Fiction, Empathy, Recognition (Part One)

Or, A Defence of Making Things Up

In her latest essay collection, Dead and Alive, Zadie Smith takes Walt Whitman to task for the somewhat naïve confidence he seems to have in his empathic capacities. It’s a good essay and one I have been thinking with and against for a few months now. In ‘Defending Fiction’, homing in on his now surely overused dictum ‘I contain multitudes’, Smith askes, ‘How can Whitman, dead in 1892, contain, or even know anything at all of the particularities of any of us, alive as we are, in this tumultuous year, 2019?’ Smith’s point is well taken. We are, of course, right to be alert to the dangers of an oversimplistic ethics of empathy. Whitman’s line has the sound and smell of colonialism; a certain swagger about it that could only be found in someone of a certain societal position and context. Whitman’s engorged – and I use the word advisedly – sense of self contains, after all, not only his neighbours – women and men a lot like him – but also the slave and slave master, and, as his logic would suggest, it also includes the contemporary tech billionaire, the colonised and homeless, the Presidents and Prime Ministers and those they deport. Seen in this light, Smith is right. Whitman’s generalised wash of empathy begins not to look like empathy at all, but an atrophied overconfidence severely lacking in grace, humility and in huge need of a reality check. Empathy in this understanding is a curiously amoral tool, making all things, misogyny, slavery, racism, permissible simply because they happen to exist: I contain the world quickly becomes I tolerate oppression. As the theologian Rowan Williams puts it in his new book Solidarity, ‘in this kind of would-be empathic identification, I am assuring myself that there is no territory where I cannot go, no barrier of otherness I cannot overcome.’ The problem with this approach, he goes on, is that ‘empathy serves the need not of a stranger but of a self that cannot bear the idea of a real stranger.’ By containing multitudes, Whitman protects himself by equating the limits of his imagination with the limits of reality itself. Every stranger is just a friend of our (his) self we haven’t met yet.

But might another reading of Whitman be possible? One that, instead of closing down the possibility of true empathy, might instead offer us a defence of writing as an essential, perhaps as an essentially empathic tool? And in all this I am not overly interested in getting to ‘what Whitman meant’ when he claimed to contain multitudes. Engaging in that sort of question rarely leads to anything worthwhile, and often leaves the most interesting questions unanswered. Instead, I am imagining a posture Whitman could have implied in the famous phrase, a posture totally open to the other, to the strange, to future strangers scarcely imaginable. What if Whitman is saying that containing multitudes is not about limiting or denying the strangeness of others, but rather to recognise the simple fact that some essential spark of humanity is common across all people, or, indeed, that some spark of strangeness persists even, or perhaps, especially, in my own self. Rather than empathy-as-colonisation, Whitman might offer us instead empathy-as-profession-of-faith, a belief that the only reason empathy, or fiction, can ever work is that there is something fundamental shared in us, by us, something that is to be recognised in another. With all its attendant problems – the potential dilution of real difference to mere variety, for example – this approach to empathy also offers an energising defence of fiction as a work of the imagination.

There is something in recognition that stirs the soul. It is in Christian scripture, too, in a story read most often at Easter. After the Crucifixion, Mary Magdalene visits Jesus’ tomb only to find it empty and Jesus’ body nowhere to be found. Distraught, she looks for her friend but instead sees two angels where Christ should be. They ask her why she is crying. A ludicrous question, really, in the circumstances. Given their presence at an empty tomb, and with the benefits of what we might assume is supernatural knowledge, the reader can reasonably presume the angels know exactly why the woman is crying. This moment is one where the reader feels the hand of a writer at work, a little moment of narrative intrusion to keep momentum up. Mary tells them she is looking for her Lord and turns from them to see a man. A gardener, she presumes, and the reader supposes the man must have been pruning roses, or tending to the soil. The reader, in their privileged narrative position, also knows this is the risen Christ, and that Mary, in her position as character and not reader, does not recognise him. The resurrection must have changed him in some way, we might suppose. This is a reasonable assumption given the presumed severity of a resurrection.

It is a poignant moment: Mary looking into the eyes of a friend she is also actively mourning. And the story ends beautifully. The gardener only has to say her name – ‘Mary’ – and the scales fall from her eyes. ‘Rabboni,’ she shouts and runs towards him. The sound of her name in his mouth seems to be all it took.

There are many implications of such a story. The one that strikes me most powerfully is this: recognition begets recognition. In other words, there is something sacred, something primary, in being recognised by another, and that once someone takes the risk of vulnerability, there is the mysterious opportunity for recognition to move in two directions at once.

There is a danger here though. In relying on recognition as a basis for empathy, are we not reducing the circle of those we can offer empathy to to the very small number of people I can in some sense recognise? This is a serious threat to the whole empathy enterprise. Such a model is scarcely better than the most solipsistic of Dawkins’ evolutionary ethics in which every act of apparent grace is really just the will-to-power in altruistic drag. There is surely a better mode of thinking than that. And we might find some help in etymology. The word ‘recognise’, rather than some thin concept reliant on the similarity between people, more literally rendered, means to ‘know again’ to re-cognise. Implicit within this is the suggestion of effort, an active seeking after knowledge or a new way of seeing. The work of recognition is exactly that, then: work. The word ‘again’ here also implies something beautiful, namely that to recognise another, we are simply reminding ourselves of something we once knew and have merely forgotten. Whitman’s containing of multitudes might, then, have something to it. We recognise because we do indeed share something in common. Because we do, in some sense, contain one another. Contain not in the sense of limiting, but the way circles in a Venn Diagram meet and intersect.

Mary didn’t meet anyone new in that garden, after all.

Recognition means she sees something – someone – familiar in a very unlikely set of circumstances.

On the other hand, Calvin says the other is a question posed by God, that they are in some sense a God-shaped invitation. And Calvin says if we want to know God, we need to travel deeper inside ourselves. Yet God is also another word for total Otherness. What I am getting at is that there is no simple division between our ‘selves’ and the selves of others, and no simple remedy for crossing the distances that separate us from one another and, crucially from our own depths. We remain unknown to ourselves, says Nietzsche, and with that in mind, how are we ever to recognise the other as familiar without acknowledgement that it is their inherent strangeness that makes them kin.

[Part 2 coming soon…]