Colum McCann: Radical Empathy

There’s a set of barbells at Frederick Douglass’s house in Anacostia. Some months ago Colum McCann picked them up, so to speak. He relocated them from Washington to Dublin inside a satchel that Douglass, already a prominent abolitionist while still in his twenties, took on a speaking tour in 1845 and 1846. He reconstituted them as barbells made from metal derived from slave-chains melted down. In doing so, he made them a vivid expression of Douglass’s circumstances: still a slave in America, Douglass was a freeman in Ireland, and yet one mindful of the contingent nature of his freedom – and mindful, even so, that he bore in the body which lifted those barbells the certain knowledge that in himself he was free.

And that, in McCann’s work, and his account of it, is an instance of “radical empathy.”

McCann was our guest in the Faith & Culture conversation series at Georgetown yesterday, and our conversation kept coming back to radical empathy. In McCann’s work, it is a quality certain characters possess: the Irish-born Bronx street-monk Corrigan in Let the Great World Spin, the peace broker George Mitchell (yes, the George Mitchell) in Transatlantic. It’s a quality that writers call forth in readers and vice versa. It’s a quality that is fostered and deepened through the telling of stories – a quality that McCann is striving to foster with a new nonprofit organization called narrative4, which invites young people from around the world to trade places and tell each other’s stories.

Most important (by my reckoning), radical empathy is a quality that McCann the novelist brings to the art of fiction. He strives for radical empathy with his characters through reporting and research, through close attention to speech and social details, through a willingness to follow the characters where they lead him (even unto death in some cases) – and through imaginative leaps like the one that led him to put those barbells in Douglass’s luggage and send them on a transatlantic journey.

Radical empathy emphasizes our ability – and our calling – to know others in spite of our differences. It’s akin to the “radical identification” of Dorothy Day and her contemporaries in American Catholic writing, who invited readers to identify with others through a recognition of their common humanity.

It’s a quality we need more of, in life and in art, as the great world spins.

• 2 May 2014