Abstract
This chapter (“Empathy and Otherness”) examines the phenomenon of empathy from the point of view of sensorimotor and kinesthetic experience. It begins by considering the components of empathy and looking at cognitive and phenomenological definitions of empathy. Drawing on Emmanuel Levinas’s Infinity and Totality, it considers the place of alterity in empathic interactions and what it means for spectators and actors to navigate otherness and difference empathically. The chapter concludes by addressing the issue of actors performing characters from different identity communities, including the controversial practice of non-disabled actors taking on disabled roles. Scenes and performances analyzed in this chapter include Gloucester’s blinding in Shakespeare’s King Lear, director Sam Gold’s production of The Glass Menagerie, and Proteus Theatre’s Merrick, the Elephant Man.
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Notes
- 1.
Barack Obama, “Obama to Graduates: Cultivate Empathy.”
- 2.
Om Malik, “Silicon Valley has an Empathy Vacuum.”
- 3.
See Marie R. Miyashiro, The Empathy Factor: Your Competitive Advantage for Personal, Team, and Business Success.
- 4.
For an interdisciplinary history of empathy theories, see Amy Copland and Peter Goldie, Introduction to Empathy: Philosophical and Psychological Perspectives.
- 5.
An excellent overview of neurological research concerning empathy can be found in Boris C. Bernhardt and Tania Singer, “The Neural Basis of Empathy.”
- 6.
R. J. R. Blair, “Responding to the Emotions of Others: Dissociating Forms of Empathy through the Study of Typical and Psychiatric Populations,” 699.
- 7.
Alvin I. Goldman, “Two Routes to Empathy: Insights from Cognitive Neuroscience,” 36.
- 8.
Christian Keysers, The Empathic Brain, 110.
- 9.
Jamil Zaki, “Empathy: A Motivated Account,” 1608.
- 10.
Grit Hein et al., “Neural Responses to Ingroup and Outgroup Members’ Suffering,” 155. In “I Feel How You Feel but Not Always,” Hein and Tania Singer discuss other individuating variables in pain-directed empathy.
- 11.
Zaki, “Empathy,” 1631.
- 12.
For a fuller discussion of phenomenological writings on empathy, see Dan Zahavi, “Beyond Empathy: Phenomenological Approaches to Intersubjectivity”; Zahavi, Self and Other: Exploring Subjectivity, Empathy, and Shame, 112–52; and Dermot Moran, “The Problem of Empathy: Lipps, Scheler, Husserl and Stein.” These writings often display a reservation toward the term empathy. Although Husserl used the term Einfühlung in his writings, he was also critical of the term’s imprecision, calling it a “false expression” at one point because it was unclear whether it referred to the projection of oneself onto another body or the actual encounter with another embodied self (Zahavi, Self and Other, 114). Merleau-Ponty, whose writings on intersubjectivity have contributed to the phenomenological account of empathy, seems to have avoided the term.
- 13.
Edith Stein, On the Problem of Empathy, 6.
- 14.
Ibid.
- 15.
For a discussion of empathy and pain from a cognitive science perspective, see Amy Cook, “For Hecuba or for Hamlet: Rethinking Emotion and Empathy in the Theatre,” 79–80.
- 16.
Stein, On the Problem of Empathy, 58.
- 17.
Ibid., 16
- 18.
Evan Thompson, Mind in Life, 392–93. Thompson offers this typology as a phenomenological framework for understanding recent studies in empathy and social cognition. For an earlier attempt at such a typology, see Natalie Depraz, “The Husserlian Theory of Intersubjectivity as Alterology: Emergent Theories and Wisdom Traditions in the Light of Genetic Phenomenology,” 172.
- 19.
Thompson, Mind in Life, 393.
- 20.
Ibid., 399.
- 21.
Ibid., 401.
- 22.
Ibid., 402.
- 23.
John H. Muse, “Performance and the Pace of Empathy,” 273.
- 24.
David Krasner, “Empathy and Theatre,” 256.
- 25.
Bruce McConachie, Engaging Audiences, 72.
- 26.
For a discussion of this theatrical dynamic in the fifteenth-century English morality play Mankind, see Stanton B. Garner Jr., “Theatricality in Mankind and Everyman,” 275–81.
- 27.
Samuel Johnson, Johnson on Shakespeare, 2: 703.
- 28.
