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Empathy as Dialogue in Theatre and Performance 1st Edition

Lindsay B. Cummings

(Auth.)

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EMPATHY AS DIALOGUE IN THEATRE AND PERFORMANCE

Empathy as Dialogue in Theatre and Performance

Lindsay B. Cummings

Empathy as Dialogue in Theatre and Performance

Lindsay B. Cummings University of Connecticut USA

ISBN 978-1-137-59325-2 ISBN 978-1-137-59326-9 (eBook)

DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-59326-9

Library of Congress Control Number: 2016940603

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016

The author(s) has/have asserted their right(s) to be identified as the author(s) of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed.

The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made.

Cover illustration: © milos luzanin / Alamy Stock Photo

Printed on acid-free paper

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature The registered company is Macmillan Publishers Ltd. London

A CKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Thank you to the Department of Dramatic Arts at the University of Connecticut, and to my wonderful friends and colleagues. In particular, thank you to Adrienne Macki Braconi, Michael Bradford, and Vincent J. Cardinal for the mentorship and emotional support, and to my students for their energy and enthusiasm. My gratitude, also, to the Department of Performing and Media Arts (previously Theatre, Film, and Dance) at Cornell University, where the ideas in this book first began to take shape. Sara Warner was and continues to be a mentor extraordinaire. I am also indebted to the guidance of Amy Villarejo, Philip Lorenz, J. Ellen Gainor, and Nick Salvato. Field research for Chap. 3 was funded by the Cornell American Studies Program, and a very early version of Chap. 4 was workshopped in a dissertation writing group funded by Cornell’s Society for the Humanities. I am thankful to many people for reading chapter drafts and talking through ideas, including Anne Beggs, Diana Looser, Aaron C. Thomas, Aoise Stratford, Shea Cummings, and Thomas Meacham. Scott T. Cummings and Erica Stevens Abbitt provided excellent editorial guidance on portions of Chap. 4. Thank you to Rachel Lewis, for always having the best reading recommendations and pushing me on to the next project. Thanks to the Women and Theatre Program for providing mentorship and an intellectual home. Thank you to Dudley Cocke, John Malpede, Henriëtte Brouwers, Dee Davis, Nell Fields, Robert Salyer, Loyal Jones, and Catherine Simmonds for taking the time to speak with me about their work and/or their participation in performances, and for the provocative, engaging conversations we have enjoyed. My gratitude to Elizabeth Barret and Caroline Rubens at Appalshop for all of the help

locating archives and interview subjects. To the University of Connecticut Humanities Institute, particularly Michael P. Lynch and Brendan Kane, thank you for the invitation to present an early version of Chap. 5 in your lunchtime lecture series. To Greg Webster and the members of Split Knuckle Theatre, thank you for providing a place for me to play, to exercise my dramaturgical muscles, and to take a much-needed break from the book. To Anne and Diana, thanks for being with me the whole way. To Mike, thank you for seeing me through the final stages. And to my family, thank you for the constant support and the care packages.

Earlier versions of some chapters have been previously published as follows: Lindsay B. Cummings, “Reviving Feeling: Performing Robert F. Kennedy in Kentucky,” Performance Research 16.2 (June 2011), Taylor and Francis Ltd., reprinted by permission of Taylor and Francis Ltd., http://www.tandfonline.com; Lindsay B. Cummings, “Naomi Wallace and the Dramaturgy of Rehearsal,” in The Theatre of Naomi Wallace: Embodied Dialogues, ed. Scott T. Cummings and Erica Stevens Abbitt, Palgrave Macmillan, 2013, reproduced with permission of Palgrave Macmillan.

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

During the intermission of a 2009 performance of Eugene Ionesco’s Exit the King at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre in New York City, I overheard an usher ask a man sitting in the row in front of me what he thought of the character of the king. My fellow audience member replied that he did not admire the king. In Ionesco’s play, King Berenger refuses to accept his mortality, even as his mind, body, and kingdom crumble around him. The usher responded, “But do you empathize with him?” His tone implied that this was the truly important question, the ultimate litmus test for theatrical engagement. The man answered, “Yes, I do. I have a daughter.” Since he did not further explain his reasoning, I assume that he meant he would not want to leave her on her own, and thus he could understand the king’s strong desire to continue his life.

But the king in Ionesco’s play does not wish to live for the sake of others. In fact, Berenger’s desire to live is so strong that he would choose life even if it meant that everyone else in the world died. He wants to live because he fears letting go, giving up power, losing himself. The man in the audience was engaging in empathy by analogy: I have a reason to want to live, therefore I can empathize with the character’s reason to want to live, even if it is different from my own. Did this answer satisfy the usher’s question? What are we actually doing when we empathize in the theatre? Are we, as is often suggested, “putting ourselves in another’s shoes”? Are we “feeling with” another, sharing his or her emotions? Identifying? And what does this empathy achieve, if anything? These are the questions that this book explores.

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016 L.B. Cummings, Empathy as Dialogue in Theatre and Performance, DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-59326-9_1

1

Whether in the theatre or outside of it, empathy is the source of much disagreement. In the collection Empathy and its Development (1987), addressing psychological perspectives on the term, editors Nancy Eisenberg and Janet Strayer call empathy “a broad, somewhat slippery concept—one that has provoked considerable speculation, excitement, and confusion.”1 This description refers to the way in which “empathy” and the German word it was coined to translate, Einfühlung, moved rapidly across fields and disciplines, inspiring new and often contradictory meanings as they went. Following German aesthetic theorist Robert Vischer’s use of the term in an 1873 essay, Einfühlung was quickly adopted—and adapted—by phenomenological philosophers and psychologists.2 With each new discipline and theorist to take up the word, empathy acquired new dimensions and meanings, so much so that as early as 1935, psychoanalyst Theodor Reik asserted that empathy had come to mean so much that it was beginning to mean nothing.3

Nevertheless, as the usher’s question implies, empathy does not mean nothing—either in our society or in theatrical spectatorship. Whatever we mean by empathy, whether we experience it or not is a question given much import. Discussions of empathy can be found everywhere these days, from politics to popular culture. Barack Obama used it frequently throughout his first presidential campaign and first term in office, arguing that the United States suffered an “empathy deficit.” He later ignited a national debate about the role of the judiciary by declaring empathy as one of his criteria for appointing judges.4 Leslie Jamison’s The Empathy Exams, a collection

1 Nancy Eisenberg and Janet Strayer, eds. Empathy and its Development (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 3.

2 The term, or other forms of it, appears prior to Vischer’s usage. I discuss this history in greater detail later in the chapter. See Henry Francis Mallgrave and Eleftherios Ikonomou, Introduction to Empathy, Form, and Space: Problems in German Aesthetics, 1873–1893, eds. Mallgrave and Ikonomou (Santa Monica: Getty Center, 1994); Laura Hyatt Edwards, “A brief conceptual history of Einfühlung: 18th-Century Germany to Post-World War II U.S. Psychology,” History of Psychology 16.4 (2013), DOI: 10.1037/a0033634.

3 Reik is quoted in George W. Pigman, “Freud and the History of Empathy,” International Journal of Psychoanalysis 76 (1995), 237.

4 Obama used the phrase “empathy deficit” on several occasions in 2006 and 2007, including a commencement speech at Northwestern University and an interview with National Public Radio. His inclusion of empathy as a quality he sought in a Supreme Court justice occurred in 2009, and dominated the media surrounding his nomination of Sonia Sotomayor. After the backlash caused by the Sotomayor nomination, Obama’s use of the term decreased notably. See “Obama to Graduates: Cultivate Empathy,” June 19, 2006, http://www.north-

of essays ruminating on the nature of empathy, was one of the most widely celebrated non-fiction books of 2014. Empathy is now deemed essential to healthy interpersonal relationships and psychological functioning, as evidenced by the updated Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders V, in which “empathy” appears far more frequently than in the previous edition. The DSM-5 lists a lack of empathy or empathic “impairment” as one of the diagnostic criteria for a range of disorders, including antisocial personality disorder, narcissistic personality disorder, and even obsessive-compulsive personality disorder.5 Scholarly interest in empathy has become increasingly prominent since the Holocaust, an event that by purportedly confounding understanding similarly confounds empathy— the method by which we comprehend others’ actions, feelings, and reasons.

In the current age of continuous global conflict, empathy seems to offer a ray of hope, leading some to claim that it is our empathetic capacities that make us human and upon which all social life and organization depend.

David Howe, social work scholar and author of Empathy: What it is and Why it Matters (2013), writes, “Success in the social world depends on our ability to recognise and understand, interpret and anticipate the mental states and behaviour of others.”6 Consequently, “Evolution rewards

western.edu/newscenter/stories/2006/06/barack.html; “Does America Have an ‘Empathy Deficit?”, National Public Radio, March 7, 2007, http://www.npr.org/templates/story/ story.php?storyId=7755013; Peter Slevin, “Obama Makes Empathy a Requirement for Court,” The Washington Post, May 13, 2009, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/ content/article/2009/05/12/AR2009051203515.html. All articles accessed March 30, 2015.

5 The DSM-5 offers two models for diagnosing personality disorders—one following current clinical practice and a new, “alternative” approach. The “alternative model” uses empathy far more often as a diagnostic criterion and catalogs a range of empathic impairments beyond the “lack of empathy” described in the older diagnostic criteria for narcissistic personality disorder. The newer model, for instance, describes the following as empathic “impairments”: “Lack of concern for feelings, needs, or suffering of others; lack of remorse after hurting or mistreating another”; “Preoccupation with, and sensitivity to, criticism or rejection, associated with distorted inference of others’ perspective as negative”; “Compromised ability to recognize the feelings and needs of others associated with interpersonal hypersensitivity (i.e., prone to feel slighted or insulted)”; “excessively attuned to reactions of others, but only if perceived as relevant to self; over or underestimation of own effect on others”; “Difficulty understanding and appreciating the ideas, feelings, or behaviors of others.” American Psychiatric Association, Diagnostic and Statistical Manuel of Mental Disorders, 5th Edition, http://dsm.psychiatryonline.org. (See, in particular, the section “Alternative DSM-5 Model for Personality Disorders.”)

6 David Howe, Empathy: What it is and Why it Matters (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 3.

the empathic.”7 In The Science of Evil: On Empathy and the Origins of Cruelty (2011), developmental psychologist Simon Baron Cohen similarly cites “empathy erosion” as the source of many social ills and lauds empathy as “the most valuable resource in our world.”8

Recent discoveries in cognitive neuroscience, meanwhile, position empathy not as a social skill but rather as a neurobiological fact. Mirror neurons, so-called because they fire both when we perform an action and when we see another perform the same action, have led many to claim that we have an innate connection to the actions, intentions, and feelings of others. Marco Iacoboni writes, “We are wired for empathy, which should inspire us to shape our society and make it a better place to live.”9 Empathy is thus a biological fact and an aspirational goal, a sign that we are “built” to be better, more compassionate, and more socially attuned than we are at present. In this view, empathy is the path to our greatest potential humanity—a rather lofty promise for a word that entered the English language little more than a century ago.

