Squaredonutwheels wrote:So I was recommended by someone not on this forum, that literature with a focus on complex character development can aid in developing cognitive empathy and an understanding of what it means to be a person.
I'm not sure if it works but I'm trying it anyway. (So far it has been grueling reading the thoughts of various character types but I'm persisting despite not actually enjoying it very much)
There is a few posters who read a fair bit on here.
What are you thoughts on this?
You're not a reader?
Out of curiosity: How'd you develop better writing skills than 99% of the general population, without being the kind of reader able to answer what you're asking?
The anecdote goes that children develop greater empathy through exposure to alternative inner worlds productive of behaviours and proclivities that differ from their own. That's more or less what a first person narrative is - an empathetic connection with the main character is the whole point. But first/third pov doesn't matter too much. A lack of empathy can be caused by a lack of imagination re: reality that's indirectly observed, and psych-invested literature tends to build a bigger concept tree to thought-experiment with. It's pretty straight forward.
Virginia Woolf is probably the most extreme case of what you're asking about (stream-of-consciousness can be more head-invasive than first-person), so long as the reader's already comfortable with longer sentences/weird syntax and whatnot. George Eliot will do your head in if you come to her after reading someone like Dickens, but she's probably the best realist, pre-modernism exponent of descriptive character motivation: (this is literally the first sentence my finger landed on)
"In Mr. Brooke the hereditary strain of Puritan energy was clearly in abeyance; but in his niece Dorothea it glowed alike through faults and virtues, turning sometimes into impatience of her uncle's talk or his way of 'letting things be' on his estate, and making her long all the more for the time when she would be of age and have some command of money for generous schemes."It's more how deeply the meaning of each word and phrase is engaged with when passing through your awareness that makes the difference. The default tendency is for us to map our own values over author intent, meaning we naturally place more attention on registers of meaning that are consistent with our own thinking patterns. That might be what Dazz was referring to a couple months back when talking about his difficulties connecting with literature as much as other types of art.
I picked reading up again a few years ago after about a 15 year break, and something that helped things to gel was a conscious effort to visualise all imagery as much as possible; then when I read more inner-world stuff (like Dostoevsky), that process sort of translated to psychological concepts, too; if you really put your mind to it, imagining thought processes as if they were your own, is very doable. Some readers are only at it to gain insight into the types of people, for whatever reason, they're intrigued by - which then gives them an increased capacity to empathise with those types of people. If your goal is to learn what makes other personality-vessels tick and to build more conceptual resources to empathise through, then that'll be exactly what you get from it; novels are kind of like natural resources: it's your goals going in that'll define the type of mining that you'll do.
Re: psychopathy: if someone's capacity to consider alternative realities is obscured somehow - if the psychopath is a solipsist - then the chances of efficacy might render it a bit of a fool's errand, but there's probably enough non-psychos out there wrongly self-identifying themselves for it to be worth a crack. Would also add that cluster-B's already know most of the crap the Russians and Germans write about. Something like Crime & Punishment doesn't give much more insight than you get from having a general curiosity about people over time - but the way things are framed and codified can provide some beneficial synergy to pre-existing knowledge.
The will to empathise won't be stimulated by reading alone, but books can guide a reader through "stepping over the wall of self", if that's the reader's goal; which might be pointless in the case of some psychopaths, when there's little tangible gain to be had. Would have it a guess the process might be unconsciously undercut by narcissism in more pervasive examples - empathy is a diametrically opposed energy to selfishness; the unique motivations of a psychopath exist precisely because they're existentially unchallengeable. Empathy is potential weakness in certain psychologies (which in some cases also infers a genetic capacity for empathy there the same as anyone else, and therefore that "psychopathy" is sometimes resultant of a deeper value that's switched a neural valve, turning reality inwardly closed-off rather than outwardly shared, etc.)
What are some novels with characters you can relate to?
Lately, Notes from Underground's Underground Man crossed with V's Pig Bodine.