Sigmund Freud, The Uncanny, 138–40. In “Smelling their Way to Dover: A Blind Director’s Take on Blind Gloucester,” David Richman offers the perspective of someone who cannot see on Gloucester’s blindness.
- 29.
As a way of deepening my understanding of this sequence’s phenomenological and sensorimotor dynamics, I participated in April 2017 in an informal acting workshop on the blinding scene in which I had the opportunity to act the roles of Cornwall and Gloucester and observe their traumatic encounter up close. Moving into actions I still find difficult to watch, these rehearsals underscored the kinesthetic and sensorimotor investments linking spectatorship and enactment during this scene.
- 30.
Sir Philip Sidney, The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia (New Arcadia), 182.
- 31.
Riverside Shakespeare, 1329.
- 32.
Ibid., 1328.
- 33.
Ibid.
- 34.
Adam Morton, “Empathy for the Devil,” 318.
- 35.
Riverside Shakespeare, 1328.
- 36.
Ibid., 1329.
- 37.
Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, 194.
- 38.
Ibid., 199–20 (my italics).
- 39.
Roger Burggraeve, “Violence and the Face of the Other: The Vision of Emmanuel Levinas on Moral Evil and Our Responsibility,” 32. I am not the first to examine King Lear through a Levinasian lens; see, for example, David Goldstein, “Facing King Lear.”
- 40.
Vilayanur Ramachandran, “The Neurons that Shaped Civilization.”
- 41.
Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 43.
- 42.
Ibid., 203.
- 43.
Ibid., 194 (emphasis in original).
- 44.
Matthew Ratcliffe, Experiences of Depression: A Study in Phenomenology, 240. Central to all empathic achievement, Ratcliffe writes, is an “attentiveness to actual and potential degrees of phenomenological difference,” ibid., 248.
- 45.
By consolidating the self in relation to an imagined opposite, otherness in the objectifying sense is different from genuine alterity, which challenges the subject’s self-regard.
- 46.
Tennessee Williams, The Glass Menagerie, 21.
- 47.
Ibid., 5. In contrast with the other characters, Williams specifies, Laura should be lit with a light that has “a peculiar pristine clarity such as light used in early religious portraits of female saints or madonnas” (10).
- 48.
Sam Gold, quoted in Louis Peitzman, “Meet the Actor with a Disability Who Is Helping to Transform a Classic Play.”
- 49.
For an interesting discussion of Ferris’s rehearsal work with Gold on meeting the challenges and opportunities of this role, see Sasha Weiss, “The Experimentalist on Broadway.”
- 50.
Rex Reed, “Sam Gold Goes Gross with ‘The Glass Menagerie.’”
- 51.
Tobin Siebers, Disability Aesthetics, 1.
- 52.
Jill Bennett, Empathic Vision: Affect, Trauma, and Contemporary Art, 10 (emphasis in original); cited in Nicola Shaughnessy, “Knowing Me, Knowing You: Autism, Kinesthetic Empathy and Applied Performance,” 39.
- 53.
Wanda Strukus, “Mining the Gap,” 103.
- 54.
David Vincent Kimel, “Glittering Translucence.”
- 55.
Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, Staring: How We Look, 19.
- 56.
Margrit Shildrick, Dangerous Discourses of Disability, Subjectivity and Sexuality, 8. For more on this imbrication see Janet Price and Margrit Shildrick, “Bodies Together: Touch, Ethics and Disability.”
- 57.
Michael Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses, 130.
- 58.
Christine Bruno, who has cerebral palsy, played Laura Wingfield at the Fulton Opera House in Lancaster, PA, in 2001, while Regan Linton, who is paralyzed as a result of a spinal cord injury, played the role at the University of California, San Diego, in 2012. Both are wheelchair bound. Ann M. Fox interviewed both performers for her essay “Reclaiming the Ordinary Extraordinary Body; Or, The Importance of The Glass Menagerie for Literary Disability Studies.”
- 59.
For an excellent discussion of this controversy over the casting of non-disabled actors to play disabled roles, including the voices of those who defend the practice, see Kirsty Johnston, Disability Theatre and Modern Drama, 37–58.
- 60.
This production originated at the Williamstown Theatre Festival in 2012 and transferred from New York to London in 2015.
- 61.
In view of the fact that the historical Merrick received visitors from the Victorian upper classes in his hospital quarters, Cooper’s Elephant Man offered an ironic spectacle of able-bodiedness, celebrity, and disability.
- 62.
