NED KELLY'S DYBBUK, OR THOUGHTS ON EMPATHY IN ART

At the end of The True History of the Kelly Gang, Justin Kurzel’s adaptation of Peter Carey’s magnificent novel of the same name, Thomas Curnow, a hostage who survives the gang’s chaotic last stand at the Glenrowan Inn, gives a speech to a fancy crowd in a fancy room. His audience wear the uniform of power – grey beards and starched collars, bejewelled consorts, diplomatic sashes and medals pinned to frock coats. Distinguished looking gentlemen all. Curnow himself is a distinguished looking gentleman (the actor, Jacob Collins-Levy, has the sort of looks that make him convincing as a Tudor king or underworld kingpin). His speech begins with a rebuke: Australia, he says, has no George Washington, no Thomas Jefferson; the closest thing it has to a national icon is a horse thief turned cop killer. Unless Australia can find other, more edifying stories to tell about itself, it will, he cautions, remain beyond the pale of respectability.

But, of course, the only story Curnow himself has to tell is Kelly’s. We have seen earlier in the film the role he played at Glenrowan. The gang’s aim being to kill as many coppers as possible, they take hostages to provoke a final confrontation with the police, then sabotage the railway line by which the latter will arrive. The train will derail, most passengers will die, they will be able to pick off the survivors. Curnow foils that plan. An English teacher, he persuades Kelly, who fills the expectant hours writing an autobiographical apologia addressed to his daughter, to let him go into town to fetch books of grammar, the better to perform the editorial work he promises to undertake on Kelly’s behalf, improving the parsing of the latter’s prose. For the parsing, concedes Kelly (by this time a twitching, gibbering, bug-eyed maniac, played by George McKay), is poor. Released by the gang on his own recognizance, Curnow does not go to town; instead he heads along the railway track and flags down the train, thus preventing the derailment. Curnow acts with sang-froid and no little courage, and in doing so he saves a number of lives. Any right-thinking, law-abiding, civic-minded individual is bound to agree: Thomas Curnow was a hero. Now I count myself among the ranks of the respectable citizenry, but watching Curnow deliver his peroration, I caught myself entertaining a more heterodox view ­— that Thomas Curnow really was a copper-bottomed cunt. (I should say now that I am familiar with the Kelly story only as told by Carey and Kurzel; whether it is accurately told by them, whatever that might mean, I do not know.)

This is not, I think, an eccentric reaction, but a measure of the film’s success. For the film, like the book on which it is based, is fundamentally concerned with the question of narrative control, of who gets to tell whose stories. (In the novel, narrated by Ned in the first person, this question is inscribed at the formal level; in the film it can only ever be one theme amongst others. This is perhaps one reason the film is less immediately satisfying than the novel, lacking its perfect integration of function and form.) Kelly, son of an Irish rebel transported to Van Diemen’s land and thus, he says, ripped out of history, is determined to be the chronicler of his own geste. Hence letters to the press, letters to his infant daughter; hence the descent into graphomania and the mad risk he runs when he lets Curnow go. Kelly knows that only he can author the true history of his gang — not just because they were his gang, but because the only way that their series of bloody acts becomes a history at all, the only way it resolves into a coherent narrative, is if it can be understood as a ferocious response to a long history of expropriation. In his own telling, Kelly’s campaign against the police, against the English, against the landed and the moneyed is revenge; writing is a remedy, an opportunity to re-enter into possession of his own history.

