"The Collapsible Space Between Us": The Empathic Literary World of Dave Eggers

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“The Collapsible Space Between Us”: The Empathic Literary World

of Dave Eggers

Anne van Binsbergen 10070796 rMA Literary Studies

June 2016

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Introduction

1.1 The Value of Literature

American author Dave Eggers (1970) leapt to literary stardom after the publication of his debut work A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (2000) and has been responsible for a steady stream of publications ever since. His works range from short story collections and novels to screenplays and adaptations, but in the past decade his efforts have taken a socially engaged turn, with books such as What Is the What (2006), Zeitoun (2009), and The Circle (2014), as well as his nonprofit organizations Voice of Witness and 826 Valencia. Eggers has turned into a literary voice to be reckoned with, advocating for human rights and illuminating instances of social injustice all around the world. He is using his work as a vehicle for social change, as a way to cultivate and spread empathy. In his hands, literature becomes more than just an aesthetic form, and that might be exactly what literature needs right now, as the value of literature in the twenty-first century is a recurring topic of discussion. Its fate may even already be decided, as shown by recent budget cuts and the precarious position of the humanities in universities all over the world. A growing number of scholars have considered the role and value of literature in a world that is relying more and more on technology and digitalization; where literature and art seem to be receding into the background while we focus more on pragmatism, scientific progress, and verifiable results (Belsey 2011; Moran 2002; Roche 2004).

Assuming it is becoming necessary for literature to prove its value, I strongly believe in literature’s ability to foster empathy and think this should definitely be considered one of its useful qualities. Because I consider Dave Eggers to be a highly engaged and empathic writer, I think he is the perfect author to use in order to better understand how certain (literary) texts foster empathy, which is the subject of this thesis. What techniques, methods, or styles do

Eggers’ works utilize in order to promote empathy amongst their readers, and how do the various genres Eggers employs allow for this to happen?

Despite my belief that literature can be useful to fostering empathy, it seems strange that the importance of literature should be questioned in the first place, as it is undeniable that human beings live and breathe stories. In an attempt to understand why we still read fiction and need literature, humanities scholar Gregory Jusdanis claims that the human mind is actually literary “because it constantly fashions narratives and then projects them onto other narratives. We

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imagine reality and construct meanings through processes that are literary” (A Tremendous Thing 16). Additionally, in this latest book, he explores literature from the perspective of friendship and sees it as an essential part of the development of empathy. This builds upon his argument in Fiction Agonistes, where Jusdanis claimed that literature serves a pragmatic social function in that it helps people distinguish between the real and the imaginary, and in doing so enables us to image something new, or to be able to project ourselves into the minds of others, which in turn is also essential for empathy. Literature, Jusdanis argues, speaks to “our capacity to imagine something new, to invent, to project ourselves in to the mind of another person, and to fight for a new world” (Fiction Agonistes 5). Wanting to “fight for a new world” may be quite an activist view of literature, but the desire and ability to connect with others is important and essential to this thesis.

There are many more instances of human behavior that point to a longing for connection, besides Jusdanis’ and Eggers’ literary examples. While people might appear to be spending most of their time on their phones, displaying high levels of narcissism and individualism, they also seem to be looking for connection at the same time, and not just in terms of their number of Facebook friends. The Human Library, where one can “borrow” a person for conversation, is one example. This project has now been set up in over twenty countries after being founded in Copenhagen in 2000. The internet sensation Humans of New York is another example. HONY is a blog started by NYC resident Brandon Stanton in 2010 in an effort to capture “New York City, one story at a time.” It includes quotes, stories and photographs of all kinds of New York City inhabitants. Stanton has also traveled to Pakistan, Syria, and Greece to document the lives of the people there, specifically in relation to the ongoing refugee crisis. The page has more than 17 million followers, and some posts have up to 800,000 likes and thousands of comments and shares. What is surprising is that all this attention is all directed at stories about people unknown to those reacting to them, showing that people are indeed interested in the stories and

perspectives of others, no matter how far removed they are from their own experiences. There is an apparent eagerness for connection between humans, the sincere desire to hear their stories, to be able to relate to them and appreciate their experiences and point of view, and this is

emblematic of the development of a new kind of craving for empathy.

Cultural thinker and writer Robert Krznaric literally wrote the book on empathy and explains its importance and necessity, claiming we are currently dealing with one of the greatest

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empathy deficits in history, and we are in dire need of an empathic revolution (Krznaric 2014). He defines empathy as “the art of stepping imaginatively into the shoes of another person, understanding their feelings and perspectives, and using that understanding to guide your actions” (x, emphasis in original). While his book does not pertain exclusively to literature - his tips on cultivating empathy in our current social climate include a great variety of things - Krznaric does contend that literature and art are examples of elements that are capable of

instigating the change he is advocating (150). In a world with a constantly expanding population, where superficial connection is made deceptively easy because of technological advances but true connection and vulnerability are avoided, where new atrocities and human rights violations happen every day, it is important to realize that “humanity is born to empathize and wired for social connection” (xvi), and to try and return to a common humanity. Empathy created through storytelling is an excellent way of accomplishing that.

1.2 Empathy Through Literature

There has been a lot of research lately into the relation between narrativity, literature, and empathy (Bal & Veltkamp 2013; Kidd & Castano 2013; Koopman & Hakemulder 2015; Miall & Kuiken 1994), and although there is some overlap between them they each ultimately focus on a slightly different aspect of the same research area and in that sense they complement each other well. Koopman and Hakemulder, for example, not only look into the effect of literature on empathy but also on self-reflection, arguing that ultimately self-reflection can also lead to an increase in empathy because it allows the reader to fully reflect upon their own position in comparison to the position of the character they have been reading about. They also differentiate between a narrow and broad definition of literature, which is important in this case. The broad definition simply refers to the presence of narrativity and the narrow definition pertains only to narrative works that display literariness, which the authors believe is achieved by techniques of “foregrounding.” They explain that “foregrounded features in the text, (e.g., novel metaphors, rhyme) can lead to aesthetic feelings of perceived beauty, but particularly surprise and

defamiliarization” (n.p.).

