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In 2006, the municipal president of Neza, a tough area of two million people on the eastern edge of Mexico City, decided that the members of his police force needed to become “better citizens.” He decided that they should be given a reading list, on which could be found Don Quixote, Juan Rulfo’s beautiful novella Pedro P á ramo , Octavio Paz’s essay on Mexican culture The Labyrinth of Solitude , Garcí a Má rquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude , and works by Carlos Fuentes, Antoine de Saint-Exupé ry, Agatha Christie, and Edgar Allan Poe. 1
Neza’s chief of police, Jorge Amador, believes that reading fiction will enrich his officers in at least three ways.
First, by allowing them to acquire a wider vocabulary … Next, by granting officers the opportunity to acquire experience by proxy. “A police officer must be worldly, and books enrich people’s experience indirectly.” Finally, Amador claims, there is an ethical benefit. “Risking your life to save other people’s lives and property requires deep convictions. Literature can enhance those deep convictions by allowing readers to discover lives lived with similar commitment. We hope that contact with literature will make our police officers more committed to the values they have pledged to defend.”
How quaintly antique this sounds. Nowadays, the cult of authenticity asserts that nothing is more worldly—more in the world—than police work; thousands of movies and television shows bow to this dogma. The idea that the police might get as much or more reality from their armchairs, with their noses in novels, no doubt strikes many as heretically paradoxical.
One does not have to be as morally prescriptive 2 as the Mexican police chief to feel that he has taxonomized three aspects of the experience of reading fiction: language, the world, and the extension of our sympathies toward other selves. George Eliot, in her essay on German realism, put it like this: “The greatest benefit we owe to the artist, whether painter, poet, or novelist, is the extension of our sympathies … Art is the nearest thing to life; it is a mode of amplifying experience and extending our contact with our fellow-men beyond the bounds of our personal lot.” 3
Since Plato and Aristotle, fictional and dramatic narrative has provoked two large, recurring discussions: one is centered on the question of mimesis and the real (what should fiction represent?), and the other on the question of sympathy, and how fictional narrative exercises it. Gradually, these two recurrent discussions merge, and one finds that from, say, Samuel Johnson on, it is a commonplace that sympathetic identification with characters is in some way dependent on fiction’s true mimesis: to see a world and its fictional people truthfully may expand our capacity for sympathy in the actual world. It is no accident that the novel’s rise in the mid-eighteenth century coincides with the rise of the philosophical discussion of sympathy, especially in thinkers like Adam Smith and Lord Shaftesbury. Smith, in The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), argues what is merely axiomatic today, that “the source of our fellow-feeling for the misery of others” is mobilized by “changing places in fancy with the sufferer”—by putting ourselves in the other’s shoes.
Tolstoy writes about this in War and Peace. Before Pierre is taken prisoner by the French, he has had a tendency to see people as hazy groups rather than as particularized individuals, and to feel that he has little free will. After his near-death at their hands (he thinks he is going to be executed), people come alive for him—and he comes alive to himself: “This legitimate peculiarity of each individual, which used to excite and irritate Pierre, now became a basis of the sympathy he felt for, and the interest he took in, other people.” 4
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Ian McEwan’s Atonement is explicitly about the dangers of failing to put oneself in someone else’s shoes. The young heroine, Briony, fails in this way in the novel’s first section when she wrongly convinces herself that Robbie Turner is a rapist. But putting oneself in another’s shoes is what McEwan is signally trying to do as a novelist in this same section, carefully inhabiting one character’s point of view after another. Briony’s mother, Emily Tallis, stricken with a migraine, lies in bed and thinks anxiously about her children, yet the reader cannot but notice that she is in fact a very bad imaginative sympathizer, because her anxiety and anger get in the way of her sympathy. Reflecting on her daughter Cecilia’s time at Cambridge, she thinks about her own comparative lack of education, and then quickly, but unwittingly, gets resentful:
When Cecilia came home in July with her finals’ result—the nerve of the girl to be disappointed with it!—she had no job or skill and still had a husband to find and motherhood to confront, and what would her bluestocking teachers—the ones with silly nicknames and “fearsome” reputations—have to tell her about that? Those self-important women gained local immortality for the blandest, the most timid of eccentricities—walking a cat on a dog’s lead, riding about on a man’s bike, being seen with a sandwich in the street. A generation later these silly, ignorant ladies would be long dead and still revered at High Table and spoken of in lowered voices.
In Adam Smith’s terms, Emily is quite unable to “change places” with her daughter; in a novelist’s or actor’s language, she is no good at “being” Cecilia. But of course McEwan is himself wonderfully good here at “being” Emily Tallis, using free indirect style with perfect poise to inhabit her complicated envy.
