Do We Read to Escape Pain, to Understand it, or to Feel it?
Elaine Scarry, the author of The Body in Pain, claims that “To have great pain is to have certainty. To hear that another person has pain is to have doubt.” She explores the concept of empathy as it relates to human suffering. While it’s true that pain is not equally distributed nor an equally shared experience, Scarry’s quote manages to question the experience of reading, and asks if it’s a futile action. People read to push their understanding of the world beyond their own lives, but what are the limitations and revelations readers face when attempting immersion into a fictional world? How can a society with little capability to empathize read truthfully and with pleasure?
If Scarry’s claim is true, this would imply that reading does not enhance intellectual intelligence — that the act of storytelling is a pointless endeavor — albeit art does invoke minimal emotion, even if only to clinically absorb information through the senses. Therefore, if so many of the canonized classics explore the common theme of pain (The Great Gatsby, Romeo and Juliet, Grapes of Wrath, The Catcher in the Rye) then the obvious question comes to mind: What is appealing about experiencing the unnecessary pain and grief of others?
The first conclusion is that humans have become desensitized to pain. In small doses, the anesthesia of daily life numbs people against the wear of living — twenty-four hour news, ten day diets, twelve packs of beer, people six feet under, one way streets. It is this exposure to the mantras of adulthood that results in neither fear nor sadness when reading of heartache and grief, but the simple realization that reality’s grim circumstances could be grimmer. Sometimes, the knowledge of pain numbs instead of gives certainty that brutality and cruelty exist. Pain, because of its consistency, has become normalized.
Another reason for humanity’s search for metaphorical burdens could be that people innately find challenge and strife to be pleasurable mind games. Afterall, how else could crime novels and the news be successful without this lust for animosity? Resilience is the most remarkable quality of humans, and overcoming adversity fulfills the desire to be useful and invincible, even if one could argue that people are neither. Humans like to have problems so that they can solve them. And if no challenges in life present themselves, humans will invent them as heroes and villains in books.
It could also be that writers, filmmakers, and artists give viewers unrealistic representations of pain; as J.D Salinger said in Franny and Zooey, “He thinks everything sentimental is tender, everything brutal is a slice of realism” (Salinger 102). Are humans simply experiencing vicarious simulations without the sensors plugged into wall-sockets? Of course, pain represented in art is not pain itself.
Aligning with Scarry’s beliefs, one would say that humans read because they want to experience suffering, fill an emotional void; challenging her beliefs would mean that humans are searching for an escape from aching. Books can accomplish either feat, however, by making a person recognize their own pain. For instance, books can romanticize mental illness or provide comfort to a person suffering from mental illness. Books can plague, but can also give hospice to those who suffer death prematurely. Perhaps reading is not meant to bolster the empathy of a person at all, but is a solitary journey of self discovery.
Good writers with great empathy, like therapists, will attempt to disprove that “to hear that another person has pain is to have doubt” (Scarry 56). They are not interested in the
anatomical qualities of art and people, but rather how both evoke emotion. But why do people instinctively feel emotion for some people or events and not for others. How can humans know if these dispositions are morally correct? For instance, why do humans feel sadness for a victim, but not equally sad for a perpetrator, even if they have also experienced great pain? And why do the sufferings of those farther in distance seem to be less real? Even if empathy can be conjured by a human, the feelings of displeasure or grief or sadness is not for another, but for themself; humans grieve for their loss, that they could be next, that something they built or made can be destroyed (because that means the builder can be destroyed too). Maybe books do not open the mind to empathy, but enact survival instincts, give the reader warnings, make them fear for all that can be lost. If humans can easily turn a page in the paper that writes of war in another country, if people can talk of crime novels as something they “read it all in one night,” if the material is dark and so grim, yet it can be read and forgotten unlike present pain in a person’s body, how can it be said that novels give true experiences of grief, strife, and strain? Humans are fascinated by pain, obsessed over the possibility of experiencing it, yet the question Scarry asks still remains relevant.
The Great Gatsby is a famous portrayal of how accountability affects empathy. How do humans forgive intentional carelessness? Faced with characters that are — in their meretricious, rich lives — wholly unredeemable, how are people expected to have empathy for those who can not reciprocate the feeling? Why is it easier to forgive the person who dug their own grave versus the person who fills it? Fitzgerald asks this question of accountability and pain: Everyone will die, but while alive, why is it easier to forgive the dead than the damned.
Empathy is also greater towards the innocent, towards bystanders and collateral damage. The Catcher in the Rye and Tim O’Brien’s chapter, “How to Tell a War Story,” are both prominent examples of this human phenomenon.
The juxtaposition between preservation, destruction, and their connotations (preservation is seen as a holy action while destruction is seen as rash) is challenged — as well as the reader’s own preserved ideas — in Things Fall Apart. Achebe shows the crude nature of both the missionaries and the aboriginals. While the missionaries placed a culture in hot water, dissolving traditions, the reader partially understands that many sacred traditions of the aboriginals are violent. Humans have a protective nature of tradition, and if the world’s societies value tradition over people, how acutely do humans understand the pain people attempt to recreate within novels? What side do people fall on when everything falls apart: loyalty for the human race or tradition?
“To have great pain is to have certainty. To hear that another person has pain is to have doubt,” (Scarry 56) is fine writing advice, but it is also a challenge to the disposition of human nature. Humans are numb and apathetic, uncertain creatures with provocative opinions, impulsive but hell-bent on preserving archaic practices, and above all — duly complicated.
Even though human capacity for empathy might be limited, an individual’s capacity for love is truly astounding. As Tim O’Brien said, “It wasn’t a war story. It was a love story” (O’Brien 81). And of this, I am certain. So I will settle for vague metaphors, similes, and diluted experience to continue the pleasure of asking the questions I can only hope to match with answers.