Theatre, both professionally and academically, often takes up the call to produce a better society through empathy. In more than one department meeting, professional conference, and hallway conversation I have heard colleagues offer, as a rationale for the continued importance of theatre in the age of Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM), the argument that “we foster empathy.” This statement is often connected to others like “we explore what it means to be human” and “we build a sense of community.” While these may sound like three distinct functions, their frequent appearance in concert speaks to the strong association between empathy, humanity, and community. This is the idea of empathy that Howe champions, and to which Iacoboni hopes we will aspire. These goals often position theatre not simply as an alternative to the skills and capacities developed in STEM disciplines, but as a corrective to the (presumed) lack of ethical, social, and community values fostered by these disciplines. These goals are also frequently presented, in college and university settings, in connection with initiatives in diversity or globalism. By becoming better empathizers, we routinely argue, we will appreciate diversity and become better global citizens.

7 Ibid., 24.

8 Simon Baron Cohen, The Science of Evil: On Empathy and the Origins of Cruelty (New York: Basic Books, 2011), 153, emphasis in original.

9 Marco Iacoboni, Mirroring People: The New Science of How We Connect with Others (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2008), 268.

And yet, for all of the excitement it has provoked, empathy has inspired an equal measure of controversy. It has been charged with promoting misguided identification, perpetuating an assumption of access to the minds of others, reinforcing power hierarchies, and encouraging an uncritical adoption of others’ viewpoints. In the Dictionary of the History of Ideas, Charles Edward Gauss offers this unflinchingly negative summary: “Empathy is the idea that the vital properties which we experience in or attribute to any person or object outside of ourselves are the projections of our own feelings and thoughts.”10 Empathy in this view always consists of a mistaken sense of understanding. Did the audience member at Exit the King recognize the difference between his reason to live and Berenger’s? Who was he ultimately understanding: the character, or himself? As Amy Shuman argues, even when empathy is not an emotional projection or misattribution, it always involves a “transvaluing” of experience, shifting “the personal to the more than personal (human, shared, universal).”11 In doing so, it may change the meaning of experience, obscuring particular details to render the experience accessible beyond its original context. Despite these critiques, theatre is still celebrated for its ability to place lives and situations before us, inviting us to imaginatively enter other worlds and entertain experiences other than our own. This ability to give a distant “other” an embodied, affective presence is what makes theatre seem, to many, an ideal medium for encouraging empathy. Without negating the significance of embodiment, this book explores another possibility, suggesting that theatre creates a unique situation that can help combat the potential problems of empathy: theatre invites dialogue. Aesthetic models of empathy imagine emotion as moving in one direction, from spectator to aesthetic object. The most prominent critics of empathy in the theatre, Bertolt Brecht and Augusto Boal, describe it as a similarly unidirectional movement going in reverse, from stage to spectator. Theatre, however, is always an exchange—between performers and audience members, between performers and each other. Live theatre involves an exchange loop that is different from reading a novel or watching a film. In those later situations, our responses may alter as a result of our own evolving

10 Charles Edward Gauss, “Empathy,” in Dictionary of the History of Ideas: Studies of Selected Pivotal Ideas, ed. Philip P. Wiener, Vol. II (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1973), 85.

11 Amy Shuman, Other People’s Stories: Entitlement Claims and the Critique of Empathy (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2005), 4.

experience of the text, but the text will never adjust itself in reaction to our particular, individual response. A novel may address us directly (“Reader, I married him”), and assume a dialogue in doing so, but a novel cannot insert a “harrumph” to emphasize a point or pull a face to respond playfully to the audience’s laughter.12 A film cannot adjust the pace and tenor of a speech to reach a bored spectator or hold a cue to accommodate a collective gasp of surprise. In theatre, an actor may adjust a line delivery or a stage manager may call a cue differently in a split second in response to the feeling she has of a particular audience. Theatre is dynamic, shifting, and taking shape in the moment, between all present.

To be effective in understanding others, empathy should be equally dynamic. I am calling this type of responsive engagement “dialogic empathy.” Dialogic empathy does not “arrive” at understanding, but rather consists of a constant and open-ended engagement, responding and reacting to the other as actors respond to fellow actors and audience, audience members respond to actors, and stage managers and other crew respond to subtle (and sometimes not-so-subtle) shifts in pace and performance both on stage and in the house. Few models of empathy, particularly those that have influenced our discourse in the theatre, account for this kind of dynamism.

In this book, I explore techniques for encouraging dialogic empathy in the theatre, particularly theatre aimed at promoting social change or increasing understanding for marginalized populations. In doing so, I draw on techniques and theories from community-based and publicly engaged performance. In these forms of theatre-making, dialogue is often a crucial part of the process, from the workshops, interviews, and story circles that go into play development to the talkbacks and other community events that frequently follow performances. Dialogue is certainly easiest to pursue in what Richard Schechner calls the “proto-performance” stages of training, workshop, and rehearsal and the “aftermath” stages of critical response, archiving, and memories.13 But these stages are not open to all who attend theatre, nor are they always utilized when available. Many theatregoers exclusively engage in the “main” event of performance

12 This particularly famous instance of direct address in fiction is, of course, from Jane Eyre. Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre, ed. Beth Newman (Boston and New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996), 437.

13 Richard Schechner, Performance Studies: An Introduction, 2nd edition (New York and London: Routledge, 2006), 225.

itself, and any discussion of empathy in the theatre must account for this. Thus, I am interested in how we as theatre artists can promote a more dialogic experience of empathy in all stages of performance, opening up the act of spectating to the more dynamic, contingent forms of engagement that we are accustomed to finding in rehearsals, talkbacks, and other para-performance times and spaces. In other words, how can we promote a more dialogic empathy in all stages and aspects of theatre and performance, broadly speaking?

Consequently, my focus here is on performances and texts, asking what dramaturgical structures and performance-based techniques we can utilize to help all of us—artists and audience members alike—rethink what it means to empathize in the theatre. The performances I consider in this book represent a range of theatrical styles and genres, from documentary plays, to community-based performances, to more traditional theatre. The range of performances indicates that dialogic empathy is not exclusive to specific styles of performance. Likewise, the techniques I explore— interruptions, repetitions, and rehearsals—are not limited to particular genres or methods of artistic creation. Rather, they have the potential to work across genres, opening moments of performance to the frisson of empathic engagement. In each of the performances I discuss, I attend to when, how, and where empathy takes place, as well as who is involved, the extent to which the various parties are able to participate as equals, and the conditions that influence their exchange. In this sense, I am following Patrick Anderson’s call to “attend to the modes through which our empathies proceed” and to “rigorously trace the ‘contact zones’ of feeling.”14 While questions of aesthetics, intended audience, commercial v. community, and so on are all factors influencing how empathy emerges, this book considers how artists working in a range of styles and contexts might elicit a dialogic empathy, thereby leading toward a more nuanced engagement with others.

The empathy I explore does not entail the transmission of thought or affect from one subject to another, but rather a dialogue in which all parties are responsive to one another. It is a provisional process that involves thinking and feeling, imagining the other in the other’s situation, allowing his or her affect to resonate with us, and communicating our interpretations back to the other whenever possible for feedback. Throughout

14 Patrick Anderson, “I Feel for You,” Neoliberalism and Global Theatres: Performance Permutations, eds. Lara D. Nielson and Patricia Ybarra (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 92, 93.

the book I will use the terms “affect” and “emotion” in association with empathy not because they are interchangeable, but because the process that I am describing involves both our immediate, autonomic responses to moods and feelings (affect) and our reflective, named descriptions of those responses (emotion).15 This process does not confuse self with other or rely on analogies. In this kind of empathy, all subjects strive to engage one another as equals in an exchange, open to the possibility of new thoughts and feelings. In short, if we are to encourage empathy in the theatre then we need to conceive of it as a process as dynamic and multi-directional as the theatre itself. It is worth considering why the work of understanding others has so infrequently been thought of as a dialogue. This requires a brief history of empathy and its various meanings. To address this, we have to begin not in the theatre, but in philosophy and aesthetic theory.

EMPATHY: A SHORT AND COMPLICATED HISTORY

Empathy, as noted above, is the translation of the German word Einfühlung, meaning “feeling into.” It combines the prefix “ein” or “into” with the root “–Fühlen,” or “to feel.” When versions of “–Fühlen” first appeared in eighteenth-century Germany they encompassed a range of connotations, from physical touch to knowing or perceiving.16 Since its inception, then, Einfühlung has confounded distinctions between sensory, affective, and cognitive modes of understanding. The concept first appears in the work of German philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder, in such texts as This Too a Philosophy of History for the Formation of Humanity (1774). Herder believed that we each have our own subjective perception of the world, and he used the verb Hineinfühlen to describe how we consider another’s historical, geographical, and cultural context in order to understand that person’s perspective: “go into the age, into the clime, the whole history, feel yourself into everything—only now are you on the way toward understanding the word.”17 Two things need to be said about Herder’s theories. The first is that, while on the surface they advocate

15 The distinctions I draw between affect and emotion are fairly widely used, but for a good discussion of these terms see Erin Hurley, Theatre & Feeling (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).

16 Laura Hyatt Edwards, “A brief conceptual history of Einfühlung: 18th-Century Germany to Post-World War II U.S. Psychology,” History of Psychology 16.4 (2013), DOI: 10.1037/a0033634, 271.

17 Quoted in Laura Hyatt Edwards, 272.

a careful engagement with other cultures, they were also linked to his strong sense of German nationalism and his notion that each nation has its own distinct, and separate character. Thus, as Rohan D’O. Butler notes, Herder’s ideas later contribute to the philosophical groundwork for the Nazi Party.18 Recognizing difference can just as easily reinforce boundaries as help us communicate across those boundaries. The second point to be made is that, although the process Herder describes requires research and intellectual engagement, his philosophical rival, Kant, dismissed Herder’s theories as mere sentiment. This critique not only helped push Einfühlung out of the discourse for nearly a century, but also likely influenced later critical reception of the term.

And so, for a time, the notion of understanding others by “feeling into” them was not much discussed—that is until 1873, when aesthetic theorist Robert Vischer published “On the Optical Sense of Form: A Contribution to Aesthetics.” In this essay Vischer uses a number of different words from the root -fühlung, 19 but only Einfühlung sparked interest and “radically altered the aesthetic discussion of an era.”20 Laura Hyatt Edwards suggests that Vischer had no knowledge of Herder’s prior use of the term.21 Vischer was building, instead, on a debate in German aesthetic theory, which was, at the time, primarily divided between two schools of thought: Formalists argued that aesthetic pleasure arose from our apprehension of harmonious forms, while sensualists argued that aesthetic pleasure arose through our emotional engagement with art objects.22 Advocating the sensualist

18 I am indebted to Patrick Anderson for this genealogy. See Anderson, 85, as well as Rohan D’O. Butler, The Roots of National Socialism (New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., 1942). Butler notes that Herder understood the potential dangers of his own nationalism, and stated that, while each nation was different, none stood above the rest as a “chosen people” (28).

