The Literature of Pity 9780748691975

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The Literature of Pity

David Punter

© David Punter, 2014 Edinburgh University Press Ltd The Tun – Holyrood Road 12 (2f) Jackson’s Entry Edinburgh EH8 8PJ www.euppublishing.com Typeset in 10.5/13 pt Sabon by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire, and printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 0 7486 3949 6 (hardback) ISBN 978 0 7486 9197 5 (webready PDF) The right of David Punter to be identified as Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498).

Contents

Plates Preface Acknowledgements   1. Distinguishing Pity

iv v vii 1

  2. Pity and Terror: The Aristotelian Framework

12

 3. Pietà

24

  4. Shakespeare on Pity

35

  5. The Eighteenth Century

47

  6. Blake: ‘Pity would be no more . . .’

59

  7. Aspects of Victoriana

72

  8. Chekhov and Brecht: Pity and Self-Pity

83

  9. ‘War, and the pity of War’: Wilfred Owen, David Jones, Primo Levi

95

10. Reflections on Algernon Blackwood’s Gothic

107

11. Pity’s Cold Extremities: Jean Rhys and Stevie Smith

119

12. Reclaiming the Savage Night

131

13. ‘Pity the Poor Immigrant’: Pity, Diaspora, the Colony

143

14. Lyric and Pity

155

After Thought: Under the Dome

167

Notes 171 Bibliography 183 Index 189

Plates

The plates can be found between pages 24 and 25 1. Rogier van der Weyden, Pietà, © Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, Brussels / photo: F. Maes (RMFAB) 2. Vincent van Gogh, Pietà (after Delacroix), © Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam (Vincent van Gogh Foundation) 3. Angus Fairhurst, Pietà, © Tate, London 2013 4. Anna Chromy, Cloak of Conscience

Preface

I conceived of this book because it seemed – and still seems – to me that pity is a matter of real public urgency; always, perhaps, but at the present moment particularly, when we are witnessing unprecedented economic and cultural divides, both within the western world and between that world and its so-called ‘other’. What, however, I had not anticipated was how deep a chord the concept of pity – and even the very mention of the word ‘pity’ – would strike. It is no exaggeration to say that everybody to whom I have talked, however briefly, about my topic has come up with their chosen questions, examples, doubts, illuminations. My thanks are due, therefore, to many of my colleagues at the University of Bristol and beyond, but also to a much broader swathe of friends and acquaintances, all of whose views have helped me in trying to address and enrich the topic. But in the end, my intention has been to try to make this a very simple book. It is informed, I hope, by current thinking in literary and, indeed, psychoanalytic theory; but it is not a work of theory. Indeed, it may not even be a monograph; it looks most, I think, like a collection of essays – on different writers, different cultural trends, different moments of history – clustering around pity. It is not, therefore, a historicist account, although I have chosen to arrange the essays in a roughly chronological order. Neither is it an account which has seriously tried to situate pity among its cognate terms – ‘mercy’ and ‘ruth’ would, it seems to me, be the most interesting and important ones. And for the most part, I am not sure that it is a philosophical account, whatever that may mean; there has been a sizeable philosophical encounter with pity, but I have not found it very useful in informing my encounters with literary (and some visual) texts. Because this is, in my view, an urgent and therefore simple book, I have not encumbered it with swathes of footnotes, although I hope I have pointed the reader in such directions as he or she might feel

­vi    The Literature of Pity ­ ecessary. It may be (it probably is) a personal vanity, but I would n like the book to be seen in relation to three of my previous books: The Literature of Terror (1980, 1996) (and the connections between terror and pity are too obvious to be drawn attention to); Writing the Passions (2001), which, as well as essaying a more grandiloquent dealing with the passions, also provides more footnotes than any one reader could need in a lifetime; and Rapture: Literature, Addiction, Secrecy (2009), which looks at a very different topic but through, arguably, a similar lens. I have tried to pare this book to the bone, and I think that is fitting to pity. I am happy to engage in debate about it; but please do not send me any more exempla of pity – my in-box has for two years now been full to overflowing. A previous version of Chapter 10, on Algernon Blackwood, appeared in ELN in Spring 2010; and one of Chapter 12, on Scottish Gothic and pity, in Gothic Studies in Autumn 2011. A version of Chapter 11, on Jean Rhys and Stevie Smith, was delivered as a guest lecture at the University of Durham in 2010; of Chapter 6, on Blake, at Edgehill University in 2011; and of Chapter 14 at the ‘Dylan at Seventy’ conference at the University of Bristol, 2011. D.P.

David Punter

Chapter 1

Distinguishing Pity

‘Pity is treason’1

‘Pity’ is a curious term. Along with its attendant adjectives, ‘pitiful’, ‘pitiable’ and (now to a much lesser extent) ‘piteous’, it is in common usage; indeed, it is a word we come across all the time. Yet its usage is fraught with difficulty. It is, of course, accepted that we can use it in relation to third parties: we may say that we pity the homeless, the destitute, the chronically ill, the disadvantaged; indeed, we may often act on an assumed basis of pity – by giving to charity, for example, by engaging in voluntary work, by calling attention to those less privileged, in one way or another, than ourselves. But if we were to use it directly, in the formulation ‘I pity you’, then the valency, the emphasis of the term would shift dramatically. We might be accused, for example, of condescension, of being patronising, of extending rather than ameliorating a position of privilege. And if we were to go further – or perhaps in a different direction – and say (or perhaps even think) ‘I pity myself’, then we might feel that we were at best abandoning some rule of emotional decorum, at worst that we were committing a sin, perhaps second only to the dread sin of despair. Self-pity is, it would appear, a largely unacceptable emotion; pity has to be directed outwards. And in thus being directed outwards, then we might say that it falls into place amid a range of other similar terms: ‘compassion’, ‘sympathy, ‘empathy’ might be the most obvious ones.2 Yet pity is different from all of these, and it has been the subject of a great deal of philosophical discussion over the ages. Great philosophers like David Hume, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Immanuel Kant and Friedrich Nietzsche have all had things to say about pity,3 and I shall return to some of these arguments as the book proceeds; but as a crude beginning, one might say that the discussion has hinged on a single dialectic. Does

­2    The Literature of Pity pity signify a genuine sharing of feeling; or is it an expression of scorn or contempt, which further weakens the other even as it strengthens our own position of assumed superiority? And a further question underpins this. Is pity an emotion or a word? Of course, to put the question in such stark terms poses an insoluble conundrum. Some would say that we know our emotions only through words: that it is in our attempts at linguistic articulation that we identify the emotions we feel. Others would say – and this is not necessarily a contradiction – that our emotions are themselves shaped through words, that there is no such thing as a raw emotion, that the availability of ‘pity’ as a word is one element in how we form our emotional repertoire. It goes without saying, perhaps, that all of these considerations are flanked by the very language which we speak, and in this book I make no attempt to explore the cross-linguistic terrain of pity; a work that did would be unmanageable, as can be easily seen if we were to think through the many different words used in different languages which appear to address the same emotion, or set of feelings. What I am concerned with here is mostly pity as it appears in the English language; and more than that, I am concerned with its appearance in, or perhaps better its trajectory through, literary writing in English – although inevitably, since the English discourse on pity has itself been shaped by writers in other, principally European, languages, they will naturally also figure. Even there, the list would be endless; so I have chosen instead to focus on what seem to me to be a number of key texts. It is possible that this book would have better been called ‘Essays on Pity’; but I hope to establish some kind of continuing thread which links ideas of pity, even as they inevitably change according to social circumstance. For I believe that emotions are not stable: it is not as though we can look back over a swathe of history at a word such as, say, ‘love’, and say that the manifold usages of that term have remained unchanged over time. Our ways of expressing and classifying emotion are constantly altering, and some of those alterations are manifested – in some cases shaped – by writers. Let us consider a few examples of how pity has figured in literary and philosophical discourse. Here, for instance, is Nietzsche, taking a characteristically negative view of pity: To show pity is felt as a sign of contempt because one has clearly ceased to be an object of fear as soon as one is pitied.4

But Nietzsche’s negativity is not the most obvious one. He is not saying that to demonstrate pity places one on a pedestal; rather, he is alluding to a more general idea that an individual’s dignity is maintained only

Distinguishing Pity    ­3

through mutual fear – an idea to which we will return in the context of the poetry of William Blake – and that pity erodes that mutual fear in a one-sided way. If you pity somebody, then you take away from him or her the fear which should necessarily be entailed in the very difference of one human being from another; another way of expressing this would be by saying that our individuality depends on some kind of aura of mystery which keeps one separate from another. Pity dissolves this mystery; it is as though one can presume to see the whole life of an other spread out, and can take a lofty view of it. Pity would thus place one in a position of (potentially malignant) divinity: to be totally seen would be tantamount to be being totally despised. Robert Lowell, in his poem ‘Florence’ (1964), takes a very different view: Oh Florence, Florence, patroness of the lovely tyrannicides! Where the tower of the Old Palace pierces the sky like a hypodermic needle, Perseus, David and Judith, lords and ladies of the Blood, Greek demi-gods of the Cross, rise sword in hand above the unshaven formless decapitation of the monsters, tubs of guts, mortifying chunks for the pack. Pity the monsters! Pity the monsters! Perhaps, one always took the wrong side . . .5

Here, Lowell is taking to task the very valuation of a version of heroism – perhaps we can see it as quite similar to Nietzsche’s own version of heroism. We admire, he is saying, these monster-slayers – from the world of myth and legend, certainly, but no doubt Lowell also has contemporary equivalents in mind, as might we in our own times when we think of the rhetoric of, for example, US foreign policy – but we give no thought to the slain – who might be regarded as suitable victims simply because they are the ‘unshaven’, the ‘formless’. What would it be like to ‘pity the monsters’? It would require, Lowell hauntingly suggests, a wholesale revision of our conception of our self: ‘Perhaps, one always took the wrong side.’ The side that one took, presumably, would be the side of the hero rather than the side of the monster; but perhaps it would not be going too far to suggest that these

­4    The Literature of Pity may be two sides of one’s self. Certainly this is how Sigmund Freud would see it: he refers constantly to the ego as the ‘hero’, to the ‘monster’ or the ‘monstrous’ as that bundle of inchoate, ‘formless’ desires and urges which we now customarily refer to as the unconscious.6 And so perhaps when we pity an other, there is necessarily involved a pitying of parts of our selves: when we see an object of pity, there may be an automatic recourse which identifies that pitiable other with a part of our self-definition. In which case, it may be that pity and self-pity may not be as fully distinguishable as we might like to believe; and of course, we experience this all the time. When we see a beggar on the street, then our reaction, be it one of sympathy or disgust, may well in fact be a refracted version of how are seeing our selves at the time, although this too, as with everything to do with pity, would be complicated. We might say that if we are feeling contented with ourselves, then we may be feeling too smug to bother to offer charity; or we might say that our own state of wellbeing might permit us a moment of reaching out. Or we might say that if we are feeling despondent, disjointed, unhappy with ourselves, then we may either reach out to the other or, instead, feel that we wish to separate ourselves, by all possible means, from this walking, talking image of what we might become were we to continue to fall down the path of deprivation. But we cannot pursue these ideas without encountering the notion of ‘abjection’, as introduced into critical discourse by Julia Kristeva.7 Essentially, abjection refers to the process whereby we encounter parts of our selves – individually or culturally – to which we do not wish, or cannot dare, to own. What happens then is that we abject – throw off – these despised parts of our selves onto the other – the poor, the racially different, the supposedly indigent. When this occurs at a cultural level, we get the roots of racism and discriminations of all kinds; when it happens within the individual, then we find ourselves seeking a kind of insulation from the other, and one of the many means of seeking this differentiation, motivated by fear, is the construction of the monstrous. The playwright Eugène Ionesco provides us with a different and salutary take on pity in The Chairs (1952), during part of a dialogue between the two principal characters, known only as the old man and the old woman: OLD MAN: They’ve wronged me and persecuted me. And if I complained, it was always they were proved right . . . Sometimes I tried to revenge myself . . . I could never, never do it . . . I had too much pity to lay the enemy low . . . I’ve always been too good. OLD WOMAN: He was too good, good, good, good, good . . . OLD MAN: Pity was my undoing.

Distinguishing Pity    ­5 OLD WOMAN: Pity . . . pity . . . pity . . . OLD MAN: But they had no pity, I would prick them with a pin; they’d attack me with their bludgeons, their knives, and their cannon, and mangle my bones . . .8

The old man’s claim here is that his pity has acted as a form of restraint; even when goaded by those to whom he refers as his ‘enemies’ (although in the play it is never clear who these might be), he finds himself constrained in his reactions. Of course, such is the genius of Ionesco’s language that there are quite other interpretations available here. The old man, for example, might be suffering from some form of paranoia: his enemies might be imaginary, and the force within himself which he supposes to be pity might be some element of reality intruding into the vast and curiously powerful structure of his misperception of the world. Or we might say that there is something paradoxical here, as there is in others of Ionesco’s plays and in many of Samuel Beckett’s, in that the old, who might be expected to have grown in experience and wisdom, have in fact relapsed into the condition of the adolescent, always suspecting plots in the world outside, and constantly in danger, perhaps more so than the rest of us, of experiencing tides of self-pity when it is felt that nobody in the outside has the necessary appreciation or understanding of our apparently extraordinary gifts.9 But what is also intriguing here is the repetition of the word ‘pity’. We might think of it as an echo; and echo itself, as a phenomenon, and also in terms of its origins in Greek myth, constitutes a kind of draining of meaning. As the word ‘pity’ tails off in the old woman’s speech, it encourages us to wonder what it really means: is it really pity which has laid the old man low, or is it a kind of more generalised weakness? At all events, pity is certainly seen here as a weakening force; what the old man is experiencing may well be a consequence of the structure of pity which Nietzsche claims, he feels as if he is the victim of contempt, as if no attempt to make his mark in the world can survive. A further example of complex dealings with pity would come from the guilt-ridden world of Graham Greene. One of his best-known novels is The Heart of the Matter (1948); a title that might lead the reader, understandably enough, to enquire, well, what is the heart of the matter? Greene tells us, naturally, halfway through the novel: If one knew, he wondered, the facts, would one have to feel pity even for the planets? if one reached what they called the heart of the matter?10

The ‘heart of the matter’ for Greene, then, is pity; or rather, perhaps, it is the limits of pity. For whom, or for what, or to what extent, can one

­6    The Literature of Pity feel pity? If one were to feel a generalised, an all-embracing pity, one that could even extend to (presumably) non-sentient entities like the planets, would this still be pity, or would it instead merely be a kind of emotional mishmash of sadness and despondency? Might it be that pity has to have some clear demarcation around it, in terms of the donor and the recipient (if those are the right terms) in order to register properly as a definable emotion? Fortunately for us, Greene enlarges on what he was trying to get at in this comment, in an interview, where he goes into a little detail as to how he had envisaged the principal character, Scobie: I had meant the story of Scobie to enlarge a theme which I touched on in The Ministry of Fear, the disastrous effect on human beings of pity as distinct from compassion. I had written in The Ministry of Fear: ‘Pity is cruel. Pity destroys. Love isn’t safe when pity’s prowling round.’ The character of Scobie was intended to show that pity can be the expression of almost monstrous pride.11

I do not want here to go into the plot of The Ministry of Fear (1943), any more than into that of The Heart of the Matter, but instead to try to continue, as I will attempt to do throughout the book, along the trajectory of pity. For here pity again encounters the monstrous: as though there is something aggrandising, dehumanising about pity – as though even as it may seem the ‘most human’ of emotions, whatever that may mean, it is simultaneously something which, at least temporarily, removes one from the human plight, so that one can revisit, as I suggested in the context of Lowell’s ‘heroes’, from above. I am not meaning here to suggest that Greene, the author, necessarily knows his own intentions; or if he did, that he is able to speak of them in ways that would account for the vagaries, the veering of the text. But the phrases ‘pity is cruel’ and ‘pity destroys’ are surely arresting by any standard; even as we may feel, somewhat tremulously, that our suspected inner pride may be saved by acts of pity and charity towards others, in fact – it is suggested here – pride and pity are involved in an endless and terrible dialectic, with each feeding the other, each pumping us up at the expense of the other – that other who is in the end not helped or succoured but rather reduced and drained by our pity. ‘Love isn’t safe when pity’s prowling round’: what might this mean? At the very least, it means that in order to establish a complete and equal relation between two people – assuming for the moment that such a thing could ever be possible – it may be necessary to banish all thoughts of pity, because pity inevitably involves the unequal, the incomplete. And this would verge on something which many philosophers have said

Distinguishing Pity    ­7

about pity. Stefan Zweig’s brilliant novel, Beware of Pity (1939) sums it up: Pity is attributed to the perception of uncontrollable and stable causes – people feel pity for a person who has an affliction due to a genetic defect or accident.12

We may or may not feel this to be true; after all, it is possible to feel pity, we would suppose, for somebody who has fallen into a situation that may well not be permanent, such as debt or illness – but the notion of inequality prevails. Perhaps we could put it this way: when we feel pity for an other, whatever the actuality of their plight, we ourselves at least perceive it as permanent (‘uncontrollable and stable’) because our fear – a fear which perhaps underlies all pity – is that we might find ourselves in such a state, without relief or recourse. Pity destroys love, or at least, it is incompatible with love: this is a challenging thought, and one that goes against certain readings of the New Testament of the Bible, which would seem to regard pity as a kind of outward manifestation of inner motions of love within the soul, a trajectory echoed in the whole tradition, in literature and elsewhere but above all in painting and sculpture, of the image of the pietà, to which I will return. But for now, there is this question of pity and love, and on this point the Renaissance poet Samuel Daniel has something to say, in The Queen’s Arcadia (1606): For pittie is sworne servant unto love: And this be sure, where ever it begin To make the way, it lets your maister in.13

This is a set of strangely ambiguous phrasings; but what it seems to suggest is quite different from, perhaps even opposite to, some of the thoughts mentioned above; namely, that pity leads us to love, that what may begin as a movement of the heart or of the soul which denies equality may nevertheless be translatable into a fuller relationship. Yet even this is formulated in such a way as to render pity a weak emotion; it is at the service of others, of value only insofar as it attends upon, and eventually makes way for, something quite different. What Daniel seems to be suggesting here is something of a ‘master/slave’ dialectic, a formula with which we are all too familiar since G.W.F. Hegel’s extensive exploration of its fundamental place in the development of spirit;14 in more commonplace terms, we may wonder whether the imbalance suggested in pity may be conceived of as prelude, as a forerunner of a deeper

­8    The Literature of Pity engagement, perhaps even as a kind of entradista emotion, as a feeling which serves to open the door to other feelings; which may, indeed, do so quite surreptitiously. Or which may indeed – at least sometimes – be something of a lie; when we think, or imagine, that we feel pity, perhaps we are concealing something further from ourselves; perhaps even using pity as a mask to hide feelings which, if fully revealed, would contravene social barriers. If pity may be linked to the master and the servant, then it may also be linked to class (and we shall see a great deal more of this later on): the emblematic scenario, discoverable in many literary texts, would be of the middle-class man attracted to a working-class woman, ashamed to own to the depth of his feelings, and therefore cloaking or concealing them in the guise of pity. This would be at least one way of looking at large swathes of Victorian fiction. In all of this, it is true to say, there is a constant general danger of hypostasising the emotions. We need to separate out the emotions in order to make sense of our feelings; but in making sense of them, we inevitably distort them, render them malleable to whatever language(s) we have available at the time. A different view (and one I have examined at length in a previous book, Writing the Passions) would be that at a certain depth all feelings, all strong emotions run into each other; we are aware of a strength of passion, but to name it as love, hatred, fury would always seem inadequate.15 Yet pity perhaps stands aside from this structure too, for pity is almost never regarded as a strong emotion; it is regarded as a weak one, although whether this is because it lacks the driving force of other feelings – it rarely leads, for example, to murder or suicide – or whether it is because of its constant association with a weakness both in our selves and in the other would be impossible to say. What it would be possible to say is that one of the emotional terms most commonly associated with pity is shame: the shame we feel on behalf of others, the shame we feel in ourselves when we grope for the words and the expressions which would allow us to express pity. Shame too, perhaps, at the hypocrisy which is a further frequent member of the chain of associations. In Paolo Bacigalupi’s futuristic novel The Windup Girl (2009), which concerns a set of robotic creatures whose only escape from their plight might be to leave human society and join one of the villages where they may live together and in peace, we come across these sentences: Is that why you told her about the villages? Because you pitied her? Not because her skin felt as smooth as mango? Not because you could hardly breathe when you touched her?16

Distinguishing Pity    ­9

What lies we tell ourselves, and especially when inappropriateness or taboo are at stake. Yet to this kind of question – what is it that you really felt? what is it that you are really feeling? – there is never a simple answer. In disentangling the emotions, we have always inevitably moved on; the purity of the moment, if such there be, is not susceptible to articulation, it lives in a world different from that of words. Large areas of the law, of course, survive and acquit themselves through the claim that it is possible to assert – and indeed prove – a certain set of intentions, in criminal terms a mens rea, behind the ‘facts’ of the case; but one might say that this is a legal fiction of convenience. To remember, to untangle, to give an account of one’s feelings at a particular moment in the past, however recent that past, would actually be an impossibility; the best one can do – the best the law can do – is to establish a set of parameters, based on, for example, premeditation, responsibility, intent, which act as a kind of translation mechanism, whereby the hidden springs of action – hidden from ourselves as much as from others – are rendered into a common currency of language, but one from which something is always omitted, always left over. Yet there is, again, a further approach to pity, hinted at already in the problematic proximity of pity to love, in the idea of pity as a guarantee of emotional movement and response even in the most frozen of emotional situations. This brief quotation picks up on the Nietzschean dialectic of pity and fear, but approaches it from quite a different angle: The recognition of pain and fear in others give rise in us to pity, and in our pity is our humanity, our redemption.17

Perhaps pity here is not meant in quite the senses referred to above; it is possible that one of the other related words, such as ‘compassion’, might be substituted without loss of effect. Nonetheless, it is the word ‘pity’ which the author (Dean Koontz) has chosen, and what he is claiming here is that pity is far from a weak and weakening emotion; on the contrary, it is a guarantee that when all else is past, when, perhaps, even the possibility of intimacy has been abandoned – perhaps under the pressure of natural catastrophe, perhaps on the field of battle, perhaps under the weight of conditions that may take us almost beyond the conventionally human sphere altogether – pity remains; if we can feel even a flicker of such a feeling, then it provides a guarantee that not only we are still alive, we are also still capable of experiencing ourselves as part of a wider community, capable of some form, however vestigial, of fellow-feeling. So pity here represents a softening, but in this case as a potentially beneficial breach in the armoured defences of the self (as both Blake

­10    The Literature of Pity and Freud variously express it); it can also figure sometimes as the final emotional refuge of the exhausted mind (and body). In his Dione (1720), John Gay says that ‘he best can pity who has felt the woe’,18 and thus we see pity not as febrile, and certainly not as a hypocritical covering for emotions which otherwise may not be able to speak their name, but rather as a kind of residue, as the final – or near final – feeling we may be able to experience when all hope, all aspiration, has gone down. Gay’s comment is best treated as a mere aphorism, and one should not build too much upon it; nevertheless, it does indicate a sense in which pity might be seen as having an affinity with death, or rather with the proximity to death, and this would again suggest to us the importance within the Western tradition of the imagery of the pietà, the form of Mary holding the dying Jesus in her arms, that form, that emotional emblem which so many medieval and Renaissance artists tried repeatedly to capture. Which might make one wonder. For of course, the pietà, as we will see in later pages, is essentially an image of mother and child; and it may be that our experiences, our articulations, of pity are very much built around precisely this emblem, the mother and the child in a moment of extremity. The young child, the baby, is potentially adrift in its environment; we see constant images of this dire possibility in the context of televised wars from all over the world – wars which, pace Jean Baudrillard, really do happen, and keep happening.19 Only through the presence of succour and nurture are we protected from the chill winds, from almost instant death. And, as psychoanalysts from Anna Freud to Melanie Klein would assert, all our adult experiences have within and behind them a backdrop of fear that this threat of Spartan exposure on the hilltop, from which only the very strongest will survive, will undo us.20 We are potentially alone, without the means of survival; it is only through the intervention of another who takes pity on us that we live at all, and thus before life, before consciousness, before flourishing, there has been a prior act of pity. And yet: to recognise this, to recognise our own past and continuing vulnerability may also entail that feared submission to self-pity. As Sri Chinmoy advises us, Do not be a victim To self-pity. Self-pity is at once The beginning and the end Of life’s uselessness.21

Against this fate we must protect ourselves; we must guard against pity, whether it be pity for the self or otherwise, because otherwise it

Distinguishing Pity    ­11

will erode us, we will not be able to stand on our own two feet (or help others to stand on their two feet, if they happen to have two feet), and we will find ourselves betraying, psychologically or even physically, our weakness. And, says Nietzsche, that would never do, because under conditions of pity ‘suffering itself becomes contagious’.22 Far from drying up the pool of tears, pity spreads it around, weakens our resolve, menaces our precariously achieved adulthood. An emotion, then, or the identification of an emotion, to be avoided at all costs; but, as many writers remind us, we need to be more precise: at what cost?

Chapter 2

Pity and Terror: The Aristotelian Framework

In the world of western culture, it is impossible to try to trace or unravel the course of pity without seeking an origin, and that origin has usually been found in Aristotle’s Poetics (c. 335 bc), where Aristotle appears to attempt to account for the force of various kinds of drama, and particularly, for our purposes, for the force of tragedy. There are, of course, many other descriptions of drama and its genres, and many other accounts of tragedy: Raymond Williams’s work on ‘modern tragedy’ comes to mind, although the title is interesting and indicative, suggesting as it does that tragedy is intrinsically something ancient, something which we can ‘repeat with difference’, but with roots laid down in the antique.1 Williams himself would naturally have shied away from the idea that this means that there is something ‘universal’ about tragedy: there are no doubt specific versions of tragedy, or better, specific events, feelings, regimes of emotion and behaviour to which we might from time to time supply the appellation ‘tragedy’. Nevertheless, when we consider the term ‘tragedy’, it is possible that we feel ourselves, however misguidedly, to be within some kind of cultural storehouse – and within that storehouse, whose proprietor is Aristotle, we immediately find ourselves in the presence of the two key terms Aristotle proposes when considering the force of tragedy: pity and terror. And so the first thing to do is to consider how these terms may be linked: how they may serve as a rebus, as an intertwined signature which we need to unravel in order to find ourselves on firm ground – what is pity? what is terror? what excites our pity? what excites our terror? I do intend in this chapter to talk about Aristotle; but rather in the manner of Slavoj Žižek in his work on Lacan through contemporary popular culture,2 I shall try to do so through instances rather than exposition. After all, we are face to face with this conundrum every day. We are approached on the street by a person who appears deprived: do we construe his or her appearance as menacing or worthy of our pity?

Pity and Terror    ­13

Do we flee, or attempt to flee; or do we read – or, in a perhaps more appropriate, certainly more resonant, word, ‘descry’ – on this face which thrusts itself unwelcomely into the trajectory of our vision the lineaments of a face we might have once had; or maybe be about to have; or may, for all we know, actually have in the eyes of those more privileged than ourselves? And a further question intrudes itself: whose feelings are we most concerned with here, our own or those of the other? A sceptic would naturally and necessarily answer, ‘our own’. But it may not be that simple. There would remain a question (and it is ably put within the Christian tradition in the enduring parable of the Good Samaritan, although perhaps not many still realise that the question being posed there is one of racism – what would it be like, what would it mean, if we were to speak of the ‘good Pakistani’?) about whose feelings we are experiencing at a moment of contact – are they our own, or are they those of another? Are we all ventriloquists of the heart (although the word ‘ventriloquism’ implies that it is rather the stomach than the heart which might be of primary concern), such that when we even speak to such an intruder our words are formed in an imagined response to the questions, the wishes, the beggings which might come our way and which, in turn, we might wish to return to our interlocutor. Because we experience pity; or because we feel afraid. It is possible that one way in which these feelings might converge is around death. We may feel afraid because we fear our own death (after all, what has such an intruder – and here we may imagine all such intruders, all those who are exiled from the kind of life of convention that we live – except, of course, that tragic heroes are forbidden that kind of life – to lose by committing the final crime) or we may feel afraid because we are in danger of passing by (on the other side of the street) an emblem of our own mortality, and then we may wonder: if that is the limit of our (my) pity for another, who will pity me? Who indeed; and then there comes another obvious question, which abuts onto the endless and unanswerable discourse around the notion of altruism, which is: who will feel better if I give? I do not mean here merely the gift of money, although the old truism about ‘’Tis better to give than to receive’ is perhaps not far from our minds as we explore these difficult yet highly conventionalised areas; I mean something about pity, about whether we will ‘feel better’ when we have given, whether or not this may mean that somebody will give to us in our inevitably oncoming indigence. And here is the twist: we will feel better, will we not, if we can assure ourselves that no such thought of recompense or reward crossed our mind?

