Stalking Goya by guesswork

Empathy has a good name, but sometimes it is only another name for Imposition. To know exactly how someone else feels may just be a way of taking over their lives.

"I have been busy with Goya for many years," Julia Blackburn begins. She knew his strange and frightening etchings as a child. Much later someone told her that in mid-life the artist had a near-fatal illness, after which he was stone deaf and produced all his great works. So she decided she had to get to know him, to get inside Goya, to get properly busy. As in body.

Old Man Goya is the result. Goya (1746-1828) is rather liable to this sort of approach. It's often felt that his art is something that really happens, not on canvas or paper, but inside his head. His images are only manifestations of his inner world, his visions, his demons. What's more, there's a lot that isn't known about the artist's private and interior life. Plenty of room for empathy then - or (as you might say) for makey-uppy.

Blackburn's methods are like those of an actor preparing a character, hopeful attempts to generate goyesque experiences. She obtains a grotesque carnival mask and puts it on. She buys some ear plugs, and puts them in.

She goes to a bull fight. She looks at a copper etching plate, and holds it.

She travels around Spain and France, to the places where Goya stayed, and is sensitive. (All these things are described for their own sake. This is the story of "a quest".) And while there remain one or two differences between Blackburn and Goya - her Spanish, she admits, is imperfect - she has little doubt of her ability to identify through the power of empathy alone. Quite soon she is having weird dreams. Ah ha, we are to think, the haunting has begun.

Many biographies contain claims about what their subjects "would have done" or "must have felt". Old Man Goya is comprised almost entirely of idle conjecture and fabulation. Recovering from his sickness, Goya has a bowl of soup. He "picks up the spoon and holds it glinting in his hand. He is fascinated by the globules of fat swimming on the surface of the soup. A yellow chicken's foot is submerged in the liquid like a drowned thing." Note the goyesque detail!

Sometimes these fictions are presented neat (as here). Sometimes they're introduced with an "I imagine Goya..." or "I see him..." or even "I would have him...". At one point: "I would have him caught in a nightmare and dreaming that he is blind." And who is Blackburn to "have" Goya do anything? Does she own him?

Indeed, she thinks she does. "I don't know what Goya saw or did not see on his journey to Madrid, but I have taken a few images from travel books of the time, and these I scatter around him..." Correction: nobody knows what Goya saw etc. But saying "I don't know", Blackburn suggests that when it comes to Goya, she alone knows or doesn't know. Such is empathy's clammy possessiveness.

Goya is not the subject here. He is the author's imaginary friend. And she is especially concerned to keep in soup. "That night, I'll give Goya a thin soup made of goat's milk, served to him by a woman wearing a thickly pleated skirt of red cloth and a tight black velvet bodice braided with..." Or: "At an inn in the town of Tolosa I would have Goya eating the same food that I was served there: a bright red soup, followed by an omelette cooked with dry cod and then pieces of ox cheek with patches of black hair still clinging to..."

What is this rubbish? I'll tell you what: it's stalking. Stalkers are empathy's leading exponents. They always know just how people they don't know at all are feeling, and what they're doing. Happily, the victim here is long dead, and the fantasies, though fatuous, are harmless enough. But Old Man Goya, telling us nothing about Goya, can tell us a little about the stalker's mind.