(Narrative) Empathy in the Novel The Scar by Svetlana Velmar-Janković

Abstract

Starting from the origin and definition of the terms empathy and narrative empathy, as well as from the most important scholars who have studied this interdisciplinary phenomenon, the hypothesis proposed and argued in this paper is that The Scar by Svetlana Velmar-Janković is a novel that encourages narrative empathy by employing well-known narrative procedures, devices, and techniques from narratology (first-person narration, the diary form of the novel, dialogue vs. monologue, showing vs. telling, a naïve (childlike) perspective, female characters, documentary and historically (un)known facts, and the story as the truth of the defeated), while also being a novel that thematizes empathy itself. Following the coming-of-age of the heroine-narrator within a family of the “fallen bourgeoisie” in the late stages of and after the Second World War (which is why the author herself, in the “Afterword” to the second edition, defined this novel as a “coming-of-age story”), the reader traces traumatic historical, family, and personal events as they are refracted through the heroine’s stream of consciousness, influencing the formation of her empathetic personality and the development of self-awareness. This is a girl who, during the most sensitive period of her life, is constantly confronted with death and suffering, who experiences the suffering of others intensely, reflects upon it, builds her identity through it, peers into her own being, and achieves self-understanding.

Since the heroine’s visions, dreams, and visionary dreaming represent symbolically rendered but exceptionally significant narrative situations and states of consciousness in which she is revealed as an empathetic subject, a separate section of the paper is devoted to their interpretation in the light of analytical psychology, which the writer studied intensively at the time of writing the novel. What is also taken into account is the Freudian context, in which dreams are seen as expressions of repressed traumas, desires, identity, sexuality, conflicts between ego and drives, and the repressive mechanisms of the psyche, as well as Jung’s teaching, in which the symbolic structures of dreams point to the path of self-understanding through encounters with archetypes (the Shadow, Anima/Animus, and the Self). Dreams speak the language of the unconscious, which is not only personal but also collective, and they lead the heroine toward the wholeness of personality. In this way, dreams in the novel The Scar function not merely as isolated symbolic segments, but as a key narrative mechanism of empathy through which the process of the heroine’s individuation unfolds. Viewing this procedure within the context of the entire opus of Svetlana Velmar-Janković shows that the symbolic mediation of the experience of the Other remains her constant narrative strategy.