Thursday, August 16, 2012
Empathy and Reality
I was struck, after my
two hours plus fully conscious operation for a detached retina (gory details in
Latest News: www.chronometerpublications.me
), how doctors must inflict pain to do their business. Also that, in the main,
they will have little idea of the depth and variety of pain that a patient
suffers. The best they can do is empathise. Maybe we wouldn’t want them to
fully comprehend and feel our suffering at their hands. It might impede their cool
professionalism and disinterested decision making. Emotional doctor? Probably
not.
When it comes to
writing, the picture changes. Travel books are enormously popular. So are cod
historical fictions with a researched background such as The Da Vinci Code and
remarkable classics such as James Joyce’s Ulysses. People read them knowing
that the writer is giving a first hand account of his or her experiences.
Autobiography in all its forms is exceedingly seductive.
So, is out and out fiction better
for the writer having experienced what his or her protagonists are being put
through? Is the fact that I have had the eye battle more likely to improve my
depiction of suffering, generally? I think so. Having read some Joseph Conrad
recently, it seems likely that his books are enormously enriched by his
experience on the oceans and rivers of the world. But having had extreme
experiences does not make a great writer, per se. It is how the writer can them
move on and apply the essence of such experiences to events they could never
have encountered, themselves. For
example, Sci Fi writers have not experienced space or time travel but something
in their biographies may provide the raw material for it. William Golding’s sea trilogy is based
upon general knowledge of the history of the colonisation of Australia by
British immigrants plus the reading of a single manual on ships of that period.
But Golding could then infuse his refined understanding of human psychology within this exotic canvass.
William Blake
suggested that you can see the world from the bottom of your garden. We write
from our histories, whether limited or expansive, but the greatest literary
imaginations can utilise personal experiences like cookery ingredients, making
an array of cakes, varied and delectable and extraordinarily different from
the originals. They combine empathy with reality.
When I wrote Azimuth,
there was much of it that was based upon my growing experience in a
natural pre-internet world
– but transmuted into fable, adventure and action that bore little
relation to
my biography.The pain that the Magus suffers at various points in the
trilogy is probably better expressed because of the pain I once
suffered. Maybe I could now write it even more grippingly after recent
events!
Labels: #writing: empathy and reality
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