The increase in empathic ability is not necessarily limited to literary fiction, according to these authors, as they claim that anything that contains a narrative can already have an effect. They do suggest, however, that there is a greater increase when it comes to fiction, as they

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explain that “while role-taking can take place for all types of narratives, literary and fictional narratives may evoke the type of aesthetic distance (stillness) that leads to a suspension of judgment, adding to a stronger experience of role-taking and narrative empathy” (n.p.). Role-taking is essential for narrative emotions as it may lead to “transportation into the narrative world and sympathy and/or empathy with the character.” However, it was Kidd and Castano who discovered a difference in empathy between readers of popular fiction and literary fiction, with a greater increase in empathy being recorded in readers of high-brow literature, and nearly no increase being detected in those reading popular novels. Miall and Kuiken expanded this further by arguing that style and foregrounding are essential to literary texts and have their own effect on reading and empathy regardless of the reader’s literary skill or training. They explain that

“foregrounding prompts defamiliarization, defamiliarization evokes affect, and affect guides ‘refamiliarizing’ interpretative efforts” (404). The foregrounded elements (examples of which will be given later) are perceived as “striking” (393). They cause the reader to pause and take notice of the text and what is happening in it. This increase in reading time gives them a greater opportunity to reflect on what they have just read and the feelings that have been evoked due to the defamiliarizing effects of the foregrounded features. Additionally, the text may be perceived as more difficult because of its structure, which may lead to more interpretative efforts and affect, because of the nature of the text and the fact that the reader simply needs to spend more time on it and is more involved with it. The conscious use of foregrounding, these authors argue, happens only in texts of a literary nature, and they prove that ultimately literary texts have the greatest effect on a person’s empathic abilities.

The notion of foregrounding emerged from the Prague Linguistic Circle. In 1932, Jan Mukarovsky wrote about artistic foregrounding and the notions of aesthetic norm and aesthetic function. These ideas have been developed further in works on narratology (M. Bal 1985) and style in prose writing (Leech & Short 1981). What is important to note is that the same elements of language may occur in both literary and non-literary works but that in works of literature it takes on a special function. In such language “it is not used in the services of communication, but in order to place in the foreground the act of expression, the act of speech itself” (Mukarovsky 44). Leech and Short explain that “foregrounding or deautomatization of the linguistic code […] means that the aesthetic exploitation of language takes the form of surprising a reader into a fresh awareness of, and sensitivity to, the linguistic medium which is normally taken for granted as an

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‘automized’ background of communication” (23). This is what sets literature apart from other texts, namely because the deviations serve an “aesthetic function” (12).

Examples of foregrounding can be on the phonetic level, grammatical level, semantic level, or even lexical level. One may use certain types of words more than others, or can use a lot of metaphors or personifications. Other examples include alliteration, inversion, repetition, or variations in sentence length and structure. The fact that the reader can recognize these types of foregrounding or stylistic features has to do with deviance (how many instances of this example occur from a statistical point of view), prominence (what stands out to the reader from a

psychological point of view), and literary relevance, (do these instances of foregrounding serve a certain artistic or aesthetic function in the text?).

The burgeoning research on the relationship between literature and empathy comes at a time where the humanities are becoming a progressively interdisciplinary enterprise, and the position and definition of literature within this changing field is being further explored and defined (Eagleton 1983; Roche 2004; Widdowson 1999). Literature is expected to be

increasingly relevant and useful to society, which is why scholars are looking for a function and use for literature (which includes its relationship to empathy), as well as linking it to a variety of other subject matters such as history and media. This prompted the 2013 New Yorker article bearing the title “Should Literature Be Useful?”, in which Lee Siegel questions whether this perceived desire for literary practicality is actually a success or simply emblematic of the “quantifying powers of social science” (n.p.).

I greatly appreciate Siegel’s argument in the sense that I do not believe literature or fiction needs to have any special kind of purpose. I even understand his claim that “the argument that producing empathy is literature’s cardinal virtue is a narrowing of literary art” instead of “exciting a new expansion of it,” because I agree that limiting literature to an empathy-promoting machine may constrain its possibilities. However, it is surely not the case that literature’s newfound empathic purpose is a destruction of literature itself, or that empathy can secretly be used for evil as well, which is where Siegel’s argument seems to lead him.

Empathy entails forming an emotional bond with someone. Using one’s insight into another’s feelings to manipulate or torture that person, which is what Siegel suggests empathy may lead to, precludes the fact that you have formed an emotional bond with them. I believe this is simply Siegel trying to alter the meaning of empathy to suit his purpose. Ian McEwan, in an

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article he wrote for The Guardian in the wake of 9/11, makes the opposite point that “it is hard to be cruel once you permit yourself to enter the mind of your victim. Imagining what it is like to be someone other than yourself is at the core of our humanity. It is the essence of compassion, and it is the beginning of morality” (n.p.). He argues that the hijackers of the planes did everything in their power “to purge themselves of the human instinct for empathy” rather than using empathy to their advantage. Siegel, however, makes the case that fiction does not need to be useful simply because society is being led by the scientific desire for concrete results and a fear of idleness and futility. And while, as I have already said, I appreciate the heartfelt attempt to protect literature from this desire to pragmatize every aspect of life, I think Dave Eggers is a positive exception. I believe the association of his works with an empathic purpose does not minimize the autonomy of literature. In Eggers’ case, it is not simply readers and scholars who are attempting to justify the existence of his works like they may do with that of other authors or literature in general by trying to prove it promotes empathy. Eggers is well-known for his “philanthropic approach to the literary world” (Twitchell 643), and his books have various characteristics and make use of several techniques to promote empathy and in so doing may be able to cause actual social change. This is what Roman Krznaric is talking about when he writes that empathy is “an ideal that has the power to transform our lives and to bring about fundamental social change. Empathy can create a revolution” (ix).

In line with his “philanthropic approach,” Eggers has initiated the nonprofit organization Voice of Witness in 2004, which publishes books of oral history, illuminating human rights crises happening all over the world. Voice of Witness is entirely made up of testimonies that view life-changing events through the eyes of one specific person. What Is the What and Zeitoun do the same, albeit in different ways, but they are constructed through and based on the testimonies of Valentino Achak Deng and the Zeitoun family, respectively. The format of the testimony is important, because the speaker relies very much on an empathic response from the listener. Elizabeth Twitchell refers to the same article by McEwan mentioned above, and responds to “his invocation of the empathic imagination as the most humane response to trauma” (622). She says one can look to trauma for “a mutual exchange that exists not in the traumatic event itself but in our attempts to understand it: the global, coexistent processes of knowing and not-knowing” (630), and in that way creates an essential bond between the survivors of the trauma and the witnesses to that survival, between the tellers of the stories and the listeners. When confronted

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with these testimonies, the only proper response is empathy. The format of the testimony thus serves the same function as the literariness of a narrative might, in attempting to bridge the gap between people of different backgrounds and different experiences, and call for an empathic reader-response.

In his foreword to The Voice of Witness Reader, Eggers explains that “[r]eading, more so than any other art form, involves direct participation, in that the reader is actively imagining the world depicted on the page. This participation creates a profound and more internalized

experience, and is the reason fiction, or great narrative nonfiction, has for a thousand years had an unparalleled power to change minds and hearts” (17). What I would like to look into is Eggers’ claim that it is literature, more so than anything else, that is able to affect people and promote empathy. By analyzing What Is the What, Zeitoun, and a selection from The Voice of Witness Reader, I will explore the various ways and techniques in which these stories cultivate empathy and move their readers, and how these techniques vary per genre. Scholars have considered Eggers’ work from the point of view of humanitarian narratives or ethics (Brooks 2010; Craps 2016; Peek 2012; Twitchell 2011), but often do not look at the specific ways in which Eggers puts these narratives to use beyond the highlighting of injustice through content. I would like to investigate how exactly people are moved to care, more specifically through foregrounding and the testimonial format of these books.

