empathy

It seems that it's becoming all the rage to talk about empathy; John Green, when he spoke in Pittsburgh Friday night, opened his talk with some words about empathy. This is a good thing; I'm hardly going to fight against a call for greater empathy.

I would, however, like to point out that I have been talking and thinking and writing about empathy for quite some time now - at least since fall of 2009, when I know I explicitly mentioned it, more than once, in my childhood's books class. Probably longer, really, because in some ways empathy is a core aspect of my dissertation, which has been in the works since 2008 for way too long.

As a person who is perenially ahead of the trends - usually so far ahead that I just look like an unfashionable nerd-dork - I would just like to state for the record that I got in on this empathy thing before it was cool to talk about empathy.

Just like I started listening seriously to Radiohead before the masses did (way before OK Computer).
And I started wearing chuck taylor allstar high tops in junior high school, which for me was (good lord) circa 1990. I had to hunt all over for my first pair of chucks, which were dark green, and which I still own and on rare occasion, still wear. They bear the marks of adolescence, including the rubber edging being inked up and picked at, and a rather mortifying peace sign drawn on the rubber toe of one show. Thankfully, that has faded over time.

Anyway, I offer these tidbits of avant-garde behaviors as further support to my claim as an early-adopter of empathy advocacy. I don't claim priority, just early-adopter status.

That's all. When I have more energy, I need to write about E. Lockhart: the pseudofeminism of her books, and the trouble with the newest Ruby Oliver book.

Marcelo

I Dropped Everything And Read yesterday (after work, anyway), and zipped through Marcelo in the Real World.
And I think the hype is justified. It was a lovely book, and a smart one. Marcelo is a wonderfully engaging character, intriguing and peculiar and very charming. 

I don't know anything, really, about autism-spectrum "disorders" (which, as Marcelo makes clear, is not quite the right word to use), so I cannot speak to the verisimilitude of Marcelo's particular situation. But his difference comes through clearly through his narration, and through his use of third person in conversation (a quirk I found absolutely delightful. it's such a small, simple way to mark difference, and it casts every conversation in a slightly different way).

Francisco Stork evidently drew on his own experiences to create Marcelo, so I take his (Stork's) word for it that there is some kind of authenticity. Then again, perhaps creating an authentically autistic character doesn't matter; since autism seems to come in an infinite variety of forms, how could we ever know authenticity? And it doesn't matter - almost - what diagnosis Marcelo has, because that isn't the point of the book. The point of the book is everything else - his relationship with his father, his relationship with Jasmine, with God, with ponies, with Ixtel.

I also really like that Stork made Marcelo an attractive person, physically. Maybe my mind was set wrong as I read, but it seemed to me that, between the lines, we're made to understand that Marcelo is HOT. And I think, generally, people as a group don't tend to think of anyone with any kind of mental disorder/disability/difference as physically attractive, as sexy or hot or appealing. But why shouldn't they be?

I cannot say that Marcelo in the Real World was a life-changing book for me. But, like The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime, this one definitely shifted my perspective, again, on autism/autism spectrum. I think the justice angle of the book, the social justice and the sense of feminism that underlies a lot of the book, is hugely important, and for those reasons, I think I'll add Marcelo to my (so far very small) list of books about empathy and philanthropy. Altruism, maybe - I'm not sure what the word is. But I have a small collection of characters and books who are good, who DO good, for no other reason that because it is right to do good. The Brothers Cheeryble from Nicholas Nickleby were the first on my list.

I'm glad Marcelo has gotten so much good press lately; it deserves it (and so does its wonderful editrix, Cheryl Klein).

The Ear, The Eye & The Arm, and my brain

Tonight I tried teaching Nancy Farmer's The Ear, The Eye and The Arm for the first time. I'm fairly certain it was not a smash hit with my class; it was also one of those unfortunate classes where I felt myself talking seemingly ad infinitum (I do not like when this happens).

However, evidently my brain has been working hard at thinking about the book. One of the first questions that was raised was a great one: why is the book called The Ear, The Eye and The Arm? Ear, Eye and Arm are secondary characters at best. A number of people seemed baffled at their inclusion at all, and suggested the book might be better without them (or at least, that they are not necessary for the novel).

And I started babbling talking, and suddenly realized that the book is composed of a series of isolated communities: the group at Dead Man's Vlei, the Matsika family (including the Mellower) in their home, the English tribe in Borrowdale, the villagers of Resthaven, the residents of the Cow's Guts, the micro-world within the Mile-High MacIlwaine, the Masks & Gondwannans in their Embassy and hideout. Each of these groups is deficient in some way, damaged (or damaging) in some way. In a way, Farmer's novel seems a bit like a very oddball echo of Walter Benjamin's "The Storyteller" essay - all these disparate groups forming their own communities, and then the outsiders: Tendai, Ear, Eye and Arm. Rita and Kuda function as outsiders to a degree, but not quite in the same way.

It seems to me, somehow, that Tendai and Arm especially, but Ear and Eye as well, are integrative characters: it is their task to make sense of the communities and link them together into one. Both Tendai and Arm are possessed by the mhondoro, the spirit of the land, and are able to bring together - at the very end of the novel - a gaggle of unrelated people to defeat the outsiders, the Gondwannans. It is the She Elephant who levels one of the death blows to the Masks, but Arm, Tendai, Mother, diners and waiters from the Starlight Room all play a role in defeating the Masks.

There's just something very, very interesting going on in this book, with all these fragmented and fractured communities. Intentional withdrawal, exile, being cast out, being simply insular in a snobbish or reactionary way - and then in the midst, Tendai and Arm, both being lost in dreams and quasi-memories of other times and places, and Arm, poor wonderful Arm, being swept up in the tide of other people's emotions, being buffeted and crushed and occasionally, very occasionally, heartened.

I don't quite know what to do with any of this, to be honest, but I also was quite surprised to discover my brain had been working this out without my knowing it - because frankly, as I spoke in class, I was finding those words coming out of my mouth without my having planned them (a fact that was probably extremely evident, but was still sort of wondrous; I haven't had that kind of stream-of-conscious critical analysis in ages).

I still think The Ear, The Eye and The Arm is a remarkable book for the ways it privileges imagination and empathy, and for the way it blurs the lines of "good" and "bad" (whatever those terms mean). In particular, the privileging of empathy is so uncommon that to find it in a book like this one is like coming across an especially lush, large oasis in a desert.