Empathy in Contemporary Poetry after Crisis

Anna Veprinska

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9783030343194
• eBook ISBN:
  9783030343200
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Historiography
• Index: Literature

This book examines the representation of empathy in contemporary poetry after crisis, specifically poetry after the Holocaust, the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, and Hurricane Katrina. The text argues that, recognizing both the possibilities and dangers of empathy, the poems under consideration variously invite and refuse empathy, thus displaying what Anna Veprinska terms empathetic dissonance. Veprinska proposes that empathetic dissonance reflects the texts' struggle with the question of the value and possibility of empathy in the face of the crises to which these texts respond. Examining poems from Charlotte Delbo, Dionne Brand, Niyi Osundare, Charles Reznikoff, Robert Fitterman, Wis?awa Szymborska, Cynthia Hogue, Claudia Rankine, Paul Celan, Dan Pagis, Lucille Clifton, and Katie Ford, among others, Veprinska considers empathetic dissonance through language, witnessing, and theology. Merging comparative close readings with interdisciplinary theory from philosophy, psychology, cultural theory, history and literary theory, and trauma studies, this book juxtaposes a genocide, a terrorist act, and a natural disaster amplified by racial politics and human disregard in order to consider what happens to empathy in poetry after events at the limits of empathy.

© The Author(s) 2020

A. VeprinskaEmpathy in Contemporary Poetry after CrisisPalgrave Studies in Affect Theory and Literary Criticismhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-34320-0_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Anna Veprinska¹

(1)

York University, Toronto, ON, Canada

Anna Veprinska

End Abstract

“The self is a patchwork of the felt and the unfelt, of presences and absences, of navigable channels around the walled-off numbnesses,” writes Rebecca Solnit in her stunning non-fiction collection of stories The Faraway Nearby. “We make ourselves large or small, here or there, in our empathies” (115–16). Through empathy, we piece ourselves together, Solnit maintains. We are ourselves, thus, through our relations with others. These empathetic relations—“the nerves that run out into the world,” as Solnit imagines them—work to enlarge us, to “expand the self beyond its physical bounds” (148).

In Philip K. Dick’s science fiction classic Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, researchers use the Voigt-Kampff Empathy Test to distinguish between humans, who can feel empathy, and androids, who cannot. In October 2014 I had the opportunity to observe this distinction for myself. Visiting the robot exhibit at the Carnegie Science Center in Pittsburgh, I initiated a computer text conversation with an Artificial Intelligence bot named Athina the Chatbot, product of Carnegie Mellon University. After some polite greetings, I decided to dive into the topic of empathy: “Can you feel empathy?” I typed. “Oh, you humans, always wanting to know about that stuff. Well, I just don’t understand,” came the response. I typed the question a few more times, each occasion generating a different response: “I don’t understand your question. Can you ask me that in a different way?” And, my personal favourite, “I’m sorry. That question might make sense to humans with your squishy, illogical brains, but to a robot it’s just weird.” Athina defines her self against the “squishy” human, against emotion and empathy. This non-human robot’s indifferent attitude toward empathy suggests the possible indifferent stance toward empathy of other non-human entities. Among these is the ambivalent figure of God, who is both an extension of the human (whether as human creator or human creation) and emphatically non-human. The fourth chapter of this book puts into conversation ideas of God and their relation to empathy. While the non-human may be defined against empathetic relations with others, the human is often defined through these relations. Indeed, Judith Butler characterizes these relations as “a primary vulnerability to others, one that one cannot will away without ceasing to be human” (xiv). Similarly, one of Solnit’s anecdotes in The Faraway Nearby features Paul Brand, a doctor who believes that “‘this quality of shared pain [empathy] is central to what it means to be a human being’” (qtd. in Solnit 108). Likewise, the front cover praise of Leslie Jamison’s 2014 collection of essays, The Empathy Exams, proclaims, “This riveting book will make you a better human.”¹ The suggestive conflation of the human with the ability to experience, imaginatively, someone else’s emotions is the issue at the heart of this book. In the aftermath of a century that witnessed two world wars and the development of technologies capable of annihilating entire populations, and the beginning of a century, not unlike its predecessor, ravaged by ruthlessness and unrest, empathy occupies a precarious place in our re-examination of what it means to be human.

Translated by psychologist Edward Titchener in 1909, the word empathy emerges in English from the German word Einfühlung, which literally means “feeling into” (Oxford Dictionary of Psychology; OED; Wispé 17; Coplan and Goldie xii, xiv; Solnit 195).² Empathy, therefore, is “the tendency of observers to [affectively] project themselves ‘into’ that which they observe” (Davis 5). Empathy’s imaginative projection suggests a kind of voyage. “It’s a coincidence,” notes Solnit, “that empathy is built from a homonym for the Old English path, as in a trail …. Empathy is a journey you travel, if you pay attention, if you care, if you desire to do so” (195). This imaginative entry or journey of the self into other parallels the work of literature, much of which (though of course not all) seems, to me, predicated on the reader’s ability to imaginatively and affectively enter and inhabit fictional worlds, ideas, and/or characters. As Solnit asserts on the first page of The Faraway Nearby, “empathy is first of all an act of imagination, a storyteller’s art, and then a way of traveling from here to there” (3).