1.3 Thesis Structure

In the first part of this thesis I will discuss in depth the way Eggers uses literary techniques in What Is the What to foster and promote empathy. I will discuss various instances of

foregrounding, which Miall and Kuiken point out are essential to both literature and its empathic capabilities. The book will be analyzed from a narratological perspective in order to determine the various techniques of foregrounding Eggers uses to get his point across, including

focalization, plot structure, and aesthetic use of language. Additionally, I will look into the ways Eggers presents Zeitoun in a similar fashion, to show that, despite the fact that it is a work of nonfiction, the work reads like a novel and therefore has the same kind of empathic effects as What Is the What. In some cases, the boundary between truth and fiction is crossed or played with, and I will explore the difference in generic approach to the story at hand and how the use of each genre plays up various empathic elements. Finally, I will introduce Voice of Witness and

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look into the narrative structure of those testimonies to see how these function in relation to the previous two books.

In the second and final part of this thesis, I will explore Eggers’ use of testimony as a way to present narratives of trauma that directly include the listeners in the process of bearing witness. To better understand testimony and the way Eggers uses this narrative form in his books, I will look into existing theory on trauma, as there has been quite a lot of writing on the relation between those that have survived the trauma and those that are charged with the

responsibility of listening to their stories (Caruth 1991; Felman & Laub 1992; Landsberg 2004). Eggers draws on these very relations by imagining himself in the position of Deng, by narrating the story of Zeitoun and his family, and by allowing the survivors of countless human rights crises to tell their story in his Voice of Witness series. He gives them the opportunity to voice their stories and others the opportunity to listen. These works allow the reader to respond to these traumas with empathy. How does this empathic response fit within the scope of trauma theory, especially when it comes to the listeners to the trauma, who, as opposed to the survivors themselves, have not lived through the event? What can be said about the ambiguous morality that comes with the way the listeners may implicate themselves in the traumas of others, and is this an issue with these narratives?

N.B. I find it important to note at the start of this thesis, as a disclaimer, that there is an inherent difficulty in the measurement of empathy. This is especially true in this case because it is a literary research project rather than a psychological or sociological one, and will therefore lack the quantitative research qualities one might expect in a scientific paper. In an effort to show real-world empathic results I have included the amazon reviews, but I am aware that these are not of a scientific quality. What is important to me, in this research, is not empirical or scientific proof, per se, that Eggers’ works actually raise empathic qualities, as the scientific articles I have used have done for literature in a more general way1_{. Rather, it is to show that Eggers’ works are} infused with an orientation towards empathy-inspiring methods of storytelling and anticipate a 1 Readers interested in the exact way in which researchers have measured the empathic responses of readers to various literary and non-literary texts may refer again to Kidd & Castano, 2013; Koopman & Hakemulder, 2015; Miall & Kuiken, 1994, Bal & Veltkamp 2013. These scholars explain their process in detail, though their research does not include an analysis of what happens to the connections in the brain when reading or when there is an increase in empathy. Therefore these articles also lack one aspect in understanding exactly what happens from a neurobiological perspective.

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certain reader-response attitude that are optimized through the use of various techniques that will be looked into and that I have set out above.

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Part 1 - Narrative to the Rescue: Literary Techniques in Service of Empathy

Eggers is no stranger to dealing with a variety of forms and styles in his writing. He has published short stories, novels, screenplays, children’s books, a memoir, and nonfiction including essays and travelogues. He is also an editor, publisher, and journalist. The works I have selected all fall under different categories, even though they ultimately deal with the same thing, namely the emotional worlds and stories of other people. They describe the histories of people and places we would not usually come across. Each of them also allows for an emphatic response by the reader, but the question remains how the different characteristics of the various genres allow for this to happen.

What Is the What, firstly, is a special case. It is subtitled ‘The Autobiography of Valentino Achak Deng,’ but is also called “a novel by Dave Eggers.” So what is it then? A novel, an autobiography, or a biography? The way this book is categorized and labels itself already raises a number of questions about genre, authorship, and the truthfulness of the story. Is it fiction or not? Zeitoun, on the other hand, makes no confusing claims and is just referred to as literary

nonfiction, as it is a truthful account of a man’s life and struggles but it is written in a more literary fashion than a newspaper or journal article or history book. It does admit to reimagining some of the dialogue but claims it resembles as closely as possible what the participants were able to remember. The Voice of Witness narratives, finally, are oral histories, perhaps the simplest form of those discussed here, as they are simply transcribed stories from actual people, exactly how they told it. These narratives may be minimally edited for chronology, but not for content. Voice of Witness will be discussed further in Part 2 in relation to trauma theory.

Despite their differences, however, each of these texts works towards a goal of creating an empathic understanding of its characters. Studies dedicated to the relation between reading fiction and empathy have found that fiction, more so than nonfiction, has a positive effect on the reader’s empathic capabilities (Bal & Veltkamp 2013; Kidd & Castano 2013; Miall & Kuiken 1994). The social processes “presented in literary fiction often disrupt our expectations,” Kidd and Castano argue (n.p.). “Readers of literary fiction must draw on more flexible interpretive resources to infer the feelings and thoughts of characters. That is, they must engage [Theory of Mind] processes” (n.p.). This means that people have the ability to imagine the perspectives and points-of-view of others, and can realize that these beliefs, thoughts, and experiences can be

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different than one’s own. The authors propose that “by prompting readers to take an active writerly2_role to form representations of characters’ subjective states, literary fiction recruits

ToM” (n.p.). In this section I will analyze the ways that What Is the What and Zeitoun utilize these literary practices discussed in the aforementioned articles, in order to foster empathy.

2.1 What Is the What

In What Is the What, Eggers foregrounds the fact that this book is actually from the mind and experiences of someone else completely. By putting Valentino’s name next to his own, he presents the book as a dual creation by both Deng and himself, acknowledging the fact that it is not just the ‘famous literary author Dave Eggers’ who is responsible for this story. Instead, the entire book is an expression of empathy, as Eggers has fictionalized a true account. He has filled in the blanks in Valentino’s narrative by imagining Valentino’s thoughts, feelings, and

experiences as if they were his own. He did not just listen to Valentino’s story, he tried to live it, he put himself in his shoes and imaged trudging through hundreds of miles of hostile African landscapes, and in so doing turned Valentino’s testimony into a novel.

