Difficulties of Ethical Life

11. Narrating Pain: The Ethics of Catharsis

11 Narrating Pain The Ethics of Catharsis R I C H A R D K E A R N E Y One of the most enduring ethical functions of narrative is catharsis. From the ancient Greeks to the present day, the healing powers of storytelling have been recognized and even revered. In his Poetics, Aristotle spoke about the purgative character of representation as a double act of muthosmimesis (plotting-imitating). More specifically, he defined the function of katharsis as ‘‘purgation of pity and fear.’’ This comes about, he explains, whenever the dramatic imitation of certain actions arouses pity and fear in order to provide an outlet for pity and fear.1 The recounting of experience through the formal medium of plot, fiction, or spectacle permits us to repeat the past forward, so to speak. And this very act of creative repetition allows for a certain kind of pleasure or release. In the play of narrative recreation we are invited to revisit our lives—through the actions and personas of others—so as to live them otherwise. We discover a way to give a future to the past. And this is, for the Greeks as for us today, an ethical imperative. There have been multiple interpretations of what exactly Aristotle meant by his pithy formulation of catharsis. So I begin by offering a brief account of my own reading. By pity (eleos), I think, Aristotle was referring to the basic act of empathy evoked by an imaginative portrayal of human action and suffering. As Aristotle was addressing the role of tragic drama, the audience’s emotional response to the events unfolding on stage before them would have been central to the aesthetic experience. But left to itself, 181 pathos risked becoming bathos. There was always the danger of a pathology of pity, a sentimental or histrionic extreme where the spectator loses his or her wits and becomes blinded by excessive passion. Empathy might veer toward an overidentification with the imaginary characters unless checked by a countervailing movement of distance and detachment. This second movement Aristotle called fear (phobos). This contrary gesture challenged the extremity of affect by introducing some sort of estrangement device (as Bertolt Brecht would later call it). For Aristotle, it was generally the chorus or commentary that cut across the fictional pretense of the drama and interpolated the message of the story. The audience thus found itself thrown back on itself, as it were, suddenly removed from the heat of the action, reflecting on the ‘‘hidden cause of things.’’ But if this movement of fear were to be taken to its extreme, we would end up as cold voyeurs, mercilessly contemplating the horrors depicted on the stage. That is why Aristotle insisted on a certain balancing of these opposing stances—subjective and objective, attached and detached, proximate and distant. And it was precisely this balancing that resulted in catharsis —that singular experience of release, equanimity, and calm that issued from the mutual encounter and surpassing of pity by fear and of fear by pity. In short, catharsis invites us both beyond a pathology of pity to compassion and beyond a pathology of fear to serenity. It literally purges two of our most basic affects—pathos and eleos—until they are distilled and sublimated into a healing brew. It might almost be compared to a homeopathic remedy that finds the vaccination or antidote within the disease, turning malady into health. This therapeutic transformation played a crucial ethical function for Athenian society in preparing the spectators of tragic drama to be balanced and responsible citizens of the polis. And this is not less true, I would argue, for contemporary society. How, then, is catharsis actually expressed? Often as a power of vicariousness , of being elsewhere (in another time or place), of imagining differently , of experiencing the world through the eyes of strangers. It is what William Shakespeare meant, I think, when he spoke of the wisdom that comes from exposing ourselves ‘‘to feel what wretches feel.’’ Or when he has Hamlet discover his ‘‘prophetic soul’’ after the near-fatal journey to England and the exchange in the graveyard, finally declaring that the ‘‘readiness is all.’’ It is, no doubt, what William Butler Yeats meant when he spoke of ‘‘gaiety transfiguring all that dread.’’ Or what James Joyce was referring to when he had Stephen Dedalus define aesthetic purgation as the ability to sympathize with suffering while acknowledging the ‘‘secret cause.’’2 182 Narrating Pain...