This project examines the role of empathy in twentieth and twenty-first-century contemporary poetry after crisis. After here refers to both the temporal writing of the poems following the crises and the act of pursuing the crises that the poems perform. Particularly, I focus on texts after the Holocaust , after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks , and after Hurricane Katrina . These events and their consequences are themselves, at least in part, a result of a lack of empathy on the part of perpetrators and bystanders. Underlying these crises, thus, is a crisis of empathy. The interdisciplinary object of my study is poetic empathy . This textual device is defined through the interdisciplinary fields (philosophy, psychology, cultural theory, history, literary theory, and trauma studies) with which it engages, but it is also distinct from these fields in two key ways. First, poetic empathy takes shape on the literary (specifically poetic) page, which suggests an imaginative experience and involves an interaction with some or all of the following: diction, trope, rhythm, rhyme, space, sound, stanzaic patterning, character, punctuation, mimesis, and genre. Second, poetic empathy demands and produces a reader, one whose reading practices vary from those of a reader of, for example, philosophy or literary theory. Some of the poets whose works I engage with through the lens of poetic empathy include Charlotte Delbo, Dionne Brand, Niyi Osundare, Charles Reznikoff, Robert Fitterman, Wisława Szymborska, Cynthia Hogue , Claudia Rankine, Paul Celan, Dan Pagis, Lucille Clifton, and Katie Ford, among others. I argue that the poetic empathy in the texts that I consider by these poets is multidimensional—the poems variously enact, invite, refuse, evoke, deploy, condemn, show interest in, and/or ambivalence toward empathy. These works, thus, display what I will refer to as empathetic dissonance . Packed with tension, this term is oxymoronic insofar as empathy implies accord (however much my project will blur this implication) and dissonance denotes discord. Dissonance is also the language of music: of tonal harmonies, of melodic refrains, of the act of listening requisite for both music and empathy. “I think of empathy as a kind of music,” Solnit writes, “‘the still[,] sad music of humanity,’ as Wordsworth once called it” (112).³ This project suggests that empathetic dissonance in the poems that I examine reflects the texts’ struggle with the question of the value and possibility of empathy in the face of the crises to which these texts respond.

Empathetic dissonance aids in understanding both the difficult, multilayered nature of empathy and the multilayered crises at the core of these texts. Studying artistic responses to contemporary crises is significant because these responses document and open a door to comprehending individual and collective devastation. “Art often mediates our relationship to suffering,” contends Elizabeth V. Spelman in Fruits of Sorrow: Framing Our Attention to Suffering. “One of the prominent functions of theater, literature, painting, and dance,” she continues, “is to get us to think and feel in particular ways about particular kinds and instances of suffering” (12). Art, thus, is capable not only of representing suffering, but also of shaping cognitive and affective (including empathetic) responses to suffering. As William Faulkner contends in his 1950 Nobel “Banquet Speech,” “The poet’s voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.” In other words, poetry can provide support to those (the sufferers, the poet, the readers) affected by social and political conflict. Indeed, I would venture to say that the articulation of empathy in poetry after crisis has the potential to offer guidance in the reconfiguration of society following a trauma.

Empathy’s place in poetry carries ethical implications for our relations with one another in and outside of literature. In the introduction to Ethics in Practice, a philosophical approach to ethics, Hugh LaFollette explains that “Morality, traditionally understood, involves primarily, and perhaps exclusively, behavior that affects others” (4). As a particular stance toward another that has the potential (though not the promise) to manifest into action, empathy is a significant part of this morality paradigm. Situating the discussion of morality in the context of pain, Sara Ahmed asserts that “the impossibility of feeling the pain of others does not mean that the pain is simply theirs, or that their pain has nothing to do with me …. an ethics of responding to pain involves being open to being affected by that which one cannot know or feel” (30). Empathy, as a practice of being affected by another’s pain, becomes an ethical responsibility.⁴

In his conception of ethical responsibility, Emmanuel Levinas posits that in the face-to-face relationship between self and other, the self has a responsibility toward the other (Otherwise Than Being 6, 10, 91, 100). “I understand responsibility,” explains Levinas, “as responsibility for the Other, thus as responsibility for what is not my deed, or for what does not even matter to me; or which precisely does matter to me, is met by me as face” (Ethics and Infinity 95). According to Levinas, this relation of responsibility occurs at the moment of encountering the face of the other: “In proximity the absolutely other, the stranger whom I have ‘neither conceived nor given birth to,’ I already have on my arms, already bear” (Otherwise Than Being 91). Although Levinas does not conceive of the relationship between self and other as an empathetic relationship—indeed, the attention to the other’s cognitive and emotional state that empathy demands works against Levinas’s notion of immediate responsibility, prior to any knowledge of the other—Levinas’s self-other relation may be instructive in understanding the process of empathy. Empathy, too, pivots upon a relation, perhaps even an ethical responsibility (if one can avoid transgression) between self and other. “We are, as bodies,” comments Butler, “outside ourselves and for one...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction
• 2. The Unsaid
• 3. The Unhere
• 4. The Ungod
• 5. Conclusion
• Back Matter