C h a r a c t e r7 5from the complex, self- contradictory nature of sexuality in a social
order which puts it to oppressive uses.
A good deal of realist fiction invites the reader to identify with
its characters. We are supposed to feel what it is like to be someone
else, even if we would not relish the thought of actually being them.
By allowing us imaginatively to recreate the experience of other
human beings, the realist novel broadens and deepens our human
sympathies. In this sense, it is a moral phenomenon without actu-
ally having to moralise. It is moral, if you like, by virtue of its form,
not just its content. George Eliot is a writer who does indeed
moralise rather too much for modern taste, but she herself saw the
novel form in just this light. ‘The only effect I ardently long to
produce by my writings,’ she writes in a letter, ‘is that those who
read them should be better able to imagine and to feel the pains and
joys of those who differ from themselves in everything but the
broad fact of being struggling erring human creatures.’ For Eliot,
the creative imagination is the opposite of egoism. It allows us to
enter into the inner lives of others, rather than remaining sealed off
from them in our own private spheres. The artistic is thus very
close to the ethical. If only we could grasp the world from someone
else’s standpoint, we would have a fuller sense of how and why they
act as they do. We would thus be less inclined to reproach them
from some loftily external point of view. To understand is to
forgive.
This charitable case has much to recommend it. But there is
quite a lot wrong with it as well. For one thing, not all literary art
invites us to identify with its characters. For another thing, empathy
is not the only form of understanding. In fact, taken literally, it is
not a form of understanding at all. If I ‘become’ you, I lose my
faculty of knowing what you are like. Who is left over to do the