Tea and Empathy (or lack thereof)

"The Storyteller ... tacitly trains ... members of the social group to recognize and give priority to culturally valued emotional states." ~Keen, "Theory of Narrative Empathy

          Our topic this week is that of narrative empathy and the theory of the mind. Narrative empathy is the idea that literary works and storytelling in general can generate an empathic emotional response for their intended audience, get them to "feel the pain" of the characters. Many successful works are praised for the extent to which they accomplish this. Others (cough Hemingway cough) can be denigrated because they are seen a not doing enough to spark empathy. But what happens when an author intentionally attempts to avoid arousing empathy in his work? The answer lies in the epic theater and Verfremdungseffekt of Bertolt Brecht.

          Brecht was a German playwright of the early twentieth century and penned such works as The Threepenny Opera and Mother Courage and her Children. Brecht tried to keep his plays very much grounded in the intellectual, to try and keep the audience aware that they are watching a play and to make them think about what they see on stage. He was notably displeased when the song "Mack the Knife" from The Threepenny Opera became popular because of the catchy tune, with no regard to the bloody, murderous subject matter. To these ends Brecht created the genre of epic theater.

Epic theater was inteded to contrast sharply with typical "dramatic theater," and was designed to distance both the actors and the audience from the action. This distance and lack of empathy desired by Brecht has been termed the Verfremdungseffekt, or "alienation effect." Prolouges before each scene describe what is going to happen in it, draining the plays of much of their dramatic tension. A recent Michigan State production of Mother Courage used silent animated shorts and boxing ring announcers to this end. Scenes and plotlines in epic theater are often fragmentary, with only loose connections between them. In Mother Courage, set during the Thirty Year's war, years can pass from scene to scene, and the whole play covers nearly the entire war.

          This distance from the subject matter is also applied to the characters and the actors in epic theater. Actors were encouraged to learn their lines in their native dialect, but perform in standard stage German, preventing familiarity with their parts. Characters are very flat, do not change, and are often defined by a single trait. Many non-central characters do not even have names. In Mother Courage, besides the titular woman and her children, only the prostitute Yvette is given a name, the rest of the characters being referred to by profession or rank in the army. Even the central charaters of the "children" (they are at least 18 for the majority of the play) are only allowed the depth a single trait will give them: Eilif is brave, Swiss Cheese is honest, and Katrin is kind. Their mother is given no personal development whatsoever, and arrives at the end of the war the same as she was at the beginning: tough, cold, and almost unfeeling, qualities you needed to survive as a camp follower in that time.

           If all of this distance results in the desired lack of empathy, the audience will leave thinking how horrible it is that war has wreaked this destruction on the world, and that war in and of itself is wrong, unlinked to any personal connection. How successful this is though, I am not sure. Humans are empathic creatures by nature, and will find ways to relate to almost anything.