pretty good ( )

Like a number of Quarterly Essays, this starts out from a question posed by Prime Minister John Howard. Though elsewhere inga Clendinnen calls Howard a "narrow man", and in spite of his hostility or at least indifference to intellectual life (scientists who talk about global warming are obviously misled; state funerals for a tycoon or a racing car driver but not for a playwright or a children's author; photo ops with elite sportsman, but a curl of the lip for elite artists and writers; pontifications about Australia's left wing intelligentsia having wilfully sided with murderous regimes), he seems to have kick-started a number of important public conversations. This one is about how history should be taught in schools, and as a logical flow-on, the nature of the discipline of history itself. Inga Clendinnen's essay makes its argument through considerations of "Waltzing Matilda", Anzac Day observances, Kate Grenville's claims for The Secret River, the Stolen Generations ... It's a huge pleasure to engage with her mind as she teases out the different importances of memory, story, myth/legend and history, and defends the discipline of history from being charged with building overarching national narratives, of whatever hue. At the same time, I'm experiencing the delicious pleasure of knowing that the next issue of Quarterly Essay will almost certainly include a response from Kate Grenville to Inga's irritated aspersions on her claims of historical status for her novel. Maybe David Malouf, also selected for dishonourable citation, will add his bit. I'm not hankering for a bloodletting between novelists and historians, but for a thoughtful discussion of the nature of historical fiction. I don't think that Inga's assertion that a novel's aim is to delight rather than to uncover what really happened quite covers the teh reality, and I look forward to reading what smart people have to say in response to her excellent essay.

http://homepage.mac.com/shawjonathan/iblog/C1020611578/E20061102232358/index.htm... ( )

Is Empathy Necessary?: A little bit review, a lot more question

According to the very candid historian and author Inga Clendinnen, the "novelist's gift of empathetic imagination" is misleading.

In her 70-page essay, The History Question: Who Owns the Past? (published in Quarterly Essay, Issue 23, 2006) she writes, "the 'insights' of empathy are untestable...Historical novelists spend time getting the material setting right, but then, misled by their confidence in their novelist's gift of empathetic imagination, they sometimes project back into that carefully constructed material setting contemporary assumptions and current obsessions."

The question is, misleading to whom?

Is it misleading to the author herself? to the reader? to the critic? to the egotistically-infringed academic? to the babysitter, the cat in the alley, the doorman, the barrista, the v.p. of marketing, et al?

And, who cares?

As I am reading a work of fiction, regardless of its origins, do or should I care if I’m being mislead? Only if what I’m reading is shallow and predictable, but then if it were, would I be mislead?

Should the author care if she’s been mislead by her subject? Only if it results in bad writing, I presume.

Should the barrista care if he’s been mislead? Ask the barrista. If he works at Starbucks, at least he has health insurance. Who can't empathize with that BASIC HUMAN RIGHT? (Note shifting pronoun throughout for sake of equality.)

Being mislead is a personal choice, if not a preference. And those that don’t want to be mislead, should not be reading the newspaper, let alone a novel, or a memoir for that matter.

Novel - a fictitious prose narrative of considerable length and complexity, portraying characters and usually presenting a sequential organization of action and scenes*

But empathy is such a beautiful and relevant quality. We (as in myself and people I know...I dare not assume a universal we in this format) can not relate without it. Empathy is what allows us to move past judgment to compassion. And compassion is what drives us (ditto). While not all people are capable of empathy, whether due to mental or genetic disorders, it's what keeps my humanity busting out of its bones, and dare I presume, yours as well.

Last night, I fortuitously watched The Hoax, a much lauded factual movie about a washed-up author (played by Richard Gere) who receives a million dollar contract to write the autobiography of the reclusive Texan billionaire, Howard Hughes. Only everything, including the verified letter of agreement from Hughes, is a hoax.

A great premise for a movie, right? Historically based no less, right?

But the characters. Oh, the characters. I could not, for the empathetic life of me, empathize with them. They were just too unlikable for me to become engaged, to care. And in their inability to evoke empathy from me, their experiences and actions became pigeonholed as…predictable.

So, is the “novelist’s empathetic imagination” misleading?

Probably, to a certain extent, if you’re a lawyer or the editor of HIPAA policies and procedures (which I have been the latter not the former), but one of the reasons for reading Philip Roth's fiction, Anne Waldman's poetry, Inga Clendinnen's accounts of history, People Magazine, or the Sunday funnies** is to exit one reality, that world of presumed innocence/guilt/right/wrong and enter into a new one. What really should be said, is that the writer's imagination is leading.

The empathetic imagination is what leads us into the realm of the text - believable or unbelievable as it may inherently be.

*novel. Dictionary.com. Dictionary.com Unabridged (v 1.1). Random House, Inc. http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/novel (accessed: February 16, 2008).

**According to Wikipedia, the Reading Eagle boasts the "Biggest Comics Section in the Land". ( )