19 See Ernest K. Mundt, “Three Aspects of German Aesthetic Theory,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 17.3 (March 1959), 291, http://www.jstor.org/stable/427810

20 Henry Francis Mallgrave and Eleftherios Ikonomou, Introduction to Empathy, Form, and Space: Problems in German Aesthetics, 1873–1893, eds. Mallgrave and Ikonomou (Santa Monica: Getty Center, 1994), 22. Gustav Jahoda argues that Einfühlung, the noun, was used before Vischer, but I cannot corroborate this. What is clear is that variations of the word were in circulation before Vischer’s essay, which, if not responsible for coining Einfühlung, at the very least launched it into popular usage. Gustav Jahoda, “Theodor Lipps and the Shift from ‘Sympathy’ to ‘Empathy,’” Journal of the History of Behavioral Sciences vol. 41 no. 2 (Spring 2005), 153.

21 Laura Hyatt Edwards, 274.

22 For more information on these aesthetic theories, see Mallgrave and Ikonomu, and Mundt.

approach, Robert Vischer’s father, Friedrich Theodor Vischer, argued that “we define our relation to the world, at least in part, through the symbolic interjection of emotions into objective forms.”23 Thus, when Robert Vischer wrote his influential essay, he was building on his father’s aesthetic theories.24 Vischer theorized Einfühlung as originating in our “intuitive investment” in the world around us.25 We seek to share our emotional lives with our fellow human beings and to experience “reciprocal feeling”: “Only by considering our fellow beings do we ascend to a true emotional life. This natural love for my species is the only thing that makes it possible for me to project myself mentally; with it, I feel not only myself but at the same time the feelings of another being.”26 As the essay progresses, Vischer shifts his focus from people to our relationship to nature and non-living objects, including works of art, in which we engage in much the same way that we engage people: “I can think my way into [an object], mediate its size with my own, stretch and expand, bend and confine myself to it.” The process Vischer describes is emotional and sensory/physical. Einfühlung suggests that understanding is connected to sensorial knowledge—how we experience our bodies in the world and, by extension, other bodies, animate or otherwise.27 As we think ourselves into objects, we are “magically transformed into this other,” a process that emphasizes that we are all parts of a larger whole.28 We do this out of “the pantheistic urge for union with the world.”29 Through Einfühlung, we experience a larger version of ourselves. Vischer places few limits on empathy. As long as we sense some kind of harmony with an other—person, object, geographical feature, painting—we

23 Mallgrave and Ikonomou, 20.

24 He was building on others’ work as well. As Michael Fried explains, Diderot also wrote about the act of viewing a painting as one of physically entering (that is, imaginatively projecting oneself into) the work of art, a process that he associated most with pastoral painting. See Michael Fried, Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980).

25 Robert Vischer, “On the Optical Sense of Form: A Contribution to Aesthetics,” in Empathy, Form, and Space: Problems in German Aesthetics, 1983–1893, eds. Henry Francis Mallgrave and Eleftherios Ikonomou (Santa Monica: Getty Center, 1990), 90.

26 Vischer, 103.

27 The physical resonances of empathy are retained in early psychological texts, but tend to drop out of the discourse until they are revived in more recent, cognitive neuroscience studies. For a discussion of the body in relationship to empathy, see Susan Leigh Foster, Choreographing Empathy: Kinesthesia in Performance (London and New York: Routledge, 2011).

28 Ibid., 104.

29 Ibid., 109.

can empathize with it, expanding ourselves into its borders and sensing ourselves as part of the world beyond the boundaries of our own minds and bodies. That sense of harmony originates in us as an urge to connect and to be connected. Empathy is therefore an encounter motivated by our own desire, which perhaps explains why the sense of reciprocity Vischer imagines is the same whether he is describing empathy with a person or a painting: The experience of communion is found not in exchange with another, but within ourselves, whether the object of our empathy is animate or not. He nevertheless notes that this process can lead us to attribute our own feelings to objects, particularly to objects in nature, from which most of the examples in his essay derive: “We have a strange knack of confusing our own feeling with that of nature.”30 When we think of a winding road as languid or a mountain as rising, these feelings do not originate in the objects; rather, as Vernon Lee explains, “the rising of which we are aware is going on in us.”31

In spite of this potential confusion between our own emotional or sensory experience and those of the object or person being observed, Vischer’s theories were soon adopted by psychologists. The most influential of these was Theodor Lipps. Although Lipps was initially interested in Einfühlung as an aesthetic concept, he later turned to the term because he sought a means to explain how we understand what others think and feel that did not rely on analogy.32 Lipps proposed this happened as a kind of inner or mental imitation: When we see, for instance, a facial expression, this causes “movement impulses” within us that mirror the expression and can, in turn, reproduce that feeling in us. Or, at least, this occurs under a rather narrow set of conditions, including our having experienced the affect ourselves and that affect not conflicting with our “own nature.”33 The process is only “objective” or knowable in retrospect.34

30 Ibid., 107.

31 In her early writing, Lee uses the term “sympathy” to describe this idea. She later adopts the term Einfühlung, translating it as empathy and crediting Titchener with the translation. Vernon Lee, The Beautiful: An Introduction to Psychological Aesthetics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1913), 62.

32 Gerald A. Gladstein, “The Historical Roots of Contemporary Empathy Research,” Journal of the History of Behavioral Sciences vol. 20 no. 1 (January 1984).

33 These phrases are quoted by George W. Pigman. Lipps’s theory is striking in that it seems to anticipate cognitive neuroscience and the discovery of mirror neurons. Mirror neurons are so called because the same neurons fire in response to observing an action as undertaking that action, leading many cognitive neuroscientists to posit this automatic, inner-imitation as the basis for empathy. I discuss the mirror neuron system in greater detail later the chapter. Pigman, 242.

34 Gladstein, 41.

As Lauren Wispé points out, to take Vischer’s term and describe it as inner imitation constitutes a rather “generous” interpretation, if not a wholesale reinvention of meaning.35 What Vischer described as a projection and expansion of the self into the other is reconceived by Lipps as a process in which the other is first imitated within the self and then that imitation is read back into the other. Lipps’s theories nevertheless proved influential. His adoption of Einfühlung led directly to the English coinage “empathy,” made by Edward Bradford Titchener in 1909. Following Lipps, Titchener argued that ideas are represented in our consciousness through sensory imitation occurring “in the mind’s muscle.”36 Titchener initially viewed this as instant and instinctive, but later expanded the concept to encompass our imaginative capacity: “As we read about the forest, we may, as it were, become the explorer; we feel for ourselves the gloom, the silence, the humidity, the oppression, the sense of lurking danger; everything is strange, but it is to us that strange experience has come.”37 Empathy, then, may occur in relation to any person or situation whose sensory experiences we are able to imagine, thereby bringing foreign experiences “to us.”

In the field of philosophy, Edmund Husserl was the first to consider the notion of empathy, initially in Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology (1913) and later in Cartesian Meditations (1931). Our own experience, Husserl contends, is primordially given—that is, perceived or given to consciousness through our own self-awareness. Others’ experiences, on the other hand, are accessible to us only through empathy, which he describes as the process of “analogizing apprehension” of the other as a thinking, animate being like oneself, but not oneself.38 Husserl’s theories on empathy were taken up by his student Edith Stein, whose dissertation On the Problem of Empathy (1916) devotes considerable attention to the issues of emotional projection and identification. Stein argues

35 Lauren Wispé, “History of the Concept of Empathy,” in Empathy and its Development, eds. Nancy Eisenberg and Janet Strayer (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 20.

36 Edward Bradford Titchener, Lectures on the Experimental Psychology of the Thought Process (New York: Macmillan, 1909), 21.

37 Quoted in Wispé, 22.

38 Edmund Husserl, Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology, Trans. Dorion Cairns (The Hauge: Martinus Nijhoff, 1960), 111. Emphasis in original. Husserl carefully qualifies the word “analogy,” noting that it is not an act of cognition, but rather a process through which all prior encounters inform subsequent encounters.

adamantly that empathy is a cognitive process rather than the more affective one described by Vischer. For Stein, empathy involves neither emotional projection nor transfer, and it maintains a clear distinction between self and other.

Stein’s intervention into the discourse on empathy is important, as it establishes the groundwork for the kind of dialogic empathy I describe in the next section. Most notably, she deviates from many earlier theorists by arguing that it is the other, not the self, who acts as the guide in empathy. The experience of another “is primordial although I do not experience it as primordial. In my non-primordial experience I feel, as it were, led by a primordial one not experienced by me but still there, manifesting itself in my non-primordial experience.”39 The other can “lead” the empathizer to places to which he or she may not have access, thus proposing limits to our empathetic capacities. Stein views these limits not as a failure of empathy, but rather as an opportunity for the empathizer to recognize the need for an expanded worldview.40 She also views empathy as more than a means of gathering information and knowledge about others. This information, she argues, may give us cause to reflect on our own behavior, knowledge (or lack thereof), and orientation to the world. She calls the process of perceiving ourselves through others “reiterative empathy.”41 By positioning the empathizer as responsive to the other, and by exploring how this process may produce the need for reflection and altered self-understanding, Stein points the way toward a form of empathy in which information and understanding travel in multiple directions.

In the space of a few short decades, Einfühlung/empathy transformed from describing the urge to enter a spiritual union with other objects and beings, to instinctive inner imitation, to a cognitive process through which we attempt to understand how others experience the world. Both the popularity of the term and its rapid metamorphosis reflect changing ideas about both the mind and the body. Rüdiger Campe explains that empathy emerged concurrent to major developments in psychological and philosophical theory: “First, empathy relates to the embodiment of the I that is able to perceive, understand, and act; and second, it underlines the circumstances that an Ego’s perceiving, understanding, or acting presupposes a world where

39 Edith Stein, On the Problem of Empathy, trans. Waltrout Stein (The Hague: M. Nijhoff, 1964), 11.

40 Ibid., 116.

41 Ibid., 89.

other Egos do similar things.”42 Susan Leigh Foster, meanwhile, argues that empathy reflected changing scientific knowledge of musculature and body, such that “it became necessary to project one’s three-dimensional structure into the energy and action of the other.”43 As our concepts of minds and bodies changed, we required new methods for comprehending them. Rather than thinking of these various definitions, with their differing emphases on emotion, sensation, and cognition, as three disparate ways of understanding others, I suggest that we consider, instead, the empathy points to the intimate relationship between mind, body, and affect. Our continued interest in the term may mark our ongoing need to understand the complexity of how we experience the world and, in turn, how we begin to conceive of how others experience the world.

The other reason why empathy arose when it did, and why it remains relevant today, particularly in US culture, is its focus on the individual. Whereas “sympathy,” a term widely discussed in the eighteenth century, tended to focus on how groups of people come to share feelings and characteristics, empathy shifts the focus from group to individual. David Hume described sympathy as the process through which feelings are shared and spread, accounting for the tendency of people in a nation to share characteristics: “To this principle we ought to ascribe the great uniformity we may observe in the humours and turn of thinking of those of the same nation.”44 To be sure, Hume understood sympathy as a tool for understanding others, but it is also a tool for building a sense of similarity and commonality.

