Empathy and Qualia: Intersemiotic View on Suffering in Fiction
An absolutely special area of studies in Author-Text-Reader connection concerns the questions of qualia and empathy in their paradigmatic relations. Empirically proven human responses to seeing the suffering of other people showed firing neurons in such a way as if the humans were suffering themselves (Cobley, 2014). While speculations on empathy in narratives are more likely to express the statement "I feel what you feel" (e.g. suffering and pain), qualia, in its turn, represents the way how people feel and experience the world (Herman, 2010), as a sort of "story world" creation. Fiction stories and fictional minds of characters are based on the same reasoning protocols, schematas, chunks or frames as the readers' psychological reasoning in every day life, turning the reading process into a "mind reading" (Zunshine,2012). Most important, the reader's identification with the fictional character and his/her suffering is one of the reading strategies leading to empathy. Surprisingly, but due to empathy, some flat characters become dynamic in the reader's interpretation. On the other hand, the empathetic effect may intervene into "a story world" creation and change the indexes of polarization among the fictional characters, subjecting the theory of empathy to serious criticism (Keen, 2007). Representation of suffering in fiction through the notions of empathy may misguide the reader and undermine the typical functions of the character, causing misreading of typical psychological reactions (e.g. ironical laugh and genuine laugh, or tears of joy and pain, etc.). Special modifying effect on "storyworld" creation by the reader belongs to timing and context, as crucial constituent parts of experiential development of a human, representing his/her Umwelt (von Uexküll, 2001). From this semiotic perspective in postclassical narratology, suffering as a fiction born emotion arises from the system of signs and what makes up signs, from a possible world of illusion and interpretation in a comparative study of Umwelten as semiotics and inner modelling (Cobley, 2010; 2014).