand a person
until you consider things from his point of view"), while at the same time
hoping to foster it concretely through the imaginative possibilities of fiction.
So the novelty isn't so much in the argument itself, but rather in the
intellectual climate in which it has become so familiar as to seem like a sort
of truism. It is precisely this appearance of self-evidence which calls for a
closer look at the premises and implications of "the empathy argument".
Perhaps its most obvious problem is that its advocates rarely bother to
consider the possibility that empathy may be misleading. Imagining the
other could end up being the most efficient way of ignoring his or her
singularity. Empathy, after all, implies that we put ourselves into the place of
the other, and it may well be possible that in so doing we end up projecting
sameness and drawing up false inferences. The focus on empathy also seems
to ignore the many ways in which fictions and poems can affect and
transform us through its verbal, poetic effects. In aesthetic terms, "the
empathy argument" unmistakably favors fiction over poetry. And many of its
assumptions rely on a shallow equation of literature with a very specific sort
of psychological realism that is today the hegemonic model of what the book
industry sometimes calls, in a sort of jesting deference, "serious fiction".
Finally, should we accept that literature be defended for its promotion of
civic virtues? Something in Obama’s description of literary experience
renders it too tame, ignoring its transgressive possibilities.
The following reading list takes a closer look at some of the most influential
recent arguments connecting empathy and related notions to literature and
democracy. It also considers an alternative perspective which suggests that
we have to look for different concepts if we want to account for some of the
defining and most politically relevant features of modern literature.
How to Cure a Fanatic (2006), Amós Oz
This slender polemical volume might have been described as a pamphlet, if
its author was not so blatantly opposed to radicalism of any kind. Calling
himself “an expert in comparative fanaticism”, Oz examines his subject in
detail in this book, identifying its causes and suggesting possible remedies to
“cure” the fanatical mind. His basic point, simply put, is that fanaticism is at
bottom a failure of the imagination – an incapacity to step away from one’s
own perspective and see the world from a different point of view. The
inaugural violent act of any fanatical movement, according to Oz, is its
unimaginative effacement of alterity: “In a small way, in a cautious way, I do
believe that imagination may serve as a partial and limited immunity to
fanaticism”, he says. “We need imagination, a deep ability to imagine the
other, sometimes to put ourselves in the skin of the other.”
“How to Cure a Fanatic” also turns out to be a meditation on the political
significance of literature and its connection with democratic life, a recurrent
theme in many of Oz’s interviews, lectures and essays. In a 2009 interview
for “The New York Times”, he would go so far as to say that this empathetic
exercise of the imagination is the common source of all his writing: “That’s
what I do for a living. I get up in the morning, I drink a cup of coffee, I sit
down at my desk and I start to ask myself: ‘What if I were him? What if I
were her? How would I feel? What would I say? How would I react?’”
Last January, right-wing group Im Tirzu unleashed a propaganda campaign
denouncing several Israeli artists and intellectuals as “moles” and traitors to
their country. Amós Oz was one of its most prominent targets. To a certain
extent, one could think, the fanatics of Im Tirzu are absolutely right. The
writer is indeed a double-agent, always here and there at the same time,
always attempting to step outside of his own individual circumstances. What
extremists fail to understand, Oz would possibly respond, is that we ought to
be unfaithful to our own personal prejudices if we are to remain loyal to our
moral duty of recognizing alterity – the other’s otherness.
At the Same Time (2007), by Susan Sontag
In March 2004, nine months before her death, Susan Sontag flew to South
Africa to deliver a lecture in honor of Nadine Gordimer, the Nobel Prize-
winning novelist and anti-apartheid activist. “At the Same Time” is Sontag’s
final reflection on the moral and political significance of literature, which in
her lecture comes to be largely equated with narrative. The inherent moral
importance of narrative, Sontag argues, lies in its ordering and finitude. A
narrative plot is, by definition, a hierarchical and limited structure, in which
events are accorded different relevance depending on how they relate to the
development of the main intrigue. The distinction between important and
accessory events, situations, characters, is understood by Sontag to be a
necessary condition for any moral reasoning at all. Morality is not simply
concerned with decisions between good or bad. Rather, it involves a
decision on what is more or less important, what matters to us, what is or
not worthy of our attention: “When we make moral judgments, we are not
just saying that this is better than that. Even more fundamentally, we are
saying that this is more important than that. It is to order the overwhelming
spread and simultaneity of everything”. Literature, in other words, is
committed to the moral significance of deciding what we care about. A
narrative implies such a choice, in as much as it always tells a certain
particular story and leads it to its completion: “Endings in a novel confer a
kind of liberty that life stubbornly denies us: to come to a full stop that is
not death and discover exactly where we are in relation to the events leading
to a conclusion (…) The pleasure of fiction is precisely that it moves to an
ending. And an ending that satisfies is one that excludes.”
