Strange Bedfellows (Part III)

The Subversive Art of Empathy: A Case Study

​Part 3 of a 4-part series.

To say that [Harper] Lee never set out to write a book about social justice and racial equality doesn’t strike the ear quite right. She lived a life in which social justice and racial equality formed an important an inescapable part of her lived identity. And yet, Lee chose not to write To Kill a Mockingbird as a philosophical treatise on injustice. 

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Fiction is one of the few experiences where loneliness can be both confronted and relieved. Drugs, movies where stuff blows up, loud parties--all these chase away loneliness by making me forget my name's Dave and I live in a one-by-one box of bone no other party can penetrate or know. Fiction, poetry, music, really deep serious sex, and, in various ways, religion--these are the places (for me) where loneliness is countenanced, stared down, transfigured, treated.

―David Foster Wallace

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​It’s difficult (maybe impossible) to explain to someone who doesn’t write that the development of characters is not something a fiction writer enters into lightly. I can’t speak for all writers, but the characters I've created feel very real to me, and I’m not ashamed to admit that there are plenty of days when I think about them, wonder how they are doing, forget that they aren’t actually living and breathing in the world beyond the page.

I realize that sounds made up—like some airy fairy comment artists make--but it's true.

Perhaps this is the flip-side to the fictional dream. If readers can become so immersed in a book that they forget they are engaged in the act of reading, doesn’t it stand to reason that writers should enter into a similarly dream-like state during the process of writing, allowing them to forget that what their subject is fabricated and therefore approach it with the right level of seriousness and commitment?

​I bring this up because in the first two blog entries of this series, I have been making an argument that fiction is not ethical propaganda or dramatized philosophy. It's job is not to tell truths about our world but to exist as an object of contemplation. And I think it bears mentioning that if, as a fiction writer, you have been following your characters around for a long time (sometimes years), getting to know them, caring about their fate, then you have a responsibility to tell their story well. That means not sabotaging the story with hamhanded polemics and ax grinding.

Maybe that sounds selfish and lacking in perspective, but consider this: what’s good for your characters is also good for the reader. 

​We live in a world where every other form of writing exists for a singular purpose: to instruct us, to tell us something. Laws and rules tell us what to do (and what not to do if we wish to remain on the good side of the law). Religious tomes and moral philosophy tell us how to live a holy, spiritual, or ethical life. Political propaganda tells us which candidates we should and shouldn’t vote for if we wish to see our interests represented. The news tells us what happened, where and to whom. Advertisements tell us what to purchase if we wish to satiate our material desires and needs. Therapy and self-help books tell us how to get better by overcoming obstacles that stand between us and inner peace. Instruction manuals and cook books tell us how to put things together to make other things.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with any of those genres. But Realist fiction provides an important alternative to all the preaching and proselytizing, punditry and moral profiteering that surrounds us on a daily basis. It offers an antidote to all the expert commentary flooding our lives.
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Somehow, impossibly, fiction listens more than it talks. In that regard, it is radically subversive. 

This doesn’t mean that fiction writing is apolitical.

Consider, as a case study, Harper Lee’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel To Kill A Mockingbird, considered one of the greatest books of the 20th century. It's widely taught in classrooms across the country because it allows for large discussions about race, discrimination, and social justice. Given it's subject matter, it’s natural to assume that Harper Lee must have been a socially conscious person (and by all accounts she was, writing bravely about racial injustice in her school newspapers at a time when few other people would touch the subject). It’s also tempting to assume then that Mockingbird must have been cleverly conceived as a platform for spreading Lee’s social and political beliefs about justice and equality.

However, it’s well documented that Mockingbird started like all most all books do: with a trigger. In this case, it was Lee’s scattered scenes and anecdotes about family and neighbors in Monroeville, Alabama. (Like Atticus Finch, Lee’s father was an attorney who defended two black men accused of murder. After they were convicted, hanged, and mutilated, he never tried another criminal case.)

To say that Lee never set out to write a book about social justice and racial equality doesn’t strike the ear quite right. She lived a life in which social justice and racial equality formed an important an inescapable part of her lived identity. She wrote about what she knew, what she saw around her. And yet, Lee chose not to write To Kill a Mockingbird as a philosophical treatise on injustice but as a fictional narrative.

The novel’s progressive anti-racism message is organic and integral to its plot. Diane McWhorter, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian of the Birgmingham civil rights campaign, says that “for a white person from the South to write a book like this in the late 1950s is . . .by its very existence an act of protest” but in doing so McWhorter seems to acknowledge that such protest is implicit in how Lee lived her life rather than explicit in how she fashioned her manuscript.

​When Lee’s depictions feel too “on the nose” (and sometimes they do!) it is usually tempered by Point of View. We forgive the sentimentality in a line like, “Atticus was right. One time he said you never really know a man until you stand in his shoes and walk around in them” because it comes from young Scout. (Is it difficult to believe a father might say this to his daughter?) Later, in the book’s rousing courtroom scene, it is Atticus (in his closing arguments to the jury) who delivers the book’s most impassioned and overt repudiation of racism, rather than Lee stepping out from the page to editorialize.
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​As a result Mockingbird remains a powerful work sparking commentary on rape, racial inequality, and loss of innocence, without reading like thinly veiled propaganda or dramatized social commentary. As novelist Allan Gurganus says, “[Lee] has to both be a kid on the street and aware of the mad dogs and the spooky houses, and have this beautiful vision of how justice works and all the creaking mechanisms of the courthouse. Part of the beauty is that she trusts the visual to lead her, and the sensory.” [Italics mine.]

It’s worth noting that Harper Lee’s recently released sequel Go Set a Watchman (in actuality, an earlier attempt at Mockingbird where Atticus Finch is a bigot) is far less successful [2] [3] [4] due in part to its overreaching polemics and lack of subtlety.

Still, we celebrate To Kill a Mockingbird and to this day use it to teach students about important social issues, not because Harper Lee set out to prove a point or write a textbook for the civil rights classroom but because, through her depiction of the rural South and her wonderment about characters like Scout, Atticus Finch, Tom Robinson, and Boo Radley, she created the right conditions for our empathy.

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To find out more about empathy's implications beyond the page,
​check back for the last entry in this series, "Fiction's Enduring Value."

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Jason Kapcala

Jason Kapcala is the author of North to Lakeville (forthcoming on Urban Farmhouse Press). When he's not writing, he enjoys reading, cooking, rock and roll, driving his Dodge Challenger, and studying the craft of writing.