Not everyone agrees with Eggers’ novelization though. Lee Siegel, in his review of the book for The New Republic, criticizes Eggers for this. In “The Niceness Racket,” Siegel seems to condemn Eggers for attempting to write about something he did not actually experience himself. Siegel quotes an interview with Eggers in The Washington Post, in which the latter explains that the idea to turn the book into a novel came from his realization that all the books about war and other big historical events that meant the most to him, and that he truly learned from and remembered well, were novels. Siegel counters Eggers’ comment by saying that the authors Eggers mentions (Hemingway, Heller, Mailer) actually lived through the wars and horrors they wrote about, whereas Eggers did not. The fact that Eggers still chose to write about it, all the while pretending he is not the one writing it, baffles Siegel. Understandably, the way What Is the What is set up is a bit of a strange configuration, but saying someone cannot write about

something because they did not experience it seems to defeat the purpose of writing. For that 2 The distinction between “readerly” and “writerly” texts as made by Roland Barthes in S/Z (1970) implies that there are certain forms of fiction, namely the literary kind, that expect a greater level of participation from the reader. In these texts, there are more meanings to be uncovered, and the text destabilises and subverts the reader’s expectations. These are writerly texts that require some degree of interpretation. Readerly texts, on the other hand, allow the reader to sit back and relax, and provide no life-altering views or multiple meanings, and require minimal work or effort on the part of the reader.

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would suggest one could not write about a member of the opposite sex, or about someone of a different age, or from a different cultural background. If one could only write about what one knows, that would severely limit one’s imagination and the subjects of books in general, because not everybody is a writer and therefore not everything that happens can or will be written about. But perhaps I am being unfair, and I am being too rigorous in my application of his words. Most likely he is only suggesting that writing about a trauma that is not one’s own is a difficult feat to pull off and one that is not necessarily desirable. He asks why a novelist would want to “inhabit emotions that few people have ever experienced” and why “so many who aren’t up to the

challenge [still] try” (n.p.). Yet this judgment still proves to me he does not understand what is at stake here, or what this book is actually trying to do. Because it is not necessarily about the success of inhabiting another person’s emotions or experiences, but the attempt to do so. The willingness to go through what they have gone through and to understand them, even if it is hard, that is what empathy is3_.

Any objections that Siegel seems to raise against this choice are therefore countered by Eggers’ own explanation for his controversial choice. Whether one thinks Eggers did a good job is a personal matter of course, but objecting to the form of the novel seems unfair. Eggers wanted to reach the largest audience possible with this story, instead of creating a niche product that would only appeal to those already interested in the conflict in Sudan (“It Was Just Boys Walking”). Because literary fiction has an effect on the empathic capabilities of its readers, writing a novel like this was a sure-fire way of reaching and moving a large audience. I therefore thought it was pertinent to include Siegel’s critique on the format of the narrative, because in my opinion it is precisely this format which makes it a success, due to the extended possibilities of foregrounding and transportation, which is linked to the promotion of empathy. “Only in a novel,” Eggers concluded in his article for The Guardian, “could [he] apply what [he] had seen in the various regions of southern Sudan to describe the land, the light, the people” (“Boys Walking”). Eggers needed the freedom to imagine the scene for himself, to put himself in Valentino’s shoes freely and without restriction. Only through allowing his own empathic feelings free reign would it be possible for future readers to follow suit and for the book to be a success. In a novel Eggers could create the conditions that are necessary for the production of 3 The dubious morality that is at stake here when it comes to the appropriation of someone else’s trauma, which appears to be the issue Siegel has with What Is the What, will be discussed further in Part 2 of this thesis where I will explore Eggers’ work in relation to testimony and trauma theory.

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empathy. Elements of foregrounding allow for a reader to be fully transported into the story, which in turn is necessary for empathy.

In their article, Bal and Veltkamp explain that “it is not the activity of reading itself that transforms the self, but the emotional involvement in a narrative, […] it is transportation that influences whether people’s beliefs about the world are influenced” (n.p.). Additionally,

Koopman and Hakemulder explain that “role-taking may also lead to narrative emotions” (n.p.). Because Eggers literally takes on the role of Valentino during the writing of this book, and he invites the reader to do the same, it leads to “transportation into the narrative world, and

sympathy and/or empathy with the character” (n.p.). It is precisely this fictionalization of Deng’s narrative that allows for transportation to take place, which in turn is responsible for an increase in empathic capabilities in its readers.

Miall and Kuiken emphasize the importance of foregrounding in literary narratives and how they allow transportation and therefore an empathic response. Examples of foregrounding include repetition, use of metaphor, and sentence structure. Already in the opening pages of the novel there is a lot of lexical repetition. The first sentence reads “I have no reason not to answer the door so I answer the door” (3, emphasis mine). And then, a few paragraphs later: “I sit and now he shows me the handle of the gun. He has been holding it all along, and I was supposed to know. But I know nothing; I never know the things I am supposed to know. I do know, now, that I am being robbed, and that I want to be elsewhere” (4, emphasis mine). The constant repetition of the word “know” reinforces Valentino’s frustration and vulnerability. He is new to this country, and is not yet familiar with its customs, and it seems people are not willing to let him settle him before they swoop in and take things from him. His final assertion of what he does know, namely that he wants to be “elsewhere,” is so sad and endearing that right from the start you feel for this man and you are experiencing his suffering alongside him.

Furthermore, in What, Valentino does use some ‘big’ words, but these feel unnatural at times. They are words he has probably been learning from books at school rather than naturally. When he is being robbed in his apartment in Atlanta - the event that opens and frames the book - he thinks to himself that “if this is punishment for the hubris of wanting to leave Africa, of harboring dreams of college and solvency in America, I am now chastened and I apologize” (4). To me, it was striking that a recent Sudanese refugee would use words like “hubris” and

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Especially since only a few minutes earlier he did not know the word for “peephole” but instead referred to it as a “tiny round window for inspecting visitors” (3). Eggers, as an author, would certainly have known this tiny window is called a peephole, but Valentino most likely would not, and so the narrator does not use that word. The other complex words that do appear to be in Valentino’s vocabulary, however, might serve to depict Valentino as the serious, sophisticated person he is, despite his deplorable situation. He continues to use an impressive vocabulary throughout the book, despite his use of often shorter, declarative sentences, especially when relating his time in Africa. He is not in the business of being superfluously elaborate or poetic. He is, however, eloquent and thoughtful, and his words reflect this. It is precisely this quality that make it so easy for the reader to identify with Valentino and be transported into his story.

The book is framed by the robbery, and as Valentino lies bound and gagged on the floor of his apartment, he starts to recount his experiences in Africa, and he continues to do so all through the day. Valentino is the only focalizer and narrator in the book. In this case they are the same person, although the focalization shifts from the current version of Valentino to his younger self when he recounts his walk across the continent, but the narrator remains the same. Because the focalization lies with Valentino, it makes sense that he refers to the peephole as “a tiny window,” as in the example already mentioned, or that he refers to helicopters as “crickets,” simply

describing the sound as “chaka-chakka” (74). These descriptions are not surprising coming from a young boy seeing these things for the first time. He is confused by what he is seeing and initially so are we because we discover what is happening at the same time and at the same pace as Valentino is.