Scholars like Susan Leigh Foster and Amit S. Rai have linked the rise of interest in sympathy, particularly from Hume and Adam Smith, to the rise of the British Empire and the need it precipitated to create new governing strategies and new concepts of citizenship and inclusion. Foster writes, “The need to theorize a common ground on which one human recognizes another…developed along with the growing awareness of cultural difference brought on by colonial expansion.”45 As a mechanism that marks the difference that it is meant to overcome (that is, the difference between an observer and the object of his or her observation), sympathy

42 Rüdiger Campe, “An Outline for a Critical History of Fürsprache: Synegoria and Advocacy,” Deutsche Vierteljahrs Schrift (2008), 357.

43 Foster, 217.

44 David Hume, A Treatise on Human Nature, eds. David Fate Norton and Mary J. Norton (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 206.

45 Foster, 231.

taught members of an expanding empire both how to recognize themselves as part of that empire and how to identify differences within that system of social organization. For the white, European male, whose province it was to understand an empire, “sympathy renders the other as object of identification, and so the other seems to be knowable, accessible, and so appropriable.”46

Like sympathy, empathy assures us of our ability to access the experience of the other even as it marks that experience as “other.” But rather than knitting together diverse communities into a common humanity in the age of empire, empathy became the means by which we understood others as psychologically unique beings in the age of bourgeois individualism. Empathy arose when, as Foster puts it, “a newly constructed interiority whose proclivities for repression, identification, transference, and sublimation were just beginning to be explored and whose defining consciousness could be fathomed only through intensive introspection.”47 The question of individual subjectivity at the heart of psychological notions of Einfühlung mark it as a distinctly modern concept. In this age of late-late capitalism and neoliberalism, this also means that empathy risks shifting our focus from systemic conditions toward individual experiences. Empathy tends to focus our attention on a single person, and on our own responses to that person, potentially obscuring social, historical, and cultural contexts in the process. If sympathy operated, potentially, as a tool of empire, empathy may operate as a tool of global neoliberalism, separating individual experiences from the wider conditions that create them. Understanding empathy as a dialogue does not eradicate this possibility, but it does create the conditions through which we might pursue more nuanced understandings of how some individuals experience the systems that shape their lives.

In summary, empathy has remained both promising and confounding largely because its various meanings—from emotional projection to the imaginative recreation of another’s experience—remain current in the discourse today, along with numerous others, producing endless disagreement and confusion. Some argue that empathy is an instinctual affective response, some define it as cognitive, and others make a distinction between two discrete categories of “affective empathy” and “cognitive

46 Amit S. Rai, Rule of Sympathy: Sentiment, Race, and Power, 1750–1850 (New York: Palgrave, 2002), 59.

47 Foster, 256.

empathy.” Some state that its presence indicates care and respect for others, while others assert that it is value neutral or even invasive. As Jamison suggests, to engage others in this intimate way may entail both “humility and presumption.”48 Some say it can lead to altruistic behavior, while others find no such connection. Still others use it synonymously with terms like compassion and pity. Rather than conclude, as Reik does, that empathy has come to mean nothing, I propose that these different definitions persist because empathy, etymologically, describes not a state but a process. That process is not clear-cut, unfolding in a neat, linear manner.49 It is messy and complicated, like all human engagement, and it may take us in many different directions.

In celebrating, rather decrying, empathy’s multivalent nature, I am following the work of Gail S. Reed, who argues that seemingly antithetical concepts of empathy persist in psychoanalytic discourse because they are all reflective of the analyst’s work, which entails “a synthesis of opposites.”50 Empathy, Reed posits, is active and passive, rational and mystical, intrusive and penetrating. In this case, “synthesis” does not mean blending these opposites so that they cancel or balance one another, but rather their copresence. When psychoanalysts engage in empathy, they are being both intrusive and respectful, to varying degrees, in varying ways, at different moments. In the theatre, spectatorial engagement can similarly range from intrusive and judgmental to open and caring. Empathy is a perpetually evolving process that may take us in divergent and contradictory directions. This does not mean that we ought to accept any and every definition of empathy. To do so would lead to serious confusion, beyond the confusion already produced by the term. Nor does it mean that the various criticisms leveled against empathy, such as its potential to be intrusive, ought

48 Leslie Jamison, The Empathy Exams (Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 2014), 26.

49 Some theorists, like Martin L. Hoffman, have proposed that empathy occurs in different “levels.” For Hoffman, the most “advanced” level involves a self–other distinction, as well as a critical awareness of the other’s personality and life situation, rather than simply their immediate situation. While I find this description of empathy helpful, I am resistant to categorizations like Hoffman’s, which distinguish levels along a scale that indicates hierarchy. I take the position that empathy is complex and ever-shifting, and to divide it into levels or stages oversimplifies the situation. See Martin L. Hoffman, “The Contribution of Empathy to Justice and Moral Judgment,” in Empathy and its Development, eds. Nancy Eisenberg and Janet Strayer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987): 47–80.

50 Gail S. Reed, “The Antithetical Meaning of the Term ‘Empathy’ in Psychoanalytic Discourse,” in Empathy, eds. Joseph Lichtenberg, Melvin Bornstein, and Donald Silver (Hillsdale, NJ: Analytic Press, 1984), 20, emphasis in original.

to be accepted as part of what is “natural” to empathy. Empathy can take many different directions, some of which may be antithetical to projects for social change or social justice, and we have to be aware of these if we are to make use of empathy in a responsible way. We are faced with the task of how to do empathy well: without projecting our own emotions onto the other, relying on analogy, or slipping into identification, and with an openness and willingness to listen to and respond to the other. This task begins by acknowledging both sides of the empathetic exchange.

EMPATHY AS DIALOGUE

In her 2003 cabaret performance Make Love, Karen Finley, dressed as Liza Minnelli, recounts her experiences living in New York City after 9/11. The performance critiques the overwhelming and often discomfiting emotional responses to 9/11 while at the same time mourning the losses of that day. As she charts the emotional complexity of the event and its aftermath, Finley asks if empathy is possible when we are overwhelmed by our emotions. She also questions what forms of empathy were in evidence in the months after the twin towers fell. Of the tourists purchasing commemorative World Trade Center salt and pepper shakers, Finley contemptuously sneers, “They had the story.”51 This comment critiques the way in which the trauma of thousands of New Yorkers became—or seemed to become—a nationally shared experience, as consumable and disposable as souvenir salt and pepper shakers. In this case, to “have” the story, Finley implies, was to not have it all, to possess only its cheap, plastic simulacra. How often do we, as spectators in the theatre, think we “have” the story? And how much does empathy contribute to our sense of acquisition? Some plays, like Finley’s, challenge our interpretive acumen, reminding us either overtly or subtly that we may not know as much as we think we do.52 Much of the time, however, we are left to our own devices when it comes to interpreting a character’s behavior, emotions, and motivations. If we understand empathy as one of the primary goals of theatre spectatorship (think back to the usher’s question), might we rush to “achieve” it or to possess some part of another’s experience without heeding warnings that

51 Make Love, Karen Finley Live (Perfect Day Films, 2004).

52 The last-minute perception shift is one way of unsettling our confidence in our interpretations. Martin McDonagh uses this technique in plays like The Beauty Queen of Leenane and The Pillowman.

our understanding is flawed or our empathy unwelcome? The dynamic give and take that I have attributed to theatre does not, in itself, guarantee a respectful, dialogic empathy. To achieve this, we have to attend to our own motives and desires, as well as to how our engagement is received.

When I refer to empathy as a dialogue, I am drawing on the work of dialogue studies, particularly the idea that a dialogue consists not simply of “taking turns” expressing established positions, but rather of an engagement with an other or others through which meaning emerges. To engage another in this way entails what Martin Buber refers to as a “turning to” the other: “There is genuine dialogue—no matter whether spoken or silent—where each of the participants really has in mind the other or others in their present and particular being and turns to them with the intention of establishing a living mutual relation between himself and them.”53 For Buber, genuine dialogue consists in neither attempting to force one’s perspective on another nor in passively accepting the other’s perspective. Nor does it entail a simple statement of each party’s position or opinion. Dialogue occurs in an open exchange in which all parties are honest about their positions in the moment while remaining open to new perspectives.

To participate in dialogue, then, one must be open to change. Later theorists of dialogue, like Bakhtin, take this sense of contingency and indeterminancy even further, arguing that meaning only emerges in the moment, in relationship to its context.54 The sense of dialogue I am interested in is nicely summarized by Julia T. Wood, who writes, “Dialogue is emergent (rather than preformed), fluid (rather than static), keenly dependent on process (at least as much as content), performative (rather than representational), and

53 Martin Buber, Between Man and Man, trans. Ronald Gregor Smith (London: Kegan Paul, 1947), 19.

54 I am aware that there are numerous differences between Buber and Bakhtin’s theorizations of dialogue. When dividing dialogue theorists into “camps,” Buber is generally identified as a liberal humanist, concerned with respectfully engaging others in order to reach new understanding, while Bakhtin is categorized as a postmodernist, emphasizing the neverending proliferation of meaning. I nevertheless see both theorists as promoting a notion of dialogue in which meaning and the self are contingent, emerging through exchange. For an explanation of different schools of dialogue theory, see Stanley Deetz and Jennifer Simpson, “Critical Organizational Dialogue: Open Formation and the Demand of ‘Otherness.’” For a consideration of Buber’s theory as compatible with more postmodern notions of dialogue, see Kenneth N. Cissna and Rob Anderson, “Public Dialogue and Intellectual History.” Both essays can be found in Dialogue: Theorizing Difference in Communication Studies, eds. Rob Anderson, Leslie A. Baxter, and Kenneth N. Cissna (London: Sage, 2004).

never fully finished (rather than completed).”55 A dialogic empathy, then, is one that does not “arrive” at understanding, but rather emerges in the moment-to-moment engagement with another.

The idea that empathy either involves or ought to involve dialogue appears almost exclusively in psychological and psychoanalytic discourses, where empathy always entails an engagement with an embodied, present other, rather than an object or an abstract “ego.” Theatre also involves an engagement between living bodies sharing the same space for a period of time. Theatre happens, to paraphrase Peter Brook, when actors and audience occupy the same space. It happens between people. By drawing on theories of empathy from psychology and psychoanalysis, I am not suggesting that theatre becomes a place for the diagnosis and healing of mental illness or that audiences ought to take on the role of therapist. This would open the way for a host of potential problems, including reinforcing the audience’s sense of interpretive authority and potentially feeding into our cultural stigma against mental illness. Nor am I suggesting that empathy in the theatre works in the same way that it does in psychological models, which are premised on clinical settings. In the theatre we empathize, when we empathize, most often with characters—fictional figures who have no life, no emotions, and no motivations beyond what performers create for them, and to which we have no responsibility as fellow beings. And yet characters are brought to life by real people who invest them with particular meaning and who are not ciphers, but rather living beings whose in-the-moment, creative, imaginative impulses are inextricably bound to the characters we see on stage. The way an actor brings a character to life will greatly influence how audience members feel about that character and what they think of her. And the actor is an embodied presence to whom we have responsibility as a fellow being. I am suggesting that we can look to psychology not to help us heal or diagnose characters (for whom these actions are entirely pointless), but rather for clues about how we might pursue a new understanding of empathy in the theatre, one that encourages us to see empathy as a dynamic form of engagement, communication, and exchange. The fact that this form of empathy is complicated by the actor/character relationship is not a problem, but rather an added layer of complexity. We cannot simply ask, “Do you empathize

55 Julia T. Wood, “Foreword: Entering into Dialogue,” in Dialogue: Theorizing Difference in Communication Studies, eds. Rob Anderson, Leslie A. Baxter, and Kenneth N. Cissna (London: Sage, 2004), xvii.

with this character,” but rather, “How are you responding to this character as brought to life in this way, by this actor? What form of engagement is happening here and now, with these people, in this theatrical moment?”

