Narrative Empathy and Ivan Cankar’s Novels The Ward of Mary Help of Christians and The Cross on the Mountain

Abstract

This article explores narrative empathy associated with the novels The Ward of Mary Help of Christians and The Cross on the Mountain (both from 1904) by Ivan Cankar (1876–1918) in order to find out why the former, upon its publication, exceeded the readers’ horizon of expectation, thereby achieving less narrative empathy in readers, while the latter met their expectations to a greater degree at the receptive level, thus evoking more narrative empathy. I consider three paths, i.e. autobiographical representation, a high level of author’s empathy, aesthetics of production and the two possibilities for the readers to empathize – identification with the character and the narrative situation. The empathizing is also analyzed according to the three modes, so-called bounded, ambassadorial, and broadcast empathy. The disharmony between the empathy of the author and the reader shows that the novel The Ward of Mary Help of Christians received less empathy not because of the defectiveness of the empathy in the author but because of the defectiveness of the empathy in the readers of the novel. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Slovenian readers were unable to share the emotions and perspectives of this innovative novel, which is why they preferred The Cross on the Mountain. To explain the disharmony between the empathy of the author and the reader, the distinction between literary and trivial empathy also had to be taken into account; this difference again proves that the novel The Cross on the Mountain was suitable for the average reader open to trivial empathy, while The Ward of Mary Help of Christians required more demanding literary readers and their orientation towards literary empathy.