It ends badly for Kelly, of course. Not just because he swings, but because it is Curnow who gets to tell the story — and he tells it well, no doubt. He is serious but suave – and so handsome! – and recounts the events at Glenrowan with modest self-deprecation, implicitly inviting contrast with Kelly’s overweening authorial vanity. He leavens the horror with a few witticisms at the expense of the outlaw’s poor parsing, eliciting titters from an audience relieved that fear can now give way to simple contempt. He paints a solemn picture of Kelly’s execution. He dwells on the famous last words: such is life. In the film they are his invention; we have earlier seen Kelly’s mother instruct her son specifically to offer no last words, but, Iago-like, trust to silence. Curnow criticises Kelly’s platitudinous banality, presented as proof of his deficient moral sensibility and absence of understanding, but the irony is obvious: the banality, the deficiency, the absence of understanding — all this is Curnow’s. He purports to have read Kelly’s remonstrance – the literally blood-soaked pages are in his physical possession, brandished for rhetorical effect – but of that long catalogue of grievances, beginning with the colonial exploitation of Ireland and ending with the sexual exploitation of Kelly’s sister by a foppishly degenerate English policeman, he has nothing to say, other than that the parsing was poor. Rather than see the world, momentarily, through Kelly’s eyes, he chooses to coddle his audience’s belief that Kelly was simply a reprobate, and the corollary belief in their own justification. And thus, for a few moments, he gets to bask in their applause. But not the applause of the audience in the cinema, necessarily. For us, who have known Ned man and boy, a different perspective is available, viewed from which he is obviously a victim — either of history, as he insists, or, as we can see more clearly than he can, of a dysfunctional family dynamic controlled by his ferocious mother (brilliantly portrayed by Essie Davis). Just as obviously, Curnow is a canting, self-serving humbug. At the end, the film makes us see Curnow through Kelly’s eyes, just at the moment when Curnow refuses to see events through Ned’s.

The word empathy bubbles up irresistibly here. Does the film offer a lesson in empathy? Perhaps. The advantage of saying this is that it inscribes it in a highly respectable, eminently liberal tradition, according to which the value of narrative art is that it extends and fortifies our capacity for empathy, thus making us better people and better citizens. The disadvantage of saying it is that I am not entirely sure it’s true. I certainly didn’t really feel morally uplifted at the end of the film; I felt as if I had been taken hostage at gunpoint by Ned Kelly’s dybbuk. This is not the edifying experience that empathy-extending art is supposed to provide. More fundamentally though, I find it hard to say whether the film offers a lesson in empathy because I’m not entirely sure what empathy means. It is a twenty-first century fetish, a universal psycho-social remedy, and, as with all magical concoctions, the exact mechanism of its functioning is mysterious. The Hellenic consonance of the word itself suggests something ancient, but it is a relatively recent coinage. Woman of letters Vernon Lee invented the term in 1902 as a translation of the German Einfühlung, a key concept in the aesthetic philosophy of Munich phenomenologist Theodor Lipps, and for the first four decades of its life ‘empathy’ was a word used almost exclusively by art critics and aesthetic philosophers. The OED defines empathy in this original, aesthetic sense as ‘the quality or power of projecting one’s personality into or mentally identifying oneself with an object of contemplation, and so fully understanding or appreciating it’. For Lipps, for Lee, it was the sine qua non of aesthetic experience. By 1946 the word seems to have taken on its secondary, psychological meaning, glossed by the OED as ‘the ability to understand and appreciate another person’s feelings, experience, etc’, since that year an article in the Journal of Clinical Psychology advised (Rogerian) psychotherapists to cultivate ‘a man-to-man regard for the client, characterized (ideally) by the understanding of empathy without the erratic quality of identification or the supportiveness of sympathy.’ Over the following decades, as a glance at its steeply rising google N-Gram shows, the word ‘empathy’ moved out of the consulting room and into everyday circulation. It increasingly became seen as a condition both necessary and sufficient for leading an ethical life. In the twenty-first century, with dreary predictability, it moved into the service economy. You can hire an empath on fiverr; at the higher end of the market they charge £200 an hour.