The type of empathy I am describing draws on the work of American psychologist Carl Rogers, whose advocacy of empathy significantly impacted the field of psychology in the mid-twentieth century. Rogers believed that it was the client, not the therapist, who was an expert in the client’s own experience. The therapist’s role was to help promote self-directed change, brought about through the therapist’s acceptance, understanding, and empathy. Rogers initially viewed empathy as a state, but later revised his definition, describing empathy as a process that helps clarify “felt meaning” in others: that is, how feelings produce meaning and which feelings accompany which experiences. Because felt meaning changes, empathy, too, must be dynamic, open, and responsive: “[Empathy] means entertaining the private perceptual world of the other and becoming thoroughly at home in it. It involves being sensitive, moment to moment, to the changing felt meanings which flow in this other person.”56 Although Rogers’s sense that we might be “at home” in the perceptual world of another rings with presumptions of access, his accompanying claim that this requires a continual awareness of changes in the other suggests that any sense of comfort or authority we might gain is temporary at best.57

Moreover, Rogers understood empathy as a give and take, perceiving and then checking that perception against the client’s own understanding of his or her experience, and then engaging again, sensitive to changes in the other.58 This is not a simple act of understanding, but rather a multidirectional “flow,” a continual dialogue between two or more parties as they attempt to understand themselves and each other and as they consider, imaginatively, the other’s perspective. Rather than the familiar idea that empathy involves “putting yourself in another’s shoes,” this process requires us to do more than simply think of how we would act if we were in the same situation; it requires us to acknowledge at the outset that the other is different from us, and as such might react quite differently to her

56 Carl Rogers, “Empathic: An Unappreciated Way of Being,” The Counseling Psychologist vol. 5 no. 2 (1975), 4.

57 Anderson and Cissna argue that Rogers saw dialogue therapy as “at best a matter of ‘moments.’” See Anderson and Cissna, 30–31.

58 Rogers, “Empathic,” 4.

situation. Empathy as Rogers describes it is cautious, involving an awareness that engaging another person in this way can be intrusive. And it is communicative, reflecting one’s own understanding back to the other for her to consider and gauge.

I am not alone in identifying the importance of dialogue to Rogers’s conception of empathy. In rhetoric studies, Rogers’s theories on empathy led to the development of Rogerian argument, a form of argumentation in which the goal is not to convince others of their wrongness, but rather to “establish and maintain communication as an end in itself.”59 This method acknowledges the other’s position and accepts it as valid, in some cases, while proposing that the author’s position may be more valid in other cases.60 Rogers also participated in a public dialogue with Martin Buber in 1957 at the University of Michigan, as part of a conference on dialogue. The two theorists differ on a number of points in their assessment of the conditions required for dialogue, and their disagreements are relevant to the case studies I will pursue in this book. In that conversation, Buber argued that the implied hierarchy of the client–therapist relationship and the fact that the attention is entirely focused on the client mean that real dialogue cannot occur in a therapeutic context.61 He noted, “Neither you nor he look on your experience. The subject is exclusively he and his experience.”62 For Buber, dialogue requires equal standing, as well as an equal awareness of all participants’ perspectives and experiences. For Rogers, on the other hand, dialogue is possible in moments or instances in which structural hierarchies can be overcome through deeply invested, mutual responsiveness.63 In the chapters that follow, I discuss performances in which the relationship between the parties involved impacts the possibility of empathy. In this sense, Buber is right that our social differences and the context in which we encounter one another deeply impact our ability to engage. But like Rogers, I find the possibility of dialogue comes in many forms—some sustained, others fleeting. Any encounter

59 Richard E. Young, Alton L. Becker, and Kenneth L. Pike, Rhetoric: Discovery and Change (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1970), 8.

60 Ibid., 275–279.

61 Rob Anderson and Kenneth N. Cissna, The Martin Buber-Carl Rogers Dialogues: A New Transcript with Commentary (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997), 41.

62 Buber in Rob Anderson and Kenneth N. Cissna, The Martin Buber-Carl Rogers Dialogues: A New Transcript with Commentary (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997), 41.

63 Ibid. See Anderson and Cissna’s commentary on p. 53.

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de amovilidad ¿Qué hago yo en Madrid, exclamé una mañana, después de haberle rodado en todas direcciones, en este Madrid, tan limitado como todas nuestras cosas, en el cual no puede uno echarse á la calle un día con ánimo de andar sin encontrarse á los cuatro pasos con la puerta de Atocha, ó la de Alcalá, con el campo de los Moros, ó la Pradera de los Guardias? ¿En este Madrid, que sólo se puede comparar en eso nuestra libertad, dentro de la cual no puede uno aventurarse á moverse sin tropezar en una traba? ¿Qué hago en Madrid?, me dije. Primero es preciso saber si hay alguien que haga algo en Madrid: todo es chico en Madrid: no quepo en el teatro; no quepo en el café; no quepo en los empleos; todo está lleno, todo obstruido, refugiado, escondido, empotrado en un rincón de la Revista española... j'étouffe. Fuera, pues, de Madrid: no bien lo había dicho, un mozo llevaba ya debajo del brazo el equipaje de Fígaro, más ligero que unas poesías fugitivas. Un lente para observar á los hombres, recado de escribir para bosquejarlos, y mi mal ó buen humor para reirme de los más de ellos. Omnia mea mecum porto.

El carruaje marchaba lentamente; sin embargo, no era carruaje del gobierno, y tardé en perder de vista el delicioso empedrado, las desiguales cúpulas de los numerosos conventos, que, semejantes al espectro descrito por Virgilio, hunden su planta en los abismos y esconden su cabeza en las nubes, ocupándolo todo. De cuando en cuando volvía la cabeza á mirar atrás, no como Héctor hacia su Andrómaca sino que me parecía oir todavía fuera de puertas el ruido de los abogados y poetas del café del Príncipe; resonaba en mis oídos la canturia monótona de nuestros actores cómicos; oía las silbas dadas á nuestros ingenios clásicos y románticos; perseguíame la deuda interior como un remordimiento: sin embargo, yo no la había arreglado: las reformas eran las únicas que no me perseguían, ellas debían ser sin duda las perseguidas.

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sustituido al ruidoso murmullo de la ciudad populosa: era la contribución que resonaba por el yermo. Felicidad, decía el segundo con acento irónico, para el que sabía oirle: miseria, decía el primero con acento de verdad y de desesperación.

No eran ciertamente los pueblos los que podían estorbarme en el camino; viajando por España se cree uno á cada momento la paloma de Noé, que sale á ver si está habitable el país; y el carruaje vaga solo, como el arca, en la inmensa extensión del más desnudo horizonte. Ni habitaciones, ni pueblos. ¿Dónde está la España?

Tres días rodamos por el vacío: hacia el fin del cuarto una explanada sin límites se desenvolvió á mis ojos, y se dibujaban en el fondo pálido de un cielo nebuloso los confusos y altísimos vestigios de una magnifica población. ¿Hay hombres por fin allí?, me pregunté. No; los ha habido. Eran las ruinas de la antigua EmeritaAugusta.

La humilde Mérida, semejante á las aves nocturnas, hace su habitación en las altas ruinas. Es un hijo raquítico, que apenas alienta, cobijado por la rica faldamenta de una matrona decrépita. Es un niño dormido en brazos de un gigante.

Mérida es indudablemente una de las poblaciones, mejor diremos, uno de los recuerdos más antiguos de nuestra España. Sus fundadores eligieron un terreno fértil, un clima productor, y un río cuyas aguas, pérfidamente mansas como la sonrisa de una mujer, debían regar una campiña deleitosa. Convencidos de las ventajas de su posición, los dominadores del mundo la llevaron al más alto grado de esplendor; y es fama conservada por los más de nuestros autores, que ha tenido un millón de habitantes. Erigida en colonia romana, y gozando de todos los fueros é inmunidades de tal, fué la segunda ciudad del imperio, y el sitio del descanso á que aspiraban altos funcionarios y guerreros cansados del aplauso de la victoria. La caída del imperio, las irrupciones de los vándalos y de los godos, la dominación de árabes, han pasado como un trillo sobre la frente de Mérida, y no han sido bastantes á allanar y nivelar su suelo, incrustado de colosales bellezas romanas. Las habitaciones han desaparecido carcomidas por el tiempo; pero las altas ruinas al

desplomarse han desigualado la llanura, y han formado, reducidas á polvo, un segundo suelo artificial y enteramente humano sobre el suelo primitivo de la naturaleza. Se puede asegurar que no hay una piedra en Mérida que no haya formado parte de una habitación romana: nada más común que ver en una pared de una choza del siglo un fragmento de mármol ó de piedra, labrado, de un palacio del siglo I. Zaguanes hemos visto empedrados con lápidas y losas sepulcrales: y un labrador, creyendo pisar la tierra, huella todos los días con su rústica suela el aquí yace de un procónsul, ó la advocación de un dios. Trozos de jaspe de un trabajo verdaderamente romano no tienen aquí otro museo que una cuadra, y sirven de pesebre al bruto que acaban de desuncir del arado. Diariamente el azadón de un extremeño tropieza en su camino con los manes de un héroe, y es común allí el hallazgo de una urna cineraria, ó de un tesoro numismático, coetáneo de los emperadores. Lo que es más asombroso, gran número de cosecheros se sirven aún en sus bodegas de las mismas tinajas romanas, que se conservan empotradas en sus suelos, y cuyo barro duradero, impuesto de tres capas diferentes superpuestas y admirablemente unidas, parece desafiar todavía al tiempo por más siglos de los que lleva vividos. Las vasijas mismas que se construyen en el país tienen una forma elegante, y participan de un carácter respetable de su antigüedad que difícilmente puede ocultarse á la perspicacia de un arqueólogo.

Una vez en Mérida, y rodeado de ruinas, la imaginación cree percibir el ruido de la gran ciudad, el son confuso de las armas, el hervir vividor de la inmensa población romana. ¡Error! Un silencio sepulcral y respetuoso no es interrumpido siquiera por el aquí fué del hombre reflexivo y meditador.

