On Empathy and Enchantment

Joyce Carol Oates, of this parish, absolutely nails it:

Reading is the sole means by which we slip, involuntarily, often helplessly, into another’s skin, another’s voice, another’s soul.

I came across this quote here, where it kicks off a very interesting meditation – by a psychologist, not a novelist – on how empathy works in fiction.

When we’re defending the value of reading, writing and funding fiction in the teeth of utilitarian policies and administrators who need to draw provable and quantifiable lines between what they spend and how much GDP that spend will generate, we often talk about how it teaches us to empathise - and push the value of that in every field and industry.

And yet there’s no reason that non-fiction, particularly creative non-fiction (defined as non-fiction written using the tools of fiction) shouldn’t teach us empathy by the same means. So why bother with fiction, when making things up from scratch is so much harder work than borrowing real life and tweaking it?

This post starts by thinking about that distinction, then asks if it means that reading is really just living lite, why in fact narrative and storytelling embodies human experience itself, and ends by unpacking what this all means for your writing.

Fascinatingly, that Couch Trip post mentions a study that shows that people who don’t empathise easily in real life have a stronger empathic response to characters in a movie if they think those characters are fictional, than if they think they’re real.

The suggestion is that in real life empathy so often feels dangerous because it involves relaxing your guard and becoming vulnerable to pain, fear and confusion coming in from outside - and thereby risking loss, overwhelm, and damage to your self. After all, any parent discovers that sometimes you have to not empathise with your child’s distress, but keep you head and heart steady, as well as your hands, while you rip off the plaster or drive away from the school gate.

Empathising with fictional characters, on the other hand, will do no worse than, say, make you cry at the end of the novel: the experience is contained between the book covers. So readers for whom empathy in real life is often too much may only be able to make the trustfall of opening up to how a story can work on them, if they have the safety net of knowing that this stuff did not, actually, happen.

In his book On Stories, philosopher and novelist Richard Kearney retells how Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List was attacked by Claude Lanzmann, the director of the documentary Shoah, who maintained that making a story out of the testimonies of Holocaust survivors was, inherently, unethical: since those testimonies were broken, beyond story-making or rationalising into cause and effect or narrative arc, a piece constructed to fulfil the needs of narrative form betrayed the nature of the experience.1 The only way to transmit such witness, said Lanzmann, was to do as Shoah does and record direct statements by survivors to the camera. We can surely understand that view even if we don’t share it, but Kearney quotes some survivors who were unable to watch Shoah at all and who had never revisited their memories, but who could watch Schindler’s List and found doing so helpful.

In other words, for some people the prism of fictional form - enactment, mimesis, re-creation - is the only way they can safely approach dreadful experiences.

This makes it sound as if reading is living lite, as it were: reality safely eviscerated. And, certainly, most of us read for anaesthesia on occasions: we read books so familiar they’re like the journey home from work; we roll into a small, familiar, safe and ultimately comfortable world for a couple of hours; we sink into crime or horror, for the catharsis of the end when the world is set to rights again.

All English teachers and slushpile readers know the heart-sink when some wild or peculiar story ends ‘and then he woke up.’ It was one of my children’s teachers who pointed out that often the child, having gone deep into its imagination and found some strange, threatening, scary things there, may need to use the story itself to declare that it was ‘only a dream’, to bring themselves back to safe, boring normality.

But anyone who’s been haunted by a book for years, or felt their life or how they see the world rearranged by a story, knows that a book is a lot more than lite. If we can slip further and better into another life and soul through prose written using the tools of fiction than by any other means, then we can also be more open to whatever joys or horrors live in fiction, than we could if knowing it’s non-fiction - ‘yes, this really happened’ - triggers our self-protective shields.

But it’s also worth thinking about empathy in terms of pace and structure. The reader can want overall to travel along with your characters and experience their story, but still need a breather from immediate emotional intensity, and a chance for some perspective on what they’ve just experienced - just as we all do in real life.