­14    The Literature of Pity Although of course it did: there is always calculation involved, never a simple deed without thought as to consequence – those tragic consequences that will be absorbing us for the whole of this chapter, if we ever get round to them, because there seem to be so many engrossing questions to be approached before that. Here is another one: what would it be like to be a creature with no foresight, a creature who had no idea what would happen as a consequence of his or her actions? The answer that it might be to be an animal, a non-human creature, is long outmoded; we know all too well now that there are many creatures other than ourselves which have foresight, whose skill in planning far exceeds our own. And so, an alternative: it might be to be an actor. It might be to be somebody who did not engage directly with the emotions of pity or fear displayed on stage, and thus – of course – there is an inherent and absolute hypocrisy within the drama – within the drama in general, and within the kind of drama which Aristotle is talking about – and which Shakespeare will go on to dwell upon (and within) in so many of his plays – what, after all, is Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba? And so: pity and terror? For how long can we circumvent these terms? Well, we can keep trying – here is another, quite different example. In the Rhetoric (c. 333 bc), Aristotle has this to say: Let pity, then, be a certain pain at an apparently destructive or painful evil happening to one who does not deserve it and which a person might expect himself or one of his own to suffer, and this when it seems close at hand.3

Pity, then, as a kind of pain – but what kind of pain? And pity also as a kind of proximity (‘when it seems close at hand’). How can we bring these considerations together? In a number of ways, no doubt; but one would be by reference to what we might call ‘phantom pain’. Without going too far into the neuroscience of pain, one might nevertheless say that pain itself is not purely a physical matter: there are numerous examples, terrible to think about, where patients who have had limbs amputated continue to claim that they feel pain in a limb which is, objectively, no longer there. One particularly striking case concerns a man who, on one unfortunate day, got a splinter beneath one of his finger-nails and, later that day, caught that same arm in a machine, which resulted in an amputation. He claimed to continue to feel the pain in his finger-nail for long afterwards.4 And so this notion of pity as ‘phantom pain’ might also be referred to, or might connect with, pity as a kind of residual pain, but always under the sign of proximity. Pity may, of course, always be felt – or so we may suppose – for that which is distant; we speak of feeling pity for the suffering and starving millions. And yet one may doubt that this is

Pity and Terror    ­15

where pity is really located; one may suspect that where it inheres is in the unwelcome, menacing act whereby these distances are collapsed and ‘when it seems close at hand’. Nothing, perhaps, can be more near than a phantom limb, a part of the body which is intrinsically connected to us and is yet unamenable to our inspection, even to our attempts to ameliorate the pain, the feeling. In a lesser way, this occurs when an ordinary anaesthesia is receding and we become aware of an itch – an itch that cannot (yet) be scratched because the flesh in which it resides is – apparently – resistant to such ministrations. But here we are talking about a version of pity that is bound to the individual, to the suffering, sorrowing body, and this is not what Aristotle, for the most part, is talking about. Let us risk a bold statement: for Aristotle, tragedy is not primarily a matter of individuality, and catharsis is not primarily for the individual subject alone. Pity (and terror) are social. Yet within the drama, they are not self-standing events within themselves: what we need always to have in mind when considering Aristotle is that what he is discussing is the way in which drama, tragedy, produce effects by symbolising – or even only approximating to – the turmoil of emotional events in ‘real life’. And thus it is necessary to keep in mind that when observing the ‘origins’ of intellectual dealings with ‘pity’ in western culture we are always in the presence of a certain sense of parenthesis. It is not that a theatrical audience, for example, can be shown to have experienced ‘pity’ during a certain theatrical production: such cultural sociologies have, of course, become subsequently available, but they do not touch on the essence of what Aristotle is suggesting, which is, in a sense, far more interesting, because it is, ‘from the beginning’, a discourse of surrogates, substitutes – pity has no beginning, as indeed we can fairly say that it is unlikely to have any end. Here (perhaps at last) is one of Aristotle’s major passages on pity, and on tragedy in general: after the foregoing discussion, we must consider what should be aimed at and avoided in the construction of plots, and how tragedy’s effect is to be achieved. Since, then, the structure of the finest tragedy should be complex not simple, as well as representing fearful and pitiable events (for this is the special feature of such mimesis), it is, to begin with, clear that neither should decent men be shown changing from prosperity to adversity, as this is not fearful nor yet pitiable but repugnant, nor the depraved changing from adversity to prosperity, because this is the least tragic of all, possessing none of the necessary qualities, since it arouses neither fellow-feeling nor pity nor fear. Nor, again, should tragedy show the very wicked person falling from prosperity to adversity: such a pattern might arouse fellow-feeling, but not pity or

­16    The Literature of Pity fear, since the one is felt for the undeserving victim of adversity, the other for one like ourselves (pity for the undeserving, fear for one like ourselves); so the outcome will be neither pitiable nor fearful.5

There are many, many things that might be said, and indeed have been said, about this passage, but one of the things that interests me is the hovering presence of the word (in a different translation of the last of these sentences) ‘satisfy’ in the phrase ‘such a structure might satisfy our feelings’; for the implication is that a structure which is instead truly founded on the deployment, encouragement or toleration of pity, although it may produce great drama, will, in some quite specific sense, not ‘satisfy’ our feelings; and that this is a non-consummation devoutly to be wished. Perhaps we might then put it like this: pity is always, everywhere, unsatisfactory. Once again, we see it in everyday life: we say we feel pity for such-and-such, and the challenge will inevitably come back: well, why don’t you do something about it? And so pity is allied with a certain form of impotence – perhaps a willed powerlessness, albeit perhaps one which is produced and enforced by social circumstances. We need to return to the issue of abjection: within our feelings of pity, within our most moving encounters with an other for whom we feel the utmost sense of a need to help, to produce change, there is an admixture of selfdisgust: we remain end-stopped at the point where we feel all we need to feel in order to help, to make a difference, but pity, while seeming to encourage these kinds of action, nevertheless, in a pure emotional dialectic, prohibits the crossing of the border from feeling into action. Pity does nothing; it achieves nothing. But this conclusion of one line of argument is not, of course, exactly in line with what Aristotle is saying – or at least it appears not to be – for Aristotle seems, in the Poetics, to be trying to tread a line between the extremes he has delineated here. He knows, he is fully aware, that none of us ordinary folk are likely to emphasise with sublime heroes or villains, and that is why these abrupt transitions from heaven to hell will never constitute the substance of good drama. There is, as always, a middle course: since the poet should create the pleasure which comes from pity and fear through mimesis, obviously this should be built into the events. Let us, then, take up the question of what sorts of incidents strike us as terrible or pitiable. Now, such actions must occur between friends, enemies, or neutrals. Well, if enemy acts towards enemy, there is nothing pitiable in either the deed or the prospect of it, except the suffering as such; nor if the parties are neutrals.6

This passage continues, and I will resume it; but there is so much to say here about pity that it is perhaps wise to take a break; after all, most

Pity and Terror    ­17

dramas do. We can dwell on certain things. There is, for example, the mention of tragic ‘pleasure’, and it seems evident that this is something entirely at odds with the theme of satisfaction above. Pity, it appears, can have nothing to do with satisfaction, yet it can be a major source of tragic pleasure. The first recourse here would be to a notion of Schadenfreude, one’s ‘shadow’ pleasure at another’s demise or ill fortune, and it is conceivable that, at the end of the day – or the night – this is all tragedy is. Yet one would hope not. Or one could have recourse to the instructive argument between Melanie Klein and Leo Bersani (undertaken, it has to be said, after Klein’s death, which some would say placed her at an unfair disadvantage – or not).7 Put at its briefest and most simple, Klein’s discourse of reparation asserts that the work of art exists in order to make recompense, through its regime of order and totality, for fantasised damage inflicted by the artist as a child (and, of course, by all of us) on our parents during the process of surviving the various vicissitudes of infantile sexual problematisation. Bersani points to various artworks (we might ourselves think, for example, of Francisco Goya, Franz Kafka, Beckett) to say that, in fact, art is not always, or uniquely, based on order or totality, and that some of the most significant art emblems down the ages have represented the complete opposite, a persistent disturbance which goes entirely against the normative order (which, for Bersani, would also include heterosexual normativity) that forms a straitjacket around not art itself, but around our necessarily limited regime of interpretation. A dialectic of the complete and the incomplete. And so we could take this back to the way in which tragic pleasure has to do, or can have to do, with pity – although it needs to be added that here Aristotle seems to equate the piteous with the horrible, or at least to leave it open to elide the two. The question would come – and especially in view of ancient Greek cosmogony – as to whether such emotions are conjured – or better, perhaps, rehearsed – as instances of moments when, or sequences of events within which, divine order is overturned. But not too far, Aristotle suggests; for if one moves too far from the boundaries, then one might find oneself in a world where such order (the order Klein speaks of, and which Bersani finds inadequate) has never been expected to prevail in the first place. Pity and terror are best observed within, not beyond, a well-ordered society: outside, in the wilderness, there cannot be pity, for we are too far from socialised norms to comprehend what is expected of us. So pity, according to this line of thought, is not a wild emotion; it is, rather, a by-product of civilisation, emerging as a by-product of those moments when civilisation, whatever it might be, reveals itself as

­18    The Literature of Pity i­nadequate to protect us against excess. Thus pity has to do with those who expect to be protected, but find that they are nevertheless up against exigencies which they could not have expected; as they (we) lie bleeding on the streets of London or Chicago, Paris or Stockholm, we can expect pity; if an identical event were to befall us on the periphery, in the canyon, far from home, then all manner of help might be manifested – or not – but we would not expect the full modicum of pity, for this would not be our ‘selves’ suffering out there, it would be someone, something else, some abjected other which always knew the risks to be taken when travelling beyond our confined definitions of the ‘known’ world. And thus pity, as Aristotle goes on to say (to resume) has always to do with the familiar, the family: What tragedy must seek are cases where the sufferings occur within relationships, such as brother and brother, son and father, mother and son, son and mother – when the one kills (or is about to kill) the other, or commits some other such deed.8

And this is the point at which Aristotle proceeds to his list of tragic examples; but before turning to one of these – Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex (c. 425 bc) – it is worth examining some of the terms he is using here, and in particular this constantly vexed issue of what is familiar, what is unfamiliar. For Freud assures us in a famous essay that these are both, in one sense, the same thing; and this is the ‘thing’, the emotion, the experience, which he summarises under the heading of the ‘uncanny’ (from which, exactly like Aristotle, he wishes to exclude the purely wild, that which lies unequivocally beyond civilised boundaries).9 What has the uncanny to do with pity? Well, perhaps this is not initially easily perceptible; but Freud does also suggest to us, in the Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905), that ‘cruelty in general comes easily to the childish nature, since the obstacle that brings the instinct for mastery to a halt at another person’s pain – namely a capacity for pity – is developed relatively late’.10 This, it turns out, is something of a throwaway line; at this point Freud is much more concerned with cruelty than with pity – and of course we may take this as a more sufficient and intriguing binary than pity and terror. But let us take this panorama in more detail. Pity, according to Freud, at least here, appears to be an ‘obstacle’; it obstructs what would otherwise be the fulfilment of a cruel desire for mastery. According to Aristotle, the conditions for pity are most adequately fulfilled within the confines of the family, although obviously Aristotle’s definition of ‘family’ would not be the same as the many different versions that have since emerged

Pity and Terror    ­19

in European culture.11 We are, of course, forcibly reminded of the facts about violence against the person, including assault, rape and murder, within western cultures: namely that they overwhelmingly occur within the ‘family’ – which we may also describe as the site within which ‘pity’, in one shape or form, might itself reasonably be expected to occur. But there is another question – one of many which one might put to this latest message from Aristotle, this latest glowing impartation of wisdom: he says that these are situations which the poet ‘should seek after’, and, however one might construe the complexities of the original Greek, this remains a challenging thought, summarised contemporarily in the culture of ‘ambulance-chasing’. Is it the role of the poet to discover, identify and turn into drama a pre-existing situation capable of eliciting (possibly false) emotional responses in his audiences? Perhaps so; after all, issues of ‘originality’ in literature are of very late date; the question of the originality of our feelings is at least similarly vexed and subject to Nachträglichkeit, that constant sense which Freud identifies as one of being after the act, behind the fact, always catching up, never entirely au fé with the event, or even sure – as we realise increasingly these days as the very concept of the ‘event’ comes under siege both in philosophy and in fiction, as no less in various sciences – as to what an ‘event’ might be. Or, inevitably, always might have been. But it is also interesting that twice later on in the Three Essays Freud conjoins pity with two other phenomena, namely shame and disgust; and in doing so he is clearly equating pity with a sense of anxiety about the body, about what it might manifest, about what it might betray. In Instincts and their Vicissitudes (1915), he goes further: I may add that feelings of pity cannot be described as a result of a transformation of instinct occurring in sadism, but necessitate the notion of a reactionformation against that instinct.12

So we may consider pity as being a second-order defence. Confronted within ourselves with a residue of savagery, pity is a way we have of ameliorating that instinct: it is not ‘natural’, Freud here claims, for us to feel pity; but when we come up against our instinctive response to deprivation, to an awareness of an inferiority – whether it be in others or in ourselves – then pity emerges as a way of counteracting what would otherwise be our terrible reaction to such things: while we might be tempted to pick off the weakest – again, in ourselves or in others – even then something arises in us which will inhibit this reaction and enable us to produce in ourselves a modicum – maybe even a simulacrum – of restraint. Perhaps this is the same restraint that Marlow feels in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899) to be the peculiar – and to him

­20    The Literature of Pity inexplicable – property of the African ‘natives’: in a situation where they could indulge in killing and cannibalism, they do not: something restrains them and, according to Conrad, this can hardly be ‘civilisation’, a term and process about which Heart of Darkness clearly feels profoundly dubious.13 Pity and sadism: pity as the Janus-like reverse of an impulse to close in on the weak, to pick them off for the sake (as no doubt might be said) of the greater good. We have all heard stories about the ways in which wolves and elephants, to take two examples of many, appear to have feelings for weaker brethren that cannot be obviously justified in terms of species survival. And since we are now on the track of wolves, it is worth citing Freud’s comments on pity in From the History of an Infantile Neurosis (1918), the case history which we now more usually refer to as the ‘Wolf-Man’. Freud goes into all manner of details concerning the formation of the Wolf-Man’s symptoms; but in particular he suggests that his entire pathology ‘must . . . have been intended to ward off . . . any identification with the object of the patient’s pity’.14 Pity, therefore, is a thing to be avoided, even at the greatest cost to psychic stability. Why should this be? And at this point we must return to Aristotle, for it is Aristotle who suggests that the problem with pity – its glory and its fate – is that, in effect, it melts the soul. And if pity melts, or is capable of melting, the soul, then it threatens our individuality. As we experience pity, then we cease, or hover on the verge of ceasing, to be individuated subjects at all. Our carefully hoarded and secreted guarantees of our difference from the other are set at nought: we are forced to abandon what, in Foucauldian terms, we might refer to as our platform of surveillance and accept that we are ourselves the surveyed, the prisoner, the commonalty from which we have tried for all our lives to differentiate ourselves.15 This, it seems to me, is an essential part of Aristotle’s dealings with pity, but it is an ambiguous one. For pity, if it returns us to a communal condition, may therefore be part of a repertoire which sanctions and supports a broader sociality: pity reminds us that, in a still useful cliché, we are all in this together. When the wolves are outside, then it behoves us to muster some fellow-feeling; perhaps, as I will explore later, this emerges particularly in time of war. And thus we may think about the difference between pity and, for example, compassion, a difference that I have assumed above but which will now warrant a little more detail. For – to put it very simply – compassion is personal. When I feel compassion for another, it is because of something that I recognise, whether I wish to or not, as similarity between the plight of another and my own plight. But pity, I suggest, takes us beyond this, and here we may wish

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to unravel, or indeed rescind, the attitude that claims pity to be a weak emotion, one that drains or robs the soul. For if this is correct, then the Nietzschean position on pity becomes revealed as a denial process, a defence against ‘melting’, precisely against finding or acknowledging that one’s own defences, one’s own denials, are in fact menaced by an enemy – not an enemy glaring at us with red eyes from beyond the reach of the camp fire or the city lights, but an enemy within, an enemy which mocks our sense of self-reliance, which utters, always half out of earshot, a truth that our primary narcissism, as Freud puts it, continually forbids us to accept or respect: namely that we are always capable of melting, of sliding back into the unformed, that the convenient neat shapes which we strive to give to our selves are not impermeable, that all that hope of structure is the painstaking work of the ego trying to maintain defences against the terror of what lies outside. And so we return again to Aristotle, albeit through a certain circumambulation, and to pity and terror. And here Charles Daniels and Sam Scully have an interesting comment, albeit the way they phrase it may seem to suggest – wrongly – that it is one so obvious that it might seem almost not worth saying: Aristotle mentions the pleasure men take in such ‘imitations’, i.e., in makebelieve. Yet if these works were known to produce real pity and fear, it would seem that only masochists would voluntarily view then. To seek to have the negative emotions of pity and fear so one can then have a catharsis and be free of them is like knocking one’s head against the wall in order to have the subsequent relief of ceasing to do so.16

Yes, this indeed makes sense, but only on certain assumptions, and one of those assumptions, germane to our present investigation, is that pity is a ‘negative’ emotion. What, indeed, is a ‘negative’ emotion. Rage? But not when directed at somebody who has killed our wife or daughter. Anger? But not when directed – righteously – against those in society who seek violently to perpetuate prejudice. Despair? But even if despair is an emotion, rather than the endpoint and death of emotion, the culmination of that omnipresent depression which in the end comes to deny to us the value of life itself, we cannot, I think, refer to it as negative; it is the perfection of, or maybe even or also the predisposition towards, a certain view of the world; its consequences may in some cases be truly terrible, but this does not in itself imply negativity. Masochists and sadists; we seem here to be in a strange world where behavioural extremities are bristling on all sides – which seems surprising on the terrain of pity. And yet not, of course, on the extreme terrain of the ancient world of Greek drama. Let us speak finally of Oedipus

­22    The Literature of Pity (perhaps there is no other way to speak of Oedipus), in the midst of his dread moment of crisis, his realisation of what he has done, or perhaps better, what the Fates have had in store for him: Unspeakable acts – I speak no more of them. Hide me at once, for God’s love, hide me away, Away! Kill me! Drown me in the depths of the sea! Take me! (The Chorus shrink from his groping hands) For pity, touch me, and take me away! Touch me, and have no fear.17

Oedipus is beyond words; words no longer can have any impact on his destiny. He knows this. And therefore he is forced back upon a physical means of salvation, or damnation – the difference between the two is at this point indistinct. He needs to be taken away; but equally, he needs to be touched. Of course, Oedipus’s blindness has become, or engendered, a constant trope throughout the whole of western culture;18 but the need for the blind to depend on the sense of touch is perhaps a little less obvious. Oedipus wants, above all else, to be touched; the Chorus, representative, so we are assured and so we appear to continue to believe, perhaps we so need to, of all that is sane and reasonable in the Greek polity, cannot do this, they are scared of contamination, they cannot touch that which has been condemned by the gods; the biblical equivalent would be the terror of leprosy, in particular that interesting leper who cannot be celebrated, it seems, at Christmas: the leper ‘white as snow’. Oedipus is not seeking redemption; what he is seeking is what we could now call assisted suicide, which some – although not all – would regard as the final act of mercy; or pity. But for this – or anything else – to take place, then there has to be something to be touched – to revert to a more modern and less precisely physical parlance, we have to be touched in our selves, in our souls; we have to be touched by pity. And in order for that touching to take place, barriers have to go down, and there has to be a certain – or uncertain – melting. This possibility of melting is possibly hinted at by an earlier reference in the play to pity, which occurs when the attendant is commenting on Oedipus’s condition: He shouts for someone to unbar the doors. And show all Thebes the father’s murderer, The mother’s – shame forbids the unholy word. Incontinently he will fly the country To rid his house of the curse of his own lips; But scarcely has the strength, poor sufferer, And none to guide him. He cannot bear the pain.

Pity and Terror    ­23 As you shall see. The doors are opening. Yes, you shall see a sorry spectacle That loathing cannot choose but pity . . .19

This, of course, is the scene where Oedipus first emerges blinded, and there is much to be said here about display, insight and vision; but lest, as is always possible with the blinded Oedipus, we be led astray, our concern must remain with pity, the pity which is, in fact, so beautifully expressed here by the attendant himself, yet also remains associated, apparently inextricably, with pain and loathing. The melting is continually accompanied by the fear, the fear of dissolution; if we fully experience our pity (and not merely in the surrogate mode of our attendance at a play), then what will become of us?

Chapter 3

Pietà

The terms ‘pity’ and ‘piety’ have long become intertwined, probably through their Latin and Italian roots; but it is in fact pity that is conjured in the famous images of the pietà which we have inherited from medieval and Renaissance art, perhaps especially emblematised in what is regarded as one of Europe’s aesthetic masterpieces, Michelangelo’s extraordinary sculpture. We are speaking here of the Christian tradition, and of how the notion of pity has become focused on the image of the Virgin Mary cradling the dead body of Jesus in her arms after he has been cut down from the Cross. But we need to ask more clearly what is at stake here, because in a different vocabulary we would refer to this tradition as a set of works of mourning, picking up for example on the alternative title ‘Lamentation’ attached to so many of these works of art, and a work of mourning which is redoubled.1 It is redoubled because there is a sense in which we believe that no parent should ever be called upon to mourn the loss of his or her child. This is, always, part of our response to the casualties of conflict: when we mourn we like to emphasise that our mourning is for the ‘innocent’, for those who, for example, have been permitted no knowledge of what the conflict might have been about, for those who have died without meaning, without cause. In doing so, we naturally mourn our own selves, as though it were the case that we too might have died before we understood the ‘cause’ for which we were dying: in this sense, the common wider fiction is that all death is ‘unnatural’. But sometimes, of course, it may be that there really is no cause; and perhaps this is something that the pietà represents. Not, of course, that this is directly to dispute Christian theology, within which Jesus died, apparently, to save us all; but rather to say that at the moment of death, or shortly after, at that instant when we know that our wounds are mortal, or fatal – and those two opposite terms can come to mean quite the same thing in the moment of desperation – there comes an alterna-

1.  Rogier van der Weyden, Pietà, © Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, Brussels / photo: F. Maes (RMFAB)

2. Vincent van Gogh, Pietà (after Delacroix), © Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam (Vincent van Gogh Foundation)

I

3.  Angus Fairhurst, Pietà, © Tate, London 2013

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4.  Anna Chromy, Cloak of Conscience

Pietà    ­25

tive moment, which is one known only to the survivor, the person who is condemned to outlast the dead or dying, ‘destined’ (as some cultures would say) to bear witness to the (always disputable) fact of death. And thus pity. But pity has to do here with redemption, or at least the possibility of redemption. Can the tears of pity be in the least way efficacious? We would like to hope so: we would like to hope that watering the ground with tears (and here the resonances of Judaeo-Christian myth and its geographical origins in the unforgiving desert are inescapable) would produce a new crop; that our pity for the passing away of our loved ones would be in some way rewarded as the generations (and the tropes of generation, and of regeneration, water in waste land) continue.2 And so the child dies before the parent; and this is a mark of terrible injustice – one from which, indeed, many people never recover – and yet it is transformed, transubstantiated into the very body of pity. But even this does not get to the heart, beating or stilled – and both are present – of the pietà; for the pietà seems to make two claims simultaneously. On the one hand it says very simply and with the utmost poignancy that here it is, here is the human lot, all there is is mourning, unsuitable death, disaster without end, for true disaster is not measured in hurricane, flood or fire, but in the death of the child, of one’s very own child. On the other it says that such suffering is actually beyond our own perception, our limited perspective; that it is Mary herself who is the one and only emblem of suffering; before which we can only worship and adore. And so pity would here appear to enter upon a problematic theological and philosophical terrain: can it pertain to our one and only subjectivity, or does it need to be brought before the thrones and emanations of a deity in order to be validated? And this, of course, would touch on what is perhaps the inestimable: namely, what do you feel (what do you really feel?) when you kneel before the pietà, how is your own subjectivity reduced or added to as you contemplate an emblematic image of suffering? But what is important is that pity is not mourning; or at least, it is not exactly mourning. For mourning takes its place over the ruin, over the dead, even though in many cases this sense of the dead may be misplaced. But pity is often for the living; for those who may not yet have physically died, but upon whose faces, inscribed upon whose bodies, one can already see the fatal sign. Since we are for the moment on the terrain of Christian imagery, we might want to return to the biblical image of the leper, by which is meant, as we might reasonably understand it, this: how far would you go, how far would your pity extend, before you risked the contraction

­26    The Literature of Pity of a life-threatening illness? Where would your charity be, where would you be if pursued by the leper (not that the leper, despite the imagery, would stand much chance of doing that). Pity is a worrisome thing: it threatens to invade our selves, our fine upstanding personhood, at the same time as it reminds us of our own origins, our roots, our prior helplessness. Pity reminds us of what it might mean, as Giorgio Agamben puts it, to be a participant in ‘bare life’.3 Although I am not sure that this is what Agamben means, I would point to the ‘bare life’ lived (if it can be lived) in the refugee camps of Palestine, of Jordan, of so many African states that have the misfortune to lie on cultural and economic fault-lines – as yet, it would appear to those in charge of the maps of the world, determinant of a destiny or set of destinies thus far undiscovered but productive of an immensity of human suffering – which undermine rights to life even before those rights have barely begun to operate. Even as we think about these matters, a danger looms. Namely, can we talk about things in this emotional way, in a way that can involve a dangerous term like ‘pity’, without succumbing to a soppy attitude, one that lacks due critical rigour? And yet it seems to me that it is absolutely crucial to put the question the other way around: is any criticism worth its salt if it cannot take on and address the key issues of the emotions and passions? And pity, I am arguing, among them. And so, because the great traditions of theological criticism have already provided at least one answer to these questions, we might feel at liberty (hoping we are not succumbing to a certain obsession) to return again to the pietà. I have chosen one among so many with which to begin the discussion, Rogier van der Weyden’s masterwork, painted in or around 1441, and currently on display in the Belgian Royal Museums of Fine Arts in Brussels (see Plate 1). The painting depicts four figures: the body of the dead Jesus himself; Mary his mother holding him in her arms; John the Evangelist supporting, in turn, her body; and Mary Magdalen looking on in an attitude of grief. It depicts also the location of the scene, at the foot of the Cross, and it supports this topography with the depiction of the skull at the foot of the painting, a reminder of the location of Golgotha, the ‘place of the skull’. What it also depicts is a terrible sense of ‘bare life’, or death. At very first glance, the figure of Mary, Jesus’s mother, is a little more indistinct than the others; this is partly because her face is pressed against Jesus’s own; it is also because her voluminous robes – blue, of course, as is her emblematic colour – swirl and flow to form a background which occupies the centre of the painting. As we look further in, the contrast between this image of a potential comfort, the comfort of clothing and

Pietà    ­27

encompassment, and the stark image of the almost naked Jesus becomes all the more telling; the body of Jesus is not only almost bare, but emaciated, the thinness of the arms and thighs wonderfully contrasted with the potential – but necessarily painfully withheld – bounty signified by the image of the mother. This is not only, it would seem, an image of a dead man; it is also an image of a man who has long been dying, whose final apotheosis is but the last stage in the reduction of the body to mere skin and bone. And blood, of course; Jesus’s wounds, and the blood flowing from them, are graphically depicted. Yet the direction of the gaze in the painting is complicated. The very centre – the ‘dead centre’, one might say – is the image of the foot of the Cross (although the Cross itself is largely absent) and it is surrounded by a sky of the utmost vividness, indeed a vividness which is not entirely simple to interpret. This may be the sunset of life; or it may be a new dawn. It may, indeed, suggest a rainbow, famous obviously as a sign of God’s ‘mercy’, but it may equally seem a signifier of the mixing of different kinds of condition, and as such an apt symbol for the mixing of despair and hope which is taken to be the significance of these scenes of lamentation. For to lament, to pity, the death of Christ is a peculiar, indeed a paradoxical thing. On the one hand, there are in this painting the obvious signs of death – I have mentioned some, but there is also the livid hue of the body so strongly contrasted with the rich reds and blues of the attire of the other characters. But merely to lament Christ’s death, merely to engage in pity for his mortality and the outcome of that mortality, is to see only, as it were, one side of the picture – for there is also, of course, the resurrection to contend with. And thus lamentation for the frailty and destruction of the human body would be, within the Christian faith, but one side of a dialectic, in which these events will be succeeded by a raising up, and pity itself will be – will it? – transcended and seen only as a function of a limited imagination, which sees the ending of the physical life as the end of all things. We might also consider the use of whites and pale colours in the picture. Mary Magdalen’s entire headdress is white, which may well signify her significance as a figure of mourning: her physicality is withheld from the central area, as though she is, in herself, a presiding deity over this scene, a representative of something even more eternal, more long-lived, more recurring, than this transient moment of death. Mary’s neckcloth picks up this motif, as does Jesus’s only garment; but it is picked up even more vividly in the dual imagery of the skull and especially of Mary Magdalen’s ointment jar, the latter of which appears picked out in peculiar detail, as though insistently to remind us of the

­28    The Literature of Pity presence – and yet at the same time the uselessness – of human, artificial solace at a time when matters have become too ‘grave’, when all is beyond the assistance of medicine or other forms of human comfort, when all pity can do is to look on. Yet Mary Magdalen is not looking on, or at least not obviously so; from the slant of her eyes it is possible that she is observing some part of Jesus’s body, but it appears far more likely that she is lost in some private grief, some remembrance of her own – and the same may feasibly be true of the figure of John the Evangelist. This is not merely a particular, a personal solitude, the solitude of death; it picks up and represents also other solitudes, other moments when we may become lost in the remembrance of the solemn procession of instances of pity. Michelangelo’s most famous representation of pity, to which I have already alluded and which was made in 1498–9, is the great sculpture in St Peter’s in the Vatican, and it has been the subject of a huge variety of interpretations down the centuries (see book cover). Some of these have focused on the apparent youth of Mary: it has been suggested that she appears to be mourning not so much the death of a fully-grown child as that of a lover, albeit, since the form of the dead body in the sculpture is on a smaller scale than the form of Mary, one who may appear to be gravely diminished in death. At all events, it seems clear that there is a kind of transference here; where van der Weyden’s depiction – and it is one representative of many others – formed itself into a tableau – not entirely unlike the tableaux of Christ’s birth, still replicated on millions of Advent calendars to this day – Michelangelo’s work represents a type of inwardness. Mary’s eyes are, of course, cast downward, and by being so they are cast upon the body of her dead son. But they are also, I suggest, cast inward. It is not exactly that Mary is pitying her son, although of course this trajectory is represented in the sculpture; it is also as though she is in a moment of silent contemplation; such a moment as we ourselves would be being enjoined, as worshippers and sharers in the Christian mystery, if that is what we happened to be, to share – or indeed such a moment as W.B. Yeats so brilliantly depicts in his poem ‘Long-legged Fly’ (1939): like the three characters there, surely here Mary’s ‘mind moves upon silence’. And of course, one of those three characters central to the evolution of European culture in Yeats’s poem is Michelangelo. There is also Mary’s mouth to consider. Perhaps as with the Mona Lisa, one wonders by what amazing trick or foible of fate such an expression could be depicted: the expression of the mouth seems to be a compound of resignation and love. It does not smack of desperation or misery; it does not bespeak anger or any railing against the human lot. In

Pietà    ­29

a way, it does not represent a discernible present at all, but rather a calm endurance which is born of long ages; the pity depicted here is not a pity unkindly focused on one event alone, on one personal bereavement as if to the exclusion of all other suffering; rather it seeks – almost selfconsciously, but not quite – to carry within itself a reservoir of human suffering and of the need to rise above that suffering and continue – into who knows what future. I have focused upon Mary alone, and I think that is appropriate to Michelangelo’s sculpture; for it does not depict, as van der Weyden’s does, a scene which is ‘communal’ – in other words, involving other characters and even a background within which death and pity may be situated. Rather, it invites us into a supreme communion with a single face, and thus, I believe it may be said, with the mysteries of human expression. In 1889, Vincent van Gogh painted a pietà (it is based on a lithograph, which was in turn based on a painting by Eugène Delacroix, which regrettably I have no space to discuss here) (see Plate 2). It has often been said that the unusual occurrence here of a ‘religious’ motif in van Gogh’s work was the result of a recent accident that had befallen him; but it may be better to think that the painting indicates the broader relevance of the notion of pity, one which moves it constantly beyond, upon its own trajectory, continually adapting itself to new times, new circumstances, new preoccupations, new – perhaps we may dare say – tragedies. Whatever the truth of this, van Gogh’s pietà is certainly an extraordinary work, strongly reminiscent of Edvard Munch in its swirling lines yet very different from Munch in its curious refusal of expressionism – or even, one might say, of expression at all.4 There is no rapport of any sort between the two figures; the figure of Mary, if indeed, as we are perhaps forced to assume, it is she, makes no attempt to hold her son; the figure of Jesus appears oblivious of her presence. Both heads are turned in the same direction, but it is not apparent that they are looking at anything – if they are, it is something way outside the trajectory or focus of the painting. The overall impression is of two separate figures being blown along by the same wind – not in contact, yet subject to the same ineluctable laws of fate.5 This representation is not about community, as we may arguably claim to be the case with van der Weyden; and neither is it about the beauty of musing solitude, as with Michelangelo. Rather, it is about exposure to the cold winds: there may well be suffering – in fact there is suffering, but it is redemptive neither externally nor internally; instead it is absurd, something to be endured because there is no present fiction of an overarching sense of divine purpose.

