Arts & Letters

Re: David Foster on Empathy

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Perhaps the greatest pleasure of literature is its access to all those extra minds (and feelings). My freshman teacher asked why I wanted to major in English. Because I like people, I said, then paused. I don’t really like people many are irritating and frankly I can be a bitch. The real reason then and now – was they fascinate.

I loved critic’s insights though not as much as narratives. So, if the following is bitter, remember I’m more jilted lover than fair observer. When I was young, we spoke openly of our passion for our discipline, but now the academy discourages such talk, understandably fearing sentimentality. But is cynicism all that attractive? It is brittle. And thin. For isn’t “strange” as Gopnik privileges it, a superficial criteria? He condemns Gottschall, a literary critic who is breaking new ground in literary theory, as a “popularizer;” Gopnik speaks from his regular gig at The New Yorker as an academic and he’s probably right. More’s the pity.

David Foster comments that empathy includes both our ability to understand others and what we do with that understanding. We recognize that maturity comes from broadening sympathies but we’ve all known con men (and, if unlucky, psychopaths) who read us rather well. But the generative subset of bio-criticism in which Gottschall works include “Theory of Mind” studies, especially Lisa Zunshine’s. It analyzes one literary signal of empathy: our ability to “think” as another. asking what does he think, what does she think he thinks, what does he think she thinks he thinks? But empathy is also part of a fiction writers’ ability. We take it for granted, though a genre with a bad reputation for wooden characters and contrived plots is “the novel of ideas.” Authors don’t make works “live” since characters are means rather than ends. Perhaps that happens when we professionalize our reading as well – the ideas we seek dominate our understanding of character. David posits “The career pressure in academia seem to be toward a very clinical, theoretical, and even cold approach to subjects…indeed, I wonder about the ratio of actual fiction-reading to the reading of other academic papers ABOUT fiction.” Critics shouldn’t “lose themselves in a good story” but keep their antennae up.

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Barry Puts Williams in Context: Coke, the Law, & a very young man

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Roger Williams tells Winthrop “I desire not to sleep in securitie and dreame of a Nest wch no hand can reach.” Puritans could hope but Williams found certainty “monstrous” when it violated “soul liberty.” He sought no conversions: while he could convince the Indians with whom he traded to go through the motions of belief, it would be deeply wrong. Indeed, he argued “any bloody act of violence to the consciences of others” would be as if “the parliament of England hath committed a greater rape than if they had forced or ravished the bodies of all the women in the world.” (The Bludy Tenent). He valued restraints civil & spiritual.

John M. Barry’s Roger Williams emphasizes Sir Edward Coke’s (1552-1634) incrementalism and careful construction of precedents that ordered chaos and defined restraints; the purpose was “to take down common law, to precipitate it out of the cloud of centuries of argument and judgment into the hard crystal of precedent, to then crack that crystal open by analyzing it, and finally to lock the piece into place by defining precedent and law more firmly than could any legislative act” (24). After 1600, Coke’s annual commentaries applied those precedents. The English tradition, Barry argues, led to a “common law more arcane and labyrinthine than civil law, but its very arcana, along with custom, created a web which restrained power, making England more resistant to absolutism than states on the continent” (21). The English valued stability, grounded in property rights: the resonance of his speech still delights as in “Every Englishman’s home is as his castle” (63). (The quotes demonstrate how heady word choices must have been: Coke’s life covered King James’ translation and Shakespeare; Williams lived during Donne’s time and taught Milton Dutch. Their words retain a life familiarity has buried.)

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So Far From God

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Poor Mexico, runs the saying usually attributed to long-time Mexican strongman Porfirio Diaz, So far from God, so close to the United States. I was thinking of this, when we went to see the movie For Greater Glory mostly because I had seen brief mention of it here and there on the libertarian-conservative side of the blogosphere, and the whole premise of it interested me, mostly because I had never heard of such a thing as the Cristero War. Never heard of it, and it happened in the lifetime of my grandparents, in the country right next door … and heck, in California we studied Mexico in the sixth grade. It appeared from casual conversation with the dozen or so people who caught the early matinee at a movie multiplex in San Antonio, only one of them had ever heard of it, either. Was there some cosmic cover-up, or did we have troubles enough of our own at the time … or was it just that Mexico was so constantly in turmoil that one more horrific civil struggle just blended seamlessly into the one before and the one after?

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Empathy – A Belated Response to Foster

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David Foster’s thoughtful “Fiction and Empathy” notes Keith Oatley’s research on reading fiction and empathy. Surely a writer’s empathy is important – Dreiser didn’t seem to like his characters, why would we? Literature often celebrates the sacred or unifies a people. Some is marginalizes the other. Surely, whether fiction leads to empathy or not is complex.

This belated riff is prompted by Jonathan Gottschall’s The Storytelling Animal. In a cutesy (his shtick) and dismissive review, Adam Gopnik simplifies Gottschall’s argument, using the ever popular straw man of academia. Well, no, these professional consumers of story are seldom moral exemplars. Indeed, some display an unusual inability to empathize.

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Inky Characters & Their Home in Deep Structure

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We are drawn into narrative because of plot our mind wonders what will happen and because of character our heart feels empathy, sympathy. In The Mind and its Stories: Narrative Universals and Human Emotion Patrick Colm Hogan uses the Sanskrit “rasa” as feeling evoked by “ink” people (Jonathan Gottschall’s term). Sanskrit “bhava” approximates emotions ones evoked in our world. But, Hogan contrasts the love he feels for a character in a play with the love for his wife. “Rasa”, here, is a form of love not sadness or pride. But that “inky” world lives: “the characters experience the bhavas, such as love and sorrow, while the readers/spectators experience the rasas, such as the erotic and the pathetic.” Of course, the definition works for us because we had the concept – our tenses hint at this universal experience: Shakespeare wrote Hamlet but Hamlet feels angst, we feel him feeling angst.

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