Empathy Empathie

Literature studies
Marie Mianowski, Univ. Grenoble Alpes, ILCEA4, 38000 Grenoble, France

As a professor of Anglophone literature, I work on representations of space and time in Irish and English-language literature of the former British Empire. Gradually, my focus as a reader has moved on towards a more concrete and material reading of representations, carrying my attention towards the manner in which the ideas of ‘place’ and ‘home’ are represented, particularly in literatures where questions of migration are central. But it took me several detours before I understood how empathy could enrich my relationships with others and nourish my literary readings and, therefore, my teaching.

I have worked extensively on the short stories and novels of Colum McCann, the Irish author born in Dublin in 1965 and living in New York since the 1990s, whose writing often strives to intertwine different time periods and different characters in one place, blending fictional characters and characters who actually existed (New York City in This Side of Brightness (1998) and Let the Great World Spin (2009), Belfast, New York City and Newfoundland in TransAtlantic (2013), Jerusalem in Apeirogon (2020)). His texts are cut through by the tragedy of life, but by hope, as well -- hope for the characters in the way the different novels weave narratives and mingle destinies, as well hope for the reader and for the world because these novels always open onto an optimistic horizon.

For Colum McCann, every individual carries a story to tell. Taking the time to share our stories and listen to others is a way of making our world a better, more peaceful place. So, in 2013, McCann founded the association Narrative4 with the goal of fostering the exchange of stories between individuals of all social, national, and religious backgrounds in order to promote what he calls “radical empathy.” The principal is simple and terribly effective: groups of two are randomly created within a group of ten or so volunteers, seated in a circle and led by two facilitators. After reminding participants of the prevailing rules of compassion and active, respectful listening, the lead facilitator forms the pairs and introduces the theme of the exchange. Each group breaks off and shares their stories on the given theme. After around twenty minutes, the circle comes back together and each member retells the story that was confided to them by their partner, to the group at large and using the first-person singular. It is this interior displacement demanded by the oral narrative in the first-person singular which truly marks the originality of this story exchange: concretely grasping the responsibility that comes with shouldering someone else’s personal story and sharing it publicly. The lived experience of empathy within the frame of this story exchange carries multiple repercussions, at once within each pair as well as within the group as a whole.

In December 2018, I travelled to Limerick in order to take part in facilitator training for these types of workshops at Narrative4’s Irish global center, and I have since facilitated story exchanges and initiations to the concept of radical empathy in various contexts, both in-person and remotely (master’s level students, university colleagues, immigrant groups in Grenoble). I find that the story exchange according to Narrative4 is a particularly good introduction to the transcultural literature seminar that I teach my master’s level students, since the texts that we study are texts written in a language other than the author’s mother tongue.

The notions of empathy and compassion are often used interchangeably. Radical empathy does not mean experiencing the emotions of one’s partner; it is not a way of suffering with that person, but of understanding what they feel while maintaining a certain emotional distance. On the other hand, through the displacement that it induces, empathy decenters us and creates a dynamic outside of the self. It widens our field of vision in understanding the world. In this sense, empathy also helps us to avoid what Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie calls “The danger of a single story.” From my point of view, empathy is thus not a magical virtue; it is a human skill to be cultivated, among others, and it is a point of reference ethically fundamental in life and pedagogically useful in literature.

Cite this item: Marie Mianowski, “Empathy”, translated by Lauren Fabrizio, Performascope: Interdisciplinary Lexicon of Performance and Research-Creation, Grenoble: Université Grenoble Alpes, 2021, [online]: http://performascope.univ-grenoble-alpes.fr/en/detail/177821