On dreams, being devastated by stories, and imagining the future (part 2)
"Pather Panchali," "Dr. Zhivago," "The Buried Giant," "A Time for Everything," and more
For the first part of this essay, “On Dreams,” click here.
Part 2 On Being Devastated by Stories
I have few barriers against stories, and when I was small I had none at all. It was as if everything painful that I encountered in a book or film entered my bloodstream and stayed there, as heavy metals might.
I’m still careful about what I read and see, but now most painful things stay with me for months, or a year or two, rather than permanently. Still, there are things even today that can have the kind of permanent impact as things I read as a child, and it occurs to me that they are all in works of fiction that combine the personal with the societal.
That is to say, that the stories that have shaped me the most have shown not only individual lives, but also the world as I do not want it to be. In that way they have helped me think about how I do want it to be.
This part of this essay is going to be a bit messy, as I try to pull together a number of different moving pieces. I want to talk about some specific works of fiction (three books and two films). I also want to talk about the difference between a work of fiction that simply evokes emotion, no matter how strong, on the one hand, and a work of fiction that changes one’s understanding of the world, on the other.
Perhaps, to start with, I should come back to the discussion of dreams that Part 1 focused on.
Dreams are stories that we all lack barriers against. We are implicated in them. We fully occupy the main character.
By definition, we have empathy for the main character in our dreams, who is us. There is no distance.
But to what extent do the stories we create and inhabit in our dreams change us? Even if we fully experience painful things in a dream, is it possible to have easy, passing, consequence-less empathy for the character-who-is-us? To experience the story so deeply, and yet remain unchanged?
Can we rubberneck our dreams, and drive on, safe in our own little cars?
My thought, when I started this essay, was no: that dreams were stories that we could not rubberneck; and that was why I began with them.
I wanted to create a shared understanding of what it means to fully inhabit a story and fully empathise with the main character, on the assumption that intensity of identification while reading a story or watching a film was going to be an essential element of the discussion.
But between Part 1 and Part 2 I find my thinking has changed.
In a 2019 article in The New York Review of Books called “The Banality of Empathy,” the novelist Namwali Serpell quotes Rousseau on a kind of empty empathy that can arise from reading stories:
“In giving our tears to these fictions, we have satisfied all the rights of humanity without having to give anything more of ourselves; whereas unfortunate people in person would require attention from us, relief, consolation, and work, which would involve us in their pains and would require at least the sacrifice of our indolence.”
She herself goes on to argue against considering fiction a valuable tool for raising empathy:
The empathy model of art can bleed too easily into the relishing of suffering by those who are safe from it.
Better, she says, to use literature to stand in many different shoes, and to reach one’s own conclusions about the world via intellect, not emotion. 1
Another writer (infuriatingly, I cannot find the text or remember who it was), in an essay or interview published around the same time, argued that one of the problems in using fiction as an evoker of empathy is that reading might actually cause a lack of urgency to bring about change.
A reader, this writer said, upon reading about someone else’s pain and feeling it deeply, can all too often fool themself into thinking that by feeling something they have done something, and go back to their comfortable life satisfied that they have done their bit for this particular problem.
A different kind of experience of fiction is, I think, what the novelist Jeanette Winterson has in mind in a recent essay on Substack.
She writes:
And those stories that end in tragedy? Maybe one of your favourite novels? What happens to you when you read it? As you read it, you see the alternatives, the missed chances, what might have happened, even when the people in the story are heading step by step to their doom. The outrage and sadness we feel prompts us towards different solutions, different outcomes, in our own lives, or in the lives of others.
Above all we see that it doesn’t have to be this way. There are other stories locked inside that story.
Imagination sees other outcomes.
(Emphasis added.) 2
What impact a particular story has can be dependent on time, and context, and the sensibilities of an individual reader. But thinking about the differences — as well as overlaps — between what Serpell is getting at and what Winterson is getting at has shaped my understanding of the devastating impact of fiction in new ways.
When I read Hans Christian Andersen’s tragic fairy tale “The Little Match Girl” as a child, it hurt like hell, and I didn’t gain anything from it. I was simply furious that he made me go through that pain, and swore never to read the story again.
Years later, in high school, reading Dickens’s The Old Curiosity Shop (that’s the one with Little Nell), it hurt too, but I was more angry at myself for being moved by it than angry at Dickens for writing it.
Oscar Wilde famously said, about the most tragic scene in that novel, that “one must have a heart of stone to read [it] without laughing.” I had cried my eyes out at that scene, but I instinctively liked Wilde’s plays more than I liked Dickens’s novels, and sensed that I shouldn’t have cried quite so intensely, and didn’t know why.
For decades, I couldn’t figure out what I truly thought about The Old Curiosity Shop and that quote from Oscar Wilde. I didn’t want to be someone who is not moved at painful things in novels. At the same time, there was something in what Oscar Wilde was saying that felt right, in a way that I could not define.
But reading those two essays by those two novelists — Serpell and Winterson — in tandem, suddenly it makes sense.
I think that for me, The Little Match Girl and The Old Curiosity Shop both evoked the kind of rubbernecking of suffering that Serpell is talking about. The stories didn’t spark my imagination about how I wanted to be in the world. I experienced pain on behalf of the characters and it stopped there; it wasn’t generative.
The novels and books I’ll talk about later on, the ones in the subtitle of this essay, evoked on the other hand the kind of generative pain that Winterson is talking about. The kind that reshapes us, that changes how we see the world and how we react to it.
