Is Empathy Necessary?

According to the very candid historian and author Inga Clendinnen, the "novelist's gift of empathetic imagination" is misleading.

In her 70-page essay, The History Question: Who Owns the Past? (published in Quarterly Essay, Issue 23, 2006) she writes, "the 'insights' of empathy are untestable...Historical novelists spend time getting the material setting right, but then, misled by their confidence in their novelist's gift of empathetic imagination, they sometimes project back into that carefully constructed material setting contemporary assumptions and current obsessions."

The question is, misleading to whom?

Is it misleading to the author herself? to the reader? to the critic? to the egotistically-infringed academic? to the babysitter, the cat in the alley, the doorman, the barrista, the v.p. of marketing, et al?

And, who cares?

As I am reading a work of fiction, regardless of its origins, do or should I care if I’m being mislead? Only if what I’m reading is shallow and predictable, but then if it were, would I be mislead?

Should the author care if she’s been mislead by her subject? Only if it results in bad writing, I presume.

Should the barrista care if he’s been mislead? Ask the barrista. If he works at Starbucks, at least he has health insurance. Who can't empathize with that BASIC HUMAN RIGHT? (Note shifting pronoun throughout for sake of equality.)

Being mislead is a personal choice, if not a preference. And those that don’t want to be mislead, should not be reading the newspaper, let alone a novel, or a memoir for that matter.

Novel - a fictitious prose narrative of considerable length and complexity, portraying characters and usually presenting a sequential organization of action and scenes*

But empathy is such a beautiful and relevant quality. We (as in myself and people I know...I dare not assume a universal we in this format) can not relate without it. Empathy is what allows us to move past judgment to compassion. And compassion is what drives us (ditto). While not all people are capable of empathy, whether due to mental or genetic disorders, it's what keeps my humanity busting out of its bones, and dare I presume, yours as well.

Last night, I fortuitously watched The Hoax, a much lauded factual movie about a washed-up author (played by Richard Gere) who receives a million dollar contract to write the autobiography of the reclusive Texan billionaire, Howard Hughes. Only everything, including the verified letter of agreement from Hughes, is a hoax.

A great premise for a movie, right? Historically based no less, right?

But the characters. Oh, the characters. I could not, for the empathetic life of me, empathize with them. They were just too unlikable for me to become engaged, to care. And in their inability to evoke empathy from me, their experiences and actions became pigeonholed as…predictable.

So, is the “novelist’s empathetic imagination” misleading?

Probably, to a certain extent, if you’re a lawyer or the editor of HIPAA policies and procedures (which I have been the latter not the former), but one of the reasons for reading Philip Roth's fiction, Anne Waldman's poetry, Inga Clendinnen's accounts of history, People Magazine, or the Sunday funnies** is to exit one reality, that world of presumed innocence/guilt/right/wrong and enter into a new one. What really should be said, is that the writer's imagination is leading.

The empathetic imagination is what leads us into the realm of the text - believable or unbelievable as it may inherently be.


*novel. Dictionary.com. Dictionary.com Unabridged (v 1.1). Random House, Inc. http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/novel (accessed: February 16, 2008).

**According to Wikipedia, the Reading Eagle boasts the "Biggest Comics Section in the Land".

A Picture of Fred Astaire

He holds a cane—not for walking; for dancing; a dancing stick. Not a stick that dances but a stick for a man who dances with a stick.

There is sound in his feet. There is sound held together, laced into rhythm by the wormy-white ties of his shoes.

This picture can move. I hear it tapping. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. What’s it they say? “From screen to stage” or something of the sort.

Read about Fred

Develop a Few Mantras

I just finished reading Searching for the Secret River and The Secret River, both by Kate Grenville. Both of which are devouringly captivating and difficult if not impossible to get in the US. You'll have more luck getting your hands on the latter, a work of historic fiction, than the former, a memoir of the writing of the novel--unless you have a trip planned to the land of Oz anytime soon.

So, if you're not as lucky as me, AND you don't know the right gypsies who have migrated from England to the US to Australia and back to England who happened to pick up a copy of said text along the way, OR if you're just the kind of person who only reads summaries and cliffs notes, OR if you're in a hurry and need a helping hand or a hint of inspiration, OR if you just want to know what I'm thinking (which for the sake of imposed-modesty as not to distance you from my moment of sarcastic pomposity, "but you probably don't want to know what I'M thinking" [NOTE: she said with a soft sigh and curl of her lower lip, her eyes folding into the circles beneath them])...

I've included the greatest lessons, at least for me, that I've gleaned from reading Ms. Grenville's story of her story.


1. Experience your characters.
“I could experience the past-as if it were happening here and now.” (p. 47)

2. Allow your research to live (by experiencing as human/sensorial).

3. Visualize.
“…what did they wear?...Did the sitters make a pet of the new baby, carrying him on their hips, arguing about swhose turn it was to push in the pram? Did they have prams?...were they the other kind of big sisters,the secretive hair-pulling and ear-pinching kind?” (p.34)

4. Take your time.

5. Be humble. And learn from your process.
“This process was teaching me to be more humble. So far I’d found nothing that was absolutely certain.” (p. 38)

6. Let the story tell its story.

7. Sometimes, but not always follow logic.
“The logical place was to start at the beginning. “ (p. 31)

8. Question your source.
“Was there so much history in Britain that it could be treated casually?” (p. 50/51)

9. Acknowledge your differences (from your story/characters).
“It [aboriginal culture] was so foreign. It took a long time to realise that that was an appropriate feeling. I was an outsider. This wasn’t knowledge you could expect to go to a beak and learn. The thing was to recognise that I didn’t know.” (p. 129)

10. See your experiences as your characters would.
“A few steps into the bush and I’d panicked…not a moral shortcoming, but an interesting thing to know. Wiseman didn’t have the track…He had a whole continent…around him, and those birds that made the place sound so very empty.” (p. 137)

11. Develop a few mantras.


Read Kate Grenville's Whispering Voices of Advice

Morning and evening...

“Morning and evening the Government chain gangs clanked and shuffled to and from the split-timber barracks where their hammocks were packed in so close together the convicts became part of each other’s dreams.”

From The Secret River by Kate Grenville.