Pathos, Part I: La Vie en Pathos

My son, Quentin, was born knowing how to pull my heartstrings like a master magician. While Jane was born leaping out of my arms to explore the world, Q never turned down an opportunity to cuddle. He didn’t speak until he was almost two and among the very first things he said was I love you, Mama. He was charmingly chubby and had giant, manga-bovine eyes and butter-soft skin. He almost never cried or threw a tantrum and was happiest when I held him, which I did until he was three-and-a-half and began preschool.

As Q settled into early elementary school life, he became delightfully enamored of jokes in general and practical jokes in particular. One day I went to our kitchen sink and turned the water on to find that Q had rigged the spray hose handle with a rubber band to keep it depressed. Water shot directly at me through the hose and I was soaked. Once he short-sheeted my bed. Another day, he insisted on making breakfast and brought me a bowl of cereal that he had put in the freezer the night before, so the spoon was frozen into the milk when I picked it up to eat. Q got me every time. I was secretly impressed by his evil genius, but I was growing very leery of the little bugger.

One day, Q was playing and asked me to join him and I couldn’t help but feel somewhat suspicious. He looked at me with his chubby, rosy cheeks and batted his Snuffleupagus eyelashes and said he needed a hug because he loved me so much. His little face was so earnest and I’m such a sucker for that boy that I dropped what I was doing and knelt to give him a hug. Q hugged me, leaned back, put his hands on my cheeks and kissed my nose. He said I love you, Mama and I swooned with love and affection.

At the end of the day—after I had run hither and yon doing errands—my husband, Joe, came home and as soon as he saw me, he started laughing. I asked what was so funny, but he couldn’t answer because he was laughing so hard. He was in danger of passing out from lack of oxygen, tears streaming down his face, and I could not figure out what was so funny. He collected himself enough to give me a hug and pulled a post-it note off my back, a note that had stuck with me all over town throughout the day:

So this explains why crowds mysteriously parted for me all day.
Photo credit: "Budding Literacy Is A Dubious Thing" by Elizabeth Welsh

Q got me when he gave me that “hug”. Like, really, hilariously got me. But why was Q able to prank me so well? Because he understood and employed pathos.

What is pathos? Pathos comes from our friends, the ancient Greeks, and it’s translated as suffering or experience. Modern words like empathy and pathetic derive from pathos, which has literary and rhetorical applications, but is used as a means of stirring up emotions to obtain a goal. In other words, Q recognized my mile-wide soft spot and appealed to my intense love for him. Then he used it against me to execute his dastardly joke.

Aristotle argued that pathos, ethos, and logos form the basis of a persuasive argument. You may remember that ethos establishes the character, credentials, and authority of the person making an argument. Pathos appeals to the emotions of the audience to bring them on board with a particular side of an argument. And logos? We’ll get to logos—logic—but you’ll have to stay tuned. That’s an essay for another day.

Pathos is used in fiction all the time; I might even argue that it’s the entire purpose of fiction: to use our emotions to challenge our hearts, minds, and world view. One of my favorite books is Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera, which explores unrequited love. It’s about Florentino Ariza, who falls in love when he’s young and can’t recover from it even though the woman he loves spurns him and marries someone else. He proceeds to spend the rest of his life waiting for another chance to get her back. When I first picked this book up, I was skeptical because it seemed ripe for the melodrama that typically bores me to tears, but I adore this book. Why? Because Garcia Marquez is so talented at using pathos to access empathy and pity, not only for Florentino Ariza, but for all his characters. Garcia Marquez appeals to his readers’ emotions, as in the following passage, where Fermina Daza, the object of Florentino Ariza’s life-long love, is grieving the loss of her husband after 50 years of marriage:

"Once he had told her something that she could not imagine: that amputees suffer pains, cramps, itches, in the leg that is no longer there. That is how she felt without him, feeling his presence where he no longer was."1 (Garcia Marquez 280)

Garcia Marquez engages the reader’s pity, fear, and/or empathy with the pain of unrequited love by comparing it to a traumatic, permanent injury that continues to induce suffering long after the rest of the world sees healing. He avoids the pitfall of melodrama because he avoids exaggeration. Melodrama aims to excite emotions, too, but it does so through exaggerating characters and events. Garcia Marquez was brilliant enough to ground his pathos in ordinary experience, which feels emotionally real and relatable. I was compelled to care for his characters because they didn’t act in the realm of soap operas. I cared because Garcia Marquez was a master of pathos.

To some people, pathos may seem like the flimsiest tool of Aristotle’s triad of persuasive argument (ethos, pathos, logos) because emotion seems too unreliable and unpredictable to take seriously. After all, if your objective is to make others not only see your point of view but change their minds to agree with you, you’re going to want to have logic and credibility on your side. But what we’re seeing playing out in the world around us today is that people aren’t persuaded by logic and credibility. They’re persuaded by their emotions, even when the factual basis of the argument can be discredited. In Brutus, a History of Famous Orators, Cicero argues that,

“[T]he greatest merit of an orator is to be able to inflame the passions, and give them such a bias as shall best answer his purpose; he who is destitute of this must certainly be deficient in the most capital part of his profession."2 (Cicero, Chapter 80, Section 279)

Cicero is saying that pathos may actually be the most effective tool a speaker has to win an argument. During the Bush/Kerry election, the main criticism I heard of John Kerry was that he was boring. I’m not interested in re-hashing the specific issues of that campaign nor debating partisanship; the point is that he was not successful in exciting his own base. He checked the boxes of ethos and logos: he debated Bush and rooted his platform in reason. He had impressive credentials established during a distinguished career that included military service, practicing law, and 20 years as a Senator. Yet he failed to excite the pathos of the country to win the presidency. Successful politicians are often adept at identifying and invoking the most volatile emotions of their audiences to get what they want. We see this all the time now in political disagreements. We’ve even recently seen complete disregard for ethos and logos with the introduction of Alternative Facts—which are not really facts at all, but pathos in disguise. Alternative facts have far more to do with emotion than credibility or logic; even when alternative facts are provably not “true,” they fail to move the opinion of the audience that accepts them because it doesn’t move their underlying emotion.

It’s important to understand pathos and how it is used for and against us. If we recognize pathos, we can critically evaluate our own stances. Perhaps more importantly, if we can learn to understand the pathos of those we disagree with, we may have a better understanding of their humanity as well as our own, which could lead to more substantive civil discourse. If we allow ourselves to recognize the pathos of others, we may have better tools for working together and reaching meaningful, productive compromise.

Please share your thoughts on pathos. Where have you seen it used especially well (or poorly!) in your favorite fiction? I look forward to reading your thoughts in the comments below!  

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Notes:

Artwork: “Concert” by Free Photos is licensed under CC0 Creative Commons.

1)      Garcia Marquez, Gabriel. Love in the Time of Cholera. Alfred A. Knopf, Inc, 2007.
2)      Cicero. “Cicero : Brutus, a History of Famous Orators.” Translated by E Jones, Attalus.org, Attalus, 22 Oct. 2003, www.attalus.org/old/brutus4.html.