But Eggers has more techniques at his disposal to allow us to fully enter into the story. When Valentino is described running through his village at top-speed, for instance, trying to impress the girl he likes, it is written as follows:

I alter my course, turning into the marketplace, into the mass of traders and shoppers, weaving through a hundred people so fast they feel only my wind. I fly past the smaller shops, past the men drinking wine on the benches, past the old men playing dominoes, past the restaurants and the Arabs selling clothes and rugs and shoes, past the twins my age, Ahok and Awach Ugieth, two very kind and hardworking girls carrying bundles of kindling on their heads, Hello, Hello, we say, and finally I step into the darkness of my father’s store, completely out of breath. (42)

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By the end of this passage the reader is out of breath too, because, for the first time since the start of the novel, Valentino speaks using one long-running sentence instead of many shorter ones. As we read along in one breath we feel the rhythm and we are running too and when we finally arrive at the full stop we are panting together with Valentino, trying to catch our breath. Here, once again, the sentence structure and length is foregrounded in order to have the reader feel the same things Valentino does, and therefore facilitate the reader’s transportation in to the story.

Similarly, when Eggers describes Valentino running through the jungle to safety, his thoughts and the passage that describes it are as jumbled and chaotic as his mind is:

As I ran my thoughts came in quick bursts and in the moments between I filled my mind with prayer. Protect me God. Protect me God of my ancestors. Go quiet. What is that light? A light from a town? No. Stop now. No light at all. Curse these eyes! Curse this breath! Quiet. Quiet. God who

protects my people I call upon you to send away the murahaleen. Quiet. Sit now. Breathe quiet.

Breathe quiet. (97)

The reader feels just as rattled and nervous as Valentino does sprinting through the darkness, not sure of what we are supposed to be seeing and not knowing what danger may lie around the corner. The alternation between italics and regular print is jarring, and the extremely short, commanding sentences sound angry and chaotic to us. It is this kind of transportation and fellow-feeling that can be achieved only through this type of foregrounding found in literature, and the opportunity to employ these techniques came with the freedom of turning this narrative in to a novel.

Despite having to include much of his own imagination in the book, because of its novelization, Eggers said he wanted the tone of the book to sound nothing like him, because ultimately it was not his story to tell. The story should not be tainted by his authorial voice, and he wanted only Valentino to be heard. In an interview, Eggers explains that telling Valentino’s story in his voice “would be distracting and tonally incorrect,” and that he had to “disappear completely” from the story (Boys Walking). This will come up again in Part 2, dealing with trauma theory, because it speaks to the necessity of avoiding appropriation, and instead recognizing that the victim’s story is his own, and not yours.

In order to make clear that it is Deng’s story and not his, Eggers has tried to shut off the stylistic devices he usually relies on in his own writing, in order to create a voice that can be

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truly Deng’s and is no longer recognizable as his own. In this book, for instance, the sentences are shorter, more staccato-like in fashion, and a bit drier than his usual rolling, flowing, loose yet carefully constructed sentences. A telling example of this other style of writing is the following passage:

Voices woke me. Laughter. I rose to my knees but could not put my feet on the ground. I no longer trusted the earth. I vomited where I knelt and lay down again. The sky was growing light when I tried again. I first rose to my knees and my head spun. Pinpricks of white leaped before my eyes, my limbs tingled. I knelt for some time and regained my vision.

My head cleared. I looked about me. There were boys milling, some sitting, eating corn. I put my feet under my body and stood slowly. It felt very unnatural to stand. When I gained my full height, the air spun around me, hissing. I spread my legs wide and my hands left and right. I stood until the vibrations in my limbs ceased and after some time I was standing and felt human again.

Five boys had been killed, three immediately and two others, whose legs had ben shredded by the bombs, were alive long enough to watch the blood leave their bodies and darken the earth.

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These sentences are quite short, and are made up almost exclusively of words with only one or two syllables. This passage contains 18 sentences with a total of 178 words. The average

sentence length is 9.8 words. Only 2 sentences have a word count of 20 or more, notably the last two sentences with a word length of 20 and 33, respectively. Out of the 178 words, 137 are one-syllable words, 37 words are two-one-syllable, and only 4 words have a one-syllable length of 3 or 4. It is notable that the final sentence is the most jarring and intense, with the imagery of blood

darkening the earth, and this is also the longest sentence. It feels like all the foregoing shorter sentences lead up to this one. This one longer sentence is the exception in this passage, which is why it draws so much attention. This sentence therefore hits the reader the hardest, because it comes as a bit of a surprise. We are gaining consciousness at the same pace as Valentino, and the realization of the death of the boys comes as a shock. In order to achieve this effect, the way the sentences are constructed is therefore explicitly foregrounded.

Compare this to a passage from Eggers’ debut novel A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius:

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Please look. Can you see us? Can you see us, in our little red car? Picture us from above, as if you were flying above us, in, say, a helicopter, or on the back of a bird, as our car hurtles, low to the ground, straining on the slow upward trajectory but still at sixty, sixty-five, around the relentless, sometimes ridiculous bends of Highway 1. Look at us, goddammit, the two of us slingshotted from the back side of the moon, greedily cartwheeling toward everything we are owed. Every day we are collecting on what’s coming to us, each day we’re being paid back for what is owed, what we deserve, with interest, with some extra motherfucking consideration - we are owed, goddammit - and so we are expecting everything, everything. We get to take what we want, one of each,

anything in the store, a three-hour shopping spree, the color of our choice, any make, any color, as much as we want, when we want, whatever we want. (47)

This passage contains 169 words to the previous 178 but only has 7 sentences to the other’s 18. The average word count of these sentences is 23.8 and they contain 20 words of three syllables of more, compared to the mere 4 of the previous passage. It also starts off with some

commanding and questioning sentences, as opposed to the sole declarative sentences of the passage from What Is the What. Because A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius was Eggers’ own memoir, the difference in style between these two works clearly shows his attempt to remove his own stylistic preferences from the novel, in order to give more space to Valentino.

The foregrounding of certain elements, such as the sentence length or structure, and the lexical choices of the narrator (using either overly simplified or notably elegant words) allow for the reader to better understand the mindset and emotional state of the character Valentino. When one is capable of inferring or understanding this emotional state, it is easier for the reader to be transported into the mind of this person. This transportation would therefore not be possible without foregrounding, and the aforementioned examples from What Is the What show how the reader is transported into the mind of Valentino.

