Empathy Archives - A Geography of Reading

From the day to day routine to the understanding of the masses, George Konrád evokes what it must be like to be a social worker in The Case Worker. From the very first words of the book, “Go on, I say to my client. Out of habit, because I can guess what he’s going to say, and doubt its truthfulness,” Konrád is showing how routine the case worker’s job is and how it has inured him from caring about his clients. Konrád divided the first chapter into a series of short sections describing an interaction with a client, the makeup of the office, another client, more description of the building. By interspersing the narrator’s client relationships with information about floorplans and the objects stored in filing cabinets, Konrád makes the individual clients seem like tasks the narrator has to deal with during his workday and illustrates the narrator’s lack of engagement with his clients. The sections about objects are longer than the sections about clients, too, as though the whip with three lashes stored in the file cabinet is more interesting than the clients themselves. This feeling continues at the beginning of the chapter entitled “Suicide Cases” as the narrator summarizes case study after case study in short paragraphs that run into one another. The sentences about these clients are short, declarative, and devoid of emotion, for example: “In 1951 thirteen-year-old Klara G’s father was denounced as a war criminal and hanged.”

The Bandula Family

In the same chapter Konrád devotes nearly fourteen pages to the story of the Bandula family. This longest section of the book so far (with comparatively long paragraphs that go on for a page or more) both conveys a much deeper understanding of these clients and also brings the reader’s attention to the importance of this case. These are individuals not just suicide cases. I could be more aware of where I direct the reader’s attention in my own writing.

When the case worker takes on responsibility for the orphaned child of Bandula, he begins to take on the characteristics of his clients, but Konrád shows this “metamorphosis” rather than telling the reader about it. He begins with one of the more benign conditions, a compulsion for order. In the chaos of the Bandula apartment, the case worker devotes enormous amounts of time to putting and keeping the place in order. Konrád writes, “there’s no limit to my passion for tidiness….One of my clients went mad because his wife was absent-minded and things were always changing place in the apartment….I can well understand his distaste for the wanderings of salt cellars…” This is the beginning of empathy. A few pages before the case worker was describing the child as “this abstract object.” First he empathizes with the other client, then with Bandula, and eventually with the child. What’s interesting is how Konrád blends the official mind of the case worker with this newly empathetic creature when he begins to see the similarities between his position and Bandulas: “All in all, I am forced to conclude that there is not much difference between this kind of training and what I did before….In my official capacity I made decisions in writing, now I administer beatings.”

Playing with Form

But this is no ordinary case worker. Sometimes Konrád deviates from the standard form of paragraphing. For example, when the case worker is first taken to the mental hospital, Konrád renders a two page chapter that is all one sentence but a series of paragraphs that look as though they mated with stanzas. It’s not whimsical, but it is lyrical and given that these types of sections occur at various times throughout the book, the reader can see that the case worker’s mind (because the book is told in first person) is not as rigid and conventional as he would like to believe. The pattern is to have long descriptive stanzas and then a series of one-line stanzas. This punctuates the one-line stanzas and makes them stand out as though they were very short sentences among very long ones, except that these are all a part of one whole. So lines like: “reserved for male mental cases/of this security ward” come off as emphatic. Near the beginning of the novel is a similar section where instead of stanza-like paragraphs, Konrád joins a series of paragraphs with ellipses to make one sentence and it is dreamlike although the facts themselves are mundane. I like to play with sentence length for emphasis but I had never even considered breaking outside of standard paragraph form.

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