Empathy, Estrangement, and Theatre for Social Change

EMPATHY, ESTRANGEMENT, AND THEATRE FOR SOCIAL CHANGE A Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Cornell University In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy by Lindsay Brooke Cummings May 2011 © 2011 Lindsay Brooke Cummings EMPATHY, ESTRANGEMENT, AND THEATRE FOR SOCIAL CHANGE Lindsay Cummings, PhD Cornell University, 2011 In this dissertation, I argue that we can look to particular aspects of theatre and performance to help us engage in empathy that is respectful and dialogic, that seeks not to consume another’s experience, but rather to engage it. As a work of theatre scholarship, this dissertation seeks to reframe the debate over whether or not theatre is the ideal site of empathy, and whether such empathy can motivate social change. Rather than arguing for or against empathy, I suggest that we must ask what kind of empathy best promotes social change and how the theatre can help us encourage that empathy. I advocate a model of empathy based on a sense of parity, dialogue, and non-linearity. Empathy, I argue, is not a state or a feeling with a stable goal (“understanding”), but rather a process. As such, it entails an affective and critical labor that requires us to meet the other as our equal and to entertain, imaginatively, his or her perspective on the world. Because the empathy I advocate takes the form of an exchange, it can take us in unexpected directions. It consists not in a linear progression toward understanding, but rather takes the shape of a conversation, twisting, turning, doubling back, and emerging in the moment of encounter. It is contingent and always incomplete—a process without end. I identify a series of theatrical techniques that can help produce the kind of empathy described above: interruption, repetition, and rehearsal. These techniques are either compatible with or derived from Brechtian theory. Thus, the dissertation calls for a rethinking of the role of empathy in Brechtian dramaturgy. To make this argument, I analyze the history of empathy or Einfühlung, a term originating in German aesthetic theory and then adopted by psychology, psychoanalysis, and phenomenological philosophy, inspiring new definitions in each of these disciplines. I argue that Einfühlung in Brecht’s work would be better understood as identification or emotional contagion and suggest that, despite Brecht’s protests to the contrary, there is not necessarily any conflict between empathy and a theatre of estrangement. BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH Lindsay Cummings completed a B.A. in Theatre and an M.A. in Theatre History and Criticism at Ohio University, where she was a student in the Honors Tutorial College. Before matriculating at Cornell, she interned in the literary department at Actors Theatre of Louisville and worked as the Education Manager and Co-Intern Coordinator at Portland Stage Company in Portland, Maine. She hails from Gravel Switch, Kentucky. iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank the many people, organizations, and institutions who have made this work possible. The research that informs Chapter 2, “Repetitions: Empathy, Poverty, and Politics in Eastern Kentucky” was funded by a graduate student research grant from the American Studies Program at Cornell University. I received invaluable feedback on Chapter 3, “Rehearsals: Naomi Wallace and the Labor of Empathy,” from my dissertation writing group, funded by Cornell’s Society for the Humanities. Parts of Chapter 2 appear in Performance Research 16.2 (2011), copyright Taylor & Francis, LTD. My thanks to the editors and peer readers of that edition, especially Marlis Schweitzer, for all of their wonderful feedback, which has also influenced the dissertation chapter. Finally, I would like to thank all the people who have assisted my research, and who have heard or read parts of these chapters, offering insight and influence along the way. My thanks, especially, to Amy Villarejo, Sara Warner, and Philip Lorenz, who have provided invaluable guidance and feedback that has shaped my theoretical and methodological approach, and even my understanding of my own work. In doing my research on RFK in EKY, I received help and support from the wonderful people at Appalshop, most notably Carline Rubens and Elizabeth Barret. Elizabeth’s assistance has continued in the many months since I left Whitesburg, in the form of all-too-frequent email conversations in which I begged her help tracking down sources and contacts. I would also like to thank Anne Beggs, Shea Cummings, Sabine Haenni, Rachel Lewis, Diana Looser, Donna Miller, and Nick Salvato. They have given feedback and support in innumerable ways—from reading drafts to helping navigate bizarre institutional bureaucracy. Thanks finally to my family, for their support and unwavering confidence in me. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Biographical Sketch iii Acknowledgements iv Introduction 1 Chapter 1 Interruptions: Estranging Empathy 78 Chapter 2 Repetitions: Empathy, Poverty, and Politics 139 in Eastern Kentucky Chapter 3 Rehearsals: Naomi Wallace and the Labor 200 of Empathy Coda 266 Bibliography 276 v INTRODUCTION TOWARD A DYNAMIC, DIALOGIC EMPATHY On June 13, 2009, I attended a matinee performance of Eugene Ionesco’s Exit the King at the Ethel Barrymore theatre in New York. During intermission, an usher asked a man sitting in front of me what he thought of the character of the king, to which the man replied that he did not admire him. King Berenger refuses to die, to accept the inevitability of his own demise, even as his mind, body, and kingdom crumble around him. The usher responded, “But do you empathize with him?” His tone implied that this was the truly important question, the question to end all questions, the ultimate litmus test for theatrical engagement. The man answered, “Yes, I do. I have a daughter.” By this, I can only suppose that he meant he would not want to leave her, and thus he could understand the king’s strong desire to continue his life. But, of course, the king in Ionesco’s play does not wish to live for the sake of others. In fact, Berenger’s desire to live is so strong that he would choose life even if this meant that everyone around him died, that the world itself died. He wants to live because he is afraid of death, of letting go, of giving up power, of losing himself. The man in the audience was engaging in empathy by analogy: I have a reason to want to live; therefore I can empathize with the king’s reason to want to live, even if it is different from my own. But how conscious is he of the differences between these reasons? What are the implications of these differences? Many of us assume that we “should” feel empathy in the theatre, and thus, we duly feel it (or we feel whatever it is that we are calling empathy), mostly by making the only or best connections we can. Often, we do so without pausing for very long in the strangeness of the other, in the aspects that we cannot so easily fit into our own stories or sense of self. Those, we gloss over or brush 1 aside in our hurry to achieve empathy, to find the connections. But those differences are important, too. Our pursuit of empathy is complicated by the fact that we use the word to mean many different things: compassion, pity, sympathy, identification, understanding. It is “a broad, somewhat slippery concept – one that has provoked considerable speculation, excitement, and confusion” (Eisenberg and Strayer 3). But, as the usher’s tone implies, whatever we mean by empathy, whether we feel it or not has come to be an important question, and not only in the theatre. Empathy is crucial to how we see ourselves as human beings, so much so that the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders IV lists a lack of empathy as one of the criterion for narcissistic personality disorder (715). As a New York Times story from April 2009 suggests, our concern over the state of empathy in our society is evident in the recent proliferation of programs designed to teach empathy in public schools, an effort aimed at reducing bullying and increasing students’ problem solving, anger management, and cooperative skills (Hu). In “The Limits of Empathy” (2007), psychoanalyst Warren S. Poland argues that we have overextended empathy as a concept by attributing too much to it. Regarding the history of the concept, he writes, “Empathy soon ballooned from being a form of perception into an explanation for all seasons. It has been seen lying at the heart of growth and development; its lack has been posited as the centerpiece of pathogenesis; and it has been put forward as the essence of what is mutative in the analytical process” (88). Poland was not the first to make this claim. As early as 1935, mere decades after the English term was coined, the prominent psychoanalyst Theodor Reik asserted that empathy had come to mean so much that it was 2 beginning to mean nothing (Pigman 237).1 If this is so, then there has long been, and continues to be, much ado about nothing. In The Fragility of Empathy after the Holocaust (2004), Carolyn J. Dean addresses what she calls “the perceived precariousness of empathy,” or our sense that we are not able to empathize as much as we would like or should be able to do, and suggests that this lack should be approached not as a given, but as a particular cultural narrative about what we feel and how we want to feel (15). Empathy, Dean argues, has become our unattainable ideal, our perceived solution to the “numbness” we encounter in the face of mass atrocity (5).

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