­30    The Literature of Pity This does not, however, prohibit or inhibit the presence of pity; pity is here, but in a different guise. It is here in the way that Mary (or at least the mother figure – or perhaps better by now, merely the female figure) is reaching out to her son; and the very fact of the impossibility of physical contact between the two of them can well be seen as finding a new location for pity. I mentioned Munch above; but this is also the world of Henrik Ibsen, August Strindberg, Anton Chekhov: a world where gestures are continually made, where even the most extravagant of promises are uttered – yet there is no hope that these promises will ever be kept, that some kind of plenitude of contact will come to relieve the ineluctable separateness which, in this particular historical moment, may have come to be seen as the true, or at least the most extreme, source and necessity of pity.6 What is also remarkable about the painting is the symmetry of the eye positions and the positions of the hands. The eyes of the woman are turned outwards, toward an imaginary viewer who is, mysteriously, standing in a position where no actual viewer of the painting ever would. The eyes of Jesus (or the male figure, or van Gogh himself, depending on interpretation) are turned perhaps downward, perhaps inward, perhaps they are closed in sleep, or death – it is hard to tell. The hands of the woman are outstretched – not, it seems, in obvious protection of her son/lover/alter ego, but rather in the hope that somebody else will come to her aid – it is almost as though her right hand reaches out of the canvas to solicit help from the passer-by, perhaps, indeed, the Good Samaritan whom we have come across before. The hands of the male figure, however, are indicators of pain and resignation – one, perhaps, grasping onto the folds of his clothing, the other curled uselessly against the incursions of the natural world, perhaps rock, perhaps waves. It might be as well, in considering further this image of van Gogh’s, replete as it is with a kind of despair as to any help or indeed sympathy which might be offered within the context, or frame, of the painting – after all, the figures look more as though they have been blown there by the winds of fate rather than being able to take a stand, even a dying one, on any particular space of ground, any specific terrain, however unstable – to look at a stanza from Sylvia Plath’s remarkable poem, ‘The Moon and the Yew Tree’ (1961). The stanza follows in part from some previous lines, ‘The moon is my mother. She is not sweet like Mary. / Her blue garments unloose small bats and owls’: I have fallen a long way. Clouds are flowering Blue and mystical over the face of the stars. Inside the church, the saints will be all blue, Floating on their delicate feet over the cold pews,

Pietà    ­31 Their hands and faces stiff with holiness. The moon sees nothing of this. She is bald and wild. And the message of the yew tree is blackness – blackness and silence.7

There is no yew tree in van Gogh; nether is there an obvious moon, though there is a strange suffused light in the background. But there is certainly an absence of ‘sweetness’, a lack of connection – which still permits the person seeing the painting to experience pity, but of a very different kind, a pity for those who may be ‘bald and wild’, who may be beyond or outside the sanctions of traditional religion, those who may be ‘blue’ (as the female figure here is blue) but with a rather different, more shifting kind of ‘blueness’ than that which is traditionally inscribed on the figure of Mary. Blue is the prevailing colour of the picture: it originates in the woman, and it seeps into the folds of the man’s garb (‘blue and mystical’, perhaps); at any rate, it serves to connect the figures where other more obvious means of connection may appear to have failed. If we turn now to the first of two more recent representations of the pietà, and thus of pity, we may begin to see further ramifications of these key themes of community, subjectivity and alienation. The first of Angus Fairhurst’s representations of the pietà, a photograph taken in 1996, depicts a figure lying in the arms of a gorilla; at least, that is a first impression (see Plate 3). The gorilla is, all too ­obviously, not a real gorilla (whatever that might be), but a gorilla suit, presumably inhabited; the figure in its arms is the artist himself, naked. The photo takes its place within a long line of gorilla images that Fairhurst used. The setting is the artist’s own studio; in a self-referential move, the artist is clearly holding the remote control for the camera, and thus there is a sense in which we are made aware that the scene photographs, represents itself. At the back of the studio are three windows, two covered by blinds, one not. Where, we need to ask, is the pity here? In sharp distinction to van Gogh, there are no visible eyes in the sense of lines of sight in the photograph. The artist’s eyes are closed; the eyes in the gorilla suit are hidden. Thus the possibility of ‘expressing pity’ – whatever, indeed, that might mean – is here foreclosed. We are thrown back on the scene itself, without the possibility of responding to a mute appeal. Indeed, there is an unhappy suggestion in the picture that the central figure may indeed be dead – unhappy at least in part because it inevitably recalls to our mind the artist’s own suicide in 2008 – yet of course this is countermanded by our knowledge that only if he presses – has pressed? will have pressed? – the button on the remote control will the photograph have been taken.

­32    The Literature of Pity Thus a mise en abyˆme; one could see Fairhurst’s pietà as a postmodern work which challenges previous simplicities of representation, even as it also recalls to our mind how frequently Renaissance art did indeed include representations of the artist – but usually, of course, relegated to a subordinate position. Here there is an unashamed positioning of the artist himself at the centre of the ‘landscape’, an attempt to try for a different involvement of pity, less displaced, more centred; and yet inevitably offset by the representation of the gorilla which is not a gorilla. The notion of the ‘unashamed’ reminds us again of the possibility of shame; in the traditional way, here a kind of shame is avoided by the artist’s careful positioning of his hand over his genitals. But this is not the most tender of the gestures in the photograph; that, surely, is reserved for the gorilla, his two hands – paws? – supporting the body so carefully, in such a way as to prevent not only collapse of the physique but more to prevent even any strain on the body lying in this posture which is so unnatural in the sense that it bespeaks death, but also so natural in that it represents a man lying on a sofa – if you were to airbrush the gorilla out, the pose would remain – or become – one of relaxation, reclination, and the remote control would be simply transformed into the remote for a TV, which the figure has fallen asleep in the very act of turning off or on. What the picture also takes up, however, is the male/female dynamic of earlier pietàs, with the figure of the gorilla challenging us to overturn our prejudices and see in this great ape the very essence of motherhood, of nurturing. Clumsiness and delicacy: the prospect of causing something through clumsiness when one had only meant to handle a situation delicately; how easy it is to shatter expectations, to break the fragile shell of an assumed subjectivity, to make a mistake which will allow pity to flow in whether it is meant to or not. And how easy it also is, perhaps, to misunderstand animals; not that the gorilla suit here is meant to fool us into believing that we are in the presence of a particular kind of (other) animal, but that the scenario is meant to remind us, as Fairhurst has said, that we need not forget our animal self.8 But we may go one stage further, and ask whether there is indeed something in pity which places us in closer touch with our animal being, with what Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari would refer to as our ‘becoming-animal’:9 we see this all the time in our relations with companion animals, as we see it in our ill-disguised wish that animals – let us say elephants or dolphins, for example – could be shown to experience and express comparable emotions to our own.10 Then we would not feel so lonely, or so dependent on the possibilities of life in distant galaxies. How we consider what animals do, how they think, how they feel, may actually be a largely linguistic matter;11 what is certain in this Fairhurst

Pietà    ­33

representation is that there is a freeing from an ancient religious tradition which simultaneously reveals – or betrays – an unfreedom, in the sense that our cultural representations of lamentation remain bound to an idea, an image, of the bereaved bending over the dead or dying, even when that bereaved may not be personally concerned with the death which it is witnessing and to which it is responding, and even when the ‘bending’, that peculiar attentive curve of the caring body, is attenuated as far as it is here. Yet in all of these examples – van der Weyden, Michelangelo, van Gogh, Fairhurst – there are at least two bodies at stake: the nurturing and the nurtured, the living and the dead, the mother and the son, the bereft and the condemned. In Anna Chromy’s startling pietàs, a series which has grown in size and range over the years since 1980, there is a filtering out, a redaction, a rejection of all that may be inessential to the image of pity (see Plate 4).12 If Fairhurst’s image may be considered as postmodern, then Chromy’s responds to a still newer sense of the relationship between humanity and the abhuman: deeply passionate, it nonetheless resists any simple location, even as its avatars occupy an increasing number of public spaces across Europe, the most recent of which have become so large that it is possible to walk inside them. The fundamental image however (although perhaps in a Baudrillardian age it is precisely impossible to speak of a ‘fundamental image’) is of a seated figure. The stance of the figure suggests dejection; the hands are planted on the knees, the head is inclined downwards. The whole figure, except the face, is covered in a cloak (the more recent manifestations of the image have been called simply ‘Cloak’) which appears rusty with age, redolent of an outdoor life, of a lack of sustenance and nurture, and yet of the kind of resilience one sees all the time in the faces of those who have been condemned to life in refugee camps across the world. But the most striking thing about the image is that there is, in fact, no face. And thus there is no faciality, no expression. What we have here is an extraordinary representation of a paradox whereby pity, that emotion – or one of those emotions – which might appear most dependent on the reading of the face, as is evident in Michelangelo among so many others, has become transmuted into something which can be read through a specific droop of the body, through a physical expressing of patience, of suffering, of waiting, of a continuation of being without hope. And yet, of course, these figures of Chromy’s, and the complex fact of their replication, do represent a kind of hope: a hope that a representation of pity – defigured, generalised, approximated – can move us to our own pity where other apparently more precise representations – and perhaps especially ones tied to a particular religious cultural repertoire

­34    The Literature of Pity – have ceased to do so. And so, to use the rather cant words, the global and the local intertwine. I would be loath to say that there can be a universal representation of pity, or indeed of anything else: there is little in the world which all can recognise, and because to attempt or enforce such recognition would inevitably involve a replication of the motions of power it is best not to go down such a channel. But this specific representation of Chromy’s, in the course and scope of its very unspecificity, does isolate and emphasise certain aspects of pity. Some would say that it does so in an unhelpful and unfeeling way: because we no longer have the representation of he-or-she-who-is-to-be-pitied, we are left with a simple starkness of a generalised mourning, lamentation. But then, where is pity located? It is of course in the one left behind, in the one grieving, in the state of mourning, in the unending cry of the bereft: this is where pity lies, and this, as I see it, is what Chromy’s image has distilled for our age. The pietà returns; it develops; it continues – if an artistic repertoire, thus hypostasised, can ‘continue’ – to offer images which attempt to keep pace with our lamentation. From personalisation to abstraction; from community to isolation; from mother to lover; from a certain hiddenness to a more overt approach to the various other emotions and passions which touch upon pity – all of these trajectories, which cannot be reduced to a simple path through the woods (where animals and demons may lurk) are among those so far traversed by the pietà. And perhaps this is the moment to remember again those cognate terms with ‘pity’, ‘mercy’ and ‘ruth’; it might be that we shall be sensing more of these multiple ‘pities’, these ‘sisters of mercy’, in later chapters.

Chapter 4

Shakespeare on Pity

It would be foolish to attempt to trace the trajectory of pity through Shakespeare’s works; the term occurs, as one might expect, many times, and in many different contexts. Indeed, as with so many other terms, we might say that Shakespeare almost defines the term; although it occurs, of course, always in a complexity of more or less strict historical contexts, it participates also in what we might call a ‘flow of aphorism’ which has all that illusory, ‘literary’ appearance of transcending history. We might begin from King Henry’s musings towards the end of Henry the Sixth, Part Three (1591). He has despatched his supporters on various military errands, and is left alone with Exeter, who fears the worst; there may be something of a match between the powers of the opposing parties, but, Exeter suspects, Edward ‘will seduce the rest’. Henry cannot, it seems, see why or how this should be so: That’s not my fear, my meed hath got me fame: I have not stopp’d mine ears to their demands, Nor posted off their suits with slow delays; My pity hath been balm to heal their wounds, My mildness hath allay’d their swelling griefs, My mercy dried their water-flowing tears; I have not been desirous of their wealth, Nor much oppress’d them with great subsidies, Nor forward of revenge, though they much err’d: Then why should they love Edward more than me?1

A good question indeed; but one that is destined to receive a partial answer a few moments later when Henry is borne off by Edward and his men. Pity, mildness and mercy have not, it seems, availed; in Shakespeare’s long series of accounts of stories of the death of kings, it would appear that they rarely do. The question here, however, is not one specifically of emotion or feeling. Rather, ‘pity’ here, along with its cognates, becomes instead a

­36    The Literature of Pity signifier of a form of behaviour; a marker of a regime. Just as there are regimes marked, distinguished, by violence, arbitrary rule and an excessive manipulation of the law, so there are ones that are characterised by a softer version of the exercise of power. But if this is so, then we might ask exactly what here is being signified by ‘pity’. For this is not an examination of Henry’s inner world; it is instead an account of a specific way in which power might deploy itself through the State. We might almost say that the word ‘pity’ here serves an allegorical function, or at least that it should be placed (as I have just done) in inverted commas. Henry is not here clearly talking about any particular movement of his own heart or soul (he might be, of course, but we cannot know that); instead he is talking about a series of devices that he regards as conducive to good governance. And so ‘pity’ here stands in, synecdochically, for ‘the perceived exercise of pity’: pity – along with mildness and mercy – becomes one way in which to deploy power. The purpose of this deployment is not exactly the relief of ‘griefs’; it is rather the securing (here evidently unsuccessful) of a power-base. Pity becomes a tactic; Shakespeare was nothing if not worldly wise, and knew a good advertising slogan when he saw one. And yet, as so often in Shakespeare, perhaps this is not the whole of the story. For the words of the three crucial lines, about pity, mildness and mercy, overflow their immediate context, and remind the audience of the broader context within which this speech is set. For it is not only Exeter who is the audience; it is us too, a far wider group of addressees, and if we cannot at this moment guess the fate of Henry, we will soon know it, and the talk of ‘wounds’, ‘griefs’ and ‘tears’ will gain an added charge. What may have begun as a simulacrum of pity is now about to become, as it were, the ‘real thing’: the ‘water-flowing tears’ are due to begin again. Does pity beget pity? We know that laughter is infectious; it may be that pity is too, as those dreaded words about the healing of wounds and the drying of tears have their own effect on an audience from whom the threat of wounds and tears – and by this I mean any audience, not just one in 1591 – gain added fluency and currency as they mesh with unspoken experiences which are now, mysteriously and in an apparently far different context, being given voice. If we turn now to the murder scene in the first Act of Richard the Third (1592), we find a more personal appeal to pity, although one which is, on a different plane, equally unsuccessful. The murderers are for a moment, under the pressure of Clarence’s eloquence, in a quandary: the second murderer even asks, rhetorically, ‘What shall we do?’ Clarence implores them to relent (although it is not easy to see, as paid assassins,

Shakespeare on Pity    ­37

that this would be exactly within their remit), but the first murderer says that to relent would be ‘cowardly and womanish’. Clarence replies as follows, addressing all but the first line to the second murderer, in whom he believes he has seen some sign of pity: Not to relent is beastly, savage, devilish. My friend, I spy some pity in thy looks. O, if thine eye be not a flatterer, Come thou on my side, and entreat for me. A begging prince what beggar pities not?

And has said previously: Which of you, if you were a prince’s son, Being pent from liberty, as I am now, If two such murtherers as yourselves came to you, Would not entreat for life?2

It seems probable from ensuing lines that Clarence has not been wrong: that the second murderer has indeed been moved, though possibly by his own conscience, if such a concept has any meaning, rather than by Clarence’s appeal. At all events, he warns Clarence to look behind him, albeit too late, and then goes into a short reflection in which he compares himself with Pontius Pilate washing his hands of the killing of Jesus. And so perhaps there is ‘pity’ in his looks, although even that phrase, like so much in Shakespeare, is ambiguous. Does Clarence here refer to something in the appearance, the expression, the very cast of countenance of the second murderer which persuades him that here is a man who can be in some way appealed to; or does he rather refer to the second murderer’s momentary glances, perhaps to a furtive or doubting expression, and is it this which gives him some cause for last-minute hope? It is possible that an important question hangs on this, for it could be rephrased as a question as to whether there is a predisposition towards pity, or whether pity is conjured up as a result of changing circumstances. Or to put it more clearly: are there individuals for whom pity comes easily, as in a pre-existent cast of mind, or is pity itself an effect which is wrought upon us by environment? Clarence appears unsure, and that is entirely understandable; but what he does do – or attempt to do – is to work with pity in terms of a substitution of position. In more contemporary parlance, what he is attempting to do is to ‘turn’ the second murderer (‘Come thou on my side’), but his argument is strange: ‘A begging prince what beggar pities not?’ Well, probably most beggars, would seem the obvious answer, but

­38    The Literature of Pity this cannot be what Clarence means; what he means is more subtle, and it concerns reversals of fortune. We can, he says, always find ourselves in this situation, of being a supplicant upon another; we can always find ourselves, therefore, at the mercy of others. Yet more than this: within ourselves we have these double potentials; what an extraordinary phrase it is when Shakespeare says ‘If two such murtherers as yourselves came to you.’ Here indeed is a holding up of mirrors: is that what you are, is that your being, your modus vivendi; are you simply, merely, murderers; is that how you would like to see yourselves when the mirror is before you, or when Saint Peter enquires into your qualifications for entry into heaven? To the second murderer, Clarence offers a choice (although he does not, of course, have any of the power to make the choice operable): come this side of the mirror (it would, of course, be the second murderer, the double, who might be seduced into change)3 and you will feel and understand what I mean by pity. If you do not, then pity will be inexplicable to you; but then, that is what you will prefer if you accede to the wishes of your colleague, for he has said, has he not, that if you experience pity then it will make you – or reveal you always to have been – ‘cowardly and womanish’. Pity occurs in Shakespeare in these contexts: in contexts of choice, decision and, quite often, desperation; or, we might say in a slightly different vocabulary, in contexts where power is about to lose its hold, where we find ourselves looking into a vacuum and doubting quite how strength and might are going to deal this time with a failing polity; or where the so-called masculine virtues are going to lead us anyway. Antony in Julius Caesar (1599), an apposite example, is sure about the potential consequences of war and brutality, and equally sure that pity will be an early casualty: Blood and destruction shall be so in use, And dreadful objects so familiar, That mothers shall but smile when they behold Their infants quartered with the hands of war; All pity chok’d with custom of fell deeds; And Caesar’s spirit, raging for revenge, With Ate by his side come hot from hell, Shall in these confines with a monarch’s voice Cry ‘Havoc’, and let slip the dogs of war, That this foul deed shall smell above the earth With carrion men, groaning for burial.4

Ate is an interesting goddess: she appears to represent vengeance, albeit for deeds committed long ago, and so her thirst for revenge is wide-

Shakespeare on Pity    ­39

spread and not always attributable to any particular current failing. It is also interesting, however, that she is followed through the world by a group of beings known as the Litai or Prayers, whose job it seems to be to clear up the bloody mess Ate leaves behind her. It is not clear that they do this through anything which we might recognise as pity; but the fact remains that Ate is, as it were, not the final word – thus ‘blood and destruction’ may be subject to some greater law, and we may be allowed to think about what might happen to pity when it is ‘choked with custom of fell deeds’. This refers, it seems, to a deadening of the sympathetic impulse: so appalling will this ruination become, Antony claims – or rather, in a sense, has had revealed to him – that not only will we run short of good deeds, we will also run short of the remembrance of what those good deeds might have been – or even, going to a further extreme, of how we may have judged them to be ‘good’ in the first place. And it is, of course, also of interest that these thoughts about the opposition between ‘blood and destruction’ and the thwarted role of ‘pity’ should come so immediately before what has become perhaps one of the most famous aphorisms, or slogans, to emerge from the Shakespearean canon: ‘Cry “Havoc”, and let slip the dogs of war.’ For to cry havoc is to invoke a reversal, an infernal version of what a ‘just’ war, or any ‘just’ series of actions, might be; it is to install the lord of misrule upon the throne, and to deny all logic to retribution – for a logic of retribution, whatever we may think about it, is at the heart of many of Shakespeare’s plays. We refer to it now in terms related to Jacobean revenge; but in Shakespeare at least there are subtler influences at work, not least the question of what might happen to a State where there is a continual interchange of vengeance.5 For vengeance – Ate – can never be satisfied; but just retribution is the realm of the law. Even so, the law is modern and recent; revenge is sweet and ancient; and thus it comes about, to use a perhaps even older parlance, that justice needs to be tempered by mercy. What this means, historically or perhaps even anthropologically, is that any legal system needs to take into account both older avatars which may be more fixated on blood for blood, an eye for an eye, and more ‘enlightened’ systems of thought, which take a longer view and realise that stability, allimportant stability, cannot be restored by a continual – and potentially and in all too many cases escalating – system of exchange. ‘Quartered with the hands of war’: an impossible interpretative conundrum. ‘Quartered’ as in ‘placed in military housing’; or as in ‘divided violently in quarters’, to hang, draw and quarter? ‘The hands of war’? Those soldiers, or perhaps mercenaries, who serve war as its

­40    The Literature of Pity handmen; or the ‘hands of war’ in a synecdochic sense, ‘at the hands of war’, in a situation therefore where they have no other choice, no recourse? All of these, of course: in Shakespeare there is no absence of plenitude of meaning; all of these senses packed tight together as a combined indeterminate yet all too resonant signifier of the fate of those who are abandoned by pity, of those who are left at the cold ‘mercy’ of the fell winds. In Act III scene v of Timon of Athens (1608), Alcibiades arrives at the gates of potential hospitality and needs to plead for admittance and for, as it were, the ‘hearing of his case’.6 The senators he encounters have just been having an intriguing discussion, which includes the lines ‘The fault’s / Bloody; ’tis necessary he should die. / Nothing emboldens sin so much as mercy.’7 Onto this brief scenario, wherein it is announced that mercy should not be exercised because it would serve pour encourager les autres, arrives Alcibiades, who immediately – and unknowingly according to the dramatic irony of the play and of this scene in particular – proceeds to invoke exactly – or more or less so, if we proceed for the moment on the supposition that pity and mercy are cognate terms – the value and indeed ‘virtue’ of the quality which they are busy subordinating to the more immediate purposes of the State. These purposes are, of course, to preserve stability at all costs, which involves preserving borders and boundaries, for if these borders and boundaries are not preserved, then where will it all end? In a kind of soft chaos, in a ‘state’ – as a condition rather than as a polity – where nothing is any longer clear, where mere tears, mere emotions, mere feelings, can wash away the severe requirements of consistency, of preservation, of longevity, of the never-ending illusion of the eternality of the State, which would also be, in Freudian terms, the substance of the illusion that the ego is eternal, resistant to erosion and encroachment, and can never die.8 But Alcibiades is here to challenge this supposition, albeit from a position of weakness; but then, what other position of challenge is there to the law other than from the position of weakness? For pity is always involved here, in assessing and judging the relative positions of strength and weakness. Apparent weakness may be strength: think of the contemporary metaphor of ‘pester power’, or think more generally of the power that the weakness of children has over their parents. It is arguable that it is this very weakness, this dependency, which is the root of all arrogation, all pride, and thus all conflict; in the urge to protect the weak, in that vulnerable womb arises the need for power, the desire to protect that which potentially suffers; and whether that potential sufferer is the child itself or one’s self as child becomes immaterial in the darkness of the cave, within the protection of the camp-fire.

Shakespeare on Pity    ­41

Alcibiades says: I am an humble suitor to your virtues; For pity is the virtue of the law, And none but tyrants use it cruelly.

Much has been said on the complex use of the term ‘virtue’ here; perhaps it does indeed mean, as is sometimes said, ‘characteristic excellence’, or distinguishing mark, although in either case the question would be of whether ‘the law’ here is meant in a general or a specific sense – ‘the law’, or ‘this law’. But at all events the interesting word here for our purposes is ‘it’: does the ‘it’ refer to the law, or does it refer to pity? This may seem an arcane debate, but it would seem to raise the possibility that pity itself might be ‘used’ ‘cruelly’, and we know from others of Shakespeare’s plays – The Merchant of Venice (1597), for example – that this is an ever-present possibility.9 However, time for these reflections is always far too short: we need to move on to what is perhaps the greatest of Shakespeare’s plays of pity, King Lear (1606). For pity in Lear is everywhere. It is most obviously part of our complex mixture of feelings towards Lear himself, and here we become engaged with the several meanings of pity that we have already adumbrated. For of course we do feel pity for Lear when, deranged and at the end of his tether, he comes to some kind of ­realisation – too late, always too late – of the terrible mistake he has made. We feel it as we might feel it for ourselves if when, many years later, it comes to us that in a moment of madness or sublime arrogance, whatever leads to an awful misprision, we made an error which will never go away, which will go on – has indeed been going on – to distort all the lives of those nearest to us. Primarily ourselves.10 But we feel pity for Lear in another sense too: we pity him for his foolishness; this is by no means the same as sympathising with him. He has made a mistake – his misunderstanding of those closest to him, his misunderstanding of the nature of love and its evidences – on a point where we cannot follow him; we do not, as an audience, say yes, I could do that; we stand aside instead in amazement and pity for Lear, not for his tragic hubris, although that is here, but for his sheer folly. It is not as though he has made a mistake that any of us could make; it is that he has made a mistake which, we believe (almost certainly wrongly), none of us could possibly have made. And thus: we pity him. But pity in Lear is spread more broadly than this; we have space only to consider one or two examples here. Here is Cordelia in Act IV scene vii commiserating with her father on his mistreatment at the hands of her infernal sisters:

­42    The Literature of Pity Had you not been their father, these white flakes Did challenge pity of them. Was this a face To be oppos’d against the warring winds? To stand against the deep dread-bolted thunder?11

And so it is not only the family relation that enjoins pity; it is Lear’s sheer age and infirmity – but thus, of course, the already dual operation of pity becomes again redoubled. There is a fine line here: we may feel entitled to pity if we are maltreated by our loved ones, but this is, despite the philosophical arguments I have mentioned above, not the same as feeling entitled to pity merely because of our physical condition. It could be argued that it is precisely in this operation of pity that one of the crucial faultlines – and thus mainsprings – of action in Lear inheres: is Lear to be pitied because he has been betrayed and is thus to be seen as a victim; or is he to be pitied – and thus in a way contemned – because he has committed a fatal abuse of power, for the results of which we can hold only him to blame? We cannot say, and neither can Lear: Where have I been? Where am I? Fair day light? I am mightily abus’d. I should ev’n die with pity To see another thus. I know not what to say. I will not swear these are my hands: let’s see, I feel this pin prick. Would I were assur’d Of my condition.

Lear is here disorientated, deranged; to put it another way, he is out of his mind. By this I do not merely mean to suggest that he is mad, but more that he is imagining himself as an other: his body, indeed, as other to himself, the identity of which must needs be subjected to a pin-prick; but more the ‘other’ which is his perception of his victimised self, in the ‘company’ of which he can allow himself to experience the pity that is, surely, self-pity, the experience of what it is like to be suffering because of a decision which, in the end and even through the mists of denial, one knows, or at least suspects, to have been one’s own. Albany, that ambiguous figure of stability and over-sweet words, has the last word, when the dead bodies of Goneril and Regan are produced: This judgement of the heavens, that makes us tremble, Touches us not with pity.12

And perhaps that is so, or it has to be so; for fully to realise the consequences of the convulsions which the State has undergone would be to endanger the very establishment of that State in the first place, and that

Shakespeare on Pity    ­43

at all costs must not be allowed; and thus pity must be banished. It is a backward-looking, again a weakening emotion that has no place in the world which we should not hesitate to characterise, even in Shakespeare, of modernity.13 Yet pity, against all the odds, will return. It returns, perhaps most famously of all, in Macbeth (1606), where Macbeth muses on the potential murder of Duncan, in the speech which begins ‘If it were done when ’tis done, then ’twere well / It were done quickly.’ In this soliloquy, as in all of Shakespeare’s soliloquies, the character is inspecting the contents of his mind, or perhaps better of his imagination: he is checking on the mental cargo, reckoning up the odds, and in the process discovering the images – sometimes hidden even from him until the present moment – that best address, or are formed by, the current circumstances – unless perhaps, of course, they have been there all along. Certainly the image of pity that emerges later in this speech gives every appearance of having ‘been there all along’, and as in previous examples it takes its birth from a consideration of justice, whatever that may here mean, and proceeds from there:          This even-handed justice Commends th’ingredience of our poison’d chalice To our own lips. He’s here in double trust: First, as I am his kinsman and his subject, Strong both against the deed; then, as his host, Who should against his murtherer shut the door, Not bear the knife myself. Besides, this Duncan Hath borne his faculties so meek, hath been So clear in his great office, that his virtues Will plead like angels, trumpet-tongu’d against The deep damnation of his taking-off; And pity, like a naked new-born babe, Striding the blast, or heaven’s cherubin, hors’d Upon the sightless couriers of the air, Shall blow the horrid deed in every eye, That tears shall drown the wind.14

The mention of ‘even-handed justice’ is, of course, deeply ironic: what Macbeth is contemplating is anything but even-handed, and he has no perceptible intention of downing the ‘poison’d chalice’ himself. And thus we confront a curious spectacle in the lines that follow. Is Macbeth genuinely assessing the various arguments against killing Duncan – for they are indeed compelling – or is he rather, in an amazed fashion, discovering for himself just how deep his ambition runs, if he can indeed counter these excellent arguments against murder?

