Unethical reading and the limits of empathy

Abstract

192 aria tumarkin, who was born in Soviet Ukraine and emigrated to Australia as a teenager, everywhere exhibits in her work the hard-­ won knowledge that authentic civic-mindedness often produces, and requires—an estrangement from consensus and the deadening language of common sense. Tumarkin’s fourth book, Axiomatic (2019), challenges reflexive frameworks of grief and trauma, offering instead the specificity of individual lives in their entanglement with the lives of others. Such vigilance is a quality Tumarkin shares with the Zambian novelist, critic, essayist, and scholar Namwali Serpell. Author of the critical study Seven Modes of Uncertainty (2014); of the novel The Old Drift (2019), a multigeneric, multigenerational conversation Namwali Serpell and Maria Tumarkin Unethical reading and the limits of empathy M exploration of Zambia’s history and future; and, most recently, of Stranger Faces (2020), a series of linked essays, Serpell displays throughout her work a rigorous attention to affect, aesthetics, and ethics, and how they are enmeshed with our individual and collective histories. In 2019, Serpell published an essay in The New York Review of Books called “The Banality of Empathy,” in which she questioned our assumption that art promotes empathy—or that it should. The problem, she argued, is not simply that empathy substitutes for action, but that it promotes its own kind of moral callousness, a fascination with others’ pain. Assuming a basic fungibility between self and other, empathy of this kind is particularly dangerous when it comes to race: “Black pain, black death, is the clarifying limit case for the use of art for empathy. Its very seamlessness condemns it.” Over an exchange of emails, she and Maria Tumarkin revisit her argument about the banality of empathy in the context of the present, while also discussing their respective interests in narrative, the ethics of time, and the fraught nature of writing and reading. —the editors maria tumarkin I must say that by talking about the banality of empathy in your 2019 essay of the same title, you articulated very precisely something (a disquiet, a protest, a sick feeling) that had been in my head for over a decade. I wonder, with the world being what it is, whether you see any “non-­ banal models” of ethics that could describe some (potential) ethical work that literature can do or has done. Or perhaps there is something intrinsically banalizing and self-­ serving about “ethicalizing” conversations about reading and writing (e.g., “giving voice to the voiceless”—yet another pungent banality…)? namwali serpell Iris Murdoch has a remarkable anecdote in her book The Sovereignty of Good. She’s arguing against the models TUMARKIN | 193 194 | SERPELL of ethics so prominent in philosophy courses: theories of moral action and utilitarianism. And, because she’s a writer, she tells a story about a woman, a mother (M), who is struggling with her relationship to her daughter-­ in-­ law (D): “M finds D quite a good-­ hearted girl, but while not exactly common yet certainly unpolished and lacking in dignity and refinement. D is inclined to be pert and familiar, insufficiently ceremonious, brusque, sometimes positively rude, always tiresomely juvenile. M does not like D’s accent or the way D dresses. M feels that her son has married beneath him.” Now, M doesn’t ever reveal this view of D: she “behaves beautifully to the girl throughout, not allowing her real opinion to appear in any way.” But, as I’ve written elsewhere, even if her behavior doesn’t alter in the least, if M “‘observes D or at least reflects deliberately about D, until gradually her vision of D alters,’ then any internal change ought to seem moral to us.” Which is to say, our general understanding of morality is as much about thinking, reflecting, and changing internally as it is about external actions. This means that perfectly quotidian, internal experiences of consciousness— like reading and writing—can be a mode of ethics. Now, Murdoch never says exactly how M’s perspective on D changes; she doesn’t even suggest that empathy is the ground of her deliberate reflection. Murdoch leaves all of this to our imagination , which is a beautiful trick, in that it demonstrates precisely what telling...