The introduction of more information, the creation of opacity, may even be a mitigating factor to sympathy, as Francoise’s heartfelt response to distant tragedies, but indifference to local misfortunes demonstrates (122). Because of the incontrovertible fact that we can never feel how another feels, just “see” how they feel, our experience of others ends with our observation of them what we call “sympathy” is made of expectations.
This theory of the novel inevitably extends into our own reading of experience, how we feel and sympathize with the indubitably ‘real’ people with whom we interact. As the whole of a being is inassimilable, untenable, wrought with contradictions (hence, “opaque”), the reader must be given the effective parts, whence he creates the affective illusion of a whole. The novelist’s art is in paring the “dead weight” of real life, and presenting us with responsive abstractions. By substituting “immaterial…things…which the spirit can assimilate to itself” for the “opaque sections” of “real” human existence, the trick of sympathy is enacted we now can substantiate and corroborate the veils which the novelist has created for us, and feel corresponding emotion for the illusory “feelings,” in the “guise of truth,” of literary creations (83). How a novel works, Proust’s narrator suggests, is by a trick of illusion, a sleight of hand, towards the end of eliciting sympathy.
If some misfortune comes to him, it is only in one small section of the complete idea we have of him that we are capable of feeling any emotion indeed it is only in one small section of the complete idea he has of himself that he is capable of feeling any emotion either.
“A ‘real’ person,” he begins, profoundly as we may sympathize with him, is in a great measure perceptible only through our senses, that is to say, he remains opaque, offers a dead weight which our sensibilities have not the strength to lift. When we encounter the narrator addressing the problems faced by the artist, he notes that “the ingenuity of the first novelist” lay in the realization that a simplification of characters that corresponds to the “suppression” of “‘real’ people” inevitably makes novels stronger, more effective in conjuring a sympathetic response from a sensitive reader.
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