Later in the section, as Emily sits by the light, she sees moths drawn to it, and recalls being told by “a professor of some science or another” that
it was the visual impression of an even deeper darkness beyond the light that drew them in. Even though they might be eaten, they had to obey the instinct that made them seek out the darkest place, on the far side of the light—and in this case it was an illusion. It sounded to her like sophistry, or an explanation for its own sake. How could anyone presume to know the world through the eyes of an insect?
Emily would think this.
McEwan knowingly alludes to a celebrated dilemma in the philosophy of consciousness, most famously raised by Thomas Nagel in his essay “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” Nagel concludes that a human cannot change places with a bat, that imaginative transfer on the part of a human is impossible: “Insofar as I can imagine this (which is not very far), it tells me only what it would be like for me to behave as a bat behaves. But that is not the question. I want to know what it is like for a bat to be a bat.” 5 Standing up for novelists, as it were, J. M. Coetzee in his eponymous novel has his novelist-heroine, Elizabeth Costello, explicitly reply to Nagel. Costello says that imagining what it is like to be a bat would simply be the definition of a good novelist. I can imagine being a corpse, says Costello, why can I not then imagine being a bat? (Tolstoy, again, in an electrifying moment at the end of his novella Hadji Murad , imagines what it might be like to have one’s head cut off, and for consciousness to persist for a second or two in the brain even as the head has left the body. His imaginative insight foreshadows modern neuroscience, which does indeed suggest that consciousness can continue for a minute or two in a severed head.)
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The philosopher Bernard Williams was exercised by the inadequacy of moral philosophy. 6 He found that much of it, descending from Kant, essentially wrote the messiness of the self out of philosophical discussion. Philosophy, he thought, tended to view conflicts as conflicts of beliefs that could be easily solved, rather than as conflicts of desires that are not so easily solved. One example he used, in his book Moral Luck , was that of a man who has promised his father, after his father’s death, that he will support a favored charity with his inheritance. But the son finds that, as time goes on, there is not enough money for him to fulfill his promise to his father and also look after his own children. A certain kind of moral philosopher, wrote Williams, would decide that one way to resolve this conflict is to say that the son had good reason to assume, as a tacit condition of the inheritance, that he should give money to the charity only after more immediate pressing concerns, like his children, were taken care of. The conflict is resolved by nullifying one of its elements.
Williams thought that Kantians had a tendency to treat all conflicts of obligation like this, whereas Williams was interested in what he called “tragic dilemmas,” in which someone is faced with two conflicting moral requirements, each equally pressing. Agamemnon either be trays his army or sacrifices his daughter; either action will cause him lasting regret and shame. For Williams, moral philosophy needed to attend to the actual fabric of emotional life, instead of talking about the self, in Kantian terms, as consistent, principled, and universal. No, said Williams, people are inconsistent; they make up their principles as they go along; and they are determined by all kinds of things—genetics, upbringing, society, and so on.
Williams often returned to Greek tragedy and epic for examples of great stories in which we see the self struggling with what he called “one-person conflicts.” Curiously, he rarely if ever talked about the novel, perhaps because the novel tends to present such tragic conflicts less starkly, less tragically, in softened forms. Yet these softer conflicts are not the less interesting or profound for being softer: consider—just to pluck one kind of struggle—what extraordinary empirical insight the novel has given us into marriage and all its conflicts, both two-person (between spouses) and one-person (the lonely individual suffering inside a loveless or mistaken union). Consider To the Lighthouse , so moving in part because it is an account not of a brilliantly successful marriage nor of an incandescently failed one, but of an adequate one, in which struggles and little compromises are daily en acted. Here, Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay walk in the garden and talk about their son:
They paused. He wished Andrew could be induced to work harder. He would lose every chance of a scholarship if he didn’t. “Oh, scholarships!” she said. Mr Ramsay thought her foolish for saying that, about a serious thing, like a scholarship. He should be very proud of Andrew if he got a scholarship, he said. She would be just as proud of him if he didn’t, she answered. They disagreed always about this, but it did not matter. She liked him to believe in scholarships, and he liked her to be proud of Andrew whatever he did.
The subtlety lies in the picture of each side disagreeing, but wanting nonetheless the other to remain the same.
Of course, the novel does not provide philosophical answers (as Chekhov said, it only needs to ask the right questions). Instead, it does what Williams wanted moral philosophy to do—it gives the best account of the complexity of our moral fabric. When Pierre, in War and Peace , begins to change his ideas about himself and other people, he realizes that the only way to understand people properly is to see things from each person’s point of view: “There was a new feature in Pierre’s relations with Willarski, with the princess, with the doctor, and with all the people he now met, which gained for him the general goodwill. This was his acknowledgement of the impossibility of changing a man’s convictions by words, and his recognition of the possibility of everyone thinking, feeling, and seeing things each from his own point of view … The difference, and sometimes complete contradiction, between men’s opinions and their lives, and between one man and another, pleased him and evoked from him an amused and gentle smile.” 7