Empathy and Epic Fiction: A reflection on the day of the Ashura of 2020

 The day of Ashura, 2020, inspired me these notes about empathy and epic fiction

 
Is it still possible to produce epic fiction in our world? It is extremely difficult in a world where everything seems to be tainted with decadence and decline, but there is a chance. And we saw truly epic moments in Russel Crowe's movie "The Water Deviner" (2014). 

Let me say first that whoever wrote the script for this movie should be cursed by the muse Calliope and receive at least a bad stomachache as punishment. Really, modern scripting is almost always bad, but this one is terrible. We see an improbable war-widow who looks like a movie star, completely out of place in a hotel in Istanbul. Flashbacks aplenty, and of the worse kind (against the basic rule of all fiction: never use flashbacks). An especially horrible scene is when the filmmaker insists for at least five minutes on showing us one of the three sons of the protagonist having to kill his wounded brother. I mean, what do you think you are allowed to do in order to try to extract a cheap tears from your viewers? Don't you have a drop of shame left in your nearly empty brain? And the script for the last 10 minutes of the film were handled by the same writer who writes the scripts for the Tom and Jerry cartoons.

But the film has this redeeming feature: it is epic. Truly. It is because the theme is epic and we can't miss that point. "The Water Deviner" tells us of a father looking for the bodies of his dead sons. That's something that resonates with all of us. You can't forget the scene, in the Iliad, when King Priam goes to see Achilles, asking him to give back to him his dead son. And Achilles weeps together with the father of the man he killed. This is possibly the highest moment of poetry ever produced in human literature. And it is epic. 

What is epic, after all? It is conflict and a good cause. There is a hero who fights for a good cause. He may be defeated, it doesn't matter. Heroism is doing one's duty in difficult circumstances. Not by chance I am writing these note in the day of the Ashura of 2020, commemorating when the Imam Hoseyn (AS) fought and died at Karbala. He fought for justice and died for justice, that's the basis of all epic stories.

So, epic can appear everywhere, in different circumstances. Even in a decadent society that seems to be bent to destroying everything that's good and decent, like ours, occasionally epic resurfaces. Think of how Virgil resurrected the epic stories of the Iliad and the Odissey in his Aeneid. Like us, Virgil lived in an age of decadence, and his attempt to glorify the birth of the Roman Empire could have turned into the worst apologetic trash that the Empire was already producing at the time. And yet, Virgil turned his story into an epic masterpiece. This is because epic is always around us, it is up to us to recognize it. 

Back to The Water Deviner, despite all the narrative disasters that plague it, the epic vein never really disappears. It is deep, and it is made especially alive by the figure of Hassan Bey, the Turkish officer who is the co-protagonist (and perhaps the true protagonist) of the movie. It is in the gradual discovery by Joshua, the protagonist, of the soul of a nation: ordinary people, the Turkish soldiers defeated in the war, who feel that they have something to fight for: to defend their land. This is epic -- truly epic. 

Of course, I know that wars are bad. In this case, after the end of the 1st world war, a lot of horrible things happened and all the sides involved have their faults: Turks, Greek, British, all alike. It is part of the human destiny to be like this. But one day we'll transcend the need of the kind of epic that involves killing people. It will be a different, and higher, form of empathy that we will reach. But we won't get anywhere if we don't develop empathy even in the simplest forms. And we have to start from the level we are: the level of feeling something for our fellow human beings. Yes, like when we are told of a father who is looking for the bodies of his dead sons. It may be Priam in the Iliad, or Joshua in "The Water Deviner" -- it is the same thing. It is the magic of empathy that makes us be them, and takes us to their world and their feeling.

The words below are attributed to Mustafa Kemal Ataturk and to have been addressed to the mothers of the Australian soldiers who died in Gallipoli during the WW1. It is not certain that Ataturk ever said these words, they may be fiction. But, then, so are the words that Achilles and Priam exchanged as told in the Iliad. And, I dare to say, that this piece of fiction by an anonymous writer of the 1930s is not inferior to the words told by Homer. Words are our link to the real world. Worlds make us see, dream, and feel. And words make us feel for something higher than ourselves -- this is empathy in its purest form. The epic in everyone of us.

Those heroes that shed their blood
And lost their lives…
You are now lying in the soil of a friendly Country.
Therefore rest in peace.
There is no difference between the Johnnies
And the Mehmets to us where they lie side by side
Here in this country of ours…
You, the mothers,
Who sent their sons from far away countries
Wipe away your tears,
Your sons are now lying in our bosom
And are in peace
After having lost their lives on this land
They have become our sons as well

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There is a point that I hadn't noticed when I published this text and that came up in the discussion on Facebook. I wrote that in the Iliad, "Achille weeps together with the father of the man he had killed." Which is true, but note the subtlety, Achilles doesn't weep for Hector or Priam. He just notices the similarity of the destiny of his own father and his friend Patroclus. And he weeps for them only. It is a kind of empathy, but I'd say a notch lower than that of someone who really can put himself inside the person he faces. It seems to fit with Julian Jaynes interpretation of the mind of the people at the time of the Iliad: their level of empathy was not so high.

Priam finished. His words roused in Achilles
a desire to weep for his own father. Taking Priam’s hand,
he gently moved him back. So the two men there
both remembered warriors who’d been slaughtered.
Priam, lying at Achilles’ feet, wept aloud
for man-killing Hector, and Achilles also wept
for his own father and once more for Patroclus.
The sound of their lamenting filled the house.

h/t Maurizio Tron