LAS ANTIGÜEDADES DE MÉRIDA

SEGUNDO Y ÚLTIMO ARTÍCULO

Mi primer cuidado en Mérida fué hacerme con un cicerone; pero no ofreciéndome alicientes la entrevista con ningún literato del país, ni queriendo que me contase ningún pedante lo que acaso sabría yo mejor que él, después de haber buscado inútilmente en aquel museo del tiempo alguna historia de las antigüedades ó de la misma ciudad, sólo traté de sorprender la tradición popular en su curso, y atúveme á un extremeño que se me presentó como el hombre más instruido del común del pueblo acerca de las bellezas de Mérida, y que haría por tanto oficio de enseñarlas.

Mi cicerone era una verdadera ruina, no tan bien conservada como las romanas; sus piernas se plegaban en arco, como si el peso de la cabeza hubiese sido por mucho tiempo oneroso á la base del edificio; sus brazos pendían también como dos arcos laterales cuyo pie hubiesen carcomido dos ramales de un río, que hubiesen lamido por muchos años los costados del hombre. La cara hubiera dado lugar á las más graves investigaciones de una academia: semejante á una moneda largo tiempo enterrada, y tomada á trechos del orín y de la tierra, sus facciones estaban medio borradas, y ora parecían letras en estilo lapidario, ora vistas á otra luz semejaban algo un rostro humano maltratado por la intemperie ó la incuria de sus guardianes. La fecha no se conocía, y aquel fragmento podía ser de varias épocas. Su desigual cabello, blandamente meneado por el viento, remedaba esa yerbecilla que por entre las cornisas y

coronamiento de una torre antigua hace nacer la humedad; sus dientes eran almenados, y la posición inclinada del cuerpo todo, fuera al parecer del centro de gravedad, le hacía parecer una pared que comienza á cuartearse, cuyas grietas hubiesen sido la boca y los ojos, y me trajo á la memoria la célebre torre de Pisa.

Tal se me representó á mí al menos mi cicerone: tal me pintaba mi imaginación cuanto en Mérida veía.

—¿De qué año es usted, buen hombre?, no pude menos de preguntarle.—Tres duros y medio, señor, me contestó, en estilo monetario, queriéndome decir que tenía tantos años como reales aquellas medallas.—Pardiez, no le hubiera creído tan del día. ¿Y usted es el que suele enseñar á los viajeros las otras ruinas de esta ciudad?

—Sí, señor... estoy algo enterado...

—¿Y vienen muchos viajeros?...

—Extranjeros, sí, señor Ingleses sobre todo, y se han solido llevar algunas cosas. Pintan ahí, y dibujan, y escriben, y qué sé yo... nos muelen á preguntas... parecen locos los ingleses. Pero españoles, señor, pocos: los más pasan sin preguntar; como no vengan de estancia al pueblo...

—Mérida ha sido gran ciudad, interrumpí al hombre de la tradición, poniéndonos en camino para recorrer las antigüedades, y siguiendo yo á la que me servía de guía.

—¡Oh!, sí, señor. La historia dice que tenía ochenta puertas, y que cada puerta estaba guardada por cuatrocientos soldados de á pie y ciento de caballería; tenía cuatro palacios magníficos en los cuatro ángulos, que eran de cuatro príncipes muy ricos.

—¿Y estas ruinas son muy antiguas?

—¡Vaya!

—¿De los romanos todas?

—¡Qué!, más antiguas, señor, mucho más; de los moros, y de los godos, y de los... qué sé yo de cuánta casta de gentes... mucho

antes que los romanos.

—¡Hola! Perfectamente.

En esto llegábamos al puente, verdadera obra romana: colocado sobre uno de los puntos en que presenta el río mayor latitud, más de sesenta ojos espaciosos le dan una longitud que se pierde de vista: él solo es una historia de las dominaciones que han pasado por nuestro suelo: sólo las dos cabezas, en una extensión regular, se conservan puras é intactas: remendado lo demás á trechos, ora por los godos, ora por los árabes, la distinta forma de los espolones, el color de la piedra y su diversa labor, revelan las fechas de las composturas: la más moderna es la mayor, y se hizo á costa de los tributos rendidos por los pueblos de cincuenta leguas á la redonda. Nuestras pobres piedras, unidas con hierro y argamasa, declaran toda la debilidad de nuestros medios, al lado de los pedruscos romanos, cuya única trabazón consiste en su colocación, y que durarán todavía más que las nuestras.

Perdíase mi fantasía en la investigación de los tiempos: romano ya enteramente, figurábaseme ver el dios tutelar del río, que, levantando la espalda colosal, repelía indignado la mísera traba que la moderna arquitectura osaba enlazar á la antigua sobre sus ondas, cuando la voz de mi cicerone, semejante á un aire colado, me sacó de mi estupor, y volviéndome hacia un nicho de ladrillo levantado sobre el trozo más romano del puente, en el cual se divisaba una pequeña é informe efigie de yeso, me dijo: —Éste, señor, es san Antonio.

—¡Muy poderosa es una religión, exclamé, cayendo de más alto que la catarata del Niágara, que ha podido colocar esa efigie de yeso sobre este puente romano! ¡El agua se ha llevado los dioses; sus piedras han durado más que ellos; y nuestro yeso dura más que ellos y sus piedras!

Dos acueductos magníficos enriquecían de aguas á Mérida: otro moderno parece elevado entre los antiguos como una parodia de piedra, como una insolencia, como un insulto y una befa hecha al poder caído: sin embargo, las ruinas son las triunfantes; arcos

colosales y gigantes asombran la vista: allí todo es obra del hombre, que ha hecho hasta la piedra; no son ya trozos cortados de una cantería: el hombre ha cogido la tierra y el guijo, lo ha amasado entre sus manos como harina, y ha hecho una mole indestructible, una argamasa compacta, á la cual el tiempo ha dado la última mano, prestándole al mismo tiempo color, y sobre la cual salta en pedazos el pico de hierro: el poder del hombre se estrella en su propia obra.

Uno de los dos acueductos romanos parecía no tener otro objeto que formar un gran depósito de aguas destinado á una naumaquia, gran diversión de un gran pueblo, para quien era sólo obra del deseo el crear un mar en medio de la tierra.

—Éste es, me dijo gravemente mi cicerone al llegar á la naumaquia, casi terraplenada por el tiempo, éste es el baño de los moros.

—Gracias, buen hombre, le respondí lleno de agradecimiento. ¿Y como cuántos moros cabrían en este baño?, le pregunté.

—¡Ui! ¡Figúrese usted!, me dijo con aire de respeto y voz solemne, como aterrado del número de los moros, y de la capacidad del baño.

El trozo mejor conservado es el circo; las ruinas han designado el terreno sin embargo, elevándolo sobre su antiguo nivel hasta el punto de enterrar varias de las puertas que le daban entrada; pero se distinguen todavía enteras muchas de las divisiones destinadas á las fieras y á los reos y atletas; la gradería, perfectamente buena á trechos, parece acabarse de desocupar, y cree uno oir el crujido de las clámides y las togas barriendo los escalones.

—Ésta era, me dijo mi cicerone, la plaza de los toros; por allí salía el toro, me añadió, indicándome una puerta medio terraplenada, y por aquí, concluyó en voz baja y misteriosa, enseñándome la jaula de una fiera, entraban el viático cuando el toro hería á alguno de muerte.

Una ruidosa carcajada que no fuí dueño de contener resonó por el ancho y destrozado circo, y pasamos á ver el anfiteatro, peor conservado, el hipódromo, apenas reconocible por la meta, y de allí nos dirigimos hacia la vía romana, vulgo en el país calzada romana;

aquí es tradición que debe de haber muchos sepulcros: se han hallado efectivamente algunos. Sabida es la costumbre de los romanos de colocar los sepulcros á orillas de los caminos, por la cual ellos solían en sus epitafios dirigir la palabra á los pasajeros.

Nosotros, al heredar las frases hechas y las locuciones enteras de su lenguaje, sin heredar sus costumbres, hemos tenido que hacer metafóricas sus expresiones propias; así, cuando hablemos de las cenizas de un muerto, que nosotros no quemamos, y cuando en un epitafio apostrofamos un viajero que no ha de ver á orillas del camino nuestro sepulcro, cometemos según los hablistas una belleza, llamada figura retórica, y según mi entender una tontería, que pudiera llamarse decir una cosa por otra.

Á la parte opuesta de Mérida suélense encontrar sepulcros de niños, á juzgar por sus dimensiones.

El arco de Trajano colocado en el centro de la actual población está en buen estado, y lo que me asombró fué encontrar en dos nichos laterales de su parte interior dos estatuas de mármol blanco, de un trabajo acabado y del gusto griego más puro, considerablemente maltratadas, en verdad, pero muy capaces de lucir como dos trozos antiguos de primer orden: y digo que esto me asombró por dos razones: primera, porque en Madrid creo haber visto un museo de escultura extraordinariamente pobre; segunda, porque la posteridad de los romanos se advierte en acabar de desmoronar á pedradas la obra de algún Fidias del imperio.

Á un tiro de bala de Mérida existe una capilla dedicada á santa Olalla, patrona de la que fué colonia romana, llamada el hornillo de la Santa, por haber sido martirizada allí: está construida con fragmentos de un templo de Marte: el viajero no se cansa de admirar los relieves, los trozos de columnas: aquel pequeño monumento se me representaba un hombre de una estatura colosal, á quien el tiempo y los achaques hubiesen encorvado y reducido á la altura de un enano. Dentro se ve ó se adivina la efigie de santa Olalla, y en la portada de la ermita se lee en letras gruesas la inscripción siguiente:

MARTI

SACRUM

VETILLA PACULLI

La idea que este contraste presenta, imagínela el lector; estas letras parecen haber sido de bronce, pero habiendo saltado el metal, sólo ha quedado el hueco de ellas, y éste hace el mismo efecto que el cóncavo vacío de los ojos de una calavera.

En la ciudad hay otros restos de igual importancia; entre ellos es de citar la casa del conde de los Corvos, construida de moderno ladrillo y cal, entre los huecos que han dejado las magníficas y desmesuradamente altas columnas de un templo de Diana, de pie todavía y empotradas en ella; el conjunto presenta la disforme idea de un vivo atado á un cadáver; aquella suma de dos épocas tan encontradas forma un verdadero matrimonio, en que los consortes parecen estar riñendo continuamente.

El conventual es otra ruina, pero más moderna; colocado á la cabeza del puente, ofrece el aspecto de un edificio grandioso, y sus murallas siguen largo trecho la dirección del río; parece haber sido una fortaleza gótica; posteriormente perteneció á los templarios, y se arruinuó en poder de los caballeros de Santiago.

Sobre una alta columna romana, que se levanta en medio de una plaza, domina una efigie de santa Olalla mirando al oriente. Al llegar aquí y concluir nuestro paseo, se acercó á mí mi cicerone, y me dijo con notable fervor:—Repare usted, señor: ésta es otra vez santa Olalla: yo no me acuerdo qué año hubo en Mérida una peste muy mortífera; la santa miraba entonces á poniente; hiciéronle grandes rogativas, y una mañana amaneció vuelta al oriente y cesó la peste; desde entonces mira á esa parte, y ya no se teme la peste en Mérida.

