Empathy and Imagination

Issue 224

Palermo, 2018

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Here are two curious lines from Rachel Cusk’s 1997 novel The Country Life:

…perhaps my mistake is not in the way I attempt to explain things. Perhaps, rather, it lies in my attempting to explain things as if they are universal, whereas in fact they are merely the defective impressions of my own mind.

When these words arrive, the narrator, Stella, is describing a woman that she’s just met, a woman that she believes is unknowable, foreign, impossible to imagine. In Stella’s mind, the ungraspable might be reasonable if she tries to consider the experience of a man, yet there’s something more perplexing about failing to comprehend the experience of another woman. She’s able to list a few traits, catalogue some behaviors, but this woman still seems so distant: her perception of the world is, for Stella, a mystery. And there’s no straightforward solution to this problem, of course, no way of ever knowing whether a personal experience resembles a commonplace experience, which puts Stella in pretty much the same position as her readers.

You might argue that nearly all stories focus on this distinction. Either you follow a character that pulls you closer, that reveals how similar your life is to all life, or you follow a character that’s outlandish, unique, almost inexpressible, with a sensibility distinctive enough to deserve an original story. Perhaps that’s the push and pull of storytelling, where there’s comfort in the familiar, in the shared experience, and curiosity at the peculiar, at the distinctions. You could even distill a good portion of classic literature into a confrontation between what’s personal and what’s universal, with the elevation of idiosyncratic, individual characters at one extreme, and with the elevation of commonplace, universal sensations at the other extreme.