It is a popular opinion that literature promotes empathy in the reader. Author John Green says in his Crash Course video “How and Why We Read,“By understanding language, you will have a fuller understanding of lives other than your own.” In the above video, author Azar Nafisi agrees, asking the question at the 2014 American Library Association Annual Conference, “Where else do you celebrate ‘the other’ except in books and in stories?”
A few recent studies, one at the New School and one in the Netherlands, have been conducted on the subject of literature and empathy and have indeed found that literature, specifically serious literary fiction, increases the emotional intelligence, or empathy, of a reader. Nonfiction does not seem to have the same effect.
An article by Lee Siegel for The New Yorker entitled “Should Literature Be Useful?” lends an interesting perspective on the matter of empathy and literature. Siegel argues that the heightened empathetic responses gauged by the recent studies of literature and empathy aren’t useful for society in any particular sense. To exemplify this idea, he suggests that empathy isn’t always used for good; he writes,
“Some of the most empathetic people you will ever meet are businesspeople and lawyers. They can grasp another person’s feelings in an instant, act on them, and clinch a deal or win a trial. The result may well leave the person on the other side feeling anguished or defeated.”
Siegel goes on to propose that the irresolute nature of empathy isn’t necessarily bad news for literature:
“Fiction’s lack of practical usefulness is what gives it its special freedom. When Auden wrote that ‘poetry makes nothing happen,’ he wasn’t complaining; he was exulting. Fiction might make people more empathetic—though I’m willing to bet that the people who respond most intensely to fiction possess a higher degree of empathy to begin with. But what it does best is to do nothing particular or specialized or easily formulable at all.”
Of course, there are strong opinions concerning the usefulness of empathy that contradict with Siegel’s. In the above video, Azar Nafisi attributes a revolutionary power to empathy; she says, “Empathy is sometimes more subversive even than difference.”
Does literature promote empathy? And, if so, is that empathy useful?