­44    The Literature of Pity The soliloquy can obviously be delivered in either way, and no doubt in many more – another method would be to see Macbeth as here in some sense fascinated by the extent of his own depravity, or perhaps better, by the depravity of what he is now seeing as the other who – apparently – dwells within him, and appears all too willing to ‘break out’; whether to do Macbeth’s will or in fact oddly to countermand it is not clear. Justice and murder: it is within this context that pity makes its appearance, ‘like a naked new-born babe’. Critics have made a lot of the strangeness of this image, but perhaps it is not strange at all.15 Macbeth is searching for an alternative to his own mode of self-analysis, for it is clear that that analysis will lead nowhere; he is horribly skilled in the arts of internal debate, this is both his strength and his doom. But pity might here represent a different kind of strength, one that can survive the utmost opposition, that can stride the blast, and so represents a combination of innocence and violence which Macbeth can only envy. Macbeth can be violent, this he knows; but what he also knows is that to pursue this course of violence will sink him deeper and deeper in the mire. So pity is here portrayed as an emotion that can rise above this sinking, that can somehow avoid being touched by, being trammelled by, the calls of the earthly. It is not clear, and can never be clear from the phraseology, whether the ‘or’ in line 22 should allow us to liken pity to the cherubim, or whether Macbeth is here searching for a different, parallel image; but what is clear is that pity is here associated with a kind of obscuring of direct vision. Under other circumstances we might say that the obscuring power of pity is through tears; here it seems to be more through a combination of tears – as offered to us in line 25 – with the power of the wind; and what the wind tends to blow is sand. And thus we could move directly – unless something has got in our eye – from this uncanny image of the ‘naked new-born babe’ who nonetheless ‘strides’ to Freud on the sandman in his essay on the uncanny.16 Tears and sand; clarification and obfuscation; cleansing and grit – all combined here, we might say, in the image of pity. Pity can wash away our sins; but pity can also come, striding, to remind us – perhaps in our dreams – of what we have done, of all that cannot be cleansed, of the blood that cannot be washed away. Pity may appear to be a weak emotion; but it persists, it does not go away easily, it remains in every reminder of a deed ill-done, in every flap of the tent in the refugee camp, in every cry for the vengeance of the weak on those who arrogate control to themselves; it can move mountains, drain oceans, or so the inner wish would go, the wish that there be some riposte to power, some longdelayed fulfilment of the startling proposition that the meek may inherit the earth.

Shakespeare on Pity    ­45

One of Shakespeare’s sonnets also powerfully invokes the notion of pity: Your love and pity doth th’impression fill Which vulgar scandal stamp’d upon my brow, For what care I who calls me well or ill, Do you o’er-green my bad, my good allow? You are my all the world, and I must strive To know my shames and praises from your tongue; None else to me, nor I to none alive, That my steel’d sense or changes right or wrong. In so profound abysm I throw all care Of others’ voices, that my adder’s sense To critic and to flatterer stopped are. Mark how with my neglect I do dispense:   You are so strongly in my purpose bred   That all the world besides methinks are dead.17

Here love and pity are conjoined, as we have seen them to be before, and treated as reservoirs of feeling which ‘fill’ the lack signified by the ‘impression’, the hole or gap caused by scandal; the scandal has, of course, a different origin from the love and the pity, and is presumably the effect of a general censure whereas love and pity, in this particular case, are within the ‘personal’ sphere, the ameliorative effect of a set of feelings which are purely interpersonal, between two people. Pity (with love) has the power to override the bad effects of outside opinion; it can deliver a kind of absolution, a fulfilled opposition to calumny. The lover here has the capacity, in a marvellously resonant phrase, to ‘o’er-green’ the erosions of the wicked, whether the ‘wicked’ is an external force or something growing out from within the soul. But the most important point to which this returns us is that which concerns the relation between love and pity themselves: incompatible in the view of some thinkers, as we have seen, yet here aspects of the same urge towards redemption. And yet one may continue to wonder: is what is being said here that pity can play a part in a genuine redemption, or are we to take this ‘o’er-greening’ as the mark of a substitute, of a palliative whereby sins are forgiven but only within the falling of a general canopy of forgiveness? Pity and compassion; pity and mercy; now, perhaps pity and forgiveness. Yet we might find a source here of alarm: if we are to know only ‘shames and praises’ from ‘your’ tongue, from the tongue of one other, then we are subscribing to a separation from the general world, from the body politic; pity becomes purely a mode of private recovery, and will find its allotted place only within a privacy that is immediately

­46    The Literature of Pity countered and yet developed by the remarkable image of the ‘profound abysm’, which here becomes the location where all worldly repute is cast, dissipated. Such pity as is depicted here, it would seem, is sufficient to counter all other forces; and yet if we regard it as such, then surely we become immune to all strength of general opinion and leave the common world to dwell in another place where all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well. Perhaps this is the message of Christ’s tears and those of his mother; but perhaps also these varying treatments of pity point us again towards the function of a ‘social emotion’ as well as to the potential hallucinations of utter privacy, for here even if that privacy is shared between two people, it might so easily take on the form of a folie à deux; which might not involve two people at all, but rather one person and her/his unassailable projection; matters on which Shakespeare leaves us, or we leave him, to ruminate.

Chapter 5

The Eighteenth Century

There is, no doubt, any number of routes that one might take through the evolution of the term ‘pity’ during the eighteenth century, but, as I have said in the Preface, this is not strictly a historical study, and so I have chosen three texts, William Collins’s ‘Ode to Pity’ (1746) and two novels, Tobias Smollett’s Roderick Random (1748) and Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones (1749) through which to trace elements of this evolution. The works of Samuel Richardson, and the whole flood of fiction (and tears) that we associate with the literature of feeling and sentiment, of which Henry Mackenzie’s The Man of Feeling (1771) is the prime example, might have provided equally interesting evidence, but space is, as always, constricted.1 What first needs to be said is that, on the whole, pity is associated on this terrain with notions of charity, although the relations between them are treated in diverse ways, often dependent on precisely the ambiguity of pity which I have already tried to outline, and therefore in these cases on the social position of the writer, and on his or her conception of whether it is appropriate or inappropriate to feel pity for the disadvantaged. This in turn involves the social location of the presumed reader: are we supposed to feel ourselves aligned with those who have the capacity, or even the leisure, to feel pity; or are we meant to experience what it might feel like to be pitied ourselves, in which case we will naturally align ourselves with those who are to be pitied, those suffering, often, from the complicated experience of not fully understood social change or, of course, from the effects of societal prejudice, whether this be based in gender or other inequalities. It is again the word itself with which I am concerned: its uses, its trajectory, its implications and ramifications. Collins’s ode2 provides a good starting point, because it is unabashedly allegorical and seeks, as it were, to locate pity amid a pantheon of anthropomorphised emotions. It begins thus:

­48    The Literature of Pity O Thou, the Friend of Man assign’d, With balmy Hands his Wounds to bind,   And charm his frantic Woe: When first Distress with Dagger keen Broke forth to waste his destin’d Scene,   His wild unsated Foe! By Pella’s Bard, a magic Name, By all the griefs his Thoughts could frame,   Receive my humble Rite: Long, Pity, let the Nations view Thy sky-worn Robes of tend’rest Blue,   And Eyes of dewy Light!

And so pity here takes on a role which we might assign as that of a kind of battlefield doctor, and this is not irrelevant because throughout the poem there is an alternation between what one might consider to be the more private emotions and the more public ones. We are in a war here; a war which, in the first stanza, is not exactly clear because of the ambiguities of Collins’s use of the term ‘his’, but which nevertheless bespeaks a monstrous clash of forces and therefore the need for the ‘binding of wounds’. Pity is a salve; it serves to render the texture of otherwise violent and savage life amenable. It is thus a function of ‘civilisation’ (it is interesting to note that the name of the ancient city of Pella is said by some to have given rise to the later word polis, which in itself summarises a whole set of developments from antiquity into a more modern, more democratic view of the State or the nation – we touch here again on the complex relations between pity, the State and modernity). And so pity serves to distinguish the potential, the aspiration, of a community of ‘Nations’, and it does so in terms which remind us clearly of Christendom as the ‘natural’ home of such feelings; it seeks to distinguish Christianity as the natural bearer of pity, most significantly through the robes of ‘tend’rest Blue’, those same robes which we have already seen linked with the Virgin Mary, and which thus serve to remind us of the enduring image of the pietà, the pity felt for the victim of violence, the grieving of the mother over the lost son. The history of the words ‘grieving’ and ‘grief’, it perhaps also needs to be said, is itself interesting. Not originally referring to an emotional state, they seem to have mainly referred instead to the possibility of retribution or recompense: the ‘grievous wound’ is not one characterised by its especial severity, but rather by the way in which it bespeaks an obvious need for some response, some manifestation of justice. The grievous wound is one which speaks out; it possesses a strange, phantomatic articulacy, to

The Eighteenth Century    ­49

be used against its perpetrator (be that an individual, a State, or indeed a god); what it speaks is a ‘grievance’, such a grievance as might be brought to a monarch or governor as a demand for justice. However: But wherefore need I wander wide To old Ilissus’ distant Side,   Deserted Stream, and mute? Wild Arun too has heard thy Strains, And Echo, ’midst my native Plains,   Been sooth’d by Pity’s Lute.

Plato walked by the Ilissus, so we are told, but probably the reference here is less specific; it is more to the lack of need to resort to a classical past when examples of pity – of its operation, of why it is needed – can be all too readily found closer to home, on the banks, for example, of the River Arun – in Sussex. What is perhaps most interesting, however, in this stanza is the reference to ‘mute’, and all that follows from that. Whatever may have been signified in antiquity by examples of pity, they now, it appears, run silent: we may take this as a small emblem precisely of Collins’s turn towards the ‘romantic’, and even more towards a notion of the ‘vernacular’ – not necessarily, as we see here, a ‘vernacular of language’, but more a ‘vernacular of culture’ – and in this respect he is of a piece with the major turn in the mid-eighteenth century towards a focus on contemporary life and conditions to which classical examples may have at best only a tangential reference.3 We might say that they, the voices from the mighty past, may now be mute; but the Arun, in its alternative antiquity but also in its continuing presence and perhaps indeed in its ‘fluency’, is listening. The word ‘Echo’ here carries a wide – indeed one might also say ‘wild’ – variety of meanings: it recalls to us again the terrible myth of Echo and Narcissus, an example of a place where the call, or cry, of pity may never be satisfied, where self-centred violence may never be overcome; at the same time it suggests, if only obliquely, that although the voice of the traditionally ancient may be ‘mute’, it nevertheless underpins, in the form of an echo, our current cultural dealings with pity; and it draws attention to the similarity and simultaneously the difference between past and present. There first the Wren thy Myrtles shed On gentlest Otway’s infant Head,   To Him thy Cell was shown; And while he sung the female heart, With Youth’s soft Notes unspoil’d by Art,   Thy Turtles mix’d their own.

­50    The Literature of Pity What we have here is an encomium to Thomas Otway, dramatist most famed for The Orphan (1680) and Venice Preserv’d (1682), plays which have hardly stood the test of time but which allow Collins to see the dramatist as, as it were, the earthly avatar of pity, of a poetry of gentleness (some would now say sentimentality) which underlines the connection between pity and the feminine that Collins has first advanced in his invocation of the Virgin Mary.4 At the same time, a further and related connection is made between pity and the child, the ‘infant Head’; and this sequence is completed by the idea that Pity has a ‘Cell’, and thus the image of a monkish retreat is conjured (although, as we shall see in the next stanza, ‘monkish’ is not the right word; although the gender of Pity has not until now been specified, it will be, and Pity is without doubt a ‘Maid’). ‘Retreat’: we could well equally refer to the eighteenth-century trope of ‘retirement’: living a life of ‘retirement’ signifies precisely a refusal to tangle with the scenes of violence that we encountered in the first stanza. Thus we may feel that there is a bifurcation in the field of operation of pity: on the one hand there is the possibility of going forth wielding magic ‘balm’; on the other the potential to retire from the field of battle, from the wider world in general – we are surely reminded here of the whole trope of the hermit in this part of the eighteenth century, both in literature and also as a part of practical garden planning. The retreat of the hermit falls under the heading of the ‘on behalf of’: what the hermit, as well, of course, as the occupants of monasteries and nunneries all over the world and within the tenets of many different religions, is practising is a solitary life and the habit of prayer on behalf of others. Here, however, there is a further complexity. Otway may, it is suggested to us, have been infused from an early age with pity, but there is a double level, a double register, going on: while Otway is singing, Pity (or at least her ‘Turtles’) is singing too. Come, Pity, come, by Fancy’s Aid, Ev’n now my Thoughts, relenting Maid,   Thy Temple’s Pride design: Its Southern Site, its Truth compleat Shall raise a wild Enthusiast Heat,   In all who view the Shrine.

Pella was built, we hear, on a ‘Southern Site’, and is, or was, replete with temples: perhaps Collins is here envisaging a temple to Eleos, the Greek god of pity, although of course the phrases ‘by Fancy’s Aid’ and ‘my Thoughts’ make it all too clear that this prospect of the reincarnation of pity, a kind of ceremonial homage to her, is unlikely to take root in

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the world of the real. But what is most remarkable about this stanza, one which figures in analysis by a number of critics, is the mention of ‘wild Enthusiast Heat’;5 for this, surely, runs against all the references to gentleness and retreat which have underpinned the personification of Pity in the rest of the poem. One critic comments that ‘the constructive potential of an externally directed impulse is compromised as the feeling loses identity and collapses into blank, though warm enthusiasm’.6 Whatever the vicissitudes of the word ‘enthusiasm’, this seems not to capture the tone of Collins’s comments here, which are surely not about ‘warmth’, but about ‘heat’: not about a generalised feeling of benevolence but rather about righteous indignation. Pity, as Blake will later put it, is inseparable from wrath. It has to be allowed, though, that this is an extraordinary moment in the ode; one where, perhaps, the writer is himself at a loss to explain why pity should be forced to retreat, to go into hiding, before the pressure of other rougher emotions. And this is perhaps something of what he, haltingly and fleetingly, wishes to celebrate in the appurtenances of the imaginary temple: There Picture’s Toils shall well relate, How Chance, or hard involving Fate,   O’er mortal Bliss prevail: The Buskin’d Muse shall near her stand, And sighing prompt her tender Hand,   With each disastrous Tale. There let me oft, retir’d by Day, In Dreams of Passion melt away,   Allow’d with Thee to dwell: There waste the mournful Lamp of night, Till, Virgin, Thou again delight   To hear a British shell!

Pity and melancholy; retreat and meditation; ineffectuality and ­retirement – all of these motifs are here, yet Pity is not necessarily consigned to her cell for all time, there will come an awakening, Collins seems to be saying, when Pity will be transformed and will again become what perhaps she has always been, albeit in temporary hiding: an avenging angel. The truth of the wounds will speak again; wounds will speak truth again. Perhaps pity can be brought to life by ‘Pictures’ of her; or perhaps by writing of her, by performing the necessary ministry of echo. Turning now to Smollett, we find that he takes just such a strenuous view of pity. This is hardly surprising: across all his work, we can see that this hardened ship’s surgeon is little disposed to imagine that somehow the gentler emotions can survive and move us if they do not shape up to the harsh – sometimes in his work, the truly dreadful – c­ ircumstances

­52    The Literature of Pity amid which we have to live. Roderick Random, like most of Smollett’s others, is certainly a picaresque novel; but we as readers justly suspect that the scenarios, the regions through which the picaresque hero has to move, are chosen at least as much for their portrayal of life in extremis as for what they might or might not reveal about his – in this case Roderick’s – character; it is doubtful whether any of Smollett’s novels constitutes a Bildungsroman in any obvious sense. In one way, although the comparison may seem a little far-fetched, they remind more of what is to come in the next century with the lurid culmination and simultaneous expiry of the first wave of Gothic in C.R. Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer (1820), where one feels, from page to page, that things could hardly get much worse; but then, albeit in the superficially jovial fashion which so effectively masks Smollett’s anger, they do. Yet perhaps the most pertinent passage in Roderick Random comes not from the novel itself but from the Preface, where Smollett is commenting in part on that distinguished predecessor work, Gil Blas (1715–35): The disgraces of Gil Blas, are for the most part, such as rather excite mirth than compassion; he himself laughs at them; and his transitions from distress to happiness, or at least ease, are so sudden, that neither the reader has time to pity him, nor himself to be acquainted with affliction. – This conduct, in my opinion, not only deviates from probability, but prevents that generous indignation, which ought to animate the reader, against the sordid and vicious disposition of the world.7

This passage has been much quoted, but not usually in terms of its inclusion of the term ‘pity’ – which, in fairness, may well be there as a sop to the Aristotelian canon. However, the conjunction of terms is significant. Pity requires time: that may be so. But more than that: if time for pity is not allowed, then we may find that we cannot enter into that spirit of what Smollett marvellously calls ‘generous indignation’, which is the source of our potential ‘animation’ as opponents of the sordid and the vicious. ‘Generous indignation’; perhaps ‘righteous indignation’ is a better known, although by now virtually clichéd term. How much more descriptive is ‘generous indignation’, encapsulating as it does the absolute continuity between our disgust at sordid and vicious behaviour – and here, as always, Smollett is referring as much to the behaviour of institutions as to that of individuals, as will his admirer Charles Dickens after him – and the way in which the realisation of such disgust – slow as it may necessarily be in coming, Smollett reminds us – is contiguous with the pity we will feel, even if we are sometimes slow (again slow) to admit

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it in ourselves – because it is a weakening? Perhaps; but here Smollett is saying that it can also be a feature, an outcropping, of strength. And this idea is reflected throughout Roderick Random. In our terms, it appears most frequently and most closely in the deeply practical bent which Smollett gives to pity, particularly by repeatedly coupling it with the notion of help – or, as it appears in the text, of ‘assistance’. Here, for example, is the plight of Roderick’s mother, brought abruptly to childbed: The violence of my mother’s affliction had such an effect on her constitution, that she was immediately seized with the pains of childbed; and had not an old maid-servant, to whom she was very dear, afforded her pity and assistance, at the hazard of incurring my grandfather’s displeasure, she and the innocent fruit of her womb must have fallen miserable victims to his rigour and inhumanity.8

‘Pity and assistance’: here the mere exercise of an emotion would be insufficient; it must be accompanied by practical steps. Pity is in constant danger of impotence: when we see the imagery of pity writ large, then aside from the stark immediacy of the pietà we also see the ambiguous image of tears being shed at a distance, a mourning over a whole condition of the world which cannot be alleviated, where the ‘balm’ is of no effect. And so we are returned to the idea of seeing pity as operating both in proximity and at a distance: it could be seen to participate in a fullblooded flow of passion but also to be standing back from what might constitute passional involvement. There is in some aspects, some manifestations, of pity an element of reserve; where anger, rage, indeed lust may operate in the almost literal ‘heat’ of the moment, there is in the operation of pity a kind of pallor, a turning away even at the moment of greatest need: it may be that all rage is rage against one’s self, but this is certainly less obvious than the problematic absorption of pity, unredeemed by practical help, into self-pity, into the endless cycle of mourning. This insistence on the practical ‘translation’ of pity is something which Smollett traces throughout Roderick Random. For example, here is an episode where Random has, as usual, been traduced – or so he sees it – and reduced to indigence, his (strangely unblemished) character impugned by the effects of vices of which he claims, or feigns, ignorance: Thus I found myself, by the iniquity of mankind, in a much more deplorable condition than ever: for, though I had been formerly as poor, my reputation was without blemish, and my health unimpaired till now; – but at present my good name was lost, my money gone, my friends were alienated, my body

­54    The Literature of Pity infected by a distemper contracted in the course of an amour; and my faithful Strap, who alone could yield me pity and assistance, absent I knew not where.9

Of course, the full weight of Smollett’s strength of irony falls behind this. Random, like his other protagonists, occupies a position of extreme vividness in terms of the complexities of what we might mean by ‘knowledge’: at one level, he never fully realises, or at least admits, his own responsibility for the various plights in which he finds himself; at another, we as readers frequently exult in his own continuing exculpations. We exult when they fail, because there we see the failure of our own excuses and see that we are not alone in being found out in our prevarications; we exult when they succeed, because then we sense the possibility of success ourselves, that we might be able to prolong the moment of infantile omnipotence which sustains that part of the self which persists – and probably always will – in believing that we will never be ‘discovered’, that the secrets which we choose to hold will remain ours, even of course when, within written fiction, they are being laid ambiguously bare to a paying public.10 And so it is significant here that the only figure to whom Random can turn is his servant Strap (or rather, here in particular he cannot, but wishes he could), for Strap is the only listener to his stories who is, by virtue of his position, forced to believe them (or, again, to feign belief). As with the previous example, there is here a turning towards the underclass; here the underlying and ongoing presence of a mercenary transaction ensures at least the simulacrum of pity, and thus renders Random secure in the possibility that at least one person, despite the fact that he is in effect paid to do so, will believe his story and will offer ‘pity and assistance’. There is space only for one further example. These were hard terms; but not to be rejected by one who was turned out helpless and naked into the wide world, without a friend to pity or assist her.11

This is part of the history of the subsidiary character Miss Williams, and therefore not directly in the language of Roderick himself, but the import is the same: that pity per se is powerless without concomitant ‘assistance’, that the ways of the world, as Smollett interprets them – under the pressure, of course, of the rampant early mercantilism characteristic of early and mid-eighteenth British society – dictate that pity be translated into practical action, whether the wellspring from which that pity derives be genuine or not.12

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‘Genuine or not’? Who can tell, for this is part of the general consideration of the passions and their expression.13 It is not as though it is possible to mount some kind of absolute distinction between real pity or mercy and their surrogate equivalents, any more than it is possible to tell whether repeated worship at the shrine of tears is itself ‘genuine’ or mere repetition. One might call to mind, sheerly for its metaphorical force, the strange fact that there are some medical conditions which prohibit the shedding of tears, and wonder how would this consort with the notion of the stigmata – would it be possible in Christian theology to bear the wounds of Christ without shedding blood? Before turning to Fielding, which I will do only very briefly, it is necessary to bring up Samuel Johnson’s most famous comment on pity: Pity is not natural to man. Children are always cruel. Pity is acquired and improved by the cultivation of reason. We may have uneasy sensations from seeing a creature in distress, without pity; for we have not pity unless we wish to relieve them.14

There are, as so often in Johnson, very complex issues at work here behind the bluntness. For the relation between reason and a certain level of education is not new within eighteenth-century thinking; but what Johnson seems to be talking about here is more a type of what we would now refer to as ‘emotional literacy’. We may have ‘uneasy sensations’, and it would be difficult to believe that the words ‘creature in distress’ are not designed to emphasise the inarticulacy of such primitive sympathies; but pity is a more elevated matter altogether, and here we may again trace the possibility of pity being an ethereal emotion, partaking in such ineffectual tears as angels weep when they see what brutish enslavements and ravages are going on below them, albeit so far from them that they can offer no possibility of relief, only of a divine benevolence in regard to the everyday ways of life. But Johnson immediately counters this while at the same time developing it, by asserting that pity, to be ‘real’, whatever that may mean, must be accompanied by an urge towards relief; and thus we return to the relation between pity and charity, on which topic Johnson has this to say (of the wife of Tim Warner): She daily exercises her benevolence by pitying every misfortune that happens to every family within her circle of notice; she is in hourly terrors lest one should catch cold in the rain, and another be frighted by the high wind. Her charity she shews by lamenting that so many poor wretches should languish in the streets, and by wondering what the great can think on that they do so little good with such large estates.15

­56    The Literature of Pity If we were to think of pity in class terms (and it would, as I have been increasingly suggesting, always be difficult not to), then here we have a clear – clear within the very terms of the all too obvious savagery of its satire – assessment of the position of the eighteenth-century bourgeoisie within a wider social structure. If we were to translate into psychological terms, then the issue would be about the move towards assuming that ‘effectual pity’ (for that is the term which we now appear to need) must always be the prerogative of the other; we ourselves lack the capacity to be effectual, and thus the emotional terrain of pity is deserted, replaced by the petty simulacra which Johnson, astute as ever, here describes. ‘Effectual pity’: a pity which is defined by its effects, its outcomes; not very far indeed from charity, or therefore from the repeated questioning of where the springs of this pity come from. It could be argued that it does not matter, and that (and it would be a philosophical consequence) would mean that when interrogating pity – and this is a process which goes on increasingly in social terms as we move towards the nineteenth and twentieth centuries – we are required to come up, in increasingly new ways, against the very notion of altruism.16 When acting towards, or moving towards, the unfortunate, are we instead completing a cycle within ourselves? But more to the point, whatever the conclusion (and there will probably be none) of this debate: does it matter? Is pity to be judged within our emotions, or is it better judged within a kind of calculus of benevolence? In his Preface to Joseph Andrews (1742), Fielding suggests that ‘great vices are the proper objects of our detestation, smaller faults, of our pity; but affectation appears to me the only true source of the Ridiculous’.17 Hard-headed Fielding is here mainly focused on the sins of affectation, of foppery certainly, but more widely on the roots and consequences of striving to appear that which (most notably in class terms, or in terms of the laid-down order of society) you are not; but the definition of pity is also interesting, as pertaining only to ‘smaller faults’. The implication is that these faults are not worthy of the grander reactions of ‘detestation’ (for which we might read ‘hatred’), and so pity is reserved for a lesser species: such that, perhaps, there might indeed be some intermingling between self and other. Whereas detestation entirely separates the object from the subject (self-detestation is psychologically possible, but only in the most extreme of cases), pity recognises the potentially salving operation of the mantra ‘There but for the grace of God go I.’ Pity here has to go with the hovering possibility of self-forgiveness, of allowing one’s self to escape from the trap, of allowing others their minor sins even as we might wish to allow ourselves our own.

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And so exactly to Tom Jones, and in particular to the description of Squire Allworthy’s general cast of mind, part of which occurs at the beginning of Chapter VII of the second book and which beautifully describes the potentially distorting effects of pity. We are here within the contemplation of Mrs Allworthy’s affection for Tom: For such was the compassion which inhabited Mr Allworthy’s mind, that nothing but the steel of justice could ever subdue it. To be unfortunate in any respect was sufficient, if there was no demerit to counterpoise it, to turn the scale of that good man’s pity, and to engage his friendship and his benefaction.18

We might fairly consider quite what demerit, given those which appear sufficiently obvious to the reader on the part of the dreadful Master Blifil, would serve to compensate for the supreme if insensate justice of the Squire’s disposition; but the point is that his mind is governed by the ‘steel’ – the scales – of justice, and therefore the utmost point of this undoubtedly ‘just’ magistrate is to pity anybody who appears to be at the mercy of an inverse favouritism. Here is precisely where pity comes in, but it is simultaneously where it reveals itself as potentially shortsighted. If justice is blind, then pity, according to certain interpretations, is myopic: it sees only short-term need, it does not have its eye on the eventual gain of the masses. This, of course, is precisely the shape of the argument which governments the world over have made, and continue to make, against the provision of aid which might ‘fall into the wrong hands’: help for the starving goes only to feed the militias – we are all familiar with that argument, if ‘argument’ rather than proclamation it can properly be called. The narrator continues: Henceforward he saw every appearance of virtue in the youth [Blifil] through the magnifying end, and viewed all his faults with the glass inverted, so that they became scarce perceptible. And this, perhaps, the amiable temper of pity may make commendable; but the next step the weakness of human nature alone must excuse: for he no sooner perceived that preference which Mrs Blifil gave to Tom, than that poor youth (however innocent) began to sink in his affections as he rose in hers.

The phrase ‘however innocent’ of course harks back to the issue of irony in Roderick Random; but, leaving that aside, the question raised here is of the extent to which pity may be a compensatory emotion, and therefore has to do with guilt. It is, of course, not true that Allworthy himself has caused any damage to young Blifil; but he suspects that his nearest and dearest have, or at least desire to, and this is what animates

­58    The Literature of Pity his sense of pity – for him the abused (the abjected, in Kristeva’s term) must always be the object of pity regardless of their sins or crimes, and so the issue of whether that abuse be deserved or not does not dilute the feeling. The quality of mercy, we might say, is not strained – although there are many interpretations of this adage. Fielding’s separations among the various consequences of pity of this type may be suspect; but it is certainly the case that he describes well some of the vicissitudes of pity in the present day. The most obvious example would occur in the whole realm of animal rights: it is of no consequence, on the one hand, to animal rights campaigners that many favoured species kill other animals (of course they do, it is what they do, they are carnivores); but neither does it ever seem clear to such campaigners that they focus merely on the most sentimentalised of creatures. Who has ever campaigned on behalf of the greatest killer of mankind in the whole of human history: the mosquito? However: I will end this chapter with a final quotation from Tom Jones, which introduces and reinforces what we might call ‘inverse pity’ – pity of the weaker for the stronger – while at the same time tying closer the curious bonds between pity and love. This is Sophia Weston reflecting on her feelings for Tom: When Sophia was well satisfied of the violent passion which tormented poor Jones, and no less certain that she herself was its object, she had not the least difficulty in discovering the true cause of his present behaviour. This highly endeared him to her, and raised in her mind two of the best affections which any lover can wish to raise in a mistress – these were esteem and pity – for sure the most outrageously rigid among her sex will excuse her pitying a man whom she saw miserable on her own account . . . In short, all which esteem, gratitude, and pity, can inspire in such towards an agreeable man; indeed – all which the nicest delicacy can allow. In a word, she was in love with him to distraction.19

Here the relations between pity and love are arguably different from anything we have seen before; but they are relations that we will see again.

Chapter 6

Blake: ‘Pity would be no more . . .’