Efectivamente, parece que desde entonces no ha vuelto ningún azote de esa especie á afligir á la antigua colonia romana, si se exceptúa el cólera; y ése, todo el mundo sabe que no es peste: con lo cual queda en pie la tradición, y la santa siempre vuelta.

No concluiré este artículo, por largo que sea ya, sin hacer mención del último descubrimiento que ha llamado la atención de los

meridenses, si se puede hablar así de unos hombres que viven entre sus ruinas tan ignorantes de ellas como los búhos y vencejos que en su compañía las habitan.

Cavando un labrador su corral, encontró recientemente debajo de su miserable casa el pavimento de una habitación, indudablemente romana, hecho de un precioso mosaico, en el cual asombra tanto la obra de la apariencia como el lujo que revela. Piedrecitas iguales de media pulgada de diámetro, y de colores hábilmente combinados, forman figuras simbólicas, cuya inteligencia no es fácil; algunas tienen un carácter egipcio, lo cual puede hacer sospechar si habrá pertenecido la casa á algún sacerdote ó arúspice; á la cabeza de la pieza se descubre, pero no se descifra, una inscripción en letras latinas, y á los dos lados parece prolongarse el precioso mosaico á otras habitaciones no descubiertas todavía.

La autoridad de Mérida parece haber dado parte convenientemente al gobierno; pero no habiéndose dispuesto nada todavía, el dueño de la casa reclama que se le deje usar de su terreno como mejor le convenga, ó que se le compre; en el ínterin, no habiendo fondos destinados á continuar esta importante excavación, y habiendo quedado á la intemperie el pavimento descubierto hasta la presente, el polvo, el agua llovediza y el desmoronamiento de la tierra circunstante, echa á perder diariamente el peregrino hallazgo, lleno ya de quebraduras y lagunas; sin embargo, bastaría una cantidad muy pequeña para construir un cobertizo y comprar la choza, ya que no fuese para continuar la excavación.

Mérida, la antigua Emerita-Augusta, posesora de tantos tesoros numismáticos, olvidada de ellos, y olvidada ella misma, es en el día una población de cortísima importancia; puéblanla apenas mil vecinos, y de su grandeza pasada sólo le quedan suntuosas ruinas y orgullosos recuerdos. Después de haber saludado á las unas con supersticioso respeto, y de haber enlazado los otros con vanidad al nombre español que llevo, proseguí mi viaje, lleno de aquella impresión sublime y melancólica que deja en el ánimo por largo espacio la contemplación filosófica de las grandezas humanas, y de la nada de que salieron, para volver á entrar en ella más tarde ó más temprano.

LOS CALAVERAS

ARTÍCULO PRIMERO

Es cosa que daría que hacer á los etimologistas y á los anatómicos de lenguas el averiguar el origen de la voz calavera en su acepción figurada, puesto que la propia no puede tener otro sentido que la designación del cráneo de un muerto, ya vacío y descarnado. Yo no recuerdo haber visto empleada esta voz, como sustantivo masculino, en ninguno de nuestros autores antiguos, y esto prueba que esta acepción picaresca es de uso moderno. La especie sin embargo de seres á que se aplica ha sido de todos los tiempos. El famoso Alcibíades era el calavera más perfecto de Atenas: el célebre filósofo que arrojó sus tesoros al mar, no hizo en eso más que una calaverada, á mi entender de muy mal gusto: César, marido de todas las mujeres de Roma, hubiera pasado en el día por un excelente calavera: Marco Antonio echando á Cleopatra por contrapeso en la balanza del destino del imperio, no podía ser más que un calavera; en una palabra, la suerte de más de un pueblo se ha decidido á veces por una simple calaverada. Si la historia, en vez de escribirse como un índice de los crímenes de los reyes y una crónica de unas cuantas familias, se escribiera con esta especie de filosofía, como un cuadro de costumbres privadas, se vería probada aquella verdad; y muchos de los importantes trastornos que han cambiado la faz del mundo, á los cuales han solido achacar grandes causas los políticos, encontrarían una clave de muy verosímil y sencilla explicación en las calaveradas.

Dejando aparte la antigüedad (por más mérito que les añada, puesto que hay muchas gentes que no tienen otro), y volviendo á la etimología de la voz, confieso que no encuentro qué relación puede existir entre un calavera y una calaverada. ¡Cuánto exceso de vida no supone el primero! ¡Cuánta ausencia de ella no supone la segunda! Si se quiere decir que hay un punto de similitud entre el vacío del uno y de la otra, no tardaremos en demostrar que es un error. Aun concediendo que las cabezas se dividan en vacías y en llenas, y que la ausencia del talento y del juicio se refiera á la primera clase, espero que por mi artículo se convencerá cualquiera de que para pocas cosas se necesita más talento y buen juicio que para ser calavera.

Por tanto, el haber querido dar un aire de apodo y de vilipendio á los calaveras es una injusticia de la lengua y de los hombres que acertaron á darle los primeros ese giro malicioso: yo por mí rehúso esa voz; confieso que quisiera darle una nobleza, un sentido favorable, un carácter de dignidad que desgraciadamente no tiene, y así sólo la usaré, porque no teniendo otra á mano, y encontrando esa establecida, aquellos mismos cuya causa defiendo se harán cargo de lo difícil que me sería darme á entender valiéndome para designarlos de una palabra nueva; ellos mismos no se reconocerían, y no reconociéndolos seguramente el público tampoco, vendría á ser inútil la descripción que de ellos voy á hacer.

Todos tenemos algo de calaveras, más ó menos. ¿Quién no hace locuras y disparates alguna vez en su vida? ¿Quién no ha hecho versos, quién no ha creído en alguna mujer, quién no se ha dado malos ratos algún día por ella, quién no ha prestado dinero, quién no ha debido, quién no ha abandonado alguna cosa que le importase por otra que le gustase, quién no se casa en fin?... Todos lo somos; pero así como no se llama locos sino á aquéllos cuya locura no está en armonía con la de los más, así sólo se llama calaveras á aquéllos cuya serie de acciones continuadas son diferentes de las que los otros tuvieran en iguales casos.

El calavera se divide y subdivide hasta lo infinito, y es difícil encontrar en la naturaleza una especie que presente al observador mayor número de castas distintas: tienen todas empero un tipo

común de donde parten, y en rigor sólo dos son las calidades esenciales que determinan su ser, y que las reúnen en una sola especie: en ellas se reconoce al calavera, de cualquier casta que sea.

1.°. El calavera debe tener por base de su ser lo que se llama talento natural por unos; despejo por otros; viveza por los más: entiéndase esto bien; talento natural: es decir, no cultivado. Esto se explica: toda clase de estudio profundo, ó de extensa instrucción, sería lastre demasiado pesado que se opondría á esa ligereza, que es una de sus más amables calidades.

2.°. El calavera debe tener lo que se llama en el mundo poca aprehensión. No se interprete esto tampoco en mal sentido. Todo lo contrario. Esta poca aprehensión es aquella indiferencia filosófica con que considera el qué dirán el que no hace más que cosas naturales, el que no hace cosas vergonzosas. Se reduce á arrostrar en todas nuestras acciones la publicidad, á vivir ante los otros, más para ellos que para uno mismo. El calavera es un hombre público cuyos actos todos pasan por el tamiz de la opinión, saliendo de él más depurados. Es un espectáculo cuyo telón está siempre descorrido; quítensele los espectadores, y á Dios teatro. Sabido es que con mucha aprehensión no hay teatro.

El talento natural, pues, y la poca aprehensión, son las dos cualidades distintas de la especie: sin ellas no se da calavera. Un tonto, un timorato del qué dirán, no lo serán jamás. Sería tiempo perdido.

El calavera se divide en silvestre y doméstico.

El calavera silvestre es hombre de la plebe, sin educación ninguna y sin modales; es el capataz del barrio, tiene honores de jaque, habla andaluz; su conversación va salpicada de chistes; enciende un cigarro en otro, escupe por el colmillo; convida siempre, y nadie paga donde está él; es chulo nato: dos cosas son indispensables á su existencia: la querida, que es manola, condición sine qua non, y la navaja, que es grande; por un quítame allá esas pajas le da honrosa sepultura en un cuerpo humano. Sus manos siempre están ocupadas: ó empaqueta el cigarro, ó saca la navaja, ó tercia la capa,

ó se cala el chapeo, ó se aprieta la faja, ó vibra el garrote: siempre está haciendo algo. Se le conoce á larga distancia, y es bueno dejarle pasar como al jabalí. ¡Ay del que mire á su Dulcinea! ¡Ay del que la tropiece! Si es hombre de levita, sobre todo, si es señorito delicado, más le valiera no haber nacido. Con esa especie está á matar, y la mayor parte de sus calaveradas recaen sobre ella; se perece por asustar á uno, por desplumar á otro. El calavera silvestre es el gato del lechuguino: así es que éste le ve con terror; de quimera en quimera, de qué se me da á mí en qué se me da á mí, para en la cárcel; á veces en presidio ¡pero esto último es raro: se diferencia esencialmente del ladrón en su condición generosa: da y no recibe; puede ser homicida, nunca asesino. Este calavera es esencialmente español.

El calavera doméstico admite diferentes grados de civilización, y su cuna, su edad, su profesión, su dinero le subdividen después en diversas castas. Las principales son las siguientes:

El calavera-lampiño tiene catorce ó quince años, lo más diez y ocho. Sus padres no pudieron nunca hacer carrera con él: le metieron en el colegio para quitársele de encima, y hubieron de sacarle porque no dejaba allí cosa con cosa. Mientras que sus compañeros más laboriosos devoraban los libros para entenderlos, él los despedazaba para hacer balitas de papel, las cuales arrojaba disimuladamente y con singular tino á las narices del maestro. Á pesar de eso, el día de examen el talento profundo y tímido se cortaba, y nuestro audaz muchacho repetía con osadía las cuatro voces tercas que había recogido aquí y allí, y se llevaba el premio. Su carácter resuelto ejercía predominio sobre la multitud, y capitaneaba por lo regular las pandillas y los partidos. Despreciador de los bienes mundanos, su sombrero, que le servía de blanco ó de pelota, se distinguía de los demás sombreros como él de los demás jóvenes.

