Writers/Readers Week @ Festival of the Arts: New York Stories
Three authors spoke about their novels, each responses to the events of 9/11. Of the three, I’d only heard of Mohsin Hamid, whose recent book The Reluctant Fundamentalist has caught my attention if not my reading commitment. He proved to be the most compelling guest, despite being present only by voice linkup from London.
Hamid spoke about 9/11’s cause and consequence as “a catastrophic failure of empathy”, on the part of the Muslims celebrating when the towers fell (who were, like the character in his novel excerpt, “caught up in the symbolism of it all” and at a remove from the human cost); on the part of those in the US and UK who turned to war.
Empathy also in his answer to Terry Eagleton’s recent broadside at Martin Amis et al, (“I have no idea why we should listen to novelists on these matters any more than we should listen to window cleaners.”)
Hamid suggested that what novelists bring that others don’t is empathy. Through story and characterisation, good writing can deliver empathy. And empathy is crucial.
5 thoughts on ““A Failure of Empathy””
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Hm. Empathy in a novel is often achieved by presenting only one side of an argument. You may empathise with the side that it presented, at the cost of the other side being reduced or even demonised.
Also, Eagleston wasn’t really talking about the novels themselves but the novelists. He was questioning why Martin Amis’s opinion, expressed outside of a novel, should matter any more than that of a window cleaner.
I don’t see why a novelist (even a good one) should be presumed to have more insight than anyone else. Nor why an opinion provided by a window cleaner must be bereft of empathy.
Pearce – you may be comforted to know that all three novelists outright said that they shouldn’t be presumed to have more insight than a window cleaner – they agreed with you. Hamid pointed at the work instead, saying that that does have some merit.
I disagree with you about empathy in a novel, by the way.
Why?
I’m more inclined to accept Pearce’s point, but then I’m also inclined to distinguish between empathy and sympathy – to provide convenient, flawed and partial definitions of my own making, sympathy is the ability to understand another, empathy the ability to imagine another as yourself. If you find these even remotely acceptable distinctions (don’t if you don’t want to), which do you think would work better for a novelist?
The bit by Pearce I was responding to was: “Empathy in a novel is often achieved by presenting only one side of an argument. You may empathise with the side that it presented, at the cost of the other side being reduced or even demonised.”
And I just don’t by that, either as a statement of prevalance, or as a rejoinder to a claim that empathy-via-novels is something worthwhile or even ‘crucial’.
I think much – most? – fiction has a lot of empathy to go around. Madame Bovary springs to mind, as does Bonfire of the Vanities, and many points in between.
In terms of your sympathy/empathy definitions, I find them a bit weird and not-mine. The definitions – understanding vs. imagining-as-self – strike me as explicit and implicit versions of the same process of engagement with the (imagined) other.
Don’t know if I’m grokking your point. Or Pearce’s for that matter. Come back with the explain-o.
For me, “empathy” means identification with; and “sympathy” can mean identification with or just compassion for.
Stories usually centre on conflict. Most stories are told from one side of that conflict, with the other side being held at a distance – to a greater or a lesser extent, as “The Other”.
Yes, some books provoke empathy towards both sides (e.g. Frankenstein) but many do not (e.g. Dracula).
GOOD GUYS AND BAD GUYS, bruvva. They don’t quite exist in the real world, but they’re in nearly every novel. The good guys are us, the bad guys are them. Yes there are a number of exceptions, but they’re still exceptions.