Taking on the Character of Someone in a Book After Reading
"You lot exist that one," I recall my girl saying to a companion. "And I'll be this one." My daughter was about five at the time, and, equally in the imaginary games played by children of that age, she and her friend were arranging roles. But they weren't about to play a game. They were preparing to watch a movie.
We tend to think of movie watching or book reading every bit passive activities. That may exist true physically, but it's not true emotionally. When we watch a pic or read a novel, we join ourselves to a character's trajectory through the story earth. We run into things from their indicate of view—feel scared when they are threatened, wounded when they are hurt, pleased when they succeed. These feelings are familiar to united states as readers or viewers. Merely our propensity to identify with characters is actually a remarkable sit-in of our ability to empathize with others.
© Leigh Wells
When we examine this process of identification in fiction, we appreciate the importance of empathy—non but in enjoying works of literature, but in helping us form connections with those effectually united states in the existent globe. The feelings elicited by fiction go across the words on a page or the images on a screen. Far from existence alone activities, reading books or watching movies or plays actually can help train us in the art of being homo. These effects derive from our cognitive capacity for empathy, and at that place are indications that they can assistance shape our relationships with friends, family, and fellow citizens.
The stuff dreams are made on
In the West, the tradition of understanding literature derives from Aristotle who, most 2,400 years ago, wrote a book called Poetics. The subject matter of his book was not simply poetry. More broadly it was what nosotros at present call fiction, which, like poetry, means "something fabricated." Aristotle said that whereas history lets the states know what has happened, poetry (fiction) is more important because it is nearly what can happen.
The cardinal term in Poetics is mimesis, the relation of the story to the way the world works. This term tin can exist interpreted in two ways. If you read an English translation, you will see the Greek word mimesis indicated past translations like "copying," "imitation," or "representation." These translations get information technology half right. While literary fine art can serve to imitate the earth—what Hamlet called holding "the mirror upward to nature"—it tin likewise create new worlds. In other words, Aristotle idea that peachy plays, such every bit the tragedies of Sophocles, which he discussed in Poetics, created worlds of the imagination. Shakespeare likened this to the way nosotros dream, such as when Prospero, the protagonist in Shakespeare'southward The Tempest, says that humans "are such stuff as dreams are made on." Dream is an apt metaphor considering, when we dream, without any input from eyes or ears, we create worlds of places, people, and emotions. What a expert story does, by ways of blackness marks on the white pages of a novel, or by the actions of a small group of people several yards away on a stage, or by the flickering images on a screen, is to offer the materials—a kind of kit—to offset up and run the dream of the story world on your mind. A story is a partnership. The author writes information technology, and the reader or audition member brings it alive.
The emotions that you experience as you breathe life into a story are related to the characters, but they are non the characters' emotions. They are yours. How does this happen? How can an bogus world conjure upwards such real emotions, and what mental capacities practice nosotros engage in gild to feel those emotions? Bright though Aristotle was, his Poetics is curiously silent on this question, as is much of the canon of Western literary theory that followed him.
But other traditions—i of Western psychology, one of Eastern literature—can assistance shed lite on how fiction elicits such empathic responses from the states.
Moving pictures
Empathy tin be thought of equally feeling with someone, or for them. In a recent study using functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) scans of brain action, Tania Singer and her colleagues showed that a basis for empathy can be identified in the brain. Vocalizer and her colleagues administered electric shocks to volunteers and too gave these volunteers signals when a loved one, present in the next room, was being shocked. In some parts of the volunteers' brains, activation occurred just when they themselves received a shock, but other parts associated with feeling pain were activated both when the volunteers received a shock and when they knew their loved i was getting a daze. Singer and her colleagues draw this dual activation every bit the emotional aspect of hurting. They argue that their results show that the empathic response that we experience for someone we know and like is the same as the emotional aspect we feel ourselves.
That will ring truthful for anyone who's always been defenseless up in a play, book, or movie—anyone who has wept for the young lovers in William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, or with the Joad family in John Steinbeck'south Grapes of Wrath, or with those who have suffered in Steven Spielberg's Schindler'south List.
Our fondness for fiction shows that we enjoy feeling with other people, fifty-fifty when sometimes the feelings are negative. In another recent psychological report, Tom Trabasso and Jennifer Chung asked 20 viewers to watch ii films, Blade Runner and Vertigo. Each film was stopped at 12 different times. Soon after the offset of each movie, and once more at the terminate, all the viewers rated their liking for the protagonist and for the antagonist. I prepare of ten viewers had the task of maxim, at each of the film's 12 stopping points, how well or how poorly things were going for the protagonist and for the antagonist. These ratings agreed with the experimenters' own analysis of the characters' goals and actions. The job of the other prepare of 10 viewers was to charge per unit what emotions, and of what intensity, they themselves were experiencing at each point where the picture show was stopped. These viewers experienced more positive emotions at points where things went well for the liked protagonist or badly for the disliked antagonist (equally rated by the first fix of ten viewers); they also felt negative emotions when things went badly for the protagonist or well for the antagonist.
So, whenever we read a novel, look at a moving-picture show, or even picket a sports lucifer, we tend to bandage our lot with someone nosotros detect likable. When a favored graphic symbol in a story does well, we feel pleased; when a disliked character succeeds, we are displeased.