This is Water (2009), by David Foster Wallace
Wallace’s famous commencement speech at Kenyon College isn’t
specifically concerned with literature or narrative, but rather with what he
takes to be the real goal of a “liberal arts education”. His point of departure
is “the single most pervasive cliché in the commencement speech genre”,
namely, that “a liberal arts education is not so much about filling you up
with knowledge as it is about, quote, ‘teaching you how to think’“. This is a
cliché Wallace’s speech will in fact endorse, reflecting upon what “teaching
you how to think” effectively means. His answer to this question is somehow
similar to Susan Sontag’s argument about morality having to do with a
decision about what is more or less important to us: “the really significant
education in thinking that we’re supposed to get in a place like this isn’t
really about the capacity to think, but rather about the choice of what to
think about.” Thinking about, here, also means caring about, paying
attention to. And Wallace’s suggestion of what we ought to care about,
simply put, is: other people. Caring about ourselves is for him a sort of
psychological inevitability – “everything in my own immediate experience
supports my deep belief that I am the absolute center of the universe (…) It
is our default setting, hard-wired into our boards at birth” – so that concern
for others is also an escape from a sort of tragic, solipsistic self-involvement
that defines ordinary experience: “The really important kind of freedom
involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care
about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty,
unsexy ways every day.”
One must fight against self-involvement, but this also means one must
conform to the sacrifices that living in society entails. The main example of
such a sacrifice mentioned by Wallace is, significantly enough, being stuck
in traffic after work. Here, empathy and concern for others come close to
being conflated with resignation to the present conditions of life in capitalist
society. Wallace says that one possible “liberal” reaction to this situation
would be to “spend time in the end-of-the-day traffic being disgusted about
all the huge, stupid, lane-blocking SUV’s and Hummers and V-12 pickup
trucks, burning their wasteful, selfish, forty-gallon tanks of gas”. The caring
liberal alternative Wallace favors is, instead, to consider the possibility that
“some of these people in SUV’s have been in horrible auto accidents in the
past, and now find driving so terrifying that their therapist has all but
ordered them to get a huge, heavy SUV so they can feel safe enough to
drive. Or that the Hummer that just cut me off is maybe being driven by a
father whose little child is hurt or sick in the seat next to him, and he’s
trying to get this kid to the hospital, and he’s in a bigger, more legitimate
hurry than I am: it is actually I who am in HIS way.”
Not for Profit (2010), by Martha Nussbaum
Martha Nussbaum’s manifesto on “why democracy needs the humanities”, as
the subtitle of this book states, draws upon her decades-long inquiry into
the connections and mutual implications between art, emotions, imagination
and morality. Although virtually every direct mention of literature in this
book is followed by the complement “and the arts”, literary works have long
figured as Nussbaum’s favored objects of discussion concerning these
matters. In “Not for Profit”, the emphasis falls on the idea that literature
(here we must add, “and the arts”) has a fundamental formative role for life
in society because it allows for the cultivation of our capacity for
understanding and sympathizing with one another: “Citizens cannot relate
well to the complex world around them by factual knowledge and logic
alone. The third ability of the citizen, closely related to the first two, is what
we can call the narrative imagination. This means the ability to think what it
might be like to be in the shoes of a person different from oneself, to be an
intelligent reader of that person’s story, and to understand the emotions and
wishes and desires that someone so placed might have.”
Nussbaum does qualify her argument with some reservations regarding the
possible limits of empathy: “the empathetic imagination can be capricious
and uneven if not linked to an idea of equal human dignity. It is all too easy
to have refined sympathy for those close to us in geography, or class, or race,
and to refuse it to people at a distance, or members of minority groups,
treating them as mere things.”
The Antinomies of Realism (2013), by Fredric Jameson
What defines modern realism for Jameson is not any kind of naive
epistemological claim to present the world as it really is. Rather, realism
involves a struggle with the contingency of modern life and its resistance to
any kind of meaningful ordering: “Experience – and sensory experience in
particular – is in modern times contingent: if such experience seems to have
a meaning, we are at once suspicious of its authenticity”. As Marx wrote of
bourgeois society, in modern times "all that is solid melts into the air",
traditional values and ways of life are disrupted and turned upside down, so
that there is an ever widening gap between individual experiences and our
capacity to interpret them and render them meaningful. In Jameson's
words, modernity imposes an “irreconcilable divorce between intelligibility
and experience, between meaning and existence” In this context, Jameson
argues, literature's relevance is not so much in helping us understand each
other, but in its constant attempt to account for those new experiences for
which we don't even have a name yet. This is what Jameson calls "affect", a
kind of sensory experience which “somehow eludes language and its
naming of things (and feelings), whereas emotion is preeminently a
phenomenon sorted out into an array of names”. Emotion comes to be
identified with convention, its names being part of a social classification of
feelings, while affect constantly points to the incommensurability between
ruling conventions and the constantly changing conditions of life. It refers
to what is not yet incorporated into the status quo, and so can be seen as a
prefiguration of the possibility of radical historical change, pointing towards
the new and the unknown, beyond current forms of social life.
