Safely Watching Wild Adventures

The article begins by examining the artistic effects of a formal device, narrative iteration, which consists in presenting the same events twice or more times. As an example from Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina shows, this kind of recounting has important artistic consequences: within the story’s plot it emphasizes the characters’ feelings and responses, thus offering the readers elements that naturally attract human attention: passions, conflicts, options, and decisions, in particular spectacular, risky decisions. Asserting that for a long time successful narratives were built around worthy topics of gossip and/or news—couple formation, individual violations of law, and fights between nations—the article argues that in twentieth-century high literature attractive, well-organized plots are less frequent, the main modes of modernist literary attention being a dispersal of attention that encourages detachment from the world and a self-involvement that entails an endless wandering within one’s own inner depths. These two kinds of narrative attention, one naturally focused on human actions and passions, the other one turning away from them, either through dispersion or self-examination, shape the way in which readers relate to the world of the story, sympathize with its characters, and participate in it. Based on Jonathan Lear’s theory of catharsis, the article concludes that “gossip/news” narratives induce a significant amount of empathy, while narratives of dispersal and self-involvement often fail to do so.