Literature as empathy: A call for stories that bridge divides and ignite understanding

One of my happiest recent discoveries in contemporary fiction has been the novels of Irish writer Sally Rooney. The hype around her latest book Intermezzo — together with a moving op-ed she wrote in 2024 about the climate crisis — piqued my interest. This was enough to get me to buy two of her earlier novels, Normal People (2018) and Beautiful World, Where are You (2021). 

Both are captivating pieces of writing. So much so, that when she saw me poring over them, a good friend jokingly accused me of reading “girl books”. If books that explore complexity in twenty-first century relationships are girl books, then guilty as charged!

Much of Beautiful World Where Are You is taken up with a correspondence by e-mail between its two main women characters, Alice Kelleher and Eileen Lydon. It’s a deeply philosophical set of letters, kind of like letters were once upon a time when they were a vehicle for  a quieter, private, more considered and reflective form of communication between two humans.

But in Beautiful World Where Are You the letters are also a literary device that enables Rooney to defy convention by probing dark and difficult questions about modern society in a novel that, otherwise, is a racy relationships novel that gives many pages over to the intimate sex lives of the two women. 

Literature is always full of surprises. I alternate fiction with history or politics. This was reading in part for escape. But in one of Alice’s letters I came across a passage that coincided with my own ponderings about the loss of compassion evident in many people. The passage reminded me of a few lines I’d written and then deleted in a recent column exploring the reasons for our numbness about the human tragedy in the Stilfontein mine massacre. 

Read more: Stilfontein massacre: South Africans need to rediscover compassion and solidarity 

In one of her letters to Eileen, Alice, a successful young novelist who has suffered a breakdown and retreated to a small coastal village a few hours from Dublin, reflects on the writings of her contemporaries, lamenting how: “The problem with the contemporary Euro-American novel is that it relies for its structural integrity on suppressing the lived realities of most human beings on earth. To confront the poverty and misery in which millions of people are forced to live, to put the fact of that poverty, that misery, side by side with the lives of the ‘main characters’ of a novel, would be deemed either tasteless or simply artistically unsuccessful. Who can care, in short, what happens to the novel’s protagonists, when it’s happening in the context of the increasingly fast, increasingly brutal exploitation of the majority of the human species? Do the protagonists break up or stay together? In this world what does it matter?”

(These might equally be Rooney’s “notes to self” when thinking about her own creative process.)

Alice goes on: “… the novel works by suppressing the truth of the world — packing it down tightly under the glittering surface of the text. And we can care once again, as we do in real life, whether people break up or stay together — if, and only if, we have successfully forgotten about all the things more important than that, i.e. everything.”

Alice has a point here. Literature or no literature it’s a fact that too few twenty-first century humans make an effort to understand the feelings of people living in desperate poverty, our fellow humans. As writers like novelist Elif Shafak and Joan-of-all-genres Kae Tempest point out, elitist politics and technology have conspired to ensure we have lost our sense of connection to most other human beings. 

Both believe that reading literature is a way back to a state of compassion. Says Tempest in her book On Connection: “It’s basically like this: anything that can remind me that at all times, other people are existing and that their existence is as fully felt as my own, is useful. Music and literature take me straight into someone else’s experience, and straight out of my own.”

We need to read good literature, to help us refind connection because we have been desensitised and dehumanised by the ceaseless exposure to what is abnormal in human relations, real and imagined violence that comes at us through our TVs and phones. In fact, we don’t even register many of today’s horrors as abnormal.

Further as inequality has deepened and even middle class-dom has become more physically removed from those stuck in poverty we have also lost touch with each other. Poor and not so poor bump into each other every day — but might as well live on different planets. 

Apartheid in the soul