Pity; the weak; the strong. When thinking of Blake’s emblematic writings on pity, it would be impossible to begin anywhere other than with the two remarkable poems in the Songs of Innocence and of Experience which deal with pity in perhaps the most sustained, certainly the most memorable way: ‘The Divine Image’ from Songs of Innocence (1789) and ‘The Human Abstract’ from Songs of Experience (1789–94). Here is ‘The Divine Image’: To Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love All pray in their distress; And to these virtues of delight Return their thankfulness. For Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love Is God, our father dear, And Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love Is Man, his child and care. For Mercy has a human heart, Pity a human face, And Love, the human form divine, And Peace, the human dress. Then every man, of every clime, That prays in his distress, Prays in the human form divine, Love, Mercy, Pity, Peace. And all must love the human form, In heathen, turk, or jew; Where Mercy, Love, & Pity dwell There God is dwelling too.1

And here, in a poetic highly redolent of the contemporary hymns by which he was so ambiguously influenced, Blake establishes pity as an essential element in the continuous transaction between the divine

­60    The Literature of Pity and the human that was the continuing basis of his theology. There is little here that is troublesome: pity, as a trait (one might even say as an abstract concept, but that would be confusing) is un-ironic, it is a quality which manifests itself as an attribute of our dealings with other people and thus necessarily with God. If there is a discordant tone struck by this poem, one which may take it momentarily beyond the kind of song that might be sung by Sunday-school children – albeit on Holy Thursday perhaps – it occurs only in the last stanza, where the potentially divisive question of belief and conversion is blandly and skilfully elided into a broader view of tolerance.2 But of course all of this – or much of it – changes when we place it alongside ‘The Human Abstract’, where, now separating it from its previous cohabitees in the human form divine – mercy, love and peace – Blake addresses the issue of pity directly: Pity would be no more If we did not make somebody Poor; And Mercy no more could be If all were as happy as we. And mutual fear brings peace, Till the selfish loves increase: Then Cruelty knits a snare, And spreads his baits with care. He sits down with holy fears, And waters the ground with tears; Then Humility takes its root Underneath his foot. Soon spreads the dismal shade Of Mystery over his head; And the Catterpiller and Fly Feed on the Mystery. And it bears the fruit of Deceit, Ruddy and sweet to eat; And the Raven his nest has made In its thickest shade. The Gods of the earth and sea Sought thro’ Nature to find this Tree; But their search was all in vain: There grows one in the Human Brain.3

There has been a huge amount of criticism of this poem, which I do not have the space to rehearse here.4 I want to emphasise only one point, which is that though Blake is here obviously developing a critique of hypocrisy, this critique originates in pity, and this is an argument which, I hope to show, Blake continued to develop throughout his work. But is

Blake: ‘Pity would be no more . . .’    ­61

this a critique, we might feel impelled to ask, of pity itself – and here is where matters begin to become complicated. Because, to put the point in the slightly different rhetoric of signs, signifiers, signification, what we have here is the first inkling of what a mobile signifier pity is to become for Blake. We have an indication of this in the very rhythms: where ‘Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love’ form, in ‘The Divine Image’, a stately quaternary – in the sense of both a group of four and also of a formal tetrameter – what we have here is an apparently jaunty trimetrical norm, replacing the hymnal tone with one which is far more that of the casual song-writer. Within this structure the term ‘pity’ itself hints at its own devaluation – or better, indeed, its revaluation in the service of a specific ideology. And the aetiology, the origins and progress of this ideology, is spelled out, it seems to me, with perfect clarity: to put it at its simplest, power is exercised through the corralling, appropriation and resignification of specific words – it is probably unnecessary to mention current political terms like ‘the big society’ for it to be obvious, although I suspect that David Cameron might disagree, that Marx and after him Louis Althusser were absolutely right: the capture of a State, the capture of an economy, is the capture of its preferred labels and their reassignation.5 Words, Blake repeatedly claims, may expand or contract, they may prove able to manifest something of the human form divine or they may shrink to the hardness, the opacity, of stones. He says as much in a brief passage from Visions of the Daughters of Albion (1793): Does the sun walk in glorious raiment on the secret floor Where the cold miser spreads his gold; or does the bright cloud drop On his stone threshold? does his eye behold the beam that brings Expansion to the eye of pity? or will he bind himself Beside the ox to thy hard furrow?6

Secrecy is the enemy of the expansive: it is the essence of capture, of repression, of the closure of the senses. Where the idea of pity, even the word ‘pity’, may be capable of an outward movement, of an embrace – a term to which Blake will return – it is equally possible that such a move may be negated by the ‘miser’ – and here I think we should not read the ‘miser’ as merely a hoarder of gold, because after all what Oothoon is here talking about, in this magnificent closing lamentation, is not the hoarding of money but the violent sequestration of human affections. What we have here, then, should actually be pictured as a struggle over signification: what – to take the particular case I am focusing on, although there are many others in Blake – will the term ‘pity’ come to mean; for the argument is surely that it has no fixed and permanent

­62    The Literature of Pity meaning, no exact selfhood, but is itself a site of contestation and struggle. To accept that we are merely given words, that we are the victims of a fixed structure of signifiers, would go counter to all that Blake claims about our power, for good or ill, to invest words with the meanings which most closely match our desires, and the simultaneous and stronger power of others to distort this process. In the case of pity, Blake develops this argument over the range of his Prophetic Books: I will look next at some passages from The First Book of Urizen (1794). Here, for example, is Urizen himself musing on his construction of his ‘books form’d of metals’, his ongoing attempt to subdue the fluxility of signification to the obdurate rule of law: ‘Lo! I unfold my darkness, and on This rock place with strong hand the Book Of eternal brass, written in my solitude: Laws of peace, of love, of unity, Of pity, compassion, forgiveness; Let each chuse one habitation, His ancient infinite mansion, One command, one joy, one desire, One curse, one weight, one measure, One King, one God, one Law’.7

This appears to be Urizen ‘musing’, but it might be more appropriate, if a little anachronistic, to read this passage in a Monty Python-esque tone of rising hysteria, culminating perhaps in somebody like the late Colonel Gaddafi asserting that he has been sent by Allah, and, by Allah, he is not going anywhere. However: in whatever tone one chooses, what is happening here is that Urizen is asserting the possibility of subduing any human quality to the rule of violent singularity. Pity is all very well, we might paraphrase, provided it knows its place. We might be reminded of one of the Proverbs of Hell: ‘The cistern contains: the fountain overflows.’8 What Urizenic order represents is a gigantic plumbing system installed to prevent overflow. There is a place in the ordered society for pity; but from that place it must never stray. These are what we might call ‘love laws’; an excellent place to find them described in brilliant detail is in Arundhati Roy’s 1997 novel, The God of Small Things: but back to The Book of Urizen. Here, on Plate 13, we have Los at his eternal work of binding Urizen down to limit his realm, and he appears almost to have succeeded when something happens: Los wept obscur’d with mourning, His bosom earthquak’d with sighs;

Blake: ‘Pity would be no more . . .’    ­63 He saw Urizen deadly black In his chains bound, & Pity began, In anguish dividing & dividing, For pity divides the soul . . .9

‘Pity divides the soul.’ Compassion weakens resolve at the very moment when we most need it. We all know the story, do we not: the hero finally has the villain at his mercy, but, precisely because he is the hero, he cannot perform the final act, he cannot perfect the execution – because to do so would mean that he is no longer truly heroic, he would have partially absorbed and been contaminated by villainy, by the obsession with repressive control and order of which he is trying to rid the world. His hand pauses; there is a sound of tearing cloth, or breaking glass; the villain has escaped to fight another day. Precisely, or almost precisely, what happens in The Book of Urizen, but the process goes through a number more twists, for it is this moment of pity, this divisive moment, within the space of which the female is born: All Eternity shudder’d at sight Of the first female now separate, Pale as a cloud of snow Waving before the face of Los. Wonder, awe, fear, astonishment Petrify the eternal myriads At the first female form now separate. They call’d her Pity, and fled.10

It is of course true that Blake’s attitudes towards women have occasioned, one might even say engendered, a great deal of criticism, some of it well-founded, some not.11 There are presumably two views one might take of a passage like this. One would be, based on that at least strange and perhaps rather appalling line ‘All Eternity shudder’d at sight’, that this is a strong expression of masculist fear, probably, as things turn out, based on womb envy; the other would be that it is a version of the Platonic, the forcible tearing apart of what has once been whole in order to produce dissimilarity and dialectic. Either way, what is most significant is that here we get, as it were, a specific naming of pity, and what it appears to induce is fear – even, one might fairly say, terror. Within this brutal world of Urizenic construction sites – Urizen is really the original property developer – and Los’s quasi-industrial labours something different has appeared, something which nobody is equipped to understand; but what this scenario also produces is an unequivocal identification of pity with the female.

­64    The Literature of Pity There is, perhaps, nothing entirely new about this: the very model of the pietà, as we have seen, is centred on the weeping figure of Mary. But what happens in The Book of Urizen is more complex, for Urizen himself becomes affected by this new presence in the world, this presence which challenges and exceeds all his attempts to prevent the overflow of feeling: For he saw that life liv’d upon death: The Ox in the slaughter house moans, The Dog at the wintry door; And he wept & he called it Pity, And his tears flowed down on the winds.12

‘Life liv’d upon death’: presumably the major, although not the only, meaning here is that life, in some sense, exceeds death; thus Urizen becomes alerted to the moan of the ox, the cry of the dog, and he becomes divided against, alienated from, himself. But will this prove a good or a bad thing, a moment of redemption through pity or of redoubled efforts at control? The major Prophetic Books all take up this story. To begin with Vala, or the Four Zoas (1795–1804). Night the First starts from a lamentation by Tharmas, the ‘parent power’. It would be difficult to explain all the mythopoeic allusions here, but the focus is on pity: ‘Lost! Lost! Lost! are my Emanations! Enion, O Enion, We are become a Victim to the Living. We hide in secret. I have hidden Jerusalem in silent Contrition, O Pity Me. I will build thee a Labyrinth also: O pity me. O Enion, Why hast thou taken sweet Jerusalem from my inmost Soul? Let her Lay secret in the soft recess of darkness & silence. It is not Love I bear to Enitharmon. It is Pity. She hath taken refuge in my bosom & I cannot cast her out.’13

To put it at its simplest, Tharmas is here regretting his distraction from the eternal form of Jerusalem. Or rather, it is not exactly distraction: like a biblical idolator, he has taken an image of Jerusalem for, as it were, the real thing; and he has simultaneously become fascinated by the lesser goddess Enitharmon. But, he protests, this is not love; it is pity, and so the term ‘pity’ undergoes a transmutation, reverting to an emotion inferior to love, one that can distract the mind from the proper adulation of holy objects. Pity here is a kind of diversion, and also a kind of excuse: one might feel that Tharmas is here very much in the position of an unfaithful husband who, when called upon to explain himself, protests too much. He has been led astray, he claims. Thus the images of pity become, in a

Blake: ‘Pity would be no more . . .’    ­65

sense, agents of delusion, and also objects of the self-serving. It may or may not be pity he feels for Enitharmon, but it is certainly pity he feels for himself as he glimpses the possible consequences of this diversion from the true vision, perhaps imbricated with a further self-pity, since this problem of Tharmas’s is also cited as the primary evidence of the consequences of the Fall, the lapse into the mundane. Pity is fatally and intimately implicated in the division of the Zoas, figures representing the separated faculties, a separation which is said by Blake to account for, or to be accounted for by, post-lapsarian guilt. But as Night the First of The Four Zoas proceeds, this prevalence of pity as a contaminating, weakening force spreads further. Urizen addresses Los thus: ‘Thou art the Lord of Luvah; into thine hands I give The prince of Love, the murderer; his soul is in thine hands. Pity not Vala, for she pitied not the Eternal Man, Nor pity thou the cries of Luvah. Lo, these starry hosts, They are thy servants if thou wilt obey my awful Law.’14

Here pity plays its part in what may appear to be a Blakean version of the fatality of temptation. Urizen, the spirit of order and reason, is offering to hand over to Los, the figure of the prophet and artist, Luvah, who is the spirit of rebellion, or perhaps indeed revolution. What Los has to do is to deal with Luvah, and all ‘these starry hosts’ will be his. But in order to do this, what Los has also to do is to quell the spirit of pity within him; he has to join sides with Urizen and ignore Luvah’s cries. And so here the term ‘pity’ endures what has been called, in another context, the ‘squirm of the true’.15 Pity here figures again as a guarantor of what we might call ‘man’s humanity to man’: Los has, uniquely, the power to end conflict, but the price he must pay is to reduce his own compassion to the same level as Urizen’s – Urizen, we note, is ‘smiling’ as he offers Los this dubious bargain. The trick partly works. In Night the Fourth, we find Los performing essentially the same acts of repression and binding as Urizen (who at this point, we are perhaps a little surprised to learn, is sleeping in what Blake refers to as a ‘stoned stupor’). Los tries to bind Enitharmon down: The lovely female howl’d, & Urizen beneath, deep groan’d Deadly between the hammer’s beating, grateful to the Ears Of Los absorb’d in dire revenge; he drank with joy the cries Of Enitharmon & the groans of Urizen, fuel for his wrath And for his pity, secret feeding on thoughts of cruelty.16

It would be difficult indeed not to see echoes here of Hamlet’s ghost in the cellarage, Urizen deep below the stage urging Los on to vengeance,

­66    The Literature of Pity urging him to sink his ‘human’ feelings (not that any of these figures is human in any obvious sense of the term) and get on with the task at hand, although, alas, Los is just as much a procrastinator as Hamlet himself. However, the point here is about the extraordinary indeterminacy that is now overtaking the term ‘pity’. For here it is virtually coupled with wrath: far from being a saving grace, it is a contaminated word, infected by the Fall, marking a separation, a division, rather than a bond of feeling, what Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen refers to as the ‘emotional tie’.17 Does pity divide or does it join? The answer in Blake – if indeed it is an answer – is that it depends on what regime we are talking about. While in the elevated world signified by Jerusalem pity may indeed be itself an elevated and elevating emotion, down here in the fallen world it can become converted into precisely what it is in ‘The Human Abstract’: a debased quality which merely serves to disguise cruelty. The point is made again in Night the Seventh (b), where we learn that the very arts of Urizen himself are ‘Pity & Meek affection’:18 these are ‘arts’ indeed, in the strongest sense of the term, artifices within which all original meaning has faded, been drained away, and what is left is a simulacrum of pity, the word itself drained of meaning, relocated, resignified. Towards the end of The Four Zoas, this debasement (perhaps it is a journey to the basement, the cellarage) is complete, For nothing could restrain the dead in Beulah from descending Unto Ulro’s night; tempted by the Shadowy female’s sweet Delusive cruelty, they descend away from the Daughters of Beulah And Enter Urizen’s temple, Enitharmon pitying, & her heart Gates broken down; they descend thro’ the gate of Pity, The broken heart Gate of Enitharmon . . .19

The ‘broken heart Gate’ is surely an extraordinary phrase: what, indeed, becomes of the broken-hearted? Well, here they descend into Ulro, a signifier of eternal night: they have paradoxically lost their humanity – pity stands for no kind of redemption, but rather for an endless mourning, a self-flagellation that forbids all action, prevents any vision of a redeemed or redeemable world. It is, of course, absurd to suggest that Blake’s Prophetic Books follow each other in neat chronological order, either a chronology of writing or a chronology of topic or event. Nevertheless, when we turn to Milton (1804–8) we do find the beginnings of a different account of pity; or perhaps it is simply one that is more self-aware, from a number of different perspectives. On Plate 8, for example, we find Los again, but this time he seems to have awoken from his deep Urizenic sleep (and, apparently, somewhat refreshed):

Blake: ‘Pity would be no more . . .’    ­67 And Los said: ‘Ye Genii of the Mills! the Sun is on high, Your labours call you: Palamabron is also in sad dilemma: His horses are mad, his Harrow confounded, his companions enrag’d. Mine is the fault! I should have remember’d that pity divides the soul And man unmans: follow with my Plow: this mournful day Must be a blank in Nature: follow with me and tomorrow again Resume your labours, & this day shall be a mournful day.’20

It would be a mistake to see here the notion of mourning as negative: rather, as in Freud’s Mourning and Melancholia, mourning is necessary, it is part of a recovery, and here it provides a welcome reminder of the perils of pity;21 or perhaps it makes us notice for the first time what a powerful and potentially destructive emotion pity can be. Fear eats the soul; pity divides the soul. It divides it because it prevents us from continuity of purpose: instead of getting on with the job in hand, Los the consummate artisan seems to be saying, it distracts us, it enables us to wallow in feelings instead of taking action. ‘Tough on crime, and tough on the causes of crime’, as the Blair-era mantra went (or indeed, tough on Tony Blair, and tough on the causes of Blair, as a more recent rhetoric might suggest): pity is here placed as an opposed signifier to the necessity of work, in what we might consider to be a Hegelian opposition between the exigencies of labour and the illusory emancipation of the untrammelled beautiful soul.22 Palamabron, of whom we have just heard, is the nearest Blake comes to incarnating a spirit of pity: his essential opposite is Rintrah, the spirit of wrath. Here, a little later in Milton, we hear more about them: Rintrah rear’d up walls of rocks and pour’d rivers & moats Of fire round the walls: columns of fire guard around Between Satan and Palamabron in the terrible darkness. And Satan not having the Science of Wrath, but only of Pity, Rent them asunder, and wrath was left to wrath, & pity to pity.23

These lines are extraordinary, and I am not sure I will ever quite understand them, but I will pick out one or two possibilities. It may be that the version of Satan Blake is talking about here is in accordance with the memorable view of John Milton’s Satan he had previously forcefully expressed in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (c. 1790–3), to the effect that Satan is the true hero of Paradise Lost;24 and that this can be put down to, mainly, the sympathy – here in the sense of pity – we as humans and as readers feel towards him in terms of his defeat at the hands of an unassailable higher authority. Or it may be that Satan is, after all, a creature who works, as in the Garden of Eden, by snares and delusions: he does not need wrath, pity will do the work for him, as perhaps it did

­68    The Literature of Pity between Adam and Eve. Or it may be that Satan has to make do with pity because, after all, God has collared the market in wrath. All of these interpretations are obviously possible; but in any event, the conclusion is that pity is separated from wrath – one might say that thus the soft emotions are separated from the ‘righteous indignation’ which might be considered to drive them. Pity is, as it were, spread all over the place in a kind of generalised weeping which can no longer achieve any specific focus. We feel for the whole suffering world; and thus we do exactly nothing. Pity recurs in the magnificent passage in Plate 18 of Milton where the Shadowy Female weaves the cloak of lamentation: ‘For I will put on the Human Form & take the Image of God’, she says, ‘Even Pity & Humanity, but my Clothing shall be Cruelty’, and again, a little later, Orc replies, ‘When wilt thou put on the Female Form as in times of old, / With a Garment of Pity & Compassion like the Garment of God?’25 Blake, it seems to me, is here working around the problem of pity. Pity is primal to human fellow-feeling; but pity weakens. Pity has no plan. Pity is associated with the female, and one would never do well in Blake to trust the words of the Shadowy Female, or at least the significations she locates within them. Pity is in the eye of the beholder, or better in the mouth of the speaker; never trust, as I have previously suggested, anybody who says ‘I pity you’, for mostly they are talking about themselves. ‘Is terror chang’d to pity? O wonder of Eternity!’26 Blake asks on Plate 34 of Milton; we probably cannot answer that Aristotelian question, but we might find it addressed if we turn, finally, to Jerusalem (1804–20). In Plate 7, Los speaks, and he seems to have recaptured something of the sense of redemption that might attend on the notion of pity. Certainly it is much on his mind. The separated parts of Albion, he says,   have divided themselves by Wrath, they must be united by Pity; let us therefore take example & warning, O my Spectre. O that I could abstain from wrath! O that the Lamb Of God would look upon me and pity me in my fury, In anguish of regeneration, in terrors of self annihilation! Pity must join together those whom wrath has torn in sunder . . .27

And so here we have a different significatory field for pity. Rather than weakening, sundering, pity now figures as a joining, rejuvenating force, but a crucial question remains, which is about who here is supposed to feel the pity for whom. Los wants to be pitied by the Lamb of God; but acts of pity here on the earth below will simultaneously be responsible for ‘joining together’. For Blake, one may suppose, the double flow of

Blake: ‘Pity would be no more . . .’    ­69

pity is indissoluble: since the gods reside in the human breast, then each act of pity, considered under this rubric, will be an operation of the divine in human form. The ‘field’, as it were, of pity in this realm is one which directly asserts consanguinity between God and man – much, again, as does the ideological thrust of the classic pietà, where human suffering is a direct expression of divine grief (albeit one which is displaced, and this is obviously crucial, from male onto female). And the sense of pity becoming a source of redemption – and indeed of the rehumanising of the world – is brought back forcibly to our attention in the well-known passage in Plate 12 of Jerusalem which concerns the rebuilding of a destroyed, polluted human world and the transfiguration of the bricks and stones of prisons and religions into a more human-shaped habitation. Here Blake is concerned at once, as he so often is, with the rebuilding of a large world and the rebuilding of a smaller, local world (we should not forget that much of the so-called ‘ribbon development’ that joined London’s villages into a city occurred, or started to occur, during Blake’s lifetime, and, unlike the mills of the industrial north, of which he knew nothing, within eye- and earshot of his own ‘habitation’). He has a problem again with property developers, but this time he converts the process to his own use: What are those golden builders doing? where was the burying-place Of soft Ethinthus? near Tyburn’s fatal Tree? is that Mild Zion’s hill’s most ancient promontory, near mournful Ever weeping Paddington? is that Calvary and Golgotha Becoming a building of pity and compassion? Lo! The stones are pity, and the bricks, well wrought affections Enamel’d with love & kindness . . .28

Here is what we might consider to be a reverse transformation, a rolling back of the brutal necessities of providing housing for the labourer in order to show the alternative possibilities of a habitation built upon – and with – the essential emotional materials. As always there is, as so often in Blake, no possibility here of separating tenor and vehicle of metaphor; the Prophetic Books operate in a realm that is well beyond metaphor as we conventionally understand it, which is why we get the continual simple equivalences of ‘is’ and ‘are’ (and the passage runs on in the same vein for some further twenty lines) and also, perhaps, the reason for the questions. The questions do not ask, is this so? They rather ask, in what way can we perceive this to be so; and by the sheer force of our imagination, can we convert these possibilities into actualities? At any rate, pity: ‘the stones are pity’. This might seem to be odd in view of Blake’s continuing opposition between the ‘soft affections’ and

­70    The Literature of Pity the stony obduracy of those like Urizen who seek to reject and demean all attempts at what one might call emotional lubrication, unless he has already converted the words into his own vassals. But, as always, pity is also capable of becoming its own opposite, even within the space of a few plates: here are the twelve sons of Albion advocating war and despising anything that might hold contention and strife back. In order to achieve this ideological task, they need to remove the image of Jerusalem from man’s eyes. They seek to do it, if only rhetorically, thus: ‘Cast, Cast ye Jerusalem forth! The Shadow of delusions! The Harlot daughter! Mother of pity and dishonourable forgiveness! Our Father Albion’s sin and shame! . . .’29

How do you encourage people – specifically men – to go to war? Well, there is clearly any number of ways. A recently published crime novel, not very good in itself, is however interesting on this point. It attributes the otherwise puzzling murders in the 1930s of a number of women to vengeance taken by the mothers of several sons to whom these women, back in 1916, had handed the white feather; the sons obediently trotted off to war and were killed, even though some of those un-uniformed and thus victims of the White Feather Club were only thus because they had been significantly under-age.30 However: ‘pity and dishonourable forgiveness’. Can pity consort with honour, or is it – again – a weakening? My final passages from Jerusalem come from Plate 80, and they provide no hope of ending this discussion of Blake on a redemptive note. It has to end instead amid blood and anguish, on the terrain of the serpent temples, the relics of ancient British violence and human sacrifice which Blake obviously saw as redolent of the continuing wars of his own times. The Serpent Temples thro’ the Earth, from the wide Plain of Salisbury, Resound with cries of Victims, shouts & songs & dying groans And flames of dusky fire, to Amalek, Canaan and Moab. And Rahab, like a dismal and indefinite hovering Cloud, Refus’d to take a definite form; she hover’d over all the Earth Calling the definite, sin, defacing every definite form Invisible or Visible, stretch’d out in length or spread in breadth Over the Temples, drinking groans of victims, weeping in pity And joying in the pity, howling over Jerusalem’s walls.31

Pity and terror; pity and memory; pity and mourning. Perhaps these are the three crucial dialectics. The issue of pity and terror is very clearly here: ‘joying in the pity’ – whose pity? Here we do not really know: what we do know is that it is possible to enjoy pity, but whether that

Blake: ‘Pity would be no more . . .’    ­71

is our own or somebody else’s, whether we are the subject or object of pity, remains unclear. Pity and memory: perhaps pity enables us to prolong our memory, if only because we recall the emotion even as the facts fade – arguably that is what all commemoration of wars is about, but of course like everything else from the serpent temple of Stonehenge to the cenotaph of Whitehall the memory may in fact fade anyway, may be replaced by the simulacrum of a memory; a replica of pity. Pity and mourning; well, yes, but here it looks more as though what we are present at is a wake, and a little later we hear from Gwendolen, who is one of the most strangely compelling characters in Blake. She has no mercy, we already know that, and since for the most part she represents Wales, a subjugated nation, that would hardly be expected, but does she have pity? How is the triangle of pity, strength and weakness represented here? Is there pity shown, for example, for the character known as Hyle, whose identity hardly matters except that he was almost certainly Hayley, a previous patron of Blake’s against whom he had a grievance. Here is Gwendolen at work:   she took up in bitter tears his anguish’d heart That, apparent to all in Eternity, glows like the Sun in the breast: She hid it in his ribs & back; she hid his tongue with teeth. In terrible convulsions, pitying & gratified, drunk with pity, Glowing with loveliness before him, becoming apparent According to his changes, she roll’d his kidneys round Into two irregular forms . . .32

As Gwendolen forms this masculine body, she goes on into even more intimate detail, the point being that this fabrication of a body, this manufacture of a home which is also a corpse for the male, the work – here, at least, of the female, a kind of mechanical and painful extension of reproduction – is conjoined with pity, but it is, I think, perhaps not pity as we frequently know or experience it. Or if it is, then it might be that the people we need to pity most are those who are the victims of pity. Or, to put it back again in a different, more textual register, Blake mobilises the term, the word, the signifier ‘pity’ across a hugely wide terrain; thereby, it seems to me, illustrating something of the range of the word – and therefore, necessarily, of the emotion, or, as we may by now feel, the complex of emotions which it purports to signify.

Chapter 7

Aspects of Victoriana

As I have suggested, it would of course be possible to approach the word ‘pity’ from a structuralist perspective: to analyse it in terms of its cognate terms (‘mercy’, ‘compassion’, ‘sympathy’, even ‘ruth’), and those with which it most often appears in opposition (a far longer and more complicated list). But the trouble with words is that they rarely prove properly amenable to such treatment; they tend to slip and slide, to drip (in some ways like tears) into other realms and dimensions, to morph before our eyes and ears. Historically, it would be fair to say that it is this propensity of words to elude a precise signification which, regardless of the orientations of specific critics, thinkers, theorists, philosophers, caused what can now be seen as the eclipse of structuralism by the various ‘arts and sciences’ sometimes known under the collective name of deconstruction. In the study of any emotion or passion, there is a continuing excess: there is an enduring instability, a process of what Nicholas Royle refers to as ‘veering’1, which means that one finds oneself trying to pick one’s way through a thicket – or, perhaps better, swamp – of associations. The task could be defined as trying to avoid the threat of that fearsome (and possibly prehistoric) monster known as the ‘thesaurus’; itself based in what one might refer to as the ‘encyclopaedic heresy’, the notion that it would be possible in some imaginable linguistic universe to provide an exhaustive list of denotations and connotations. And that, of course, is the process, the aspiration, in which dictionaries are based. Dictionary and encyclopaedia: late efflorescences of the ‘encyclopaedist’ hopes of enlightenment. But perhaps the study of words does not provide enlightenment, at least in any immediately recognisable sense: perhaps instead it represents a series of drillings down, of forays into the unknown; and perhaps, as with any foray beneath the surface of the ocean or beneath (as the poet W.S. Graham expresses it)2 beneath the arctic or Antarctic ice, the effects are strictly temporary. Perhaps all words are, in the sense intended by, among many others, Herman Melville in Moby-Dick

Aspects of Victoriana    ­73

(1851), hieroglyphs: representations whose form and content are continuingly unintelligible.3 And nowhere more so than in poetry. In 1793 Jane Austen wrote a short, two-stanza poem called ‘Ode to Pity’.4 It was, obviously, a work of her youth; more interestingly, apart from the title, it does not contain the word ‘pity’. Here is the first stanza: Ever musing I delight to tread The Paths of honour and the Myrtle Grove Whilst the pale Moon her beams doth shed On disappointed Love. While Philomel on airy hawthorn Bush Sings sweet and Melancholy, And the Thrush Converses with the Dove.

The rhythm and metre here are, obviously, deeply strange, and whether or not they are motivatedly so will no doubt remain for us to ponder. What is certain, however, is that the persona of the poet, the writer, here is very much in the foreground: we are in the presence of what appears to be an (understandably) adolescent ‘musing’ on what the relation might be between her ‘own’ feelings and those which might be sanctioned (and, thus sanctioned, expressed) by a set of literary-traditional equivalents – the figure of Philomel; the thrush; the dove. We can go further: this poem raises the question of the extent to which any feelings we might appear to have are in fact ‘our own’, and this in two cognate ways: are they our own when we ‘feel’ them (or are they writ large, reinscribed, upon a set of experiences of the other which have – possibly forever – defined how we describe our own emotions; do they take their place simply as the latest addition to a huge palimpsest), and are they our own when we write them (or does this constitute a further immersion in a prior world of the expressed passions wherein our own can only swim, feebly, trying to find cognate souls in the depths to whom we might have a relation which is merely the one we have previously mentioned of Echo to Narcissus?). Or is Narcissus (or primary narcissism) the key to pity? Certainly we can say that this first stanza verges very much on the idea of self-pity: the self-pity of the adolescent, the sense of being unrecognised, of being a prophet without honour in her own country. Philomel, of course, could be considered to be a primary focus of pity: raped, dishonoured, her tongue torn out, she represents among many other things the terrible fear of being rendered unable to tell her own story. And this, the myth suggests, might be the most pitiable plight of all (and a plight which is repeated across vast swathes of ‘children’s literature’, whatever that

­74    The Literature of Pity might be, wherein children are disbelieved, distrusted by the world of adult institutions, and have no recourse but to suffer in silence – it is arguably the principal theme of all literature written for children and, perhaps more particularly, for adolescents).5 But Philomel is, as we know, not silenced: rather her words are transformed, translated, into song, into the wordless – the wordless represented here by Philomel’s song, by the ‘conversation’ between the thrush and the dove. Where is the poet here? She is ‘alongside’ this conversing: she does not participate in it, she is separated by her ‘musing’, her own pity is taking place in an apparently endless ‘while’. Her own pity, if it is capable of moving outwards at all and is not locked in a cycle of her own self, cannot directly engage with these past avatars: they may be companions, but in this condition, whatever it might be, there is no possibility of a direct, or even indirect, address to the other; except, of course, within the context of the poem itself, which would in any case raise the question of whether this poem – or, in fact, any other poem, any poem at all – was written to be heard by the other; or not. ‘Heard’; or, to use that great trope of romantic-era writing, ‘overheard’.6 The ode (if it is an ode) continues thus: Gently brawling down the turnpike road, Sweetly noisy falls the Silent Stream – The Moon emerges from behind a Cloud And darts upon the Myrtle Grove her beam. Ah! then what Lovely Scenes appear, The hut, the Cot, the Grot, and Chapel queer, And eke the Abbey too a mouldering heap, Conceal’d by aged pines her head doth rear And quite invisible doth take a peep.

It could be said that the most startling line in this stanza is the second one: ‘sweetly noisy falls the Silent Stream’. This silence, as I have already suggested, is not the true silence of absence of sound; rather it is the absence of the ‘conversable’ – yet this very absence renders the possibility of a conversation with the non-human all the more possible. Perhaps, indeed, the curtailing of speech is the only way of allowing for a properly respectful interchange between the human and the non-human and perhaps, again, as we continue with the endlessly necessary task of reinterpreting the myth of Philomel it will come to be seen as this, as a recognition that there is a register of sound different from language, and that this is the only way in which the human can, while laying down its arms, as it were, while sacrificing the propensity for command which accompanies ‘language’ as we usually conceive of it, live ‘alongside’ the non-human other.

