Sympathetic Constellations: Toward a Modernist Sympathy by Monica Jean Miller A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in charge: Professor Elizabeth Abel, Chair Professor Ann Banfield Professor Debarati Sanyal Fall 2012 1 Abstract Sympathetic Constellations: Toward a Modernist Sympathy by Monica Jean Miller Doctor of Philosophy in English University of California, Berkeley Professor Elizabeth Abel, Chair This dissertation examines five modernist writers’ revisions of sympathy in response to modernity’s changing theories of subjectivity, knowledge, and ethics. I argue that the dominant narrative of modernism as an aesthetic movement that values impersonality over interpersonal interaction overlooks the modernists’ interest in developing new theories of emotion and its transmission, an interest inseparable from their aesthetic and philosophical goals. The guiding principle of their explorations of emotion is not empathy, a relatively recent concept whose popularity reflects our contemporary valorization of embodiedness, affect, and fluidity, but rather sympathy, which is currently dismissed as an antique from the Scottish Enlightenment further encumbered by its importance to the Victorians, with their sentimentality and imperialism. In using sympathy as the starting material for their experiments with fellow feeling, however, the modernists not only situate themselves in an ongoing literary and intellectual tradition, but also emphasize sympathy’s structure, distance, and social relationships over the inward-directedness of pity or the immediacy of compassion. The preservation of space is fundamental to sympathy: by maintaining rather than collapsing the distance between the sources and recipients of emotions, sympathy creates an opportunity for experimentation much like that opened by the indeterminacy of language. Taking advantage of this parallel, modernist writers revise sympathy through formal experimentation. The development of new conceptions of emotion and theories of aesthetics were not, as has been assumed, independent processes, but rather two intertwining threads of a complex story about the nature of subjectivity, representation, and experience. I begin with two Bloomsbury writers, E. M. Forster and Virginia Woolf, because their revisions of sympathy are motivated largely by ethical differences with the Victorians. In “How to Connect,” I trace Forster’s development from a grudging Victorian liberalism to a quietist liberal irony that leads him to favor negative over positive liberty. To this end, he settles on a passive sympathy that demands tolerance of the other’s point of view rather than attempts to improve her station. The next chapter’s title, “Putting Ourselves In Mr. Ramsay’s Boots,” refers to a formal method by which Woolf allows us to experience the “pathos, surliness, ill-temper, charm” of the boots’ owner detached from “his concentrated woe; his age; his frailty; his desolation.” Faced with sympathy’s tendency to 2 balk at the gulfs between the classes or genders, Woolf borrows a technique from Cubism, spreading the traditional content of subjectivity across arrays of common objects in order to form landscapes of emotion detached from individual owners and thus accessible to anyone. In “Unfastening Feeling,” the relationship between subject and object, button and button hole, comes undone: Gertrude Stein lifts the Bloomsbury writers’ concern with the nature of the subject and the relative position of the object out of an ethical framework and considers them in terms of aesthetics, countering the limitations subjectivity and objectivity impose on the representation of emotion by breaking down the distinctions between subjects and objects until she is left instead with interchangeable subject-objects. Emotion in Stein’s work is no longer a coherent cognitive response to be transmitted between subjects, but a perpetually shifting transmission that arises out of the differences between representations and requires multiple points of origin. For James Joyce and Samuel Beckett, the barriers to sympathy are epistemological. In “An Uncertain Sublime,” Joyce reformulates sympathy so that it no longer depends on certainty but rather on a Kantian concept of negative presentation. However, even as Kant’s sublime models a means by which Joyce can avoid reformulating the unknown other in terms of the self, it reduces the other to the Other – to the idea of an enigma. Thus Joyce buffers a totalizing unknowability with the humbler space of error, locating the other’s emotion at an indeterminate point within the larger space of the unrepresentable. For Beckett, the minimalist structures of mathematics replace the messiness of human