Gregg Mozgala, “The Elephant in the Room.”
- 63.
Lennard Davis, “J’Accuse: Cultural Imperialism—Ableist Style,” 36.
- 64.
Animal science professor and autism spokesperson Temple Grandin describes a related instance of empathic failure: “Normal people have an incredible lack of empathy. They have good emotional empathy, but they don’t have much empathy for the autistic kid who is screaming at the baseball game because he can’t stand the sensory overload. Or the autistic kid having a meltdown in the school cafeteria because there’s too much stimulation. I’m frustrated with the inability of normal people to have sensory empathy. They can’t seem to acknowledge these different realities because they’re so far away from their own experiences” (“Q&A: Temple Grandin on Language”).
- 65.
Oxford English Dictionary.
- 66.
Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity, 129.
- 67.
Rhonda Blair discusses the actor’s use of empathy from a cognitive science perspective in “Cognitive Neuroscience and Acting: Imagination, Conceptual Blending, and Empathy,” 98–102. In a passage that supports the discussion in the remainder of this chapter, Blair writes, “Empathy can be triggered by bottom-up or top-down processing; often both are involved simultaneously. Part of the actor’s work is to become more conscious of both of these perspectives, and to learn to manipulate these as effectively as possible through the use, for example, of physical mirroring exercises and imagination, based on research and the rehearsal process” (ibid., 100).
- 68.
See, for example, Eric Lott’s Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class and Joseph Roach’s discussion of Mardi Gras krewes in Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance, esp. 17–25.
- 69.
Carol Martin and Anna Deavere Smith, “Anna Deavere Smith: The Word Becomes You. An Interview with Carol Martin,” 51.
- 70.
A clip of Smith giving her performance of Allen Bullock during a lecture is available on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dili9CSKHtU. I attended Notes from the Field at New York’s Second Stage Theatre in December 2016.
- 71.
Dorinne K. Kondo, “(Re)Visions of Race: Contemporary Race Theory and the Cultural Politics of Racial Crossover in Documentary,” 96 (italics mine).
- 72.
Richard Schechner, “Anna Deavere Smith: Acting as Incorporation,” 63.
- 73.
After a successful run at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 2008, Merrick, the Elephant Man was brought to New York in late 2009 as part of the Brits Off Broadway season. A one-minute promotional video of Merrick, the Elephant Man that includes clips from the production can be viewed on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XfQuQQEI4q8 (accessed 1 March 2018).
- 74.
“Breakout! Blue Sky Thinking for Adults with Disabilities,” Proteus: The Changing Face of Theatre, http://www.proteustheatre.com/?page=BreakoutProject (accessed 30 June 2014).
- 75.
Saul Jaffé, personal correspondence, 16 June 2011.
- 76.
Mary Swan, personal correspondence, 8 August 2011.
- 77.
Ibid.
- 78.
The published text of Pomerance’s The Elephant Man includes the following warning: “No one with any history of back trouble should attempt the part of MERRICK as contorted. Anyone playing the part of Merrick should be advised to consult a physician about the problems of sustaining any unnatural or twisted position” (3).
- 79.
Saul Jaffé, personal correspondence.
- 80.
Mary Swan and Saul Jaffé. “Merrick, The Elephant Man (final draft),” 1.
- 81.
Ibid., 8.
- 82.
Jaffé commented on the ironic relation between able-bodiedness and disability in this trapeze work: “[T]he trapeze can be quite tortuous, so the inevitable irony then is that an able-bodied actor has to disable himself on it in order to make the disabled character appear able-bodied” (personal correspondence).
- 83.
Swan and Jaffé, “Merrick,” 6.
- 84.
Ibid., 2.
- 85.
Those who are interested in the powerful empathic responses to Joseph Merrick by those who are disabled and severely disfigured can view David Hevey’s seventeen-minute film Behind the Shadow of Merrick, which was completed in 2008 as part of the “Rethinking Disability Representation in Museums and Galleries” project commissioned by the Research Centre for Museums and Galleries at the University of Leicester (Hevey, dir., Behind the Shadow of Merrick). For further information on the Merrick project, see Hevey, “Behind the Shadow of Merrick.”
- 86.
Petra Kuppers, Disability and Contemporary Performance: Bodies on Edge, 12.
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Garner, S.B. (2018). Empathy and Otherness. In: Kinesthetic Spectatorship in the Theatre. Cognitive Studies in Literature and Performance. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91794-8_7
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