Empathy-based defenses of fiction may only reach what readers already find familiar

Evidence

This is a popular line of argument among writers, generally used to bolster claims about the novel form as a conduit for empathy. Ahdaf Soueif, for instance, sees the writer’s duty as being to create characters who stimulate empathy in readers—“such powerful empathy that they want to reach through the print to help or comfort them.… A work of fiction lives by empathy—the extending of myself into another’s, the willingness to imagine myself in someone else’s shoes.” These thoughts are a handy reminder of the basic tasks of fiction, but we need also to distinguish active transcultural empathy from a lazily universalizing notion of shared human experience that can encourage us to respond only to that which is already familiar. — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 32

Categorization

• XREF: Relevant to Reluctant Fundamentalist’s framing device: is Changez’s confessional mode engineered to solicit just this kind of reader empathy, or does Hamid’s structure resist it? This is the central contest-vs-reinforce question.
• QUESTION: Does the monologue form of The Reluctant Fundamentalist force ‘imagining myself in someone else’s shoes,’ or does Hamid undercut that empathic read — the reader must decide which.
• SEED: Essay angle: empathy as a technology of reading that may reproduce the very hierarchies it claims to overcome when fiction flattens difference to secure it.