Empathy and the Novel (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Empathy and the Novel Tara McGann Keen, Suzanne. Empathy and the Novel. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. 242 pp. $65.00. Does novel reading make you more empathic, even more moral? In this groundbreaking study, Suzanne Keen subjects to scrutiny the assumption that novel reading induces empathy, thereby motivating altruistic behavior. Further, Empathy and the Novel questions the notion that culturally valued works kindle morality better than popular fiction. Nonetheless, while complicating an assumed coincidence between novel reading and empathy, she distinguishes herself from critics of empathy and of empathic reading. Unlike those who decry the indulgence and withdrawal from real engagement that they see empathy as encouraging, as well as its reliance upon universal categories, Keen sees empathy as a “precious quality of our social natures” (viii). She writes, “I do not quarrel with the intrinsic value of human empathy, nor do I regard narrative empathy as a cheat or a fake” (146). Rather, Keen asks that we examine what she terms the empathy-altruism hypothesis in a spirit of open exploration rather than either uncritically presuppose or simply reject it. That scientific bent to her project determines the book’s structure as well as its admirable commitment to cross-disciplinary investigation. Attempting to study [End Page 263] narrative empathy comprehensively and empirically, Keen skillfully knits together modes of inquiry as varied as narratology, neuroscience, moral philosophy, reading studies, developmental and social psychology, cognitive literary studies, feminist and postcolonial literary criticism, and reader-response criticism. Given the density of this weave, the book’s lucidity and accessibility across disciplines is impressive. So too is its rigor. The preface squarely takes on the assumption that novel reading, by stimulating emotional responsiveness and the role-taking imagination, helps readers become moral world citizens. The problem, as the book will establish, is that no evidence exists to support this comforting scenario. Yet Keen does not reject out of hand that such evidence could be found even as she dismantles inflated claims for narrative empathy, which “need not definitively perform renovations of civic virtue nor of individual behavior to be recognized as a core component of emotional response to fiction” (ix). The preface lays out the book’s project of understanding what creates narrative empathy as well as its manifold effects. As noted, Keen does not disdain empathy and indeed takes seriously the reading experiences and expectations concerning character identification of middlebrow novel readers, who are the overwhelming majority of the dwindling population of novel readers and usually women. In shedding light on a critically ignored dimension of novel reading, this book exposes such a bias as a gender bias. Before setting forth on its project, the book defines empathy: “In empathy, sometimes described as emotion in its own right, we feel what we believe to be the emotions of others” (5). It surveys contemporary scholarship on empathy and considers its popular representation, namely how in popular as well as academic discourse, empathy is still often gendered as a supposedly female trait. In exposing literary critics to the way psychologists approach the study of empathy, the first chapter seeks to bring information to a conversation between literature and psychology, for many who want to cultivate empathy turn to novels to achieve this goal. However, as Keen argues, prosocial behavior need not arise from empathy, nor can we assume that empathy leads to altruism. Further, we cannot assume that narrative empathy translates to compassion towards living human beings, let alone to taking action to benefit others. Narratives can be used to confirm prejudice or even stoke hatred. In this chapter Keen provides an example of the kind of studies that will need to be conducted, relating one with her own students, who were asked to respond to three narrative texts, one an excerpt from a novel. Keen wanted to find out which genres and narrative techniques generated the greatest empathy among her students as well as test her hypothesis “that fiction deactivates readers’ suspicions and opens the way to easier empathy” (29). There is something about the very fictionality of a novel that disarms readers, she contends, inviting them to identify with characters. The field of psychology can also learn much from...