Everyday Canvas

Emotion in Fiction

Prompt: Jacques Derrida in the Ear of the Other, writes: “Prayer works for many people; sometimes therapy works for me, but literature has really been the most reliable way for me to access emotion.”
What is your take on the quote? Do you get emotional with some of what you read or does your reading encourage you to discover different emotions for specific subjects?

=============


Literature, especially fiction, is a cultural resource for everyone but especially for the younger set as it introduces and elaborates on complex social relationships and emotional characteristics of the human species.

While in my teens, possibly because I adored a lit teacher and another poet, I read the classics voraciously. Among what I read in those days, The Idiot by Dostoevsky introduced me to emotional concepts foreign to me; although I wasn’t and am not as nice a person as Prince Mishkin, not only I felt for him, but also, I felt with him. Dostoevsky’s Tales from the Underground managed to do the same thing; with that book, I experienced being imprisoned and unjustly treated. Those books taught me empathy for people suffering unfamiliar hardships, and since, in real life situations, empathy was stressed by my family’s upbringing, what I read validated it for any situation.

Why do we respond emotionally to a story that we know is make-believe? Seemingly, there might not be a rational basis for our emotional responses to fiction. Yet, because fiction imitates life and relationships, when we see a similar situation to ours, we have no alternative but to respond emotionally to it. Even in situations alien to our personal experiences, through empathy or sympathy, we learn about others’ joys and miseries and feel their emotions even if the characters in a story may not be real people. By the same token, the younger and less experienced reader can learn a lot about the world and the different situations in it and can be introduced to emotions he or she hasn’t experienced yet.

For me, fiction has to have meaning other than fast action or cheap thrills. Decades after my teenage years, I am still looking for the deep emotion in any story, especially if it is not written in a sappy style or manner. I think, since I am part of this brief and transitory life, I need to learn what I possibly can, and since I can’t experience every single situation, I might as well become emotionally engaged in fiction’s game of make-believe.