Psychic distance is such a powerful writing tool because it reflects and embodies exactly our human engagement with human experience. We experience our lives in the world as our own viewpoint character, and our consciousness, separately, grapples with that experience and tries to make sense of it.

It’s not an accident that this separation is the key to most forms of therapeutic practice, as Philippa Perry, also of this parish, often reminds me. And when you look at how narrative works in terms of psychic (narrative, emotional) distance, you are separating out what the viewpoint characters are experiencing from what the narrative makes and transmits of it all.

This is true even if one of your characters is telling the story, in first person. This kind of internal narrator is still a narrator: their narrator self is subtly or drastically separate from their place as an actor in the story - again, just as we are in our real lives.

• What do you want your reader to feel and think here?

  • This is something I often find myself asking students and mentees when I’m getting mixed messages from how the story’s written, or how the characters are behaving. It’s not that characters can’t have mixed or confused feelings, of course, and certainly not that everything must be laid out en clair, without subtext. But in these cases, as a reader I’ve felt not the depth of a confused reality but only the flatness of something that offers me nothing clear to engage with.

  • And it can be very disconcerting when someone giving feedback feels very differently about a character from how you feel, whether it’s someone asking you how the wife of your lovable rogue of an MC feels - or your agent saying that they think your MC’s beloved is a bit of a plonker.2 Again, it’s not that they’re necessarily right, but empathy - how much and what with - is one, crucial kind of experience that readers seek. Can you walk a few yards in that reader’s shoes, and try to understand why they had that reaction? Do you want to act on your understanding - or are they just not the reader fo you?

• ‘Another’s voice’ is as important as another person’s skin and soul: it’s your medium - your word choices and sentence structures - that make the reader feel that they’re slipping into another person’s self.

  • Writer’s yoga will help your prose muscles to respond to whatever your imagination comes up with

  • Exploring different narrative setups can help bring out narrative voices which will draw the reader in

  • Developing your understanding of narrative voice and dialogue will give you confidence to try new things

• How empathetic and exposed do you need to be to write well?

  • As I said here, the best writing does tend to come from situations and materials which are potent for you, and if you want your reader to understand why your characters are how and who they are, you will need walk some miles in their shoes, even if your readers should not and will not.

    • If something you need to write is not potent for you, then spend a bit of time finding that potency: perhaps thinking about parallel situation in your own life, or simple holding your mind to the situation until you come to feel its imaginative reality.

  • But the best writing also comes from keeping that crucial distance, which enables you to pick and arrange the most effective elements, and discard the rest, darlings and all.

    • It’s easy to be macho and suffering-artiste-ish about how it’s necessary to dare all and bare all if you want to write well - but the risk of working with truly painful material is that you constantly pull your writing’s teeth. (This is how I know this.) Far, far better - not just for you but for your readers - to write something less obviously dreadful which you are then able and willing to (re)inhabit fully.

• Reading like a writer is one way to train your empathy-ometer and develop your sense of how it all works. When you’re reading, stop and notice every now and again:

  • how much do you feel inside or outside the character’s skin here?

  • what words, phrases and paragraphs are making you feel that way?

  • how does this level of engagement fit with how engaged you are at other parts of the story? Is this overal rhythm working?

So where does that leave us? Even if you don’t buy into the full Freudian package, Bruno Bettelheim’s classic The Uses of Enchantment is still fascinating in how it explores the deep psychological events and states which the classic fairy tales embody, and embody them in a form which is not too real, not too close to home, but which can nonetheless work through the fears and angers which we must resolve in order to grow up. Christopher Booker’s The Seven Basic Plots does something similar from a Jungian standpoint, and is probably more useful, practically speaking, for thinking about structure. (It’s also much longer, mind you!).

Not that the deep fears, angers and joys ever go away. Sure, Max sails home and finds his supper still hot. But the wild things are still out there, and it’s in reading that we can go and find them again, when we need to.

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