2.2 Zeitoun

Eggers’ highly acclaimed work of nonfiction, Zeitoun, is the winner of the American Book Award and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and is another example of engaged writing promoting empathy. Eggers prefaces the book by writing the following:

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Zeitoun (pronounced Zay-toon). Dates, times, locations, and other facts have been confirmed by independent sources and the historical record. […]

This book does not attempt to be an all-encompassing book about New Orleans or Hurricane Katrina. It is only an account of one family’s experiences before and after the storm. (xiii)

Eggers puts a disclaimer on his book concerning the fact that it is historically correct but also that it is not complete. It only reflects the views and experiences of one specific family and is not claiming to have all the answers. In this it is not a straightforward work of nonfiction. In style, as well, it differs. Eggers infuses the narrative with beautiful writing and literary flourishes. The book follows specific days from both Kathy and Zeitoun’s experiences, heading different parts of the book under the various dates on which the events took place. This could be a very simple account of the events, yet the story is filled out in beautiful language. Take the opening lines of the book:

On moonless nights the men and boys of Jableh, a dusty fishing town on the coast of Syria, would gather their lanterns and set out in their quietest boats. […] A mile out, they would arrange the boats in a circle on the black sea, drop their nets, and, holding their lanterns over the water, they would approximate the moon. The fish, sardines, would begin gathering soon after, a slow mass of silver rising from below. The fish were attracted to plankton, and the plankton were attracted to the light. […] The black gaps between silver links would close until the fishermen could see, below, a solid mass of silver spinning. Abdulrahman Zeitoun was only thirteen when he began fishing for sardines this way […]. And when Abdulrahman first witnessed the sardines circling in the black he could not believe the sight, the beauty of the undulating silver orb below the white and gold lantern night. (3-4)

This is how Eggers introduces Zeitoun: as an innocent boy filled with wonder, placing Zeitoun in a childhood in a faraway place, with this magical image of the sea of silver underneath the black sky. This image is recalled when Zeitoun paddles around a quiet New Orleans in his canoe. In these passages one hears Dave Eggers, the lit erary artist, talking. What follows is the true account of Zeitoun’s life in New Orleans, from how he met his wife Kathy, started his

contracting company, stayed behind in the abandoned city after Hurricane Katrina hit, and how he was subsequently arrested and held for 23 days in various (makeshift) cells and prisons before

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finally being released back to his family a changed and broken man. These peaceful images of Syria are harshly contrasted to the reality of Zeitoun’s life in America after he is unjustly arrested in the wake of the storm.

Despite the book’s heavy reliance on the chronology of the story, the dates and times corroborated and meticulously noted, it is no less capable of promoting empathy than the aforementioned What Is the What. Bal and Veltkamp acknowledge the trouble with the fiction and nonfiction distinction, as they say that “an increasing number of books are published that are based on actual events, but yet are written in ways very similar to fictional novels, such that they may be very narrative in nature, in which the author in detail describes how events affected people’s thinking and emotions” (n.p.) These works, and I believe Zeitoun is one of them, may be similar to a fictional narrative experience. Bal and Veltkamp explain that this is due to “the fictional nature of these types of stories (i.e., the author stresses believability of the story, and the narrative primarily aims at eliciting emotions in the reader)” (n.p.) These characteristics may then lead to effects “in line with the transportation framework,” which in turn will lead to a heightened empathic response, as we have already made the connection between transportation into the story and empathy (n.p.). This is in opposition to the logico-scientific category of nonfiction like newspaper articles or other more straightforward journalistic pieces: “without characters to make inferences about, there are no processes of perspective-taking, sympathy and empathy” (Koopman and Hakemulder n.p.).

A closer reading of passages from Zeitoun will show this book to be of a literary quality, with similar techniques of foregrouding found in What Is the What. The book is permeated with metaphors and imagery that has to do with water, underscoring the theme and plot of the story. Not only are there constant referrals to the ocean the Zeitouns grew up with in Syria, but there are also continuous comparisons and similes made using water, such as the comment that Kathy’s breathing was “not unlike the shushing of water against the hull of a boat” (5), making the smooth transition from Zeitoun’s dream of fishing in his hometown Jableh to his life in New Orleans. But the water and ocean imagery that is used slowly changes from conveying a calming feeling to embodying a more threatening one. Later, for example, when a fire breaks out in the city and Zeitoun is watching it from a safe distance, the narrator describes “the fire ebb and flow” (153) and “a block of homes burning and sinking into the obsidian sea that had swallowed the city” (152). Note also the alliteration of s-sounds in this last quotation, as well as in the

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following sentence: “Zeitoun was safe on his roof, the city was silent and still, the stars were in their place” (153).

There are many more examples of interesting imagery, such as the following example: “The sky was a child’s fingerpainting, blue and black hastily mixed” (72). Suggesting the sky is childlike seems to want to try and make it less of a danger than it is, but really the image of a rough mixture of dark blue and black still feels very threatening. Then there follows a

personification of the house: “Branches clawed at the walls, the roof. There were unknown thumps everywhere. The bones of the house seemed to be moaning under the strain of it all. The house was under assault” (72). The personification is then extended from the house to the city itself: “There was only the sound of the city breathing as he breathed, weary from the fight, grateful it was over” (78). This suggests that Zeitoun and the city are one, and there is no one else there.

Besides imagery, there are also many instances of foregrounding in terms of lexical repetition in order to highlight certain feelings or emotions, such as when Zeitoun accidentally left his newborn baby in the yard: “The baby. Of course she wanted the baby. He turned to give her the baby, but there was no baby. The baby was not at his feet. The baby was not in the room” (9). The frequent repetition of the word baby emphasizes the importance of this thing and how obvious it is that he should have had the child with him, as well as the panic of realizing the baby is gone, even if just for a second.

The book is focalized in turns from Zeitoun’s and Kathy’s perspective. But the narrator is heterodiegetic, as it is not a story told in the first-person and the narrator is not a character in the plot. Due to the book’s focalization, the reader is often at a loss at what exactly is happening. Instead, we learn what is happening at the same pace as Zeitoun is. He is described waking up because of a sound, for example, and we slowly figure out what it indicates:

The sound continued, something like running water. But there was no rain, no leaks. He thought a pipe might have broken, but that couldn’t be it; the sound wasn’t right. This was more like a river, the movement of great volumes of water.

He sat up and looked down through the window that faced the backyard. He saw water, a wide sea of it. It was coming from the north. It flowed into the yard, under the house, rising quickly.

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but now it had returned, far stronger. And this water was different from the murky rainwater of the day before. This water was green and clear. This was lake water.