This process seems rather bones. Information technology is rather bones. If this liking for a protagonist were all there was to information technology, reading fiction and watching dramas would not exist much different than going on a roller-coaster ride. Indeed some books and movies do little more than than offer just such an experience. They are chosen thrillers. Merely in some books and films, much more tin occur. Along with the basic process of empathic identification, we can start to extend ourselves into situations we have never experienced, feel for people very different from ourselves, and begin to empathize such people in means we may have never thought possible. George Eliot, a novelist whose books offer such effects, put it like this:
The greatest do good we owe to the artist, whether painter, poet, or novelist, is the extension of our sympathies. Appeals founded on generalizations and statistics require a sympathy ready-made, a moral sentiment already in action; but a picture show of homo life such as a great artist can give, surprises even the trivial and the selfish into that attention to what is apart from themselves, which may be chosen the raw material of moral sentiment. ... Art is the nearest thing to life; information technology is a style of amplifying experience and extending our contact with our fellow-men beyond the premises of our personal lot.
What Eliot is implying is that art is capable of inducing 1 of the most profound aspects of empathy: the ability to sensitize the states to the emotions of other people, transcending the limits of our own experiences and perspective. This wasn't territory that Aristotle covered.
In Bharat, at that place has been a literary tradition parallel to that of the Due west that does address this topic. In this Eastern tradition, readers' and audience members' emotions have had a more key role. The idea in Indian poetics is that fictional characters and fictional situations have to be created in the minds of readers and audition members by suggestion. The Sanskrit term for this suggestion is dhvani. This attribute of the tradition is not so unlike from Aristotle'due south idea of the earth-creating attribute of mimesis. But the Eastern notion, for which there is no Aristotelian parallel, is that what is suggested to readers or audience members in their empathically imagined worlds are special literary emotions, called rasas. (See sidebar.)
The job of writers or actors is to write or act in such a way that the reader/audition experiences these rasas. The Indian theorists thought that we experienced rasas because, by means of the suggestiveness of the poetry and the actors' skills, memories would be brought to heed from the whole range of past lives. We moderns would probably now say that we feel emotions even from outside our own experience because of our kinship with the rest of humanity. But here is the important point that was stressed by the Indian theorists: Rasas are like everyday emotions, except that we experience these literary emotions without the thick crust of egotism that often blinds u.s. to the implications of our ordinary emotions in our daily lives. For instance, if we are sexually attracted to someone in ordinary life, nosotros tin become rather selfish. Indeed in the Due west, falling in dear is often given as a reason for suspending other social obligations. In a play or novel, however, we not but feel empathically with the character in love, but we tin feel with other characters as well. The idea of a rasa is that we can feel the emotion, but likewise understand its social implications without our usual, frequently self-interested, involvement. We can experience the energizing aspects of love, simply also—depending on the context—understand its potential effects on others.
You may be surprised to learn that, in the West, the person who seems to have been the first to write about empathic processes in literature was Adam Smith, who became famous for his ideas about how the marketplace regulated itself every bit if past an "invisible hand." Smith's abiding interest was in the glue that holds society together. His kickoff book was The Theory of Moral Sentiments. In it he argued that an important component of this glue is what I am here calling empathy, which he chosen sympathy or compassion. Reading, he argued, draws on sympathy, because we necessarily become an interested but "impartial spectator" in other lives. We go involved in what is going on in the story, but not as if it were happening to us direct. We might become angry in sympathy with a protagonist, but without the narrow-minded vindictiveness that can occur when injustices bear upon us direct. The argument is the same as that of the rasa theorists, although it seems unlikely that Smith knew near them.
Reading sure kinds of fiction, then, is the very model of how we might properly view events in our social world. It is right that they engage our emotions, as if they were happening to someone with whom nosotros are closely involved, only not directly to us. In literature we feel the pain of the downtrodden, the anguish of defeat, or the joy of victory—but in a condom space. In this space, we tin can, every bit information technology were, practice empathy. Nosotros can refine our human capacities of emotional understanding. We can hone our power to experience with other people who, in ordinary life, might seem too foreign—or likewise threatening—to elicit our sympathies. Perhaps, then, when we return to our real lives, we can meliorate empathize why people act the mode they do, and react with circumspection, even compassion, toward them.
In her volume Poetic Justice, philosopher Martha Nussbaum has taken Adam Smith's argument farther and claimed that reading, peculiarly of sure novels, not only uses our faculties as sympathetic spectators, simply information technology exercises them in such a way as to make united states of america better citizens when information technology comes to social issues such as justice. Nussbaum points out that what we really hateful past justice is not just mechanically applying a dominion book. It involves being able to empathise imaginatively and deeply what is going on both for perpetrators and for victims. It is difficult to remember how this tin be ameliorate achieved than through sure kinds of literature. Even some television shows, such equally Police force and Order, are written to enable the viewer to enter imaginatively into both sides of issues such as racism, women'southward rights, and questions about whether people who are seriously mentally ill can human action voluntarily.
Reading can exist an escape—a ride on an emotional roller coaster. But nosotros tin can also read and go to the theater to extend our sympathies. In Romeo and Juliet, nosotros can feel for the boyish Juliet as she finds herself in dear with someone her parents hate considering he belongs to the wrong family. In The Tempest, nosotros can feel for the aging Prospero as he nears the end of his career. Our feelings are for these characters, but they are our own feelings. In the hands of writers like William Shakespeare or George Eliot, we can perhaps empathize these feelings amend than if they were caused by events in our own lives. Works of fiction depict on our skills of empathy, and allow us to practice these skills. Then not but do they extend our individual experience, but they tin become topics of word with others, who can show usa fifty-fifty further implications of our emotions than what we had perceived ourselves.
Source: https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/a_feeling_for_fiction
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