Aspects of Victoriana    ­75

What has any of this to do with pity? This, I suggest, is deeply uncertain; but we get a hint when we consider the act of transformation that takes place when the moon emerges from behind a cloud and ‘darts’ her beam. Something here has changed: the mundane has been turned, shall we say, into an image of itself, an image which is partial, shadowed, yet paradoxically more ‘real’, more comprehensive – or, as the cynic might say, merely more aesthetically pleasing. From this point until nearly the end, the poem appears to descend into a repertoire of Gothic motifs with which we could well be familiar from our readings of Ann Radcliffe and Mary Shelley. But the problematic structure of silence and noise reappears, in a different sensory realm, at the end of the poem: the moon is ‘invisible’ and is ‘peeping’. The most obvious reference for this dialectic is in childhood, in the ‘hide-and-seek’ illusion (which is not unrelated to Freud’s game of ‘fort/da’)7 that, if we cannot see ourselves (in either or both of the senses of that phrase) then we cannot be seen, we become effectively invisible by covering our eyes. Some would say that many apparently quite grown-up politicians appear still to be of the same persuasion. Is it that the moon exerts some kind of pity over this scene, so that what might otherwise appear mundane and unexceptional comes to capture our emotions? Or is it that the moon, in some perhaps underspecified way, serves to unite the scene, to give the poet her place in it? The moon can ‘take a peep’; does this mean that the poet too can dare to ‘take a peep’, and if so is this conditional upon her remaining ‘invisible’; such that she cannot be seen by the ‘scene’ which she sees? Can your poetry, your writing, look back at you, and if it did would it either share in the pity which you have been claiming to feel, or would it rather expose it as a mere thing of clichés, traditional phrases, generic assumptions? If it did, would it also continue to suggest that all you have written to date is unworthy – because, after all, it is by definition the work of a younger and less experienced self? Perhaps Walter Benjamin’s angel of history is with us again here, looking back over the detritus of the past while being blown helplessly into a future of which it is continuingly unaware. We may have pity for the ignorance – or innocence – of our past self, but we may also have pity for the vulnerability which will continue to be our own as we are blown forward (in this case out of adolescence) into realms of which we know nothing and against which writing, despite all its pretensions, may prove no lasting defence. Austen’s Emma (1815), from beginning to end, is replete with pity: the extent to which any of the references is ironic remains an ongoing debate, but one startling moment occurs in an early conversation between Emma and Knightley, when Emma does not flinch from using

­76    The Literature of Pity the very formulation that might be considered impermissible in any society, let alone in that which considers itself ‘polite’. Emma has been congratulating herself on her matchmaking; Knightley is unimpressed, and puts what she considers to be her success down to a ‘lucky guess’. Emma responds: And have you never known the pleasure and triumph of a lucky guess? – I pity you. – I thought you cleverer – for depend upon it, a lucky guess is never merely luck. There is always some talent in it.8

‘I pity you’: in a way, one could say that the entire mechanism of the plot takes its cue from this incautious judgement, however flippantly intended and uttered. Indeed, the flippancy is a large part of the point: Emma’s un-self-conscious trammelling of the boundaries between the self and the other is what forces us readers to admit that she requires an ‘education’ of sorts, and at the same time suggests that Knightley might be the person to do it, if only in order to propel her into not making such hurtful (and indeed un-self-aware) pronouncements again. On this point, we might take a further cue from Charles Dickens in Nicholas Nickleby (1838–9): When men are about to commit, or sanction the commission of some injustice, it is not uncommon for them to express pity for the object of that or some parallel proceeding, and to feel themselves, at the time, quite virtuous and moral, and immensely superior to those who express no pity at all. This is a kind of upholding of faith above works, and is very comfortable.9

Of course, Dickens is writing here about a series of acts that have far more obvious social consequence than those of Emma’s vanities; but the combination of ‘expression’ and ‘pity’ is particularly arresting. Pity, it would seem, is an emotion that can be all too easily feigned; and yet here even the word ‘feigned’ would not be entirely accurate. For Dickens speaks not only of the expression of pity but also of the feeling itself. What are we to make of this ‘feeling’ of pity? Is it itself a kind of ‘feigning’, or are we to suppose that the feeling itself is perfectly genuine yet also serves to cover over a quite different emotional positioning: how can we be sure, Dickens asks, whether what we experience as the pity of another is real or a mere veneer (one thinks inevitably of the Veneerings)10 which serves to render socially comformable other feelings that might be more nakedly linked to the exercise of power. Dickens’s concern is, of course, as always with hypocrisy; yet it is in his explorations of the ambiguities of hypocrisy that many of his novels come most alive. It may be that we all need lies, lies to live by: without

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them we would see the world as coldly brutal. Yet these very lies, the ‘lie of pity’ for example, are what simultaneously allow power to continue to commandeer, to present itself with a human face. The figure of the judge comes to mind, the apparently merciful judge who shakes his head (in pity) as he passes judgement, a judgement, he claims, which it is not within his power to alter even were he so minded. Thus power comes to be re-presented as a kind of submission to an inevitable powerlessness. Yet those who express no pity may have greater access to the truth of the state of affairs, may be more alert to true power relations. At any event, pity here becomes a suspect emotion, a recourse to an attempt at fellow-feeling which is simultaneously a masking of ‘superiority’, a superiority which may embarrass yet which at the same time brooks no possibility of change. ‘Pity is treason’, to return to an earlier formulation – that time, of course, in a revolutionary context: to feel or express pity would be to disturb what is perceived to be the unalterable destiny of the revolutionary state, and would be at the same time to give in to a set of feelings which would in no way reflect the perceived pitilessness of the old order. In Oliver Twist (1837–8), we can, as in most of Dickens’s novels, trace the twists and turns of pity as it squirms under the author’s merciless exposure of hypocrisy. There is, for example, the interchange between Oliver and Noah Claypole when Oliver’s mother’s death is being discussed: ‘Yer know, Work’us’, continued Noah, emboldened by Oliver’s silence, and speaking in a jeering tone of affected pity: of all the tones the most annoying: ‘Yer know, Work’us, it can’t be helped now; and of course yer couldn’t help it then; and I’m very sorry for it; and I’m sure we all are, and pity yer very much. But yer must know, Work’us, yer mother was a regular right-down bad ‘un’.11

‘A jeering tone of affected pity’; ‘of all the tones the most annoying’. The question here would be about the extent to which this is a calculated set of insults, designed to upset Oliver (although presumably failing to predict the violence which then ensues); or whether it is more the result of an absence of fellow-feeling on Noah’s part which utterly fails to take account of Oliver’s investment in his mother’s reputation. At all events, what is revealed is a singular relation between tone and word, such that ‘pity yer very much’ – as we have said, a virtually unacceptable phrase at any time – here becomes invested with something far more sinister, a redoubling of the power which Noah – speaking here, in however unlikely a voice, for the entire mass of institutions which bear down on Oliver’s head and indeed threaten his very survival – has over him.

­78    The Literature of Pity Pity, then, as cover-story, as we have seen; but also as an exposure – a ‘double exposure’, we might say: an exposure of Oliver’s weakness and (here) Noah’s relative strength, but also an exposure of the possibility of ‘affecting’ pity, of repeating what has been learned – to whatever effect and from whatever mix of motivations – in a simulated form – ‘jeering’, but also teasing, deliberately trying to ‘get a rise’ out of the other by pretending to commiserate. To pursue the trajectory of pity through Twist, we can turn on to the interview between Nancy and Rose Maylie in the fortieth chapter. Nancy, having admitted her part in the abduction of Oliver, speaks of her own past history: ‘Thank Heaven upon your knees, dear lady,’ cried the girl, ‘that you had friends to care for and keep you in your childhood, and that you were never in the midst of cold and hunger, and riot and drunkenness, and – and – ­something worse than all – as I have been from my cradle. I may use the word, for the alley and the gutter were mine, as they will be my death-bed.’ ‘I pity you!’ said Rose, in a broken voice. ‘It wrings my heart to hear you!’ ‘Heaven bless you for your goodness!’ rejoined the girl. ‘If you knew what I am sometimes, you would pity me, indeed.’12

Nancy is speaking, of course, of sexual abuse and of the consequences of sexual abuse; but for our purposes what is significant here is the two layers of pity being referred to. Rose, it seems, is able to say ‘I pity you’, partly at least because she does so in a ‘broken’ voice: she is not speaking here from on high but out of an obvious fellow-feeling. And yet, although this may seem at first glance straightforward enough, it is complicated by Nancy’s later use of the word. For this generalised pity that Rose feels is insufficient; there are further, more specific depths to be plumbed. It would be possible to detect a certain wry irony in Nancy’s comment; it would also be possible to trace a liminal operation of power. Nancy is here undoubtedly a supplicant; but at the same time she houses a kind of knowledge that Rose does not have, and never can have. But if Rose knew, if she were told all, then would the consequence indeed be as Nancy suggests, or does she have her reasons for concealing the depths? For if Rose indeed came to ‘know all’, then perhaps pity would shade off – into horror, perhaps, or disgust; perhaps this is the very reason why Nancy tells no more – indeed, changes the subject. Pity, it would appear, would have its limits; and it is the underclass who know – or at least sense – most clearly what those limits are. Pity in Dickens often verges on sentimentality, as many critics have observed,13 and perhaps no more so than in the scene when Oliver is first

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seen by others after his ‘rescue’. Rose stoops over him, and ‘her tears fell upon his forehead’: The boy stirred, and smiled in his sleep, as though these marks of pity and compassion had awakened some pleasant dream of a love and affection he had never known. Thus, a strain of gentle music, or the rippling of water in a silent place, or the odour of a flower, or the mention of a familiar word, will sometimes call up sudden dim remembrances of scenes that never were, in this life . . .14

But if this is sentimentality, it is also a reflection on the processes of maturation, on the rebuilding of memory, even if that memory is technically false. Pity can have this power, it would seem: to remind of lost love, even if that love has never, apparently, been there in the first place. Pity here has a piercing power: it can cut through the hazes of distortion and come at a true and clear picture – even though, and perhaps this is the whole point, a ‘picture’ is exactly what it is. Yet this power of pity to rearticulate the possibilities of a lost or perverted childhood is, for Dickens, insufficient: there is always the need to translate this overflow of powerful feeling into practical action. ‘Oh! as you love me,’ Rose adjures the elder Mrs Maylie, ‘and know that I have never felt the want of parents in your goodness and affection, but that I might have done so, and might have been equally helpless and unprotected with this poor child, have pity upon him before it is too late!’15

What is required here is rescue; it is the exercise of practical charity to remove Oliver from his surrounding circumstances: ‘have pity upon him’ here has little to do with feelings or their expression, much more to do with providing a remedy for the abuse that Oliver has suffered. Feeling; expression; practical action – in a well-ordered society, these might seem to form a seamless whole, but in Dickens as in many other writers, in the nineteenth century and at other times, they do not, and it is in the crevices between these aspects of pity that we can sense the latent violence of the state machine. Pity, it may be, recalls maternal care; it also suggests embedding this principle of care in the wider society. But at the same time, and Dickens is as aware of this as we are today as we contemplate the difficulties that accompany the replacement of institutional provision by private charity, pity can become an excuse; a way of distributing social action away from the centre which in turn reinforces the gap between the haves and the have-nots, even if the former can salve tender consciences through the operation of good works. In George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871–2) pity pursues, if possible,

­80    The Literature of Pity an even more complex trajectory as Eliot explores the relationships between Dorothea, Casaubon and Will Ladislaw. Frequently pity is foregrounded as the key to these relationships; but as often as it is out-turned, directed towards an other, it is in-turned and seems to find its natural home – as does Austen’s in her ode – in a specific relationship within the self. Will is outspoken in his dealings with Casaubon’s pretensions towards depth of learning, citing it as involved with a set of prejudices which prohibit intellectual development: ‘it is a pity,’ he says in an unguarded moment to Dorothea, ‘that it should be thrown away, as so much English scholarship is, for want of knowing what is being done by the rest of the world. If Mr Casaubon read German he would save himself a great deal of trouble.’16 It needs to be said, however, that this specific invocation of ‘pity’ is a weak use of the term, and there are many, many such instances: to say that it is ‘a’ pity that such-and-such should be the case is not a reference to pity, it is the mere chanting of a chimeric term now long since drained of meaning – as witnessed by the fact that in these sorts of usage ‘pity’ could easily be replaced by ‘shame’, despite the fact that the emotions signified by these terms are so different as to be almost opposite. So Will’s pronouncement itself lacks depth, but that does not mean that it cannot sink deep into the other, as it does into Dorothea: Will only thought of giving a good pinch that would annihilate that vaunted laboriousness, and was unable to imagine the mode in which Dorothea would be wounded. Young Mr Ladislaw was not at all deep himself in German writers; but very little achievement is required in order to pity another man’s shortcomings.

And so in this short transition ‘a pity’, that throwaway phrase, is translated into a far more potent version of pity: this translation is expressed on behalf of and in the persona of the narrator, but there can be no doubt that it recounts also Dorothea’s experience as she seeks to cope with the wounding effect that Will’s remark has had on her (and, of course, as she will see, on how it relates to her own unadmitted feelings towards her husband). Pity is not here the salve for the wound; on the contrary, its poignancy, its pointedness, constitutes the cause of the wound itself – as we have seen before, if pity serves to remind us of a state of things that have gone before, or even, more probably, that have not gone before, then it takes its necessary place on the stage of loss, pointing to those things which we wish had been different, had been done differently, either to or by us. Eliot here is being ironic to the point of sarcasm: there is no excess flesh on the bone. The effect on the word ‘pity’ is to denude it of all

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honesty or appropriateness: either, we as readers are enjoined to believe, Will has been deliberately scathing towards Casaubon, or else he is an idiot. Some critics would argue that this is a question left unresolved even at the end of the novel. However, there is little doubt throughout what Eliot (or her narrator) thinks of Casaubon. After a long catalogue of his shortcomings (so long that it almost enlists the reader on his side), concluding with a mention of his soul ‘fluttering in the swampy ground where it was hatched, thinking of its wings and never flying’, one of the most terrifying visions in the whole of literature of the impossibility of maturation, of escaping from the swampy emotions which we might justly think of as inescapably enmeshed in self-pity, she remarks that: His experience was of that pitiable kind which shrinks from pity, and fears most of all that it should be known: it was that proud narrow sensitiveness which has not mass enough to spare for transformation into sympathy, and quivers thread-like in small currents of self-preoccupation or at best of an egoistic scrupulosity.17

This dense passage of extraordinary psychological speculation delivers many matters of interest, and also several of ambiguity. The first concerns the word ‘experience’: which here presumably does not refer to Casaubon’s passage through life, but rather to the summation of the ways in which he has absorbed, repelled, dealt with, those experiences which have come his way. The second is to do with this ‘shrinking’ from pity: the more obvious reading here would be that he is unable to respond to the pity of others (not surprising in itself) but the secondary signification is that this leads him to conceal such feelings as he might have of a sympathetic kind towards others, all of which confines him with himself. If pity, at least in this construal, amounts to a broad and strong possible connection with others, then Casaubon fails the test on all counts, and is mercilessly pilloried for it by the narrator. And here we see the full negative force of the adjectival form ‘pitiable’. Here, at least, it does not mean in the least that Casaubon is actually going to be pitied: something may be ‘pitiable’ without one feeling, or inciting, the least pity for it. Absolutely on the contrary: the ‘pitiable’ is precisely that from which true pity may be justly withheld; it has none of the bravery, the courage under duress, that may excite our true pity. It is instead a thing of contempt, of scorn; and we might justly say of Middlemarch that one of its major trajectories is along the line of where Dorothea will project her arrows of pity; and where, rather more complexly, we as readers will be likely to follow them. We can almost certainly follow her in her impatience with Casaubon, as for example on the occasion when she, remarkably, ‘thought that she

­82    The Literature of Pity could have been patient with John Milton’ – a task indeed, and heavily referenced, of course, in terms of the patriarchy under which Dorothea is from time to time in danger of stifling – and adds that she had never imagined Casaubon behaving in this way; and for a moment Mr Casaubon seemed to be stupidly undiscerning and odiously unjust. Pity, that ‘new-born babe’ which was by-and-by to rule many a storm with her, did not ‘stride the blast’ on this occasion.18

The power of pity; but the question here is double, as characteristically with Eliot. On the one hand in this quotation, there is the powerlessness of pity, its status as a ‘new-born babe’ which refers us back to all those dealings with infantilisation and the maternal; on the other, there is the ‘striding’, the assertion that pity can, in some perhaps unspecified way, enable us to adopt a different perspective – not necessarily, of course, an ideal one: as so often in common parlance, our way of surviving an insult may be by attributing to the insulter a set of prevailing conditions which allow us to feel pity for him or her, sometimes without the least grounds for doing so. Thus the danger of compounding the insult with redoubled pity. Later in the novel, of course, relations between Will and Dorothea change, and so does the treatment of pity – as between themselves, but also in a more abstract way. We might consider, for example, this paragraph, which has Will saying ‘I will never grumble on that subject again.’ There was a gentleness in his tone which came from the unutterable contentment of perceiving – what Dorothea was hardly conscious of – that she was travelling into the remoteness of pure pity and loyalty toward her husband. Will was ready to adore her pity and loyalty, if she would associate himself with her in manifesting them.19

It might be, at first glance, difficult to see what is going on here, but pity is the key with which to unlock the discourse: if Will can only associate himself with Dorothea’s mood – her trajectory, her travel, her series of encounters – with these feelings of loyalty and, above all, pity, then he may well be the ultimate beneficiary. What has to be achieved is a work of education into pity; once that has been accomplished, then pity will find its objects as it will.

Chapter 8

Chekhov and Brecht: Pity and Self-Pity

Inactivity and the call to action, lassitude and energy, pessimism and optimism, stasis and history – there could perhaps be no more significant opposition than that between two of the greatest playwrights of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Anton Chekhov and Bertolt Brecht. And within this opposition, this contrast of mood and possibility, it is possible to trace some of the vicissitudes of pity. In Chekhov we can find an apparently endless sequence of meditations, soliloquies which represent self-pity in all its plethora of forms – soliloquies which, of course, diverge widely, even wildly, from the Shakespearean standard in that, far from providing windows onto the stage of the individual’s soul, they rather serve to provide the audience with further insight into the delusions of the characters, into how far it is possible to misrepresent the state of one’s emotions and concomitantly to build up a false image of the self and the other upon which one can then feel bound to act, to the distress of all involved.1 Where Chekhov is apparently languorous (although this, of course, is a carefully contrived effect of his plays rather than their guiding principle), Brecht is brisk. He engages directly with Aristotle, to the effect that pity is no longer to be any part of the purpose of the theatre. The problems with Aristotelian theory, as far as Brecht is concerned, are twofold, although the two are inextricably linked.2 The first is the personalisation of the purported effects of drama: for Brecht, theatre is essentially a social activity – as of course it also was for Aristotle, but for Brecht the effects themselves need to be felt upon the social pulse rather than within a potentially individual act or feeling of catharsis. Second, Brecht is concerned about the ‘end-stopped’ nature of the Aristotelian diagnosis: theatre for Brecht is part of a wider, more general social texture, and the feelings it inculcates or causes will thus themselves have societal repercussions. Pity can play no part in this, says Brecht; because pity is an inhibitor of action rather than a spur to the realisations which,

­84    The Literature of Pity in his theory, inevitably precede the move towards revolutionary social change. To return, however, to Chekhov, the great dramatist of impossibility, the depictor of social and interpersonal situations in which no movement, no change appears possible. In all of Chekhov’s scenarios, there are inhibitors on action, and the great Chekhovian question concerns the extent to which these inhibitors are external or internal. There is, obviously, an enormously detailed social critique underlying Chekhov’s plays: the decay of the land-owning classes, burdened by debts which it will never be possible to repay; the destitution of the countryside amid the urge for greater growth in the cities; the increasing isolation of the ‘provinces’ under pressure from the metropolitan centralisation of Moscow; the impotence of the intelligentsia, when cut off from the cultural centre and unable to find the resources to support its own activities and analyses. And there is, alongside this – or, more correctly, deeply interwoven within it – a psychological critique, which essentially has to do with the factors that prevent movement, and with delusions that ferment when movement is stopped. Without exception, the moments in Chekhov when characters protest or profess enduring love – or indeed any other emotion, including hatred and contempt – are succeeded by moments when not only is such protestation unravelled, it is made to seem irrelevant, the mere outcome of an accidental combination of circumstances. No supposed feeling in Chekhov can survive the light of day – or, indeed, even survive overnight; but that could, of course, be said in a different way, as a question as to whether there is indeed any feeling in Chekhov at all, rather than the mere simulacrum of feeling. Let us begin with Ivanov (1887), and here is Ivanov attempting to explain what an older rhetoric might refer to as the current condition of his heart: The gist of the matter, my dear Doctor, is that . . . [hesitates] that, to put it briefly, I was passionately in love with her when I got married and I swore I’d love her for ever, but . . . Well, five years have passed, and she still loves me, but I . . . [Makes a helpless gesture with his hands]. Here you are, telling me that she’s soon going to die, and I don’t feel any love or pity but just a sort of indifference and lassitude.3

Nothing new here, one might initially say: there is nothing surprising whatever in the thought that what might have been a temporary rush of passion subsides – or indeed develops – into something quite different. What is unusual in Chekhov is not Ivanov’s revelation, but rather the representation of the depth of his stupidity: how could he have in

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no way understood what was likely to occur as intimacy grows into different forms – that has been common knowledge within the western tradition at least since the Odyssey. But it is a function of Ivanov’s lack of awareness – both personal and also intellectual, or at least within the realm that we might reasonably call that of emotional literacy – that he finds himself unable to muster any deep or even real feeling at the fatal turn of events that he is witnessing; and thus here the call upon ‘pity’. For in this reference, what is happening is a variety of transferred epithet. Ivanov is here apparently referring to his feelings, or more to the point lack of feelings, for Anutia; but the ‘pity’ reverberates inwards, it becomes a function of his ‘feelings about his own feelings’, a feeling without an external object, just as will be the case with mentions of ‘indifference’ and ‘lassitude’. What is omnipresent in Chekhov is not only the misrepresentation of feelings, although this operates throughout the plays, but also the emptying of feelings, such that they evaporate almost as soon as declared. In fact, of course, something far stranger than this is going on in Chekhov, because it is as if it is the actual expression of feeling that precisely causes it to atrophy and wither: any feeling, however robust, cannot withstand the pressure of the real, even if the real in Chekhov is an atrophied, withered species in itself. And so as the feelings atrophy, or perhaps shrink away appalled as they hear themselves expressed – writ large, as it were, and condemned, committed, to being remembered, for this is after all what none of Chekhov’s characters can stand, or understand – then so do the words that we use to describe them become less and less reliable, and what we find in respect of pity in Chekhov is a continuous recourse to the ‘weak’ use of pity already mentioned in other contexts. Ivanov, again, says that his wife is ‘not at all well. Today the doctor told me definitely that she has T.B.’; this diagnosis is almost immediately ridiculed, but in the meantime Zeenaeda Saveshna finds the time to say ‘Really? What a pity! . . . [Sighs]. And we are all so fond of her . . .’4 The response, of course, is radically inadequate; indeed, the sigh itself appears to indicate that Zeenaeda is connecting the news of this fatal condition to herself, or to the general plight of the world, rather than to the actual sufferer who might be the appropriate object of her pity. Pity is thus simultaneously deflected, and devalued: ‘What a pity’ – there is that phrase that more than any other degrades pity, suggests that it is merely a form of words, a cliché, a convention which does not manifest any emotion but rather serves to conceal it in case it might serve to break the endlessly protected yet tender surface of social propriety. Later on in Ivanov, Lyebedev has an apposite remark, in the general context of the atrophied or misrepresented feelings that appear to form

­86    The Literature of Pity the inner landscape of Chekhov’s plays: ‘Misfortune,’ he says, ‘hardens the soul. I don’t pity you, Nikolasha, you’ll land on your feet, things will come right, but I feel hurt and angry, my friend, when I hear what other people . . .’5 The passage breaks off there; or rather, as is so usual with Chekhov’s characters, Lyebedev moves on to other matters. It is also the case that the offhand remark about Nikolasha falling on his feet is, as we might expect, inappropriate; or rather, it is an impossible statement or hope amid the atmosphere of ruin that surrounds the play. Nevertheless, the mention of the plight – or rather of the impossibility – of pity serves its purpose: any succumbing to pity in this context would merely increase the general sense of decay and rot. Is pity in Chekhov a real or validable feeling, or is it merely the expressive outcome of self-pity? There is, of course, no answer to this question; but we can certainly trace its delineations, as we have been doing throughout, through the plays. Let us stick for the moment with Ivanov, and move on to one of his own deeply flawed self-assessments: I’m a rotten, pitiful, contemptible creature. You need to be a wretched, wornout drunkard, like Pasha, to be able to love and respect me still.6

What is most interesting here is the ‘doubleness’ of the diagnosis. Clearly Ivanov needs, in some sense, a double: one who can appreciate him, who can throw back to him an image – a self-image, but also an image of the self as other – the image of the self as other, thus one which can be valued and respected in itself. But here there is a problem: the only image that can return from the wider flux is itself fatally tainted, it comes back only from unreliable sources, and thus how will we assess whether we are ‘pitiful’ or not – whatever ‘pitiful’ might mean: does it imply that we are ourselves ‘contemptible’, or does it mean that we ‘deserve’ pity? Deserving of your pity; there is another cliché. But what does it mean – are there those who (or which) deserve pity more than others? Is pity susceptible to hierarchy, and if so what hierarchy – perhaps the ‘order of nature’, or perhaps indeed the inverse order, which we might refer to as the ‘order of guilt’. In The Seagull (1898), it is at least thinkable that the seagull is itself an image or symbol of pity, and that pity in some sense dominates the whole play, but the characters rarely achieve the articulacy to make this manifest. Instead, pity tends again to emerge in a ‘weakened’ form, as, for example, when Dorn is commenting on Trepliov’s writing: Well, I believe in Konstantin Gavrilych. He’s got something! He certainly has! He thinks in images, his scenes are vivid, full of colour, and personally I’m deeply moved by them. But it’s a pity he doesn’t set himself any definite

Chekhov and Brecht    ­87 goal. He makes an impression, that’s all, but an impression alone doesn’t take you very far.7

But pity here spreads beyond its ostensible object; for it is precisely the continuing recourse to self-pity in the play which could be seen as hampering the effort to write, or compose, or to make anything that can have an impact on the wider world. Here pity stands for a kind of impotence, the inability to break through the skin, the ‘envelope’ of the self as Didier Anzieu would have it, and link artistic endeavour to social consequence.8 There is a type of romanticism at the heart of Chekhov’s work, but it is constantly in danger of falling into the trap of sentimentality: any urge towards manifesting higher ideals is immediately torn down, relegated to self-involvement; aesthetic goals are seen as having no place where, on the one hand, questions of mere economic survival are paramount, and, on the other, any attempts to see this ‘bare life’, in Agamben’s term, as something to be surmounted are instantly rendered risible. Uncle Vania (1900) takes the critique of pity further, and simultaneously renders it more precise. Marina, for example, is concerned to relate pity to the socially excluded: ‘the old,’ she says, ‘are just the same as the little ones, they like someone to pity them – but nobody pities the old’.9 ‘Nobody pities the old’; but here there is an ambiguity, for if pity here amounts to a type of condescension, then maybe it is better for this pity not to be felt at all; maybe it is only from their own self-pity that ‘the old’ construct a myth of what it would be like to live in a world where valid fellow-feeling could have a living, breathing life, rather than being a matter of moment-by-moment simulacra. In fact, where we might think that pity could indeed be a sign – perhaps even the sign – of fellow-feeling, in Chekhov it is constantly in danger of turning into its own opposite and becoming the indicator of a kind of dehumanisation, signified here in Marina’s ‘translation’ of the pity we might feel for an individual into a generalised, abstract type of feeling. Is it possible to feel pity for a class or group as a whole, or is this a sublation of person-to-person interaction?10 In Chekhov, all this is hazy: the characters appear to be remembering what it might once have felt like to see each other clearly, but when they come to interact they do so only in terms of an already laid down set of prejudices and conventions – by which they are then themselves further dissatisfied as their own sense of self retreats and atrophies when they fail to find authenticity in dealings with the world which proceed only under the sign of generalised other. ‘She’s kind and generous,’ says Sonia, quoting a comment she has heard about herself, ‘but what a pity she is so plain’:11 a weak use again,

­88    The Literature of Pity but the wider question would be whether Sonia is speaking at all here, or whether she is rehearsing a cliché, uttering from an inherited repertoire of attitudes from which personalisation has already been excluded. Yet it is Sonia herself who later finds herself in the position of appealing to pity as a potential saviour in a rare speech where she appears to break through the skin of social convention, albeit with a sense of the hopelessness of this attempt to use language to somehow exceed itself and produce practical results: You must have pity, Papa! Uncle Vania and I are so unhappy! [Restraining her despair]. You must have pity!12

Here it is the stage direction which is so telling – and indeed challenging: to act as though one is restraining despair is surely an extraordinary demand, but the force of it is clear: there is only pity – a final act of clemency or mercy – to stand between Sonia – and many of the other characters in this and others of Chekhov’s plays – and a final collapse into despair, that collapse with which we as audiences are frequently left as the plays wind towards their inconclusive conclusions, leaving characters standing, as it were, on the brink. On the brink of death and salvation: When our time comes we shall die submissively, and over there, beyond the grave, we shall say that we’ve suffered, that we’ve wept, that we’ve had a bitter life, and God will take pity on us. And then, Uncle dear, we shall both begin to know a life that is bright and beautiful, and lovely.13

Nothing, of course, could be more antithetical to Brecht’s theory and practice than this appeal to a supernal order to correct the injustices of the present, although the tone in which Chekhov presents this theurgy clearly itself invites scepticism on the part of the audience. In The Three Sisters (1901), Chekhov hints again at the link between love and pity – ‘I thought he was queer at first, but then I started to pity him . . . then I began to love him . . . love everything about him’14 – but for Brecht, it would seem, pity should only be a sign of weakness, a deflection from the pressing demands of social revolution. Yet the term does crop up; it cannot, it seems, be so easily excised from the texture of life, especially when, as for Brecht, it is the plight of the suffering, the outcast, which continually underscores his ongoing plea for social justice. It crops up, for example, in The Good Woman of Setzuan (1941), specifically in the context of the central revelatory scene when Shen Te and Shuo Ta are disclosed as one and the same person, the device upon which the entire plot hinges, the device through which Brecht reveals

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that behaviour may be as much a question of circumstance as of deliberate action. Part of the key speech reads as follows: It was when I was unjust that I ate good meat And hob-nobbed with the mighty Why? Why are bad deeds rewarded? Good ones punished? I enjoyed giving I truly wished to be the Angel of the Slums But washed by a foster-mother in the water of the gutter I developed a sharp eye The time came when pity was a thorn in my side And later, when kind words turned to ashes in my mouth And anger took over I became a wolf15