At that moment, Zeitoun knew that the levees had been overtopped or compromised. There could be no doubt. The city would soon be underwater. If the water was here, he knew, it was already covering most of New Orleans. He knew it would keep coming, would likely rise eight feet or more in his neighborhood, and more elsewhere. He knew the recovery would take months or years. He knew the flood had come. (85-86)

Not only is this passage important in terms of focalization and identification with the character, because we are coming to the same realizations he is, including what it means, but there is also a lot of lexical repetition once again, to emphasize the most important aspects of what is

happening. The terms “this water” is repeated often, as well as “he knew,” suggesting he finally realizes the predicament he is in because of his decision to stay behind in city. Once again this type of foregrounding and the focalization which has the reader discovering what is happening at the same pace as the characters, allows one to be fully transported into the story because we share in the experiences of the characters and are transported into their mind. Occupying the emotional state of another person and learning about their thoughts and emotions increases one’s emphatic response.

As the action continues, and Kathy becomes increasingly worried about Zeitoun’s fate, the passages that describe her actions throughout the days are made up of shorter paragraphs than at the start of the book and compared to Zeitoun’s passages. They become less of a coherent story, but convey short bursts of action and jump from moment to moment, interspersed with sentences that mention the current death toll in New Orleans, such as “The death toll jumped to 423” and “The death toll was at 648 and climbing” (191). The reader can feel Kathy’s despair as the passages alternate between her phone calls to acquaintances in New Orleans and the rising death toll, as her thoughts shift only between the doom scenario of the rising death toll and the

uncertainty she faces when it comes to the fate of her husband.

Eggers’ narrators are often great fans of lexical repetition, or of listing many sentences with the same structure or syntax. They make for striking passages: “He did not want any of this to be true. He did not want it to be true that his home and his city were underwater. He did not want it to be true that his wife and children were fifteen hundred miles away and might by now presume him to be dead. He did not want it to be true that he was now and might always be a

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man in a cage, hidden away, no longer part of the world” (256, emphasis mine). Or: “This country was not unique. This country was fallible. Mistakes were being made. He was a mistake. In the grand scheme of the country’s blind, grasping fight against threats seen and unseen, there would be mistakes made. Innocents would be suspected. Innocents would be imprisoned. (263, emphasis mine). In both these passages, all the sentences are connecting and grouped together because of their similarity in syntax, and because of the use of many of the same key words. The sentences have an almost poetic feel to them because of this.

The final passage is especially saturated with instances of foregrounding and is worth looking into in-depth:

And so he builds, because what is building, and rebuilding and rebuilding again, but an act of

faith? There is no faith like the faith of a builder of homes in coastal Louisiana. And there is no

better way to prove to God and neighbor that you were there, that you are there, that you are

human, than to build. Who could ever again deny he belonged here? If he needs to restore every

home in this city, he will, to prove he is part of this place.

As he drives through the city during the day and dreams of it at night, his mind vaults into glorious reveries - he envisions this city and this country not just as it was, but better, far better. It can be. Yes, a dark time passed over this land, but now there is something like light. Progress is being made. It’s so slow sometimes, so terribly so [sic] sometimes, but progress is being made. We have removed the rot, we are strengthening the foundations. There is much work to do, and we all know what needs to be done. We can only do the work, he tells Kathy, and his children, and his crew, his friends, anyone he sees. So let us get up early and stay late, and, brick by brick and block

by block, let us get that work done. If he can picture it, it can be. This has been the pattern of his

life: ludicrous dreams followed by hours and days and years of work and then a reality surpassing his wildest hopes and aspirations.

And so why should this be any different? (325-26, emphasis mine)

Note the many instances of repetition in this passage, of the verb “building,” of “faith,” of “work.” The alliteration of “to prove he is part of this place,” of “brick by brick and block by block.” These all add to the continuous themes of faith and building that pervade this passage. The metaphor of “rot” and “foundations” refers not only to the individual buildings but the entire city as a unit. The oppositions between day and night, between simultaneous forward motion of

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progress and the frustrating slowness of it also jump out at the reader, and all in all this passage is very uplifting. That the first and final sentences start with “And so…” suggests that Zeitoun will simply go on as he always has, that this was but a temporary setback in his life and he, as well as the city he loves, will be back on track soon. Finally, the phrase “that you were there, that you are there, that you are human” is not only another example of syntactic repetition, but is also haunting in its reaffirmation of Zeitoun’s existence and humanity.4

I have attempted to prove that both What Is the What and Zeitoun contain a significant amount of foregrounding that cannot be explained by regular, communicative language use. Instead, the type and manner in which these techniques of foregrounding have been implemented elevate these works to a literary level in order to increase empathy amongst their readers. The use of certain words or the way the passages are constructed through sentence use facilitate the transportation of the reader into the mind and emotional state of the character they are reading about. This transportation is essential for the promotion of empathy precisely because it entails the imaginative leap that makes it possible to understand another’s feelings and perspectives, which is what empathy is.

It is hard to show exactly why foregrounding promotes empathy, to show exactly what happens to the reader when reading heavily foregrounded text. The authors of the articles I have mentioned also do not have an answer for this, they merely noticed the results and were able to make a connection between reading literature and improved displays of empathy. The main point is that foregrounding enables better transportation into the book, because the reader is much more intensely invested in the story, due to increased reading times and being stimulated by the more aesthetically formulated phrasing. What seems to be essential as well is the use of one’s imagination: aesthetic or imaginative language leads one to see a picture in one’s mind, and can conjure up emotions while reading, due to rhythm or imagery, for example. It is precisely this emotional and imaginative investment that is necessary for empathy. I therefore think that the defamiliarizing effects caused by certain grammatical, lexical, or syntactic choices are necessary for the imaginative leap that the reader needs to make in order to be transported into the story, and therefore be able to identify with the people in that story. This happens because one is forced to think deeper, or interpret more heavily, in these cases than they would otherwise have had to 4 The idea that Zeitoun needs to reaffirm his humanity is a sentiment that is also expressed in the final passages of What Is the What, and I will get back to this necessity of demonstrating one’s humanness in the second part of this thesis.

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do, and therefore the imagination of the reader is stimulated, which allows for transportation. When one is transported into the story and identifies with or understands the perspectives of the characters, empathy usually follows.

A research team at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Science looked into the science behind empathy and found that our “own emotional state can distort our understanding of other people’s emotions, in particular if these are completely different to our own” (n.p.). This means we usually tend to impose our own emotional state onto others, and our own feelings therefore influence our empathic qualities. The research showed that when people consider themselves to be in a happy situation, they judge the situation of others to be happier too. When people are uncomfortable or unhappy, however, the assume others to be so as well.

I interpret this projection of one’s emotional state to mean that one is too preoccupied with oneself to be able to fully consider another person’s perspective. However, when reading a book, one could claim that our personal emotional states are left out of the equation, because we are completely immersed in the emotional state of the characters. I think that better transportation into the story world means that one is less aware of one’s own state because one is so engrossed in the character’s life at the moment. It follows, then, that when one is reading a book and is transported into it because of its techniques of foregrounding, the reader may be better equipped to infer the actual emotional state of the character rather than conflating his or her own feelings with that of the character, and in this can become more empathic. I do not suggest this immersion means that the reader is mindlessly taken along, the foregrounding can still work in

defamiliarizing ways. It is precisely the way that these elements constantly force the reader out of their own minds, to which the foregrounded elements appear jarring or surprising, in order to inhabit the perspective that is different from his or her own emotional state, that makes empathy possible.

