The Poetics of History
There was an interesting subject under discussion at Cliopatria yesterday and this morning – history as defamiliarization, poetics and history, the difference between history and fiction. The whole subject touches on a lot of difficult, knotty questions – other minds; the reliability or otherwise of testimony, autobiography, narrative – of what people recount about their own experiences; empathy; imagination; the general and the particular, the abstract and the concrete – and so on. Meta-questions.
I wondered about the much-discussed idea that fiction can teach empathy in a way that more earth-bound, or factual, or evidence-tethered fields cannot. That novelists have a special imaginative faculty which enables them to show what it’s like to be Someone Else so compellingly that we learn to be tolerant, sympathetic, forgiving, understanding etc. in the act of reading. Cf. Martha Nussbaum in Poetic Justice for example. It seems plausible, up to a point, but…only up to a point. For one thing there are so many novels that are full of empathy for one character but none for all the others; and there are so many that have empathy for the wrong people and none for their victims (cf. Gone With the Wind); and there are so many mediocre and bad novels, and the aesthetic quality of a novel has little or nothing to do with its level of empathy-inducement.
I think there are a couple of background ideas at work here, that could do with being dragged into the light. One is that all novelists, all fiction-writers have this ability to teach empathy – that there is something about the very act of telling a story that produces character-sympathy, and that character-sympathy translates into sympathy for people in general as opposed to sympathy for one particular character. But anybody can set up as a novelist, including selfish, unreflective, egotistical people. There is no guarantee that telling a story has anything to do with empathy. And then there is a second idea, that what novelists imagine about other minds is somehow reliable. But why should that be true? Especially why should it be true of all novelists? At least, why should it be any more true than it is of the rest of us? We can all imagine what’s going on in other minds – and we can all be entirely wrong. Or not. It may be that particularly brilliant novelists are better at imagining what’s going on in other minds – at guessing the truth – but particularly brilliant novelists are a rare breed, and in any case, nobody knows for sure whether they have it right or not. We think they do, it sounds right, but we don’t know. All it is, after all, is the imagining of one novelist. Lizzy Bennett and Isabel Archer and Julien Sorel may tell us what it’s like to be someone else – or they may not. We simply don’t know.
You nailed it. Now, how about nailing those critics who take some book or story and then spend several pages advancing their own political agenda which was suppisedly “coded” into it? When I can’t myself see such a connection?
Not even do they have the decency to say A is kind of like B, they just say A *is* B, when I am not in the least sure that is what the author had in mind.
It really ticks me off, even when I agree with said agenda. I wish they would come clean on what’s theirs and what is the author’s. Bad enough when they just found Fraudian symbolism under every bush, now it’s politics. Aaaaaaaggghhhh.
Yes, well, of course what the author had in mind has been ruled inadmissable. Actually that ruling long predates current trendiness; it was trendy in the 50s. The ‘intentional fallacy,’ you know. And the idea isn’t completely silly. What writers intend to say is one thing and what they succeed in saying is another, and then what readers choose to understand them saying is several million others. But…it doesn’t follow that any old nonsense is warranted.
(Another factor it’s worth always keeping in mind of course is the fact that there are X thousand university level English teachers in the US, all of whom are expected to publish something. A fanciful interpretation may well be purely vocational in origin.)
But doesn’t that take away from the time they get to spend teaching? WHY do they have to publish to prove themselves–now that we have the Net, can’t they just post on B & W or something?
Maybe it’s a good thing I dropped out after all.
hehe, “fraudian”… was that intentional? ;)
After reading this post it occured to me that there’s a subconscious assumption that people like me, who don’t spend enough time thinking about these things, often make about fiction. It is that the more aptitude a author shows for describing aspects of MY mind or life, the more authentic their descriptions of aspects of other minds or lives are likely to be. Pretty dreadful assumption really, but probably made by a fair number of ‘ordinary’ people. Depressed now.
But is empathy important? Surely if we are respectful of other human beings and their right, within the law, to be different from ourselves (even so different that we don’t understand them), the need to empathize to resolve disputes becomes redundant. And empathy is obviously irrelevant to rational argument about facts. Yet it’s amazing how often people claim better empathy as a strength of groups they belong to in order to put others down and/or claim imaginary moral authority (e.g “women have more empathy than men” = “men are selfish bastards” and “spiritual people have more empathy than empiricists” = “empiricists’ opinions on matters involving emotion are unworthy”).
Oh, the publishing v. teaching issue. That’s a big one. Yes, of course having to publish takes time away from teaching. Then again, someone who is doing research and/or thinking is likely to be a more stimulating, interesting teacher than someone who isn’t. But one can do that without necessarily having to publish – etc. There is a vast amount to say on both sides. The positional good aspect – the relative status of teaching and research – is a huge factor, and one that seems amazingly resistant to change. Or maybe it’s not so amazing.
Sorry about depression. Know what mean. Have had similar thoughts.
Empathy – exactly. I’ve had many conversations along those lines. I do think empathy is over-rated and also sentimentalized right now. As a matter of fact I had a discussion (email discussion) of just that with my colleague a long time ago, before B&W was even thought of. I said empathy is over-rated, he said it’s important; I said yes but, he said yes but. Etc.
A big subject. There will have to be further exploration, I can tell.
Yes, “Fraudian” is intentional…and so is “Junkian.”
About the value of research to teaching…they say if you want to learn something better try teaching it, now if you want to teach something better should you try researching it…yep, it makes sense…
Don’t get me started on that empathy bit.