En carnaval era el que ponía las mazas á todo el mundo, y aun las manos encima si tenían la torpeza de enfadarse; si era descubierto hacía pasar á otro por el culpable, ó sufría en el último caso la pena con valor, y riéndose todavía del feliz éxito de su travesura. Es decir que el calavera, como todo el que ha de ser algo en el mundo,

comienza á descubrir desde su más tierna edad el germen que encierra. El número de sus hazañas era infinito. Un maestro había perdido unos anteojos, que se habían encontrado en su faltriquera: el rapé de otro había pasado al chocolate de sus compañeros, ó á las narices de los gatos, que recorrían bufando los corredores con gran risa de los más juiciosos; la peluca del maestro de matemáticas había quedado un día enganchada en un sillón, al levantarse el pobre Euclides, con notable perturbación de un problema que estaba por resolver. Aquel día no se despejó más incógnita que la calva del buen señor

Fuera ya del colegio, se trató de sujetarlo en casa y se le puso bajo llave, pero á la mañana siguiente se encontraron colgadas las sábanas de la ventana; el pájaro había volado; y como sus padres se convencieron de que no había forma de contenerle, convinieron en que era preciso dejarle. De aquí fecha la libertad del lampiño. Es el más pesado, el más incómodo: careciendo todavía de barba y de reputación, necesita hacer dobles esfuerzos para llamar la pública atención; privado él de medios, le es forzoso afectarlos. Es risa oirle hablar de las mujeres como un hombre ya maduro; sacar el reloj como si tuviera que hacer; contar todas sus acciones del día como si pudieran importarle á alguien, pero con despejo, con soltura, con aire cansado y corrido.

Por la mañana madrugó porque tenía una cita: á las diez se vino á encargar el billete para la ópera, porque hoy daría cien onzas por un billete; no puede faltar. ¡Estas mujeres le hacen á uno hacer tantos disparates! Á media mañana se fué al billar; aunque hijo de familia no come nunca en casa; entra en el café metiendo mucho ruido, su duro es el que más suena; sus bienes se reducen á algunas monedas que debe de vez en cuando á la generosidad de su mamá, ó de su hermana, pero los luce sobremanera. El billar es su elemento; los intervalos que le deja libre el juego suéleselos ocupar cierta clase de mujeres, únicas que pueden hacerle cara todavía, y en cuyo trato toma sus peregrinos conocimientos acerca del corazón femenino. Á veces el calavera-lampiño se finge malo para darse importancia; y si puede estarlo de veras mejor; entonces está de enhorabuena. Empieza asimismo á fumar, es más cigarro que

hombre, jura y perjura y habla detestablemente; su boca es una sentina, si bien tal vez con chiste. Va por la calle deseando que alguien le tropiece; y cuando no lo hace nadie, tropieza él á alguno; su honor entonces está comprometido, y hay de fijo un desafío; si éste acaba mal, y si mete ruido, en aquel mismo punto empieza á tomar importancia; y entrando en otra casta, como la oruga que se torna mariposa, deja de ser calavera-lampiño. Sus padres, que ven por fin decididamente que no hay forma de hacerle abogado, le hacen meritorio; pero como no asiste á la oficina, como bosqueja en ella las caricaturas de los jefes, porque tiene el instinto del dibujo, se muda de bisiesto y se trata de hacerlo militar: en cuanto está declarado irremisiblemente mala cabeza se le busca una charretera, y si se encuentra ya es un hombre hecho.

Aquí empieza el calavera-temerón, que es el gran calavera. Pero nuestro artículo ha crecido debajo de la pluma más de lo que hubiéramos querido, y de aquélla que para un periódico convendría: ¡tan fecunda es la materia! Por tanto nuestros lectores nos concederán algún ligero descanso, y remitirán al número siguiente su curiosidad si alguna tienen.

LOS CALAVERAS

ARTÍCULO SEGUNDO Y CONCLUSIÓN

Quedábamos al fin de nuestro artículo anterior en el calaveratemerón. Éste se divide en paisano y militar; si el influjo no fué bastante para lograr su charretera (porque alguna vez ocurre que las charreteras se dan por influjo), entonces es paisano; pero no existe entre uno y otro más que la diferencia del uniforme. Verdad es que es muy esencial, y más importante de lo que parece: el uniforme ya es la mitad. Es decir, que el paisano necesita hacer dobles esfuerzos para darse á conocer; es una casa pública sin muestra; es preciso saber que existe para entrar en ella. Pero por un contraste singular el calavera-temerón, una vez militar, afecta no llevar el uniforme, viste de paisano, salvo el bigote; sin embargo, si se examina el modo suelto que tiene de llevar el frac ó la levita, se puede decir que hasta este traje es uniforme en él. Falta la plata y el oro, pero queda el despejo y la marcialidad, y eso se trasluce siempre; no hay paño bastante negro ni tupido que le ahogue. El calavera-temerón tiene indispensablemente, ó ha tenido alguna temporada una cerbatana, en la cual adquiere singular tino. Colocado en alguna tienda de la calle de la Montera, se parapeta detrás de dos ó tres amigos, que fingen discurrir seriamente.

—Aquel viejo que viene allí: ¡mírale que serio viene!—Sí; al de la casaca verde, ¡va bueno!—Dejad, dejad. ¡Pum!, en el sombrero. Seguid hablando y no miréis.

Efectivamente, el sombrero del buen hombre produjo un sonido seco: el acometido se para, se quita el sombrero, lo examina.

—¡Ahora!, dice la turba. ¡Pum!, otra en la calva.—El viejo da un salto y echa una mano á la calva; mira á todas partes... nada.

—¡Está bueno!, dice por fin, poniéndose el sombrero; algún pillastre... bien podía irse á divertir...

—¡Pobre señor!, dice entonces el calavera, acercándosele; ¿le han dado á usted?, es una desvergüenza... ¿pero le han hecho á usted mal?...

—No, señor, felizmente.

—¿Quiere usted algo?

—Tantas gracias.

Después de haber dado gracias, el hombre se va alejando, volviendo poco á poco la cabeza á ver si descubría... pero entonces el calavera le asesta su último tiro, que acierta á darle en medio de las narices, y el hombre derrotado aprieta el paso, sin tratar ya de averiguar de dónde procede el fuego; ya no piensa más que en alejarse. Suéltase entonces la carcajada en el corrillo, y empiezan los comentarios sobre el viejo, sobre el sombrero, sobre la calva, sobre el frac verde. Nada causa más risa que la extrañeza y el enfado del pobre; sin embargo, nada más natural.

El calavera-temerón escoge á veces para su centro de operaciones la parte interior de una persiana; este medio permite más abandono en la risa de los amigos, y es el más oculto; el calavera fino le desdeña por poco expuesto.

Á veces se dispara la cerbatana en guerrilla; entonces se escoge por blanco el farolillo de un escarolero, el fanal de un confitero, las botellas de una tienda; objetos todos en que produce el barro cocido un sonido sonoro y argentino. ¡Pim!, las ansias mortales, las agonías, y los votos del gallego y del fabricante de merengues, son el alimento del calavera.

Otras veces el calavera se coloca en el confín de la acera y fingiendo buscar el número de una casa, ve venir á uno, y andando

con la cabeza alta, arriba, abajo, á un lado, á otro, sortea todos los movimientos del transeúnte, cerrándole por todas partes el paso á su camino. Cuando quiere poner un término á la escena, finge tropezar con él, y le da un pisotón; el otro entonces le dice: perdone usted; y el calavera se incorpora con su gente.

Á los pocos pasos, se va con los brazos abiertos á un hombre muy formal, y ahogándole entre ellos:—Pepe, exclama, ¿cuándo has vuelto? ¡Sí, tú eres! Y lo mira: el hombre, todo aturdido, duda si es un conocimiento antiguo... y tartamudea... Fingiendo entonces la mayor sorpresa: ¡Ah!, usted perdone, dice retirándose el calavera: creí que era usted un amigo mío...—No hay de qué.—Usted perdone. ¡Qué diantre! No he visto cosa más parecida.

Si se retira á la una ó las dos de su tertulia, y pasa por una botica, llama: el mancebo, medio dormido, se asoma á la ventanilla.— ¿Quién es?—Dígame usted, pregunta el calavera, ¿tendría usted espolines?

Cualquiera puede figurarse la respuesta: feliz el mancebo, si en vez de hacerle esa sencilla pregunta, no le ocurre al calavera asirle de las narices al través de la rejilla, diciéndole:—Retírese usted; la noche está muy fresca, y puede usted atrapar un constipado.

Otra noche llama á deshoras á una puerta.—¿Quién?, pregunta de allí á un rato un hombre que sale al balcón medio desnudo.—Nada, contesta: soy yo, á quien no conoce, no quería irme á mi casa sin darle á usted las buenas noches.—¡Bribón!, ¡insolente! Si bajo...—Á ver cómo baja usted; baje usted: usted perdería más: figúrese usted dónde estaré yo cuando usted llegue á la calle. Conque buenas noches: sosiéguese usted, y que usted descanse.

Claro está que el calavera necesita espectadores para todas estas escenas: sólo lo son en cuanto pueden comunicarse; por tanto el calavera cría á su alrededor constantemente una pequeña corte de aprendices, ó de meros curiosos, que no teniendo valor ó gracia bastante para serlo ellos mismos, se contentan con el papel de cómplices y partícipes: éstos le miran con envidia, y son las trompetas de su fama.

El calavera-langosta se forma del anterior, y tiene el aire más decidido, el sombrero más ladeado, la corbata más négligé: sus hazañas son más serias; éste es aquél que se reúne en pandillas: semejante á la langosta, de que toma nombre, tala el campo donde cae; pero como ella no es de todos los años, tiene temporadas, y como en el día no es de lo más en boga, pasaremos muy rápidamente sobre él. Concurre á los bailes llamados de candil, donde entra sin que nadie le presente, y donde su sola presencia difunde el terror: arma camorra, apaga las luces, y se escurre antes de la llegada de la policía, y después de haber dado unos cuantos palos á derecha é izquierda: en las máscaras suele mover también su zipizape: en viendo una figura antipática, dice: aquel hombre me carga; se va para él, y le aplica un bofetón: de diez hombres que reciban bofetón, los nueve se quedan tranquilamente con él, pero si alguno quiere devolverle, hay desafío; la suerte decide entonces, porque el calavera es valiente: éste es el difícil de mirar: tiene un duelo hoy con uno que le miró de frente, mañana con uno que le miró de soslayo, y al día siguiente lo tendrá con otro que no le mire: éste es el que suele ir á las casas públicas con ánimo de no pagar: éste es el que talla y apunta con furor; es jugador, griego nato, y gran billarista además. En una palabra, éste es el venenoso, el calavera-plaga: los demás divierten; éste mata.

Dos líneas más allá de éste está otra casta, que nosotros rehusaremos desde luego; el calavera-tramposo, ó trapalón, el que hace deudas, el parásito, el que comete á veces picardías, el que empresta para no devolver, el que vive á costa de todo el mundo, etc., etc.: pero éstos no son verdaderamente calaveras; son indignos de este nombre: ésos son los que desacreditan el oficio, y por ellos pierden los demás. No los reconocemos.

Sólo tres clases hemos conocido más detestables que ésta: la primera es común en el día, y como al describirla habríamos de rozarnos con materias muy delicadas, y para nosotros respetables, no haremos más que indicarla. Queremos hablar del calavera-cura. Vuelvo á pedir perdón; pero ¿quién no conoce en el día algún sacerdote de ésos que queriendo pasar por hombres despreocupados, y limpiarse de la fama de carlistas, dan en el