In season 3 premier of The Handmaid’s Tale, Serena Joy burns down the Waterford house. About 30 minutes into the episode, June is seen standing outside Serena’s room, running her fingers through what looks like wisps of smoke in the air. The soundtrack is subtle, yet nudging - like a repressed memory being set free, taking an ominous shape in reality. As June follows the smoke, she finds herself in front of Serena’s bedroom, the doors half-closed. The scene begins like this - Serena is standing in front of a bed that is in flames - the bed, the ‘ceremonial’ bed. As gigantic tongues of fire circle around the frame of the bed, starting as if a mutiny against the roof, the walls of that house, Serena stands motionless, staring at the fire, a slight quiver in her lips, almost as if by finally exercising her will in this suicidal yet liberating demonstration, she is trying to feel that uncontrollable mutiny of the fire in her bones. The scene is sombre and spine-chilling at the same time. It is like a piece of post-apocalyptic music created by someone who can read destiny - someone who could both see the apocalypse as well as what was to rise in its wake. The next moment, June calls out Serena’s name, with no sign of panic or any sense of emergency. “Serena, come on,” says June - decidedly, discerningly, as she stretches a hand out for Serena. And they leave the room - Serena, the heroine of the dystopia within our story, in many ways its creator, the evil to our own heroine June, our protagonist. And yet, this is not a good-versus-evil story. No story ever is.
The first episode of season 3 begins with June asking Commander Lawrence to take her to her daughter, Hannah. June decides that she cannot leave without her daughter. Meanwhile, her baby Nichole, is gone. Emily is taking her north across the border to Canada, to freedom. And Serena is left with nothing - she wakes up, her face attacked by despair, grief, her little finger cut, her hand bandaged. Serena’s character, at this point, seems truly, deeply poignant. Watching her set fire to her house, keeping in mind the specific place which this event occupies in the entire story - the past and the present - one is forced to come face to face with a rather fundamental question about stories, characters and people in general.
During my days in the university (this makes me sound very old - even though it is not a fact, it is still a very true feeling these days), I often caught myself trying to understand empathising with literary characters as a mental process. On certain perfect days, I found myself doing it with the narrative voice, and the author, too. The question, ‘why do we empathise’ with certain characters is a much more loaded one. It involves asking oneself, what is empathy? Why do we feel it? How does that feeling feel? It was obvious to me that not everyone empathises with the characters I empathise with - we all have our own soft spots for our own reasons. While reading Anna Karenina for a course that was called ‘the human condition’, the whole class would often find itself debating why a character deserves the reader’s empathy in one particular scene, over another character in the same scene. In those debates, empathy was understood as a literary-given - we debated empathy as something that readers inevitably feel, it is a phenomenon that inevitably occurs during the process of reading. As students of literature we just get it. And so when we defend our empathy for a complex character in a complex work like Anna Karenina, we do it with help of instances from the work itself. In other words, we debate the circumstances of that work, that world. We do not debate empathy.
In such debates, there is always a lot of meat left on the bones that we discard. Empathy, I feel, is an interesting feeling because it really involves a displacement - a displacement of the self onto the other. While during our debates we went with a general assumption that perfect empathy was not possible - and this is the reason why all of us could not empathise with one given character, even if it was the protagonist herself - I do not think that that is really the case. While perfect empathy is hard to achieve, it is not impossible to describe what it may look like. In the words that academic like, it is possible to have a theory of empathy.
In order to do that, as I said, empathy must be studied as a mental process, a state of being whose configurations it is possible to abstract and theorise. Take Serena for example. It is not enough to say that she deserves our empathy because she is “human too”, or because she did really love baby Nichole whom she had to let go in an act of truly unconditional love. it is not enough to say that we empathise with her because in the world that she helped create for a better future, in that world of her dreams she was punished by her husband - twice, physically. These are facts - the circumstances given to us. One does not empathise with people simply because of what happened with them - it is neither the human in itself, nor the condition by itself that evokes empathy in us for the other. Empathy is both a function of the human-coefficient as well as the condition-coefficient — and still, it is more.
To elaborate what I think the course on ‘the human condition’ was really about, the human condition moves us because when we find ourselves in the moment where the other person standing right in front of us is evoking a feeling of empathy or commiseration in us - in that moment we see in them, or rather on them, on their countenance, signs generated from what I think is a more fundamental cognitive location than values like compassion and empathy.
The process, however, needs to be broken down. We say that the other evokes empathy in us, when really that evocation comes at the end of a number of feelings that are first assimilated and accommodated, to borrow from Piaget’s theory of knowledge. Empathy is really the end product of the process that happens in that moment, that encounter. Empathy is the realisation. To be specific, it is the realisation of the self in the other. In order to reach that point of realisation - which admittedly happens very quickly in most cases - a series of smaller, more elemental realisations are made. In other words, empathy is the product of a knowledge of the self vis a vis the other. This knowledge shares qualitative aspects with other kinds of knowledge that we as human beings acquire. This is perhaps best explained through analogies.
I think that the feelings that are produced in an encounter with the other are similar to the feelings that are produced in our encounters with certain phenomena, ideas, even art. These may be situations like one’s first real visit to a planetarium (one where the observer realises her relative insignificance with respect to the cosmos), finding one’s favourite song (there is one - ask yourself, what could be the musical counterpart of your epitaph?), finally falling in love, reaching the summit of a big mountain after a particularly tough trek, giving birth to another human…I think that when a human being is truly moved - moved: displaced, lifted off the ground, changed, having a realisation such that the old configuration of each cell in our body seems wrong, not enough, in need of a transformation - being truly moved is really a feeling of becoming something else, or rather becoming more - of the other, and really of oneself. It is a feeling of overwhelming pleasure at the face of ground-breaking knowledge.
The knowledge here pertains to the self becoming more, so to speak. To be able to perfectly empathise is therefore, I think, a capability. In the game of life, it is like a new level unlocked. In this level one has perfect understanding of the other. One inhabits the other’s world, metaphysically speaking. In this level of being one is reminded of the potential, the possibility of being more - just like the existential reminder slapped across one’s face upon the mountain summit or under a simulation of the milky way in the planetarium. Just like that, this reminder works as a paradox. With the realisation of one’s insignificance, smallness, comes the realisation of that which is not insignificant and small - that other out there which becomes the source of meaning. It is the other - the stars, the mountain, the character in the story - that confers meaning upon our realised insignificance. Empathy, therefore, is the moment at the end of a paradigm shift in one’s emotional as well as existential consciousness, where one becomes one - one whole - only through the realisation of the other one. It is where one’s condition of being human is expanded and there is a new truth, a new condition to live by, one which is not constructed by external forces of morality the way values may be.
When we truly empathise with another person, we become them. We transcend the boundaries and rules of existing in our own minds, our own bodies, and we inhabit the emotional world of the other. Any of us who have felt the joy of learning something new that has then changed their lives, will understand on a smaller scale the joy of learning - and here, it is the learning of an other being. **
** I am currently in the process of trying to fork this theory of empathy through Haraway’s manifesto for cyborgs. I am also trying to reference this with work that has already been done on empathy. I do not yet know what that is going to look like, but working on hunches is what we do. It might as well be a dead-end. This, however, does not take away from the joy of talking about things, so thanks for reading!