The Art of Sympathy in Fiction: Forms of Ethical and Emotional Persuasion by Howard Sklar (review)

During his stay in Ferney, Voltaire’s mansion became a pilgrimage site for people who wanted to meet the sage. John Moore, one of the English visitors, reports that Voltaire used to put on stage the tragedies that he himself had written. What attracted Moore’s attention during these performances, even baffled him, was Voltaire’s strong emotional reaction to his own plays:

He enters into the feigned distresses for the piece with every symptom of real emotion, and even sheds tears with the profusion of a girl present for the first time at a tragedy. . . . I do not readily comprehend, how he can be more easily moved and deceived, by distresses which he himself invented. . . . While these tears are flowing, he must believe the woes he weeps are real: he must have been so far deceived by the cunning of the scene, as to have forgot that he was in a playhouse.

(Moore 1996 [1783]: 124–25)

This anecdote captures, with a twist, a fundamental aspect of our encounter with fictional works: they move us emotionally. An emotional response to fictional characters is familiar to every reader of fiction and movie- or theatergoer. The peculiarity of Voltaire’s case is that the very person who is moved to tears by fiction is aware more than anybody else of its fictional nature, because he is the one who created it.

Voltaire’s tears illustrate the complex psychological nature of our emotional response to fictional characters: at some level we are aware of the fact that they are not real (“feigned”), but we nevertheless react to them “with every symptom of real emotion.” Experiencing emotions towards fictional characters does not mean that we confuse fiction with reality. There is an important difference between Voltaire’s emotional reaction, even when it seems excessive, and Don Quixote’s leaping to rescue a damsel in distress at Master Peter’s puppet show. In the former, one is immersed in the fictional world, responding to it as if it were real; in the latter, one believes the fictional world to be reality. Whereas the former is a basically normative emotional response to fictional illusion, the latter is a psychological delusion.¹

Howard Sklar’s The Art of Sympathy in Fiction examines sympathy as an important aspect of our emotional response to fictional characters. The first chapter revisits the old question of the reality of literary characters, focusing not on ontology but on psychological or psycho-epistemic issues: instead of debating the different “modes of existence” of Prince Andrey in War and Peace and Prince Charles of England, Sklar calls attention to the way we get to know real people and fictional characters alike. In both cases, we are busy “filling in the gaps” (11, 13), relying on our knowledge of the world, integrating a series of details into a “Gestalt” of a character. The outcome of constructing (real or fictional) characters may be schematic or detailed, flat or rounded, stereotyped or individual. While these terms are often used in discussing literary characters, if we are to follow Sklar’s reasoning, we can also apply them to real people: some people occupy a one-dimensional “slot” in our minds (e.g., “I’ve met this highbrow classicist”) while others acquire a more complex, individual status (e.g., “I’ve met this highbrow classicist and found that he is also an avid reader of literary trash”).²

According to Sklar, the gap between real and fictional characters is further narrowed when we consider the way we get to know them from texts, literary and non-literary. We apply similar processes when we construct a (fictional) character out of a paragraph in a novel or a (real) character out of a paragraph in an autobiography or history book. He also reminds us that fictional characters sometimes become for us less “strangers” than most real people (21–22).

Chapter 2 concentrates on one specific emotion — sympathy. It...