The thinking here is very complex. The ‘good’ and the ‘bad’ are not, for Brecht, innate dispositions; they are instead determined by social status, by the possibility of access to the world’s goods, by the social position of those who suffer and those who administer suffering. In a way uncannily similar to Blake’s dealings with pity, Brecht appears to suggest, in the first place, that pity or compassion are only possible for those who have the means to acquit themselves along pity’s paths; as we have discussed before, one view of pity is that it can only be a function of an inequitable, unjust society. We do not, we need not, indeed we cannot feel pity with its true force for those who are in the same material position as ourselves. Yet what does Brecht mean when he says that pity was a ‘thorn in my side’? He may mean that pity is a disabling condition: it prevents us from feeling the full force of the anger which should overwhelm us when we consider the plight of the world and the condition of our fellow-­ inhabitants of it. Yet this is not the only possible interpretation: the ‘thorn in the side’ can also be the spur to action, that which refuses to go away, to quieten, to lie down as we contemplate the other. Is pity indeed a deflection, or is it rather the enduring sign of the wound, the splinter lodged in the heart, that which propels us on towards further understanding – even if this understanding comes in the form of the wolf, under the sign of an awareness that that which is necessary to overturn the injustice of the world comes in the guise of what Blake would refer to as ‘Rintrah’ rather than the ‘pallid’ form of ‘Palamabron’? If we return to thinking about pity in general, we now see more clearly the forms of this bifurcation. The very idea of the good woman of Setzuan in the play is, obviously, ironic: it refers to a state of affairs

­90    The Literature of Pity wherein one attaches specific labels to specific people, and therefore falls into the trap, as Brecht would conceive it, of investing certain characters with unalterable qualities, qualities which are capable of endowment and survival whatever the circumstances among which they are born, flourish and die.16 This, according to Brecht, following Marx on the absence of the restrictive category of ‘human nature’,17 is a misprision, and it is one which is thoroughly motivated at an ideological level: how convenient, indeed, to separate people off into the ‘good’ and the ‘bad’, the angel and the wolf, and thereby to pass over the brutal facts of that which might drive people to extreme actions, extreme modes of being, as they claw their way desperately through the dark tunnels of a social underworld which has been designed specifically for them by the operations of power. ‘A person is never as bad as he was on his worst day’: this oft-repeated adage, usually deployed as a corrective against unduly severe penal systems, also fits well with the need, here expressed, to withhold judgement of the individual unless or until she or he can be seen against an entire social backdrop – which will, above all, include the suffering that accompanies the status of the outcast or, usually for Brecht, the criminal. I will here turn to two of his poems (there are those critics who claim that he was at least as important a poet as he was a playwright):18 the first is ‘Sonnet No. 1’, and is dedicated ‘In Memory of Josef Klein. Beheaded for robbery and murder 2 July 1927 in Augsburg gaol’: I dedicate this poem to Josef Klein It’s all I can do for him, for they cut His head off just this morning. Pity. But That made it clear we don’t approve of crime. That’s how they handle flesh and blood, the swine. Strapped flat upon a wooden board it rode (It got a bit of Bible that some Holy Joe’d Picked out, well knowing that no God loves Klein). But I think that it’s really rather much. Approve it? No, I’d really rather not Since their crime never stops once they’ve begun it. I don’t care to be seen among that lot. (At least not until I’ve had time to touch The money that they owe me for this sonnet).19

This poem belongs to that large group of Brecht’s poems which we might justly call the ‘scorpion poems’; in other words, those in which the sting in the tail runs perilously close to destroying the body of the poem itself, as here the author ironically concedes to mercenary

Chekhov and Brecht    ­91

motives. We might alternatively classify such a poem as ‘sacrificial’: the writer is sacrificing his own exemption, his own position ‘outside’ the scenario in order to offer himself up as an example of how penetrative the mercenary attitude can be. Or we might, thirdly, refer the type of irony offered here to its antecedents in certain kinds of Roman poetry, where the ironic immersion in a corrupted world runs at least as deep. However, let us focus on the word ‘pity’; and as we do so, I suggest, it slips out of focus. Of course, it could be a weak use: what a pity, in other words, that I cannot do more for the unfortunate Klein, since he has just been executed. But of course the lines will stand many other interpretations. For example, we might consider, looking at the material organisation of the text, how it is that this one word stands alone and yet, I suggest, permeates the rest of the poem. For pity is ‘at stake’ here, in the starkest of forms. Here we have Josef Klein, a robber and murderer (or so we are led to believe, and it is certainly not the purpose of the poem to ameliorate his crimes), yet we also have ‘pity’ – or rather, what we do not have is pity. What we have instead is a judicial system which exists to make it clear that we do not ‘approve of’ crime. Yet the ‘we’, the first person plural, is here unstable, and constantly transmutes into a ‘they’, signifying the uncertain position of the narrator. Indeed, by the third stanza, it is unclear exactly what the poet is approving or not approving, crime or the treatment of crime: both are locked together, it might seem, in a world of violent action and equally violent retribution. Neither is it entirely clear what the ‘it’ of ‘it rode’ in the second stanza might refer to – the body of the executed criminal, one might assume, and of course in this respect there are unmistakable Christological echoes, re-emphasised by the dessicated reference to the conventionalised use of the Bible – here to dehumanise rather than the reverse. Yet the poem constantly reminds us of the vicissitudes of ‘pity’, the isolated word which tolls like a bell – a death-knell, perhaps – throughout the poem, as perhaps an echo of a lack, if there can be any such thing. Again it needs to be emphasised that the narrator is not seeking clemency for Klein; this would be far too simple. Rather, he is underlining a certain version of complicity: the ‘we’, the ‘they’, however syntactically arranged, nevertheless draw tight a connection between the poet, the reader and the executed man, and the absence of pity, here a word which simultaneously haunts and is haunted, stands over this c­ onnection, presides over the scenario even as it is trampled underfoot.

­92    The Literature of Pity Pity here, then, is in a sense a memory, but definitively a memory of that which never was, or has never been seen to exist; it is that which exists only in recollection, as a reminder of the possibilities of that which has never truly occurred. It is a shadow of itself, perhaps etiolated, perhaps hovering over the scene – a scene, maybe, very like that portrayed in W.H. Auden’s underrated masterpiece, ‘The Shield of Achilles’ (1952), where all is seen in retrospect, as though there is an eternal ‘as though’ haunting the field of past historical action.20 And it is this sense of a lost history, possibilities missed, that Brecht takes up in one of his greatest – and most mysterious, if only in its very plainness of diction – poems, ‘Report on a Castaway’: When the castaway set foot on our island He came like one who has reached his goal. I almost believed that when he sighted us Who had run up to help him He at once felt pity for us. From the very beginning He concerned himself with our affairs only. Using the lessons of his shipwreck He taught us to sail. Courage even He instilled in us. Of the stormy waters He spoke with great respect, doubtless Because they had defeated a man like him. In doing so They had of course revealed many of their tricks. This Knowledge, he said, would make us, his pupils Better men. Since he missed certain dishes He improved our cooking. Though visibly dissatisfied with himself He was not for a moment satisfied with the state of affairs Surrounding himself and us. But never In all the time he spent with us Did we hear him complain of anyone but himself. He died of an old wound. Even as he lay on his back he Was testing a new knot for our fishing nets. Thus He died learning.21

There can be no doubt whatever here that pity is being portrayed as a strong and positive emotion; indeed, it is vitally linked with that set of attitudes and behaviours which Brecht regarded as the most positive at all – to do with practical making, with seeing one’s fate as being in one’s own hands, with a continual exercise of learning and teaching. This version of pity has nothing whatever to do with condescension; rather, it serves the purpose of putting into perspective a certain view of normalcy. All of the gifts the castaway brings – courage is perhaps the most notable of then – are ones lacked by what one might consider to be

Chekhov and Brecht    ­93

the ordinary state of the ‘island’ (which is here as much the ‘mainland’ as anything else). The required perspective is thus, as so often in Brecht, that of the outcast. One could here make a brief excursus into discussing how remarkable it is in Brecht that the perspective of what, following Richard Hoggart and others, one might refer to as the ‘respectable working class’22 is displaced, relativised by the more radical perspective of those who have no ‘stake’ in society at all, those who appear, as it were, from the depths, in a condition of desperation, and proceed to instruct us as to how flimsy our carapace of conventionality and continuing life actually is – a similar stance, albeit shorn of its societal resonance, appears in Conrad’s emblematic ‘The Secret Sharer’ (1910). However: the version of ‘pity’ here is one which touches at all points on sympathy, on the ability of pity to provide an alternative account of our lives, one in which we can begin to see the brute facts of our own deprivation – or, perhaps better, our own timidity. The castaway, after all, teaches them how to sail; but even then there is no attempt, as it were, to ‘sail away’; it is the skill, the aptitude itself which is relevant, the remarkable – and yet uncannily ordinary – skills which the castaway has acquired – no doubt precisely as a function and effect of his outcast status – that form the texture of the poem. Pity here implies a kind of unthought selflessness, an innate understanding of need, and the utmost effort – even if that effort appears effortless – to improve the lives and fortunes of those whom one encounters. The poem, of course, reads as a revision of Robinson Crusoe (1719); and is itself succeeded by, for example, Edwin Morgan’s remarkable poems of alien ‘invasion’.23 But more than this, it reads as a version of how practical consequences follow from a set of simply defined lacks: ‘Since he missed certain dishes / He improved our cooking.’ Pity, we might say, gets to the heart of the matter. No longer a shadow, a haunting, it instantly (‘at once’) recognises need, and acts to address that need, with no thought for the interior lack (‘visibly dissatisfied with himself’). This sense of a lack does not rebound and produce self-pity, vanity, envy, the panoply of sins; instead it produces a notion of social service, based on a transmuted experience of being without, beyond, below the social norm, an experience which can perhaps be the only true source of understanding, perspective, help. Pity thus comes to signify a certain form of participation, and when we think back to Chekhov we see how widely divergent the interpretations of pity can be, from a sense of stasis produced by exile to the value which that exact condition of exile might produce. The question again is of internalisation and of the move beyond, outside the ‘envelope’;

­94    The Literature of Pity but it remains true that many of the most detailed, and even desperate, explorations and invocations of pity, have their place within the textuality of war; and thus we need now to turn to one of the twentieth century’s most celebrated references to pity, that of Wilfred Owen; but also to the further range of textualities within which we might consider pity and war.

Chapter 9

‘War, and the pity of War’: Wilfred Owen, David Jones, Primo Levi

It is arguable that the twentieth century’s immersion in mass warfare has altered the meaning of pity. Where pity in the Aristotelian sense used to be one of the terms attached to the plight, the rise and inevitable fall, of the hero, then, the argument would run, in times of general slaughter there are no more heroes; indeed, there are no more names. The ‘tomb of the unknown soldier’ stands as testament to this, as do so many war memorials where assigned names are followed by an unspoken rubric which seeks to cover all those other nameless dead – dead, indeed, who may well have been not only nameless but literally bodiless, considering the rapid evolution of weapons of mass destruction from the First World War onwards, forwarded relentlessly ever since by the efforts of the military/industrial complex. There is, of course, a recent counter-argument, and it is emblematised in the UK by the people of (now Royal) Wootton Bassett, a small country town which happened to be on the way between the incoming bodies from battles in the Middle East and their final resting-places, and where thousands of men, women and children came to see it as their duty to mark these memorials of death in their own fashion of silent mourning. These dead were named dead, just as current military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan are ‘small-scale’ in comparison to earlier devastations – although, of course, only for the western powers, the ‘coalition of the willing’, where names are written, inscribed in registers and rolls, unlike the ‘rolls of the dead’ in those far-flung nations themselves, where it has proved impossible to record the names or often even the local habitations of the victims. Pity is a live concept. It is all around us. Although it may have taken the folk of Wootton Bassett a little while to realise what a dignified response might be to the odd situation in which they found themselves, they did find such a response, even though, and it may be hurtful to say it, that dignity was greatly eroded by the media’s endless thirst for

­96    The Literature of Pity its own strange blend of emotion-with-repetition – and thus there was always the danger that Wootton Bassett would become a soap opera, or at the very least a reality show. ‘Reality show’: perhaps that is the key to representations of war, and perhaps it also marks the limit to a certain view of writing, representation and of literature. ‘Above all,’ Wilfred Owen wrote in what has perhaps become the most charged of all pity’s manifestoes, ‘I am not concerned with Poetry. The subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity.’1 In a way, this still seems a surprising proclamation: after all, why on earth should a book of poems be, above all, ‘concerned with Poetry’? Perhaps the key is in the (repeated) capitalisation: what Owen is doing, in literary terms (whether he would himself have sought to repudiate them or not) is wave away the last, floating vestiges of romanticism, tear down the gauze curtains, expose a certain starkness – which is not the starkness of the revealed hero, the intense subject stretched on his, or her, bed of personal pain, but the starkness of a generality, albeit a generality which is still not an abstraction; and thus we find ourselves in the presence of a pity which may, in some sense, be all-encompassing, but which yet has to focus itself on the nameless yet still individuated life which has been cut short by death. We can recast the problem here, and it would be very much in the terms that Paul Virilio proposes in his unceasing encounters with the memorials of war, the bunkers, the transformed landscapes, the paysages which have been irrevocably altered by the transitions of battle2 – and yet, of course, there is nothing new in this. Since at least Neolithic times, whole landscapes have been thus shaped by battle or the threat of battle: what else are the hill-forts which stud the landscape of (at least) western Europe but a set of attempts to control and delineate the otherwise unmappable countryside in terms of oppositions, tribal allegiances, the length of arrow-shot or spear-hurl? What else, ab origine, are roads but means for the effect of military convoy, supply routes, ways of keeping ‘open’ a set of zones which might be otherwise ‘closed’ – by forest, by swamp, by the brute exigencies of a varied nature which could, unless teased and molested, have no truck with straight lines and the alternative clarity required for hill sightings. Owen’s best-known poem is ‘Strange Meeting’ (1918), and as well as a reflection on war it is also a reflection on the changes in the landscape which war engenders. It is also, of course, as it states near the outset, a poem about pity: It seemed that out of the battle I escaped Down some profound dull tunnel, long since scooped

‘War, and the pity of War’    ­97 Through granites which titanic wars had groined. Yet also there encumbered sleepers groaned, Too fast in thought or death to be bestirred. Then, as I probed them, one sprang up, and stared With piteous recognition in fixed eyes, Lifting distressful hands as if to bless.3

We will come to know as the poem proceeds that there is reason for this recognition; but for the moment what we have, inter alia, is the strange word ‘piteous’. What is strange, perhaps even uncanny, about the word ‘piteous’ is that it conflates, even confuses, the regimes of subject and object: who is doing the pitying here, who is supposed to exert pity? What one might suspect is that here everybody is involved: the dead soldier, the narrative persona on his quest in the lands of the dead – like so many before him in myths of every culture of which one might readily think – and necessarily the reader, seeking guidance in this land of the dead yet also having to submit to this demand, this call for recognition, this haunting by the emotional tie which seeks to establish this ghost as real.4 ‘I mean the truth untold,’ Owen (or his un-dead persona) continues, ‘The pity of war, the pity war distilled.’ Again, this crucial ambiguity: is pity the ‘appropriate response’ to the devastation of war; or is it that rather there is a kind of reservoir of pity, in all of us, ready to overflow at any provocation, and is it thus that war provides – and this thought is terrible to think on – the readiest means by which we might unleash – not mass destruction, although there is that too – but also a cistern of tears which might otherwise remain unshed? Is war our mechanism for revealing the depth of our fellow-feeling, a feeling which might otherwise remain unused? There are other dealings with the ‘piteous’ in Owen’s poetry, with that word which seems to suggest, among other things, what Sylvia Plath will later refer to as the ‘O-gape of complete despair’.5 There is a sense in which the ‘piteous’ might almost seem, uncannily, to preclude pity: if something is ‘piteous’, then we might suspect that it belongs in the chasm, in the abyss, where flames leap and there is an impossibility of return; and thus all our tremulous moments and motions of merely human pity might be of no avail, might be mere sussurations, mere mobilisations of petty troops on Hell’s borders. And so the quasi-military metaphors must continue; of that, there can be no doubt. And so they do in Owen’s ‘Greater Love’ (1918): Your voice sings not so soft, –   Though even as wind murmuring through raftered loft, –

­98    The Literature of Pity Your dear voice is not dear, Gentle, and evening clear, As theirs whom none now hear;   Now earth has stopped their piteous mouths that coughed.6

The orthography and pronunciation of the English language is unendingly odd: of course ‘soft’, ‘loft’ and ‘coughed’ rhyme; but the last word is ‘rough-edged’ where the first two are not, it is, as Larkin would put it and with an inescapable further relevance to the condition of war, ‘oathedged’ with ‘pipe-smoke’.7 The death of Alfred Lord Tennyson and his Georgian successors, that is how we might refer to this stanza: no more Marianas mourning in their moated grange, there is something more pressing, some register more haunting, some sense of death and unawareness more piteous. Some ‘greater love’? Perhaps not; but some love which is freed, if disastrously, from the romantic obsession with the individual, some gesture towards a more encompassing love which will yet not rest in that vast insubstantial golden bowl which constitutes the Christian lax forgiveness of the killer, as of the dead (for the dead are, of course, always equally to blame, for leaving us behind, for giving us good cause for moan). And under those circumstances, we are of course ‘disabled’; as Owen says in his poem of that name – to my mind, his best – which is, painfully, about a returner from the Front: Now, he will spend a few sick years in Institutes, And do what things the rules consider wise, And take whatever pity they may dole. To-night he noticed how the women’s eyes Passed from him to the strong men that were whole. How cold and late it is! Why don’t they come And put him into bed? Why don’t they come?8

This version of pity consorts very closely with death. The idea of putting to bed is obviously also an idea about burial (and about sex, but the thought is lost here); here it is coupled, brilliantly, with a version of a terrible petulance; this is, to return to where we have been before, no hero, but an irritable old man – not old at all, of course, but ‘old before his time’, to quote the cliché, although it may be relativised by the halfhidden Shakespearean reference to ‘fortune and men’s eyes’.9 So; pity here is drained, or perhaps it would be better to say ‘doled’ (rationed); no longer free, if it ever has been, it has fallen subject to the terrible ‘logic’ of disability, which here in turn (although not always) is itself subject to the (il)logic of war. And thus perhaps, afflicted by these desperate occasions, we may be reduced, or be pleased to be reduced,

‘War, and the pity of War’    ­99

to insensibility: and that is the title of another of Owen’s poems, and it concludes thus: But cursed are dullards whom no cannon stuns, That they should be as stones; Wretched are they, and mean With paucity that never was simplicity. By chance they made themselves immune To pity and whatever mourns in man Before the last sea and the hapless stars; Whatever mourns when many leave these shores; Whatever shares The eternal reciprocity of tears.10

The great sin, according to these lines, is insensibility and, in particular, insensibility to pity. Without pity, with instead a kind of immunisation or cauterisation, we are but stones, we are lost without feeling, isolated within and against the conjoining, the brotherhood and sisterhood, which only tears can sustain and guarantee. And unless we should think for even a single second, the fraction of a microcosmos, that we are here being lured into the Vale of Sentimentality, we have only to turn, still remaining within that ambience of terror which is the Great War, to David Jones, and firstly to his dealings with pity in In Parenthesis (1937). Here the army, the troop, the platoon passes ceaselessly on, struggling through mud, baffled by lack of direction; ‘they pass’, for example, a place where there was a ruin, they heard muted voices: the dark seemed gaining on the hidden moon – No. 6, in front, no longer seen. A fanned-flashing to the higher dislocations – how piteous the torn small twigs in the charged exposure: an instant, more intenser, dark.11

Here is the night of loss, in which we wander stricken and unaware: we cannot even see the person in front of us, while all around is a vast battleground, yet mostly unseen, unintelligible. Yet there is indeed the possibility of light, light of a sort: the flash here could be that of a sudden flashlight illumination, more probably it represents the accompaniment to an explosion, but either way it does not truly alleviate the dark, it brings it into sharper relief, but in doing so it also focuses on the tiny losses of innocence which war brings: the fate of the twigs, the ‘dislocated’ patterns their remnants etch on the retina, minute symbols of destruction that form a sharply ‘relieved’ reflection of our own suffering. As in T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922), these moments of microscopically fused intensity are themselves ‘relieved’ by other moments,

­100    The Literature of Pity ones of communal feeling, popular song for example, in which language plays an entirely different role, not one of focus but one of relaxation, the temporary pleasure of sharing a set of formulaic words for experiences however terrible and thereby salving, assuaging some subterranean thirst: He continues his song; he beats time with his heels thudding the trench-wall, his trade in his lap: Kitty Kitty isn’t it a pity in the City – it’s a bad break, Bertie.12

‘Pity’ here is a largely empty signifier, though the song itself is not: it was the trademark song of the signallers, the men whose task it was to repair the ‘breaks’, to maintain the lines of communication: without them all would be ‘at sea’, nothing would be known, orders could not be transmitted and the pity of war, no doubt, would be all the more intense and yet dissipated, it could not be communicated down the line, down the wire. And thus it would not, we might say, survive, and we would ourselves know nothing of this war; or of how it might echo, have echoed, other long-past conflicts, and it is this process of echoing that is a large part of the task, difficulty and achievement of Jones’s work. Our pity is never entirely our own; a lengthy and beautiful passage piles echo upon echo – Come for sweet princes by malignant interest deprived. Wait, wait long for – with the broken men, nest with badger and the martin-cat till such time as he come again, crying the waste for his chosen. Or come in gathering nuts and may; or run want-wit in a shirt for the queen’s unreason. Beat boys-bush for Robin and Bobin. Come with Merlin in his madness, for the pity of it; for the young men reaped like green barley, for the folly of it.13

And so the pity, the folly, the ‘tearing out’ of ‘the sacred root of war’,14 are not of one time, neither are they of one place. Yet neither are they ‘universal’, whatever that seductive and useless word might mean: rather they comprise a tissue of hauntings, a set of half-forgotten recollections rising up in time of pressure, adding to themselves episode by episode, origins lost in myth and mist, the future as uncertain as a signalman’s attempt to mend a line-break (and perhaps the echo of poetry’s formalities is not so distant here) in the dark with the ‘fanned-flashings’ overhead the only light to guide us.

‘War, and the pity of War’    ­101

But now we need to revisit others of the most innocent victims of war, in whom perhaps we can also find our selves delineated, yet without the taint of either our guilt or our complicity in these violences (‘he’ in the first line below, and ‘his’ thereafter, refer, as was conventional during the First World War, to the enemy and his weaponry): It was about an hour after Lights-out, and he caught the horse lines, and Nobby’s shop too, which sent up half the company’s boot repairs; No. 7 was turned out to get water from the pond – the tell-tale flames intrigued his observation posts; long-distance shells crawled from far over, like interminable rolling stock; the siege-people woke up; a cantankerous liveliness disturbed the hovering dark; out of this June half-night neighing horses reared on you, trailed their snapt tethering, cantered off; and dark hoof-thudding, circles concentrically the heavy fields, and clods thrown high – these dumb, who seem to sense how they perish with this flesh – their whinnying so pitiable.15

This is not the land of Merlin, and neither is it entirely the land of the current war; the spelling of ‘snapt’ alerts the reader to the long historical roll-call of emergencies such as this in the night, the uncontrollability of fear, and especially the fear of animals other than ourselves caught up in the senseless round. Dogs (‘even the dogs’),16 of course, run because of the need to pursue prey, however dimly the domestic varieties remember it; horses will not run in this way – obviously, because grass mostly stands still – and so the only way to make a horse run is through fear and/or pain. Jockeys and huntsmen have a terrible understanding of that; small girls from the Home Counties mostly do not. Yet. What a pity. There are biblical echoes here too: the ‘dumb’, those who perish, and the reduction of bodily life to ‘flesh’; echoes as well of Jones himself and his circumnavigations around the phrase ‘the many men so beautiful’, as here in ‘their whinnying so pitiable’, which almost manages to render the word ‘pitiable’ itself onomatopoeic, such is the withheld force of ‘whinnying’, the incomprehension implicit to fear which, although without what we recognise as language, is nonetheless far from dumb. Perhaps it is among the most appropriate of sounds to conjure in response to pity, whether that pity be for ourselves or for others: and for horses, less individuated than humans, then the border lines around pity would in any case, if we were but to know, be different. But for humans, the language around pity is compelling, and can form a tight net within which our pity may not be displayed. ‘He found him’, we hear – and here the issue of who is the ‘he’ and who is the ‘him’ matters not a whit, for we are within the realm of the repeated scene, of the echo (of pity),

­102    The Literature of Pity He found him all gone to pieces and not pulling himself together nor making the best of things. When they found him his friends came on him in the secluded fire-bay who miserably wept for the pity of it all and for the things shortly to come to pass and no hills to cover us.17

‘Pull yourself together’; ‘make the best of things’: the adjurations of those who seek – and indeed may need to seek in order ‘that civilisation may not sink’18 – to place boundaries around suffering, and therefore around pity; but this man, mortally wounded (for so we may reasonably assume from Jones’s ceaselessly elliptical prose, if prose it is), is not pulling himself together, neither is he making the best of things: for he is in pieces, he is shattered. Quite who weeps – there are four possibilities: himself, his friends, the fire-bay itself (mysteriously but not implausibly) or the ‘us’ which also includes the reader – will never become clear. And thus – and now in Jones’s other master-work, The Anathemata (1952) – to the essential religious recourse under such circumstances: Ladies of Tyre and the Phoenician littoral pray The Lady to have a native pity on this ship’s company – consider: how many inboard, along of us, belong to her!19

But it might not matter, for those in peril on the sea, or in the heat of battle, whom we consider to be our mistress or our master; and it might also not matter what we consider to be our ‘native’ land, our natural aspiration, our point of supposed origin; instead, all origins are confused, curled up, in the moments where we perceive, with unnaturally clear eyes, the moment and manner of our dying. The Anathemata again: roses-on-a-stalk reach to salute you       along with the shapeless and dowdy pious and the pious donors, and, brow-bright Pietas herself just where, just now      with what’s left of lips the swaithed incurable that crept unseen      left his unseen mark?20

The ‘pious’ who lead up to, even while they demean and in their meanness denigrate, Pietas herself; who is also known as ‘Our Lady of Sorrows’,21 and whose earthly avatars are the sisters of mercy – she too is here, but it too late for praise or prayer: the lips are gone, the language has fled, the loss of speech is incurable. What then is left of pity but its own shreds and morsels, a set of relics of an emotion ploughed out of us by the ceaseless tilling of the ground, the earth of Flanders, for example, replete with dead bodies – and thus on to the Second World War, and

‘War, and the pity of War’    ­103

only to one instance of the writing of those terrible fields of death and mutual shame, Primo Levi. And he will be our guide as we move across the catastrophic lands depicted in his master-work, If Not Now, When? (1986). This is the story of a group of Jewish and other people as they roam eastern Europe in the last years of the war: they see themselves as partisans, but as one of those whom they encounter comments, who has ever heard of a Jewish partisan? The comment is apposite: ‘partisan’ is a complex and conflicted term, but has historically mostly referred to those who defend their homeland, however hopelessly, against the inroads of tyranny or invasion. Such a notion of ‘homeland’ is only relevant in the most oblique of ways to these Jews and other exiles; as indeed it may also be to the many groups of apparent ‘home-dwellers’, prejudiced and potentially violent, whom they encounter. This is a world of chaos, distrust and severed origins of which we in contemporary Europe now know very little, unless, as through the eyes of a film like, for example, Into the West (1992), we are able to reactivate this history by seeing life as it appears to a gypsy, a traveller, one of the few surviving nomads of the western world. There is not much mention of pity in If Not Now, When?; oddly enough. There is plenty of pity to be felt; the tears that well are copious. But the word itself is infrequent; it is as if there is always too much to do, there are too many matters to be attended to in the fight for survival and the ensuing, consequent struggle to maintain some sense of dignity, for such a potentially weakening emotion to be allowed much airspace. Deaths occur and are in some sense coped with; what Levi portrays is a world which is suffused with mourning and yet which is also in some sense beyond mourning; as, no doubt, with a herd of wild animals, the death of an individual is something that has to be left alone, for to concentrate upon it, to take the time to perform what might be considered the ‘proper rites’, would be to expose the herd to further danger, the catastrophic consequences of ‘staying still’. Yet pity is named; it cannot, in the end, be kept away. It comes up when a description is offered of the fate of the Jews of Opatow. ‘What did they do to them?’, asks a character. Another replies: They pulled them out of the ghetto and shut them all up in the movie theatre: even the children and the old people and the dying: more than two thousand people in a theatre with five hundred seats. They left them in there for seven days, not giving them anything to eat or drink, and they shot any of us who showed pity and tried to hand something in through the windows; and they also shot some others of us who also took them water, yes, but in exchange wanted the last money they had.22

­104    The Literature of Pity The speaker is (as is perhaps obvious) not a Jew, although he is the mayor of a village close to where this atrocity happened (yet this is, perhaps, not even the heart of the atrocity, which is the fate of those who survived their movie experience), and this sense of difference is developed through the deployment of the ‘us’, the ‘us’ who remained on the outside – necessarily so, of course, one could not suddenly become an honorary Jew out of sheer solidarity, or was this after all itself a shirked possibility under some circumstances? – and the ‘us’ who showed pity. Although, of course, there is a further reticulation here in the two versions of the ‘us’: there are those who attempted to provide food and drink out of a sense of pity, and there are those who attempted exactly the same enterprise out of a lust for profit – we might fairly say, recalling other moments in the novel, from a tragically mistaken sense of trying to recoup from the Jew what the Jew had supposedly harvested from Europe. The fate of both groups was, it turned out, exactly the same: the weapons of death turned out to have no regard for motive, they did not respond to the sympathy and tears of those whose motives were ‘genuine’, whatever that might mean. Pity’s relic is destroyed by the mechanics – and, unfortunately, the mechanicians – of violence; the robe of sanctity is torn, and the possible commonality of those who suffer is wrenched apart even in the very, apparently contradictory, act of ­undifferentiation – which, as emblematically here, is also the act of death. The other reference to pity in If Not Now, When? to which I want to refer is in a sense more complicated. It occurs quite near the end of the book, when the travelling group has managed to end up, after so many trials and tribulations, in northern Italy. Here they find themselves having to account for themselves: the clash between the apparent signifiers of a civilised world and the manners, habits, appearance and even clothing of the partisans is almost comical after so much suffering. Much is made at this point in the novel of how the Jews of Italy were not subject to the disastrous policies that obtained throughout non-Mediterranean Europe. One of the partisans does his best to speak Italian (the issue of what languages might be appropriate to describe and commiserate over experiences is as live as an electric wire throughout the novel): Gruppo, lovely signora. Group. Sempre together. Russia, Polandia. March. Forest, river, snow. Dead Germans. Many. We partizani, all of us, porca miseria. No DP. We, war, partisanka. All soldiers, madosha. Women, too.23

But the woman who is trying to welcome (?) them is ‘puzzled’ by these followers of a partisan leader called Gedaleh:

‘War, and the pity of War’    ­105 She asked the Gedalists please to step aside and wait, and she picked up the telephone. She spoke at length, in an excited voice, but covering her mouth with her hand to avoid being overheard. In the end, she told Pavel to be patient: they would have to spend another night camping, here in the corridors, too, as best they could. But the next day she would find a better arrangement for them. Wash up? It wasn’t easy. There were no baths, not even any showers; the buildings had been reactivated only recently. But there was water, lavatories, soap, and even three or four towels. Not many for all these people, of course, but what was to be done? It wasn’t her fault, or her colleagues’; they were all doing their best, even making personal contributions. In her words and in her face Mendel read reverence, pity, solidarity, and alarm.

