The Empathy Engine - Steven Conte
Posted by: Steven Conte
4 December 2008
As a 20-year-old in 1986 I spent a year hitchhiking around western Europe, stopping to work in Belgium and Cornwall in order to fund each new leg of travel. The year was rewarding in many ways, but one of the most enduring benefits was having the time to read 65 books, most of them novels. In subsequent years I’ve sometimes let my reading slide, but that year of intense absorption in books in early adulthood gave me a reservoir of story which I still draw on as a writer.
A subtle shift was taking place in my reading at this time. Previously, I had tended, consciously or otherwise, to read with the aim of better understanding myself; now I was not only becoming more analytical about the craft of fiction but also more emotionally involved in the dilemmas of characters who were unlike myself. Five more years would pass before I really understood the difference, and the book that clarified it for me was George Eliot’s Middlemarch.
Middlemarch is a truly great novel (and one peculiarly suited to readers around the age of 25, I suspect). It is full of interest, but what particularly fascinated me was the novel’s depiction of the marriage of the heroine Dorothea and the emotionally arid, elderly scholar Casaubon, particularly Casaubon’s attempt to extract a promise from Dorothea that after his death she will write the magnum opus he has spent his whole life researching. The plea is both cruel and pathetic, yet later (at the end of Chapter 42) Casaubon seems briefly to understand that Dorothea deserves freedom:
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“Come, my dear, come. You are young, and need not to extend your life by watching.”
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When the kind quiet melancholy of that speech fell on Dorothea’s ears, she felt something like the thankfulness that might well up in us if we had narrowly escaped hurting a lamed creature. She put her hand into her husband’s, and they went along the broad corridor together.
I dislike the idea that fiction is for anything – that it functions as therapy for the writer, for instance, or as edification for the reader. But while stories may not have a function they do have one powerful effect: the creation of empathy for others. Eliot shows empathy in action, but by immersing us in the inner lives of her characters she also makes empathy a basic requirement for reading her work. This has far-reaching effects, not just on individual readers (whose brains, I’d wager, are reconfigured by reading fiction) but also on the societies they’re part of. Notoriously, many Nazis were connoisseurs of music and art, and yet novels were poison to them. I’d go so far as to claim that the behind the great liberation movements of the last 200 years – the freeing of slaves, the universal franchise, decolonisation, the civil rights movement, feminism and equal rights for gays and lesbians and co. – there were people whose values were shaped by reading fiction.
There should be more of it.
George Eliot, aka Mary Anne Evans
December 4, 2008 at 9:41 pm
I agree with your comment that talking about numbers is a bit personal and intimate. It can leave you feeling a little lacking or …something to discuss with people how many books you’ve read in the past year, week or month. Maybe thats just me though, because I’d always love to read more but don’t get the chance to read just because I want to, well, not as much as I would like. I was jealous hearing about your 65 books in a year! I haven’t done that since I was about the age you were or younger, and ever since I haven’t come close. I used to be such a book “tart” that I’d read several at once, I just couldn’t get enough of books, what they could give me, the worlds I would be exported to and characters I could immerse myself in!
December 4, 2008 at 2:47 pm
Christi, for all my talk about empathy with others I’m conscious that I’ve spent a lot of this week speaking about myself, and I can see that talk about numbers of books read could seem competitive and boastful. You’re right: reading is pleasure, that’s the main thing. For writers and aspiring writers, though, there is an element of necessity to it - there’s nothing more irritating than meeting aspiring young fiction writers in creative writing classes who blithly tell you that they watch films rather than read books, but that writing books seems easier to them than breaking in to the film industry. Having said that, I have a theory that really determined writers often read fewer books than the true bookworms, since many writers experience a sense of dissatisfaction with the work of others, and are itching to write the book that they’d like to read.
As I admitted in my post, I’ve sometimes let my reading slide badly, depending on the other demands in my life. Lately (and I’m very evangelical about this), I’ve managed to boost my reading considerably by listening to talking books, which I get from the library. With talking books you naturally lose the look of the text on the page, but you can still absorb and learn from the shape of the story, and a good actor-reader can add something to your appreciation of character. I tend to listen when I’m making myself lunch or coffee or some other automatic task (city driving would be too demanding, I reckon, and also it’s bad for the atmosphere).
Talk of numbers is a bit intimate, like discussing the frequency of your sex life, but after some very lean years, and with the help of audio books, I seem to have settled on 25-35 books a year, three-quarters of which are novels. Bear in mind that I’m not a parent. Audio books are a particularly good method, by the way, of dealing with the door-stopping, gob-smacking dimensions of some of the classics. I should mention, too, that since 1986 I’ve listed every book I’ve read, a habit I highly recommend, and it’s never too late to start!
So now I’ve come clean - how about some true confessions from the other writers?
December 4, 2008 at 12:40 pm
What a fabulous touch, to add that photo at the bottom. I’ve never seen her face in this light before.
December 4, 2008 at 12:19 pm
I thought I had read a lot of books. I have read a lot of books, ask anyone who knows me and they’ll say “she reads a LOT of books!” However I have to say reading your posts Steven, I am feeling decidedly underliterate. I confess I haven’t read Middlemarch either. I haven’t read any George Eliot and I think I should have because she’s a bit of a feminist icon really.
And thinking along that line I have a big, long list of books I think I should have read by now but haven’t. I mean I work in a library, it’s a daily reminder of all the books I haven’t read, some of them I have no desire to, by the way. Every time I read a thriller I feel like that’s precious reading time that could have been devoted to something more substantial - it’s like a literary fling. I rarely read non-fiction unless someone like Nick Hornby has written it and I would read a KFC blurb by him.
But I agree with what you said, Steven, fiction isn’t for anything. I just love reading it. I love being carried away by someone else’s life. I love that (as I am experiencing reading the end of Zookeepers War) I can continually switch which character I am empathising with (I take sides in these things I can’t help it!). I love that it tugs at my heart, that I laugh out loud, cry, sigh…
I know I’ll never read every book I’d like to, I just know I will not waste another second reading something I’d don’t love.
Well, unless you pay me, or I’m studying, or it’s about autism - sometimes less lovely knowledge is required I suppose…