But before we move on to those, I’d like to address an aspect of fiction that I think is a subtext to but is not overtly stated in either essay: fiction as a straightforward source of information.
As a small child I read Paula Fox’s book The Slave Dancer, from the children’s section of our little public library. It showed in horrific detail events on a ship carrying people as property from Africa to North America. One understood, even as a very young person, that although the book was fiction it was showing facts: that these things had happened, even if not to the particular people in the book, and that they had been accepted by the society that they were happening in.
Similarly, as a child reading Anne Frank’s diaries, and then the unbearable afterword explaining what happened to her and her family in the concentration camp, one understood that an entire society had allowed such things to happen.
Those two books, and others like them, didn’t make me feel angry at the writers for causing me pain, the way Hans Christian Anderson’s story had. Instead, the books made me understand, terrifyingly, that there had been eras in the world that were unspeakably cruel.
I remember quite distinctly thinking it through, when I was perhaps nine or ten years old, and deciding that I did not need to worry about living though such eras as in those two books in particular.
The person I was, in this lifetime, I reasoned, could not handle it; therefore I had been born in this era, and not one like those. This seemed perfectly logical, and deeply reassuring. It was a long time before I fully understood that the people who had lived through those eras couldn’t handle them either.
The Paula Fox novel and what happened to Anne Frank’s family frightened me, and they made me ill with sadness, but in a way that I think was closer to the way that Serpell means than that Winterson means, though of course I didn’t have any of that language or concept to work with. I was affected by them, but more passively than actively.
All the same, the knowledge of the facts that they conveyed became part of who I was, as has knowledge from thousands of other books or movies, and all of that has shaped me, beyond doubt. Fiction can carry information in that way, and, for some readers at least, is unparalleled as a way to absorb facts easily and lastingly. However, information-sharing is different from questions either of empathy or of the moral imagination. I want to separate that information-sharing element out, therefore, from the core of this essay, which is on the moral imagination part.
The rest of this part of this essay will focus on four stories (told via three books and two films based on books) that did provide the kind of life-changing experience that I think Winterson is writing about.
The discussion of Pather Panchali: Song of the Road, a 1928 novel by Bibhutibhushan Banerji [Bandyopadhyay], translated from Bengali into English by T.W. Clark and T. Mukherji in a volume published in 1968 ; and “Pather Panchali,” a 1955 film based on the novel, directed by Satyajit Ray, will focus on caring for each other as a family and a community.
The discussion of “Dr. Zhivago,” a 1965 film directed by David Lean and based on the 1957 novel Dr. Zhivago, by Boris Pasternak, will focus on loss and failure of care when a society falls apart.
The discussion of a section of A Time for Everything, a 2004 novel by Karl Ove Knausgård, translated from Norwegian into English by James Anderson in a volume published in 2008, will focus on experiencing the end of the world.
The discussion of the The Buried Giant, a 2015 novel by Kazuo Ishiguro, will focus on division and isolation.
The next instalment of the essay will begin with the novel and movie Pather Panchali, so here is the introduction in case you find yourself interested and would like to see the movie before reading about it (and having the plot be given away).
Pather Panchali (book and film based on the book)
I grew up before the era of video rentals and streaming films, and the little town I grew up in was too small for a movie theatre. But even so I saw a surprising number of films as a child. For several years running someone in town ran a town movie series, where mostly serious films — real films, on film reels — were rented and played on a big screen in the Community Center or our other shared public space in town, which actually belonged to the water utility. I think that I pretty much went to all of them (though I wish I hadn’t gone to quite all: the one where Peter O’Toole turns into Jack the Ripper gave me nightmares for years).
There were also occasional trips in with my parents to see new movies in theatres an hour away in Berkeley or San Francisco.
But the movie that mattered to me the most in all of my years in that little town was a slow, black-and-white film from India that had come out in 1955. We saw it in Mill Valley, a town just on the other side of Mt. Tamalpais, in a place on the main street, opposite the health food store, where there was no theatre.
The memory of going there was so strong that decades later, when I finally went back to California for the first time, and we stopped in Mill Valley, I really needed to know how I could have seen that film in a place were no films could be seen. Someone in the bookstore was able to tell me: apparently there was a space there that had once been a theatre. It was long out of use by the time I was a child, but occasionally it could be rented for private showings. That must have been what had happened, and shortly afterwards my parents gave me the original novel that the film was based on (or perhaps I found it on their bookshelves), so I got the story in both forms.
Pather Panchali takes place in a small village in Bengal, with a train that runs past it. The main characters are a small girl, her younger brother, her mother, an elderly auntie, and the children’s father, who is a feckless poet and writer as well as an itinerant priest in the Hindu tradition.
There are also their neighbours in the village, who sometimes help and sometimes harm.
The film, which is the first in director Satyajit Ray’s famous “Apu Trilogy” (Apu is the name of the young son in the family), is considered a masterpiece. The acting is stunning, the visuals of the land and water are astoundingly beautiful, and the music is by Ravi Shankar.
Coming next: the rest of Part 2. Part 3 will focus on imagining the future.
Footnotes:
Namwali Serpell, “The Banality of Empathy,” The New York Review of Books, March 2, 2019
Jeanette Winterson, “I GUESS IT'S TIME TO COME BACK,” Substack, January 22, 2025 (
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