Karl Ove Knausgaard’s acceptance speech for his 2015 Welt Literaturpreis, published as “The Vanishing Point” in The New Yorker, doesn’t use the word empathy but typifies the general tenor of the claim. Musing on the photo of a “dead little boy on the beach”—Alan Kurdi, a young Syrian refugee who washed up drowned on the shores of the Mediterranean—Knausgaard is shocked into a realization: “Are people dying? While this insight may be banal, its repercussions are not.” He goes on to compare the news media, which he thinks takes a remote, drone’s-eye view of other people, with an idealized version of the novel:
There is a vanishing point in our humanity, a point at which the other goes from being definite to indefinite. But this point is also the locus for the opposite movement, in which the other goes from indefinite to definite—and if there is an ethics of the novel, then it is here, in the zone that lies between the one and the all, that it comes into force and takes its basis. The instant a novel is opened and a reader begins to read, the remoteness between writer and reader dissolves. The other that thereby emerges does so in the reader’s imagination, assimilating at once into his or her mind… This space—that is, the novel’s—is idiosyncratic, particular, and singular: in other words, it represents the exact opposite of the media, which strives toward the universal and general.
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