Obama’s conversation with Robinson about the need for empathy—and novels

David Rothgery
April 4, 2016

When President Obama sat down with novelist Marilynne Robinson in Des Moines last September, much of the conversation centered on the “gap” between Christian and traditional American values (“Love thy neighbor as thyself,” generosity, humility, importance of hard work), on the one hand, and formal governmental institutions, on the other. The New York Review of Books published the entire conversation, but it was what Nicholas Dames, in “The New Fiction of Solitude” (Atlantic, April 2016), did with it that got my attention. Dames asks, alluding to the Obama-Robinson meeting, “How often does power pay homage to imagination?”

The answer? Probably not often—at least on the global level. Still, U.S. presidents often honor artists. Poets read at Inaugurations (e.g., Frost, Angelou), and the list of artists who have received the Presidential Medal of Freedom is 100 plus long: actors (Streep, Moreno, Peck); painters (Wyeth, O’Keeffe, Rockwell); musicians (Anderson, Dylan, Ellington); and, yes, novelists (Steinbeck, Morrison, Allende).

Nicholas Dames, however, saw the Robinson-Obama visit as a more significant, revealing phenomenon. Obama was seeking insight from a novelist regarding our country’s loss of empathy—specifically, for others in very different situations from us. He sees the novel as a stimulant for reinvigorating that empathy, the growing deficit of which “imperils democracy.” Serious novels exercise the “moral imagination.” In a complex world “full of grays” but with “some truth,” novels “expose every part of ourselves—what it means to be human.” Obama, in recognition of their unique contribution to social values, laments the effect on our culture of so few reading them anymore. Literary novels, according to Dames, require and demand a solitude which moves beyond introspection to a sort of disruptive insight about the self. Quoting the Norwegian Karl Ove Knausgaard, author of the multivolume autobiographical My Struggle, Dames writes:

“Even then I had felt I was being false, someone who carried thoughts no one else had and which no one must ever know. What emerged from this was myself, this was what was me.”

Dames concludes that the new novelist may be what we need: “a stubbornly solitary voice . . . telling us what it means to be human—and what may keep us human.”