I am sceptical as to whether this would be money well spent. Not because I don’t buy the premise of the practice, the idea that having someone share your emotions can have a therapeutic effect (which is a long way, of course, from saying it has an ethical effect). It’s simply been my observation over many years that when a person tells you they are an empath, this is a reliable indicator that they are in fact an egoist, and that conversation between you will revolve, endlessly, around their traumas, neuroses, hang-ups and fears. In part this is surely just the converse of the usual human tendency to project our own failings on to others. We can only read the book of ourselves in the mirror, so we read it backwards: we ignore the virtues others find in us, claiming for our own those we find in others. But it is also, I think, a function of the fact that the word empathy has been pressed into double service, and a confusion has arisen as a result. The OED understand the early, aesthetic meaning of the word ‘empathy’ as a specialized sense of the second, psychological one. But to assume that the psychological meaning simply encompasses the artistic one is to assume a similarity between aesthetic and interpersonal experiences which is perhaps problematic. When empathy is understood as the capacity for aesthetic experience it is conceptualized as egoistic projection. What does it mean, after all, to talk about empathizing with Emma Bovary? It cannot really mean to feel her pain, for Emma Bovary’s pain – and so accomplished is Flaubert’s illusionism that it easy to forget this – does not exist, for the simple reason that she herself does not exist, or at least not in the way that you and I do. The only pain we feel is our own; it is our disappointment and bitterness and disillusion rising in her gorge when she looks, vexed and frustrated, at Charles. Emma Bovary is an inflatable doll; our breath fills her, bringing her to something resembling life. Feeling flows from me, into her. This aesthetic experience would seem to be quite different from how we conceptualize empathy in an encounter with another, actually existing, human, in which feeling flows into me from them.

In saying this I don’t want to suggest that engaging with art is just a narcissistic experience, or that Emma Bovary is merely an aid for emotional onanists. Of course art offers contact with the other. That may be the only thing it can offer. But which other? The gods originally, for the painters working in the caves at Sulawesi and Lascaux, for the Greek rhapsodes when they went, divinely, mad. Later, in the twentieth century, psychic spelunkers in Zurich and Harlem and Mexico City called it the unconscious, but it’s all the same thing. Art connects us, but not with other people, other egos. (It can do this obviously, at a book club, or when you go to the flicks with a friend, but snooker can do that too, or roller derby or model railway building; it’s not art’s distinguishing or essential property.) Art connects us with something else, completely familiar, utterly alien, intimate and strange, something that exists always beyond the self and always within it. That thing of darkness you acknowledge yours. Art is a magic mirror that shows you a reflection of yourself you barely recognize, a map to the sunken cities within.

In Kurzel’s film, craving for contact with the other is thematized through cross-dressing, a motif which, judging by IMDB comments, has vexed or perplexed many viewers. Some find it in it only a silly ostentation; others a desperate lunge for edginess. Of course, the notion that the Kelly gang habitually dressed as women is an invention of Carey’s book, which uses it as part of its exploration of masculinity whilst also providing a plausible historical context to make sense of it: it is presented as a continuation of an Irish rebel practice, a counter-forensic measure intended to make it more difficult for the police to identify the men who took part in anti-British actions. But cross-dressing is central to Kurzel’s film in a way it is not to Carey’s book, simply because the images of wiry young men in their brothel finery – orgazna and lace, sometimes bedizened with blood – are so arresting. They are images of incongruity, obviously, and the incongruity has become the point. Cross-dressing, a practice copied from their father, is part of the Kellys’ patrilineal anti-inheritance, which consists mainly, paradoxically, in the awareness of their dispossession; lost boys, they cleave to traditions from the old world, which in the new world no longer serve their original purpose. Their cross-dressing is plainly no longer tactical. Instead it is an expression of a deeper impulse, the carnivalesque temptation to turn the world upside down and inside out, to disrupt all fixed patterns of identity, to become other. We can read this as an emancipatory practice, in which case the political and the psychic dovetail smoothly. But the film complicates this, for the Kelly Gang are not its only cross-dressers: Ned’s friend-turned-nemesis, Constable Fitzgerald, played by Nicholas Hoult as a cross between Caligula and Hugh Grant, likes to wear a dress while he’s fucking. Heightens the pleasure, he tells Ned — you feel like you’re breaking the rules. Is Fitzgerald’s cross-dressing different from Ned’s? It seems different, because the idea of transgression in the latter case can be linked to a political narrative, whereas Fitzgerald’s is, unapologetically, for kicks; his purely hedonic understanding of cross-dressing severs the psychic from the political. Earlier I said that watching the film I thought I had been possessed by Kelly; of course, in reality, I’m the one doing the possessing, climbing inside Kelly’s skin for a moment and trying it on for size, for renegade thrills. Cross-dressing is the figure the film finds to describe the processes of identification it enables. But maybe it’s not really Kelly I identified with at all. Maybe it was Fitzgerald.