“Children of the Sea”

Abstract This essay connects empathy’s origins in aesthetic theory – the notion of Einfühlung (in-feeling) – with Michel Foucault’s biopolitics and Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of “sympathetic co-experiencing.” It argues that Joseph Conrad’s novella ‘Narcissus’ and Edwidge Danticat short story “Children of the Sea” both engage in a biopolitics of aesthetic empathy that “gives life” to dying characters, but with different formal strategies and results: whereas the former uses passive voice and first-person plural narration to elicit an Einfühlung that is egocentric, the latter uses apostrophe and dialogic storytelling to dramatize sympathetic co-experiencing. While Einfühlung violates the Other’s interiority via objectification, sympathetic co-experiencing is a more ethical mode of intersubjective relation that preserves the boundaries of the Other.