Empathy

Thursday evening two weeks ago, I had an upsetting experience with my writers’ group. No one said anything deliberately hurtful, and there was no horrible argument. The members are generous in spirit and with their constructive comments. I didn’t make my feelings known.

For that Thursday’s writing group session, I’d submitted the opening 34 pages of a novel in which the first-person narrator is blind. To make him credible, I have him notice things in ways people with vision don’t tend to think about: He “hears” a smile in someone’s voice and checks out restaurant silverware by touch. I wish I didn’t feel compelled to highlight such differences, but sighted readers invariably ask: How does he know? How can he tell?

Fiction writers know better than anyone that when a story is written in the first person singular, it doesn’t mean the narrator is the author. However, most of my critics that evening kept saying “you” when referring to my character, something they never did when commenting on other members’ fiction: “You say you are attracted to her voice, but you don’t say what about her voice attracted you.” This personalization of the fictional character to me, his creator, was no mere confusion. One member said, and repeated in her subsequent written comments: “He sounds very like you, but you’re a much warmer person. I’m missing that warmth, that life.” I’m pleased that she thinks of me as warm, but sad to find myself her only point of reference for a blind character.

Normally, after the other group members in the Zoom meeting have given me an hour’s thoughtful commentary, I’m exhilarated at the prospect of incorporating their suggestions and improving my submission. This time I was deflated.

I was the only blind student at my high school, as I was for most of my college years, and then the only blind employee for much of my office career. I made many friends during those years and felt good about leading a life in mainstream society. Even so, when looking back on my high school experience, a time when we spend hours examining our own and other people’s navels, I wrote the following paragraph on empathy:

Openness could be cathartic not only for the speaker, but also for listeners. Someone talking about how badly a date had gone might help listeners feel better about their own dates from hell. But sighted people were inhibited when it came to talking about blindness-related problems because the condition went beyond anything they could imagine. It couldn’t be shared, and so there was no catharsis; just pity and involuntary repulsion. It was too threatening. They had to push it away.

Black and gay people have found ways to talk about their experiences and feelings in mainstream outlets, as other minority groups have done. Sadly, disabled people are a long way from a similar level of engagement.

You don’t win over an audience by demanding they give you their attention. Those of us who write or otherwise communicate to society’s mainstream from a minority point of view, whatever the nature of that minority, must earn that audience by turning specifics into universals. I don’t mean to suppress unusual and different experiences. Far from it. But they need to be secondary: a starting point, a sideshow, a new angle on the human experience. As differences get threshed out, a bigger picture-perspective might yet emerge where the focus shifts to what we all have in common.

That Thursday night, I felt the impossibility of my ambition. The only books by and about blind people that reach mainstream reviewers’ desks are memoirs. But fiction is where characters can come alive for the reader and thorny issues gain traction. I have to resist my pessimism and trust that one day fiction with disabled characters by disabled authors will be embraced.