2.3 Voice of Witness

Though I will discuss the testimonial format of Voice of Witness in the next part of this thesis, I will nonetheless introduce the project here. It is not fruitful to analyze VoW in the same manner as the previous two works by Eggers, because these stories are transcribed testimonials from people, sharing their experiences as they lived them. Therefore, there has not been an author involved in making these narratives any more literary or aesthetic than they could have been,

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because the entire point of this book series is to have people tell their stories in their own words. Any instances of foregrounding will therefore most likely be coincidental in nature, and it will not be useful to analyze them in the same way I have done for Zeitoun and What Is the What. The testimony of Achol Mayuol, for example, a woman from Sudan who was kidnapped as a young child and held as a slave for years before she managed to escape, repeats various words in certain passages of her story, but never does this suggest to be premeditated or to serve any aesthetic function. She says, for example: “A few women complained about our situation, and they were killed. They were shot. They shot one pregnant woman who had not complained. I think they thought they had made a mistake by abducting a pregnant woman, so they fixed that error by killing her. They killed an older woman for the same reason” (VoW 151, emphasis mine). The repeated words in this passage serve no other function than to communicate exactly what happened. The woman tells her story so matter-of-factly and in such a simple style that there is no lexical variation necessary, perhaps she lacks the vocabulary or she just wishes to communicate her story in the most minimal and straightforward way possible. However, the repetition is not striking enough to be purposefully included to serve an aesthetic purpose.

Foregrounding may not be worth looking into, in this case, but I would like to look into the concept of narrativity in relation to VoW, as a bridge between the first and second part of this thesis. Eggers emphasizes that VoW is a project dedicated to showing episodes of world history through the eyes of specific individuals. While there are, of course, various ways in which to represent events, it appears that humans are most comfortable with, and almost always resort back to, narratives. Events and experiences are so much easier to understand when they are in the form of stories with a beginning, middle, and an end. In “The Value of Narrativity in the

Representation of Reality,” Hayden White claims that “narrative is a meta-code, a human

universal on the basis of which transcultural messages about the nature of a shared reality can be transmitted” (1). This suggests that our thoughts and experiences are mediated through narrative and that we need to structure them through narrative in order to derive meaning from them and understand them. White is talking specifically about historiography, and thinks about true events of the past and the best ways to represent them. He emphasizes that each mode of representation carries with it certain moral or interpretative weight, which means that, while objective facts exist, objective events do not, because the only reason they are known as an event is because they are being hierarchically ordered and interpreted through narrative. Even though Eggers is

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mostly thought of as a novelist, as he deals mainly with fiction, in the case of the works that are the subject of this thesis he is also a historiographer of sorts because he turns the facts of

someone’s life into a narrative event.

The sociological articles on literature and empathy that were discussed above show that narrative is one of the essential - if not the most essential - elements to influence the promotion of empathy when reading literature. Hayden White in turn shows us that the most useful and successful way of talking about history or historical events is through narratives. It then follows that, because both the Voice of Witness projects and Zeitoun deal with historical events as

experienced through the eyes of one specific person who tells their story as a narrative, this is the most empathic way of conveying this story. The same even goes for What Is the What, although in the latter case it might be a more difficult argument to make because we are dealing with fiction and the others claim to be historically accurate, even if they are subjective accounts of the events.

Eggers has chosen this individualized format rather than an attempt at an all-encompassing narrative because he felt that experiencing the story through one particular set of eyes would have more of an impact. He explained in an interview that when it came to “these vast and complex episodes in history” people sometimes “learn the most – and certainly empathize the most - by seeing that moment in history through the eyes of one person” (“Interview” n.p.). This idea is confirmed by Bal and Veltkamp, who bring up the theory of “psychic numbing.” They explain that “it is easier to experience affect if a message presents information about a single, identifiable individual, than when information is presented about entire groups or using statistics.” They mention “a process of psychological numbing towards stories about large groups of people or objectified or statistically presented facts” whereas “fictional narratives that are usually more about individuals and their personal stories, may influence people to a much stronger degree” (n.p.) Therefore we can say that this kind of history may be more effective than traditional ways of dealing with historical events. Voice of Witness operates entirely on this premise, making use of the fact that personal stories dealing with individuals have a greater effect on people. They have the power to bring issues that are usually considered far away closer to home and can inspire action and empathy.

What I have attempted to show for Voice of Witness is that it is not necessarily the foregrounding that makes these stories empathically powerful, as is the case for What Is the

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What and Zeitoun, because any instances of foregrounding will most likely have been coincidental. What is essential though, is the narrative format of these life stories, which are similar to the other two works. They tell a very personal story, rather than objective facts, and because the reader feels closer to the people that are narrating their story, there is a very real sense of connection and empathy, despite the absence of an intervening author who embellishes the work with aesthetics or literariness. I therefore do not necessarily think it is the fictionality that is essential in the creation of empathy, but more so the fact that it is rendered in a narrative mode, as a story. If it was formatted as a fictional newspaper article the effect would not be the same.

2.4 Real Reader’s Responses

Hopefully it has become clear that each of the books discussed and the narratives they contain have been crucial in the depiction of instances of history and in people’s lives that may be difficult to understand in other formats. But Eggers has been able to bring these stories close, to make them tangible, and in so doing has promoted empathy amongst his readers, because he has brought these stories in a form that enables an empathic reaction.

However, I claim this empathic effect on the basis of sociological articles and my own, personal, probably biased, experience. In order to back this claim up without any quantitative or sociological research of my own, I have perused the review section for the books on

amazon.com. The overwhelming majority of reviewers rated both What Is the What and Zeitoun 5 stars. Many of those who gave 1 star reviews failed to elaborate on their reasoning beyond simply stating the book “sucks,” and therefore I feel we need not pay much attention to them. Because the Voice of Witness Reader is a relatively new publication, there are no reviews on amazon.com as of yet, but there are some reviews of individual Voice of Witness publications, such as Voices from the Storm: The People of New Orleans on Hurricane Katrina and Its Aftermath.

What each of the positive reviews about What Is the What had in common was that they all agreed that this was a very “moving” and “touching” story; the readers felt “transported to Sudan” and better equipped to “understand the experiences of someone far away.” A reviewer with the username m0arpheuson wrote of What Is the What that it “changed [him] irrevocably.” He felt he became “a better, more worldly, more humble and more introspective person after having read this book.” Another user named Genene Murphy wrote about Valentino that “you’ll

"The Collapsible Space Between Us": The Empathic Literary World of Dave Eggers