The Limits of Imagination
Are there limits to acts of the sympathetic imagination? Are specific, extremely physical or emotional experiences simply beyond the reach of the aesthetic? This is not a topic writers want to confront. Doing so opens up a debate that moves us away from a simple version of empathy towards reciprocity.
#literature | #Coetzee | #imagination
Disgrace and the Sympathetic Imagination
In J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace (1999) the retired academic David Lurie presses his daughter, Lucy, to report a rape to the police. Lucy tells him, “you don’t know what happened. […] No, you don’t begin to know”’ (Coetzee 2000, 123) His lover reinforces the message, ‘you weren’t there. You don’t know what happened’. Laurie questions this assault on the powers of sympathetic imagination:
[h]e is baffled. Where, according to Bev Shaw, according to Lucy, was he not? In the room where the intruders were committing their outrages? Do they think he does not know what rape is? Do they think he has not suffered with his daughter? What more could he have witnessed than he is capable of imagining? Or do they think that, where rape is concerned, no man can be where the woman is? Whatever the answer, he is outraged, outraged at being treated like an outsider. (Coetzee 2000, 123)
Lurie takes his belief in the strength of the sympathetic imagination from his self-acknowledged master, William Wordsworth. And yet he is blind to another act of violence, his rape of a student. He grounds his Romanticist worldview on a quasi-mystical conviction in the existence of a single reality. It is shareable at will between all individuals (Scarry 1998, 43) Think of the infamous Romantic lamp of the imagination pushing out into the world beyond it.
Necessarily, the contemporary literature industry shares this conviction in the imagination. So much so that the enduring legacy of Romanticism can be hard to spot.
What can we imagine?
Lurie comes to realize that his understanding of rape must always be limited, but that there is one sense in which he can understand being there:
[H]e can, if he concentrates, if he loses himself, be there, be the men, inhabit them, fill them with the ghost of himself. The question is, does he have it in him to be the woman? (Coetzee 2000, 160)
When we glibly give the sympathetic imagination the power to easily translate from the experience of one into the knowledge of another, we risk harm. In Disgrace, this translation allows the meaning and experience of a rape, a moment of extreme objecthood entirely out of kilter with ordinary day-to-day shared reality, to be subsumed, denigrated, and dismissed (Du Toit 2009, 94-5)
It seems perfectly reasonable to use inference for some imaginative experiences. I can, on the balance of probabilities, probably imagine what it feels like for you to taste an apple. This is not the question. The question is whether some experiences are so alien, so removed from ordinary experience, that they are inaccessible. And if so, where does the point of demarcation lie? Are we to simply subsume this within the word trauma?
Lurie had convinced himself that what he had done to his own student was not rape: Not rape, not quite that, but undesired nevertheless, undesired to the core. As though she had decided to go slack, die within herself for the duration, like a rabbit when the jaws of the fox close on its neck (Coetzee 2000, 25).
Not quite that: so the story goes.
Elizabeth Costello
Coetzee’s fiction repeatedly and subtly dramatizes these problems. It often deploys the imagination in pursuit of its boundaries. And does so in full knowledge of its capacity to hurt itself and others.
Take Elizabeth Costello (1999). Here, Coetzee imagines Costello as the imaginary author of the fictitious novel, The House on Eccles Street. This is a novel in which Costello imagines herself as James Joyce’s Molly Bloom. Bloom is, in turn, a figment of Joyce’s imagination. This setup leads Costello to the conclusion ‘there is no limit to the extent to which we can think ourselves into the being of another’, whether that be ‘a bat or a chimpanzee or an oyster’. Because these beings all share the common ‘substrate of life’, for Costello, ‘there are no bounds to the sympathetic imagination’ (Coetzee 2004, 80)
Wendy Doniger, amongst others, sides with Costello. The basic fact of being, Doninger says, is itself enough to allow an ‘empathic leap of faith, the Kantian belief that what hurts me hurts you – and hurts horses’ (Doniger 1999, 103). Except, of course, that as Coetzee’s novel progresses, any solid ground to support that perspective evaporates in a multiplicity of ironic points of view.
Dennett vs Nagel
Daniel Dennett, countering the locus classicus advanced by Nagel, has explained what is really at stake here. If, according to the monist position of physicalism, there is but one ‘substrate of life’, then the very idea that consciousness might be a unique exception (that is, a second substance) is a ‘dubious’ vitalist legacy, ‘some infusion of wonder-stuff, élan vital’ (Dennett 2017, 192; 1991, 439). In Dennett’s view, we can imagine the Other because we are but one stuff; we should all just try harder.
The consequences of what we can and cannot imagine are profound. And not only for what we can or can't write or should and should not guess at. As Costello suggests, one issue is that if one can imagine a horse’s emotional life, it becomes increasingly difficult to want to eat it.
Coetzee often leaves these problems hanging. Costello’s sympathy with the otherness of animals leaves her estranged from humans. She ends the novel unable to see the callousness caused by simplistic analogies derived from the imagination, best typified by how she identifies the abattoir with the Holocaust’s gas chambers.
Does Coetzee ever resolve this? I’m not sure he does. We are left with only fleeting conclusions.
What remains
The tenuous nature of what might be preserved for the aesthetic is captured best by his non-fictional admission that only ‘by a strenuous effort of sympathetic projection one can reach a flickering intuition of what it is like’ (Coetzee and Kurtz 2015, 135-6)
Strenuous. Flickering. Intuition.
Coetzee’s work appears to arise from this incredibly tender, tenuous, self-conscious compromise with the imagination.*1*
But that is not the approach most contemporary fiction takes.
Footnotes
*1* In the [Master of St Petersburg](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TheMasterofPetersburg)[ (2004)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TheMasterofPetersburg) Coetzee has his fictional Dostoevsky suggest to the bureaucratic police officer Maximov that the unique value of fiction results from its ability to provide access to a different type of conscious experience because of the multiplicity of perspectives, that are unavailable to individual perception.
Bibliography
Coetzee, J.M. 2000. Disgrace. Penguin.
Coetzee, J.M. 2004. Elizabeth Costello: Eight Lessons. Vintage.
Coetzee, J.M., and Arabella Kurtz. 2015. [The Good Story: Exchanges on Truth, Fiction and Psychotherapy](https://www.google.co.uk/books/edition/TheGoodStory/dLVSBgAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=0). Vintage.
Dennett, Daniel C. 1991. [Consciousness Explained](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ConsciousnessExplained)_. Little, Brown.
Dennett, Daniel C. 2017. [From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FromBacteriatoBachandBack)_. W.W. Norton.
Doniger, Wendy. 1999. ‘Reflections’. In J.M. Coetzee, [The Lives of Animals](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TheLivesofAnimals)_, edited by Amy Gutmann. Princeton University Press.
Scarry, Elaine. 1998. ‘The Difficulty of Imagining Other Persons’. In The Handbook of Interethnic Coexistence, edited by Eugene Weiner. Abraham Fund.
Du Toit, Louise. 2009. A Philosophical Investigation of Rape: The Making and Unmaking of the Feminine Self. Routledge.