Take Heart

Abstract

Take Heart Speer Morgan Plato banished poets and playwrights from his ideal Republic because he felt they dealt in irrationality and half-truths. Only philosophers, who deal in absolute truths, could occupy his Republic, thus safeguarding it from emotion and unreason. Likewise, lately, some have questioned the idea of literature as a source of helping develop human empathy since it requires half-truths and the condemnation of some characters to allow us to empathize with others. It demands that we live with degrees of uncertainty and delayed judgment. Critic Wayne Booth discussed this issue in The Rhetoric of Fiction, in effect saying, "So what" if we identify with Hamlet and condemn Claudius, or if Othello is not fair to Cassio or Lear to the Duke of Cornwall? In his best plays, Shakespeare hardly made pure heroes and villains of anyone. Even in the face of political correctness and professional outrage, literary writers can't be prohibited from centering our interest and sympathy for certain characters and restraining sympathy for others. They can even imbue sympathy in some antiheroes, such as Heathcliff, despite the character's bizarre and even cruel behavior. Literature must be able to witness malice among some and inherent destructiveness in certain situations. When reading As I Lay Dying for the first time, I didn't feel revulsion toward any one character but a deep appreciation for the way an author can empathize with a family living in a place and circumstances so diminished that almost any choice its members make can be cruel, even to the point of absurdity. Empathy in life or in literature is never about merely identifying with a character or set of circumstances but about sharing—in whatever style [End Page 6] or method—their lives and the events that comprise them. Literature is replete with the paradoxes of real life. Some believe that the common denominator of postmodern literature, beginning sometime in the 1960s, is that it came from serious writers giving up on naive empathy and on easy logic or coherence in literature. In a chaotic world where the apocalypse is another world war or bullet or bomb away, why insist on order, even in the form of a literary work? There are no heroes or villains, only characters navigating a world that does not make sense. In Joseph Heller's Catch-22, protagonist Yossarian hopes only to not go on the next bomb run, to not die, even in a righteous war. Call him paranoid, call him a coward, that's fine with him. And to follow his experience in war closely, the writer cannot use artificial logic or neatness, even in the form of the novel. In fact, it is true that some of our best-remembered literature since the 1960s includes messiness and disorder. It also openly admits to artifice, to the pasting together of different types of writing as well as the employment of deep realism alongside open fantasy. It acknowledges storytelling techniques instead of trying to hide them. It recognizes writers as flawed persons with mood and attitude. Thomas Pynchon, Kurt Vonnegut, Margaret Atwood, Toni Morrison, Gabriel García Márquez, and many others of the last sixty years have used the techniques of metafiction, altered history, pastiche, and magical realism. However, it is also true that neither perfect form nor a naive sense of virtue and vice has ever been a function of serious literature, no matter the period. Just as true empathy looks beneath the obvious and finds deeper veins of truth, so vital form has never resided in surface perfection. This issue features our 2021 winners of Missouri Review's Perkoff Prize for writing about health and medicine. Our nonfiction winner, Sally Crossley's essay "Facing It," is the author's first publication. Crossley writes with honesty and hard-earned wisdom about how her life—and face—changed at age thirty-one, when a severe case of Bell's palsy caused a permanent facial droop. In thirty-five years of living with the palsy and its effects, which have worsened with age, Crossley has gone from denial to a philosophical acceptance—compassion for herself and her face that makes the reader stop and...