Rereading Davis

"Theatricality is not likely to be present when a performance is so absorbing that the audience forgets it is spectating." (Tracy Davis, "Theatricality and Civil Society in Theatricality", p. 128)

-The spectator must decide that the performance is significant for them before they feel sympathy. (p. 129)

"As long as sympathy is withheld, the theatrical circumstance persists; only if sympathy is granted can we cease to be spectators to ourselves and others." (p. 141)

-The spectators feel admiration and sympathy for the brave man on the scaffold, but they turn away from the brave man being pilloried. We choose sympathy when it benefits us, ennobles us, not when it makes us feel shame. (p. 150)

"A world where only sympathy occurs would be a dull one indeed, but it is the conditioned choice to sympathize or theatricalize that matters." (p. 153)

"Is this not how new law is conceived: not by cathecting with victims but by enabling the seeing of acts (sexual harassment, stalking, driving under the influence of alcohol) where before there was either 'nothing' or sympathetic social sanction?" (p. 154)

New things to consider in my second reading:

1) The first time around, I didn't focus so much on her interpretation of sympathy as a choice, but now I think that has far-reaching implications for transport. We can be transported only because we are willing to allow ourselves to do so, and that allowance is predicated on complex personal, cultural, and social situations. Maybe the important question is not, "What is the quality of science fiction that transports me?" but "What is it in me that is so willing to be transported by science fiction?"

2) Empathy is not unselfish. This was underlined by the example about the pilloried man vs. the hanged man, and although it might seem obvious, it deserves closer attention than I have given it. If sympathy/empathy is a choice we make, then it is affected by the flaws of human nature that affect every choice. I often think of empathy uncritically as a good effect of encountering difference through literature, but I should be more aware of the circumstances in which empathy is generated and its more selfish benefits to the one who empathizes.

3) Naming something brings it into view. This one comes mainly from the last quote from page 154. Science fiction and fantasy is uniquely equipped to give new names to things, especially when it constructs societies radically different from our own. I think immediately of the concept of shifgrethor in Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness and the dispossessed language usage in The Dispossessed. I never thought of the ways that possessive language might have negative consequences with regard to the way I think about other human beings (for example, Le Guin's Odonians would say "the mother" instead of "my mother" because the use of a possessive would imply ownership over another person).