Every act of learning is an act of using intelligence, adding someone else's knowledge to your mental library. Every act of empathy is an act of emotional equality, of matching another's reality to your own in order to understand it. I used the English language — not my own — to write these words.
The tyranny of our time is that, because the hero of modern fiction is the victim, our catalog of ways of injury has increased immeasurably. The array of possible crimes is so vast that we are left in a state of paralyzing hypervigilance, always on the defensive, always trying to cover up the complaint and avoid prosecution. Because it is difficult to create in a defensive environment, no region of life has suffered more from this than our art – trembling before the whip of cultural appropriation, artists are left with smaller and smaller boundaries of permission for who and what they can imagine. It's as if we have forgotten this name sympathy itself just over a century old, it was coined by Rilke and Rodin to describe the act of imagining a work of art that represents something outside of itself. We seem to have forgotten that, at its best, art is not a mirror but a kaleidoscope, throwing on the walls of our lives a thousand hues of experiences we have never lived. As a little girl in the mountains of Bulgaria in the early 1990s, I would never have known what it was like to be a boy on the North American prairies in the early 1900s if I hadn't read a novel by a German woman about a Lakota father and son. You may not know what it's like to be the long-suffering wife of a Siberian serf, but you have Dostoyevsky.
Troubled by this brutal disability, Zadie Smith offers a remedy for extraordinary strength and pain in one of the stories collected in He is dead and He is alive (public library), focused on realizing the folly of turning one's identity into a war given how changeable, inflexible, and scattered the first thing is. You write:
I've always realized that I'm a consistent person. For having so many conflicting voices pounding in my head. As a child, I was ashamed of it. Some people seem to feel strongly about themselves, so they know exactly who they are. I wasn't like that. I can never shake the suspicion that everything about me was the result of a series of unforeseen accidents – not the least of which was the 400 billion to one risk of my birth. As I saw it, even my strongest feelings and beliefs could have been different, if I had been a child of the next family down the hall, or a child of another century, another world, another God.
The era after Walt Whitman – a person completely different from himself with all the unselected variables that we take for granted in his personality – celebrated his contradictory masses, thinking to make his own, borrowed from the lives of others, real and imagined:
I rarely walked into a friend's house without wondering what it would be like to never leave. That is, what it would be like to be Polish or Ghanaian or Irish or Bengali, rich or poor, say these prayers or hold that politics. I was an equal opportunity voyeur. I wanted to know what it was like to be everyone. Above all, I wondered what it would be like to believe things I didn't believe… And what I did in life I did with books. I lived in them and I felt they lived in me. I felt like Jane Eyre and Celie and Mr. Biswas and David Copperfield. Our autobiographical links were rarely the same. I had never had a friend starve to death or be raped by my father or live in Trinidad or the Deep South or the nineteenth century. But I was sad and lost, sometimes desperate, often confused. It was because of those fragile emotional clues that I found myself feeling with these strangers in thought: I felt for them, for them, around them and for them, from my feelings, which, although remarkably small compared to the high dramas of fiction, still had some relationship with them, as do all human feelings. The characters' voices include all the other voices within me, working to obscure the concept of “my voice”. Or maybe it's better to say: I've never believed that I have a completely different voice from the many voices I hear, read, and internalize every day.
But if the purpose of art is to give us, in the perfect phrase of Iris Murdoch, “the opportunity to ignore ourselves,” then it is not a mistake but a natural advantage for the artist to have a self without limits, to be curious about the interior of other lives without discrimination, even in the most remote areas of possible experience. He offers an alternative to our counter-model of our culture of interpersonal curiosity:
What would our debates about fiction look like, I sometimes wonder, if the preferred vocabulary for this writing about others was not “cultural appropriation” but rather “interpersonal voyeurism” or “deep fascination” or “epidermal reinterpretation”? Our conversations will still be intense, maybe still angry – but I'm sure they won't be the same. Are we not so bad when dealing with inherited concepts? We allow them to think for us, and stand as place markers where we can't be bothered to think… I believe that the writer's job is to think for himself, although this job, for me, does not mean a fixed situation but an ongoing process: to think things anew, each time, in each new situation. This requires no small amount of mental flexibility. No respect for culture… should or ever will be completely stopped or protected from the tracks of history. There is always the possibility of radical change.
Invoking Whitman's timeless exhortation to “reexamine everything you have been told in school or church or in any book. [and] get rid of anything that insults your soul,” he adds:
Full disclosure: what offends my soul is the idea – popular in culture right now, and presented in varying degrees of sophistication – that we can and should only write about people who are fundamentally “like us”: racially, sexually, genetically, nationally, politically, personally. That only a deeply authorized autobiographical connection with the character can be a suitable basis for fiction. I do not believe in that. I wouldn't have written any of my books if I had.
What a beautiful reminder that art's invitation to imagine what it's like to be someone else is what allows us to discover the essence and glory of who and what we are. What a beautiful emphasis on the courage to be yourself the courage to be more than yourself, the courage to remember that but a thin veil woven by lucky events dating back to the Big Bang falls between you and not you, a veil that we have found a way to separate – books – to reduce the basic loneliness, isolation, and isolation.