relationships, so that sympathy is an emanation not of individual subjects, but of symmetry. However, because perfect symmetry is no better an antidote to solipsism than a glance in the mirror, we must learn to feel “Sympathy for Surds”: for irrational numbers rather than ones or zeroes, rough approximations rather than fully realized subjects or Gayatri Spivak’s “originary nothingness.” In fact, what creates company and thus the possibility of emotional transmission is the tension between a conception of the real and an imperfect approximation; sympathy is impossible without a feeling of friction or opposition, even if the other who provides it turns out to be a fragment of the self. One narrative of modernism took T. S. Eliot at his word and banished ethical criticism and the study of emotion from the academy; it seems useful, then, as those outcast fields regain critical attention, to excavate another narrative of modernism, one that is messy, ambivalent, and often tacit, but that reveals the fissures and internal contradictions in our understanding of emotion and its transmission and, in turn, lays the groundwork for a revision of our own conception of sympathy. i For Dylan, scientist-sympathizer ii Table of Contents Introduction: Sympathy in the Age of Empathy…………………………………….iv How to Connect: Forster’s Subjects of Sympathy…………………………………..1 Putting Ourselves in Mr. Ramsay’s Boots: Woolf’s Sympathetic Objects………….25 Unfastening Feeling in Tender Buttons and A Long Gay Book……………………..50 An Uncertain Sublime: Negative Sympathy from Dubliners to “Ithaca”…………..74 Sympathy for Surds: The Unverifiable Emotions of Beckett’s Prose……………….97 Bibliography…………………………………………………………………………121 iii Acknowledgments This dissertation would not have been possible without the advice and assistance of many people. First, I would like to express my gratitude to Professor Elizabeth Abel, my committee chair, for her intellectual and moral support, her incisive guidance during the early stages of this project, and her patient perusal of draft after draft. I am also grateful to my committee members: Professor Ann Banfield, who shared her endless knowledge with me at every stage of my graduate career, and Professor Debarati Sanyal, whose advice helped me take a broader view of my dissertation. Thanks are also due to graduate advisors Lee Parsons and Doro Unger-Lee for applying their trusty scissors to the red tape in which I had a talent for entangling myself. I’d also like to thank my fellow graduate students in the entering cohort of 2005 for their scholarly, emotional, and culinary generosity. Furthermore, I owe my gratitude to the many professors in the English Department at Berkeley who sparked the ideas that eventually grew into this dissertation. My journey through graduate school has been an unusual one, one that I could not have completed without the unending support of my parents, Dr. and Mrs. John and Chiyen Miller. Furthermore, I owe a debt of gratitude that I can never repay to Drs. Peter Domaille and Tracy Handel for opening their home to me during a difficult period. Finally, for enduring a whirlwind tour of every possible fate mentioned in our marriage vows and still managing to muster up enough energy to cheer me on as I finished the last few chapters of this project, I thank my husband, Dr. Dylan Domaille. This dissertation is for you. iv Introduction: Sympathy in the Age of Empathy A History of Modernist Sympathy It is almost a truism to say that sympathy is not modern. I do not mean merely that sympathy, the descendant of a cluster of classical concepts that includes the medical term for the interdependence of bodily systems, the cosmic sympatheia of the Stoics, and the more familiar fellow-feeling, is older than modernity.1 Nor do I mean that as the central concern of Scottish moral philosophy, Victorian popular culture, and even, as Catherine Gallagher argues in Nobody’s Story, the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century novel, sympathy is older than modernism. I mean, instead, that sympathy as traditionally formulated appears to be opposed to the very idea of modernity, with its fractured subjects, distrust of transparency, and suspicion of knowledge as such. Sympathy justifies its demands with a prescriptive ethics: it calls the sympathizer into action on the behalf of a possibly unwitting other, requiring, as Amit Rai observes, the obliteration of the conditions of its own existence (57). As Audrey Jaffe argues, it draws upon and reinforces existing social hierarchies, setting out terms for a humanity from which some humans are necessarily excluded. It flattens the other into an object that can be possessed as knowledge, a closed, complete