The blend, of course, is fascinating, and we can probably gloss it thus: reverence for the appalling suffering and privation which the group has endured on its apparently endless journey from Russia to Italy; solidarity for all those who have suffered from and been displaced by the war; alarm (although this is more complicated), presumably about what difficulties the presence of these travellers (who after all have a huge toll of German blood on their hands) might cause for the smooth running of refugee camps and eventual repatriation; and pity. The pity, of course, is intrinsic: it flows almost naturally from those in positions of authority, or at the very least in positions of comparative safety, to those whose situation is altogether more precarious. There is a problem here with vision and perspective: all through the book we have been aware that Mendel, Pavel and their companions have been living outside the law, beyond the reach of civilisation (and towels and soap) but we have, as readers, become accustomed to their company. Here, for the first time, we see them as others see them, we view them through the looking-glass of the remains of a civilised world. In their own terms, they may have seemed admirable, or at the very least strong and proud; but here, in this new world which promises a civilised order, they are to be seen quite differently: as dirty, uncouth, exhausted refugees, not as the fearsome fighters they consider themselves (with evidence which we readers have seen over the entire course of the novel) to be. The most fruitful comparison is with the young hero of J.G. Ballard’s Empire of the Sun (1984): until we see him through the eyes of others, we can almost believe that he is sane; it is only when we see him as others see him that the florid extent of his derangement, and thus of his need for pity, emerges.24 ‘War, and the pity of war’: better now, perhaps, to think of the ‘war machine’ and of all that it menaces, treats, and spews out.25 For pity is not necessarily naïve; it is not purely a matter of sympathising with the plight of the individual, soldier or civilian, caught up in the maw

­106    The Literature of Pity of the vast machine – described perhaps better than in any other place, better even than by Herbert Marcuse, Virilio or Deleuze and Guattari, by Kafka in his short story ‘In the Penal Colony’ (1914). Pity can also get to the heart of the matter: it can form itself, ‘shape itself up’, as the correct and proper response to destruction and stupidity, the apparently endless destruction which is consequent upon stupidity. Perhaps the most crucial lesson to be learned is that fundamentalisms down the ages – and fundamentalism is crucially a function of stupidity (which is quite different from ignorance) – have been pitiless; and worse, have prided themselves, and continue to pride themselves, on this absence of pity.

Chapter 10

Reflections on Algernon Blackwood’s Gothic

There is a great deal that could be said about the relations between pity and Gothic; indeed, a radical view would suggest that the longstanding association between terror and Gothic has been in part a cover story which places us as readers in positions of power – identifying, for example, with the hero/villain – rather than allowing us to share in the no doubt pitiable plight of the victim/heroine. But in this chapter I want to reflect on only one writer, and a writer who might indeed be seen as somewhat athwart the Gothic mainstream: Algernon Blackwood. Blackwood is still comparatively little known, despite having been one of the best-known writers of supernatural tales of his time, and some introduction is no doubt necessary. He was born in 1869 and died in 1951, and it has been said that he was one of the greatest English writers of ghost stories and supernatural fiction. That is not my comment but one made by H.P. Lovecraft, and it perhaps provides a rare opportunity to agree with something the egregious Lovecraft said. He (Blackwood) was also a writer of children’s stories and novels; he was a traveller, particularly in Canada, where some of his best-known stories are set; a sometime newspaper reporter and factory owner; and he had a vast range of spiritual interests, ranging from Buddhism and Hinduism to the Order of the Golden Dawn. Among his output was a series of psychic detective stories, featuring the ‘physician extraordinary’ called Dr John Silence, which was extremely popular at the time they emerged; the last significant publication of his work by a mainstream publisher was the collection of stories called The Insanity of Jones and Other Tales by Penguin in 1966, although many of his other works, which run to some thirty book-length titles plus a mass of other material, are now available from small presses. His fame in England seemed – wrongly, as it turned out – secured when he embarked on a radio career in 1934, which later took him on to television as a story-teller and led in 1949 to the award of a CBE for

­108    The Literature of Pity services to literature. He was interested in science; he was interested in psychology and psychoanalysis, and was an avid reader of Freud; he was interested in various strands of late Victorian and Edwardian strands of mysticism and psychical research. It has been said, no doubt contentiously, that Blackwood was the only major writer of supernatural fiction to take the supernatural seriously. This may or may not be so; what is certainly true is that in Blackwood’s writings it is possible to find a peculiar, perhaps eccentric, certainly unique form of mysticism, which gives rise to a curious kind of textuality. In his stories and novels there are certainly ghosts; there are even, occasionally, horrors, and when Blackwood wished to chill the blood he could certainly do so. But we may suspect that that was not his main concern. We might see this particularly clearly if we contrast his work with that of his near contemporary M.R. James. Where James produces, in stories like ‘Count Magnus’ or ‘The Treasure of Abbot Thomas’ (both 1904),1 a set of supernatural forces which are frequently brutal in their physicality, it is rarely in Blackwood that we as readers can be sure that we are being presented with something physical at all. Whereas the terror in James springs from the thought of what we might be subjected to if we were to see clearly the things which flap and howl at the borders of our vision, in Blackwood we are more likely to run the risk of being, to distort the old critical phrase, ‘blinded by insight’.2 There is a kind of euphoria, a kind of rapture, in the visions that conclude many of Blackwood’s stories, when the curtain inside the mind is torn back and we find ourselves exposed to forces vaster than we can comprehend before that phenomenon with which we may well be familiar from other supernatural stories of the time, the opening of the inner eye; forces which, crucially, enjoin the reader to pity for the suffering protagonist. And there is, in Blackwood, what one might almost feel to be a surfeit of pity. Here is a brief conspectus. In ‘The Listener’ (1899), our protagonist – and diarist – in a brief interlude of cheer from the ‘terror’ that surrounds him, finds that ‘even the grey-faced landlady rouses pity in me’.3 In ‘The Wendigo’ (1910), a story about that figure of the desolation of the North American wilds which Blackwood made so peculiarly his own, Dr Cathcart wakes in the night to find his guide Défago sobbing: ‘This intimate, human sound, heard amid the desolation about them, woke pity. It was so incongruous, so pitifully incongruous – and so vain! Tears – in this vast and cruel wilderness: of what avail?’4 The seer’s young wife in ‘Clairvoyance’ (1911) changes ‘most marvellously’ in his presence: ‘lines started into being upon the pale skin of her girlish face, lines of pity, pleading, and love . . .’5. Dr John Silence, the psychi-

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cal researcher, is uninterested in clairvoyance, telepathy, the culture of the séance; indeed, ‘for the modern psychical researcher he felt the calm tolerance of the “man who knows”. There was a trace of pity in his voice – contempt he never showed – when he spoke of their methods.’6 The terrifying ‘Woman’s Ghost Story’ (1907) features a female protagonist who finds herself in the company of a (dead) man who is only frightening because he is himself utterly, terminally frightened: ‘If only someone would be kind to me – laugh, speak gently and rationally with me, cry if they like, pity, comfort, soothe me [. . .] Now, madam, won’t you take pity on me?’ [. . .] A horrible laughter came gurgling up in my throat as I heard him, but the sense of pity was stronger than the laughter [. . .]7

In ‘The Kit-bag’ (1908), perhaps apparently more prosaically (although as in all of Blackwood’s stories the prosaic moment is strictly – or numinously – limited), our hero is off to the Alps for Christmas, but as ‘a furious gust of wind’ rattles the windows, he takes the time to think ‘with pity of the poor Londoners whose Christmas would be spent in such a climate’;8 it turns out, naturally, that his pity is misplaced and might have been more fruitfully directed towards himself. In ‘May Day Eve’ (1907), one of Blackwood’s masterpieces, the protagonist observes an impossible scene, one aspect of which is an abhuman figure in a kind of transparent cell, whom he recognises as a ‘projection of myself’; yet before this startlingly modern realisation, ‘I shrank back, shuddering with mingled pity and disgust.’9 ‘The Camp of the Dog’ (1908) is no less compelling, neither is it less psychologically revelatory: at a crucial moment the first-person narrator tries to interpret Joan’s fascination for an obscure object of desire by saying that ‘the true explanation is that you pity him for loving you, and at the same time you feel the repulsion of the healthy, vigorous animal for what is weak and timid’.10 Finally, in terms of these short notes, a character in the novel A Prisoner in Fairyland (1913) falls asleep and devises ‘wonderful plans’: ‘The saviour spirit was ever in his heart. It failed to realise itself because the mind was unequal to the strain of wise construction; but it was there [. . .] He had that indestructible pity to which no living thing is outcast.’11 A classic ambiguity: should we read this as saying that there is within every living thing a sense of pity; or as saying that true pity includes every living thing in its orbit? To return, however, to the opening of the inner eye, the ascent to ecstasy in Blackwood is fraught with pitfalls and complexities; and the main one is death. From this point on, I will be alluding to stories which for the most part do not name pity as such; but I hope I have established a framework sufficiently robust to reassure that pity is never far from Blackwood’s concerns. The first story I want

­110    The Literature of Pity to mention, ‘The Dance of Death’ (1907), concerns a young man named Browne who has been warned by his doctor that his heart is weak. Oppressed by this discovery, and finding himself invited to a dance despite the fact that he has been warned to undertake no excessive exertion, he goes. He has a poor and uninteresting time of it until he notices across a crowded floor a girl: She was dressed in pale green, and always danced with the same man – a man about his own height and colouring, whose face, however, he could never properly see. They sat out together much of the time – always in the gallery where the shadows were deepest.12

He asks various people who she is, but not only do they not know, they do not see her at all. The dance goes on: Browne prepares to leave but finds he cannot until he has seen the girl again. As he waits he is assailed by sharp stabs of pain, but then is rewarded when she again appears, now without her previous escort, and they dance. As they dance, Gradually the room emptied of its original comers, and others filled their places, silently, with airy graceful movements and happy faces, till the whole floor at length was covered with the soundless feet and whirling forms of those who had already left the world. And, as the artificial light faded away, there came in its place a soft white light that filled the room with beauty and made all the faces look radiant. And, once, as they skimmed past a mirror, he saw that the girl beside him was not there – that he seemed to be dancing alone, clasping no one; yet when he glanced down, there was her magical face at his shoulder and he felt her little form pressing up against him.13

It comes, of course, as no surprise at all to discover in the cursory concluding paragraph that he has already dropped dead of a heart attack. In fact attacks of the heart, in various meanings of that phrase, are all too frequent in Blackwood, and this makes reading his work in the twenty-first century difficult. It is, of course, possible to feel that in stories like this mysticism tips over into the sentimental – one might think again of the vast difference between those apparently cognate adjectives, ‘pitiable’ and ‘pitiful’ – or that the sympathy one might feel for the protagonist becomes more like pity in one of the worse senses of the term. What, though, fascinates about the story is the intensity and smoothness of the transition: the way – unusual, I think, in western literature though more common in, for example, Chinese tales of the supernatural – in which the text seeks, quite overtly, to manage the passage between life and death. There is no fear here: indeed, there is a kind of fulfilment of a hope for escape from what Blake referred to as the ‘same dull round’.14 And that

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escape is, more often than not, into a world of great trees, cool air and open skies – a scenario to which I will return in a moment. However, for now I will turn to another story called ‘The Glamour of the Snow’ (1911). The plot is perhaps not dissimilar, though the setting is different: Hibbert, the protagonist, is holidaying high in the Valais Alps, where he is trying to write a book. Torn between the world of the tourists who are his only human companions and the wonders of nature all around him, one night he ventures out skating alone on the hotel ice-rink, and there he meets (as we might have come by now to expect) a girl who skates superbly but whose face is hidden. Over the next few nights, she entices him out of the safety of the hotel and higher and higher up the mountain slopes until at last: The girl stood in front of him, very near; he felt her chilly breath upon his cheeks; her hair passed blindingly across his eyes; and that icy wind came with her. He saw her whiteness close; again, it seemed, his sight passed through her into space as though she had no face. Her arms were round his neck. She drew him softly downwards to his knees. He sank; he yielded utterly; he obeyed. Her weight was upon him, smothering, delicious. The snow was to his waist [. . .]15

Hibbert survives this deathly encounter, leaving behind him, when he finally goes home from the village, an enduring legend of the mad night skier. But it is the blinding, the blindness of these moments of vision which seems to me most emblematic of Blackwood: the series of attempts to convey the sense that, in the end, or perhaps explicitly and particularly at the end, when we seek to feel the utmost pity for the dying protagonist, nothing can be seen; that the gaze which has been merely impeded by natural objects – again, perhaps the implicit Blake reference is obvious here16 – comes to be able to pass through them undisturbed so that a different world may be encompassed – through, of course, senses different from the ones we exercise in daily life. I mentioned that at the end of ‘The Dance of Death’ the protagonist escapes to a world characterised, at least in part, by a sense of oneness with the trees, with forests, and this is another familiar – if for that very reason distinctly uncanny – theme of Blackwood’s. I want now to move on to two more of his stories, ‘The Willows’ (1907) and ‘The Man whom the Trees Loved’ (1912). ‘The Man whom the Trees Loved’ is, put very briefly, the story of one Bittacy, a forester who, having spent all his life caring for trees, is in the end, as it were, ‘spirited away’ by the forest despite his wife’s best efforts to save him. He becomes one with the trees, ‘becomes-forest’ as Deleuze and Guattari might put it, but in the process necessarily dehumanises; what is left, we are told, is ‘but the shell, half

­112    The Literature of Pity emptied’.17 Our humanness, as we work with the great forces of nature, becomes revealed, so Blackwood seems to say, as a mere defence: while we are working at the self-appointed human task of control, the natural world is working away against that, undermining boundaries, continually spilling over and spilling out, proliferating in ways which Deleuze and Guattari would refer to as ‘rhizomatic’,18 overwhelming attempts at power and order; until what is left is only the mutual pity experienced between man and whatever we may like to call the ‘natural order’. Yet pity is not the only term we might use. It is a term which Bittacy’s wife uses: on one occasion when he leaves her for the trees, ‘love, yearning, pity rose in a storm within her, but as in nightmare she found no words or movement possible’. But she also construes this emotional tangle in other ways: She saw that jealousy was not confined to the human and animal world alone, but ran through all creation. The Vegetable Kingdom knew it too. So-called inanimate nature shared it with the rest. Trees felt it. This Forest just beyond the window – standing there in the silence of the autumn evening across the little lawn – this Forest understood it equally. The remorseless, branching power that sought to keep exclusively for itself the thing it loved and needed, spread like a running desire through all its million leaves and stems and roots. In humans, of course, it was consciously directed; in animals it acted with frank instinctiveness; but in trees this jealousy rose in some kind of blind tide of impersonal and unconscious wrath that would sweep opposition from its path as the wind sweeps powdered snow from the surface of the ice. Their number was a host with endless reinforcements, and once it realised its passion was returned the power increased.19

‘All men kill the thing they love’, Oscar Wilde had written fifteen years previously20 – perhaps in a fit of self-pity, but if so in a marvellously evocative one; but the real question here is about anthropomorphism, and about what this textual, rhetorical move to spread the emotion of jealousy across the natural world achieves and what in the way of mutual sympathy it runs the danger of destroying. What seems to me most interesting here is the extraordinary complexity of the phrases around the ‘remorseless, branching power’, for this is surely, at one level, the encompassing, entangling power of jealousy; but it translates effortlessly, rhizomatically, into the arborescent power of the forest canopy. What would a jealousy be that is impersonal and unconscious; but perhaps we might reverse this question: what would a jealousy be that is not, as Iago suggests to us, impersonal and unconscious, one that continues to see clearly the object of its wrath – would this be jealousy at all, or something more rational, something far more foreign to the regime of the forest, the ‘blind tide’. Here the word ‘blind’, the notion

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of blindness, is again crucial, as are the ‘endless reinforcements’ which suggest the fearsome grasp of passion, the utter prevalence of jealousy, in one form or another, as the very pattern of murder, as pity’s oblique opposite. ‘The Willows’ is set on the Danube, and a scary region it is. ‘Here,’ says the narrator, was a place unpolluted by men, kept clean by the winds from coarsening human influences, a place where spiritual agencies were within reach and aggressive. Never, before or since, have I been so attacked by indescribable suggestions of a ‘beyond region’, of another scheme of life, another evolution not parallel to the human. And in the end our minds would succumb under the weight of the awful spell, and we should be drawn across the frontier into their world.21

This, then, is a region which is uncontaminated, pure; it is also – in a sense for that very reason – completely unintelligible; it makes us blind, and in the absence of location or bearings there is always the risk that it might bring about a critical heart condition and that we might end up needing the caring pity of others. What we have here, at any rate, is a momentary defeat for the forces of ceaseless imperialistic exploration: if the impetus behind such forces is to wipe out the right of nature to hold its own secrets then here, for a transfixed and transfiguring moment, invasion is held at bay and challenged for supremacy. Bittacy the forester, whether of his own volition or not, moved, when the trees took pity on him, into a realm where, as it were, the ‘case is altered’ and our preconceptions about natural and physical boundaries dissolve in the bright mist. Here amid the willows, the question is again put as to what would happen if ‘our minds would succumb under the weight of the awful spell, and we should be drawn across the frontier into their world’. Would we end up writing, as Deleuze and Guattari suggest, like a non-human – like a willow, perhaps; like a wolf? like a dog? Like a dog, maybe: ‘The Camp of the Dog’ (1908), which I have already mentioned and is mainly about the werewolf, the double, is also about trees again, but I will turn instead to a particular moment in another story, ‘The Lost Valley’ (1910), where our hero penetrates, not unusually in Edwardian writing, into the heart of a ‘lost valley’ (as I have said, Blackwood had read a great deal of Freud): he now became distinctly aware that the emptiness of this lonely valley was only apparent. It is impossible to say through what sense, or combination of senses, this singular certainty was brought to him that the valley was not really as forsaken and deserted as it seemed – that, on the contrary, it was the

­114    The Literature of Pity very reverse [. . .] The valley as a matter of fact was – full. Packed, thronged and crowded it was to the very brim of its mighty wooded walls – with life. It was now borne in upon him, with an inner conviction that left no room for doubt, that on all sides living things – persons – were jostling him, rubbing elbows, watching all his movements, and only waiting till the darkness came to reveal themselves.22

One thing one might fairly wonder here is exactly what Blackwood means by ‘persons’. Plenty of his other work would suggest that a closer approximation to his meaning would be the Buddhist term ‘beings’, which could, of course, include the multitude of creatures without elbows or, as with dogs, with elbows which we humans perceive to be the wrong way round. Certainly, to put it in a quite different framework, his perception here could be easily converted into a version of and comment on the notion of the ‘empty land’ conventional as a founding myth of settler colonies (including, of course, Blackwood’s own occasional domicile Canada); the notion that there is nothing here, that the land is ours to occupy, that the ghosts of previous indigenes, whether they be humans or other animals, are mere intimations we receive because of our fear, that they do not relate to the inevitable return. And so we are reduced again to slash-and-burn or, in V.S. Naipaul’s inimitable and more upto-date term, ‘insuranburn’,23 as a way of warding off the inroads that pity might make if we were fully to confront the ghostly objects of our displacements. Blackwood’s vision in the ‘The Lost Valley’ suggests the notion of a community of mutual sympathy where the identity of each individual – human, animal or phantom – need not be a condition of entry. This may sound mystical, and that is probably because in one sense it is, and I am not worried about that: to stay in tune with Blackwood there has to be a certain adoption of mystical values. But in another sense perhaps it is not: because if we are to think about the forces of nature without imposing our imperialist will, delivered for example through the horrifying anthropomorphisation meted out to companion animals, then we have to go through a process, at least arguably, of meeting the animal, the ‘other world’, the world of ‘nature’, whatever that might mean, on its own terms without imposing what Hegel challengingly and counter-intuitively (as always) refers to as the laws of spirit.24 I am not sure whether this is something of what Blackwood is trying to intimate in his curious, half-lit, phantomatic stories; but it does seem to me that in many of them the narcissistic centralisation of the human suffers, if not from displacement, at least from a perceptible set of tremors – tremors of the heart, signs of an angina of the soul – which emanate

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from a larger, less certain sense of what ‘life’, in the more general, more proliferative sense of the term, might mean. It suffers also from an unavoidable realisation of the presence of the almost unheard languages in which something might be replying to, at the same time as undermining, the assertive accents in which humanity tends to deal with those forms of life which it continues to perceive as its inferiors and to exile its own no doubt frightening sense of pity. We can return from these issues, which are essentially to do with our conflicted relations with the animal world, to something more recognisably human – if anything by Blackwood is fully recognisable as human – by turning to his story ‘The Insanity of Jones’ (1907). In one sense, this is a simple tale of madness and paranoia. Jones, a clerk in a fire insurance office, is, we are told, a man who had always been tremblingly aware that he stood on the borderland of another region, a region where time and space were merely forms of thought, where ancient memories lay open to the sight, and where the forces behind each human life stood plainly revealed, and he could see the hidden springs at the very heart of the world [. . .] So convinced was he that the external world was the result of a vast deception practised upon him by the gross senses, that when he stared at a great building like St Paul’s he felt it would not very much surprise him to see it suddenly quiver like a shape of jelly and then melt utterly away, while in its place stood all at once revealed the mass of colour, or the great intricate vibrations, or the splendid sound – the spiritual idea – which it represented in stone.25

Possessed of these convictions, Jones inhabits two contradictory worlds. In one of these worlds, the world of dream, he meets a man – if it is a man; certainly whatever it is, it is dead – who convinces him that, in a previous life some four hundred years ago, he has suffered a terrible wrong and it is his duty to avenge it. He has pointed out to him the perpetrator of this age-old injustice and Jones, utterly persuaded of the justice of his own cause, shoots him several times and then, ‘acting impersonally’ as he sees it, ‘as an instrument in the hands of the Invisibles who dispense justice and balance accounts’,26 places his final shots direct into the man’s eyes. Jones is insane, of course: the title of the story tells us as much. But what is interesting is that his insanity takes, for the larger part of the narrative, a shape almost indistinguishable from the intimations of final, blinding insight with which we have become familiar from others of Blackwood’s tales. The belief in the curtain, and in what lies behind the curtain, can, it seems, lead us towards a kind of insight through the blinding of the outer senses; or it can, as in the final paroxysm of this story, lead us into a field where all trace of humanity is buried,

­116    The Literature of Pity e­ mblematised here in the intolerable blinding of the other, while at the same time the reader is aware of a pity for the deranged narrator which is itself well-nigh intolerable in the emphasis it places on the roles played in our own lives by delusions of grandeur, of exemption for the generally pitiable condition of mankind. Perhaps in some ways Blackwood seems old-fashioned, Edwardian to the core; but there can be no doubt that there is a thread which runs through his stories and can connect us to more contemporary thoughts on the notion of the inhuman, even the abhuman. Blackwood’s chief characters are, as it were, only temporarily or even parenthetically human: the something else which is going on inside and around them can be thought of as mystical; it can also be thought of as related to Blackwood’s readings of Freud, to his conviction that everyday interactions are only a surface layer, a set of egoic fictions, which act as a frail and flimsy cover on a quite different set of aspirations, desires and violences; it can be thought of in terms of a series of attempts to conjure textually apposite responses to the human plight, especially on the brink of death or in the company of the strange and the phantomatic, which would otherwise be banished, buried in a heap of ‘soft emotions’ which threaten to undermine the carefully built stockade of our defences against tears. My final example from Blackwood is a story called ‘The Touch of Pan’ (1917) – not, of course, to be confused with Arthur Machen’s masterpiece The Great God Pan (1894), but traversing, in a way, quite similar terrain. Here we have a man faced with a choice: a choice as to whether he will look outward or inward. On the brink of a conventional marriage he experiences a series of visions, collected around the figure of a wild girl and of the always hidden form of the god Pan, who cannot be seen and is indistinguishable from the trees whose movements both reveal and conceal his presence. The question is whether he will obey the summons; or, perhaps more accurately, what will be the balance of power and weakness that will lead him into one or the other of the solutions to his impossible dilemma. The story is virtually postmodern in its hinted indecisiveness; it is not as though Heber, the protagonist, is even in a position to make a choice. Whatever he may choose has been already laid down for him: the achievements and disappointments which will flow from one or the other decision do not belong to the short-term future alone but are emblematic of a far longer movement of time. And time, as of course Freud says, does not exist in the unconscious; or if it does, it is looped into baroque patterns, it has lost its beginnings and its ends, its origins and its trajectory. The passing of time, the clear movement from past

Algernon Blackwood’s Gothic    ­117

through present into future, is a mere distraction; rather what one has, what one is destined to live with, is an endless looping, perhaps specifically a looping of phrase, a process caught in condensation and displacement. The most obvious example in ‘The Touch of Pan’ is the repeated phrase ‘In the heart of that wood dwell I’. At one point when the shadowed girl utters this formulation, His heart gave another leap – more violent than the first – for the sentence caught him like a spell. There was a lilt and rhythm in the words, a wonder and a beauty, that made it poetry [. . .] It seemed the last line of some delicious runic verse: ‘In the heart of that wood – dwell I’. And it flashed across him: that living, moving, inhabited pine wood was her thought. It was thus she thought it, saw it. Her nature flung back to a life she understood, a life that needed, claimed her.27

What is going on here, it seems to me, is an attempt to incarnate a world in language: to make a form of words into a magical incantation which is capable of bringing a world into being and which thereby asserts a formative, primordial power of language which will undercut and undermine our attempts to use language for our own ends. Again, this is the very stuff of certain kinds of mysticism: one might think, for example, of the constitutive power of the magic word in Jacob Boehme. But perhaps there is little to distinguish that post-medieval account of the magic word from the post-Freudian account given by Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok in The Wolf Man’s Magic Word (1986): in both cases it is the word itself which creates the world.28 In conclusion, I will return, as it were, to the heart of the matter. Blackwood’s concern is constantly with the heart – the state of the heart, the course of the heart. The involution of the heart places it directly over against the processes of time and history, and furthermore it implies a constant oscillation between life and death, such that one does not simply supervene upon the other. There is an emphasis on the condensation and collapse of time, an emphasis on the ‘fatal instant’, on the attack of the heart, the question of what might be a full life and by what criteria it might be judged. But within this constellation there is, I believe, a deeper, half-articulated concern with what it might mean to feel or to experience pity. What would a community based on acknowledging its own pity look like? What would our relations with the animals, the forests, the ghosts be like if we were constantly aware of their fears, their awarenesses of danger and mortality? What, above all, do we continually (and unsuccessfully) attempt to suppress in our moments of unwillingness to speak of pity? The question, it seems to me,

­118    The Literature of Pity is a wide one for the Gothic; but perhaps we might feel that it is again Blake who sees the issue most clearly. ‘To Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love / All pray in their distress’, ‘For Mercy has a human heart, / Pity a human face . . .’; or is the truth in fact, as we have already suggested, radically, pitifully different: Pity would be no more If we did not make somebody Poor; And Mercy no more could be If all were as happy as we.

Chapter 11

Pity’s Cold Extremities: Jean Rhys and Stevie Smith

Jean Rhys’s Voyage in the Dark was one of her early novels; published in 1934 to little acclaim, it was only really resurrected when she underwent her curious renaissance in the later 1960s. Read now, it is I think – at least for me – a terrifying book. It tells, I suppose one might say, the story of Anna: lacking parents, in one sense or another, she is brought to England from the Caribbean by her aunt Hester, who effectively abandons her. She drifts from the life of a chorus girl into semi-prostitution, whatever that might mean, and becomes pregnant – she has no idea who the father might be. She undergoes an agonising abortion, whereupon the novel abruptly ends with Anna dreaming of beginning life all over again. To say that is to suggest that we end our reading of the text on a note of redemption, but this is in fact the opposite of the case. Anna’s dream of rebirth is exactly that, a dream: the reader feels at no point that such a rebirth could actually be possible; what has been done has been done and cannot be unravelled. Besides, we have no compelling reason to believe anything Anna says: she spends most of her time, as she and various other characters in the novel say, half-asleep; she is permanently exhausted and spends weeks on end in bed, retreating from the always ‘cold’ world of London and England. It is not that she is a victim: to suppose such would be far too simple. Rhys has an advanced and extraordinary insight into notions of collusion, which I need to try to explain. It is not that Anna colludes in her fate: to say that would be implicitly to call into question the appalling destinies of thousands of displaced, indeed trafficked women. But what Rhys does do – some would say, indeed some have said, decades before her time – is to try to feel her way – no doubt aided by her own experiences – into the blank, into the void. We all know, I am sure, how easy it is to say: ‘If only she had behaved like that’; ‘If only she had taken her life into her own hands’; ‘If only she

­120    The Literature of Pity had just run away.’ What Rhys captures is that there is no running away, because to run away you have to have some at least primitive sense of where you already are; but if you are hidden under the blanket, then you are blanking out any realisation of where you are. Anna does not lack for money, ill-gotten though some people might consider it; she is not precisely destitute. But she does not know where she is; she does not want to know where she is, because to know that, to understand that, would conjure up the spirit of where she is not, in her case the memory of the Caribbean, in unbearable detail. Yet none of this is particularly vivid. It is not as vivid as it is in, say, the work of Joan Riley or Andrea Levy.1 Voyage in the Dark is a remarkable book, but one thing it is not is vivid. Instead it is constantly shadowed. The question of who is speaking to whom is often obscured, as though we are hearing voices from the other side of the blanket; or from downstairs while we as children are cowering upstairs as our fate – we know but cannot hear – is being decided. Anna suspends our pity; she does not want our pity, or rather, she would not recognise our pity even if we could manifest it, because she has already come to accept that the world – as she has experienced it and as she believes she will continue to experience it – is exploitative, that any act of kindness has other motivations. The moment of pity, then, in the text is as we might expect – perverse, appalling. It occurs when her aunt Hester, who appears to believe that she has been trying to turn the Creole Anna (and although I do not have space to go into it here, ‘Creole’ is not a simple word) into a good English girl, says that ‘I always pitied you. I always thought that considering everything you were much to be pitied.’2 Anna responds by asking what Hester means by ‘considering everything’, assuming that what is meant is that she believes Anna’s mother to have been, as she puts it, ‘coloured’. The argument, we as readers may reasonably believe, was a potentially violent one, but we have no evidence of this because Rhys leaves out any adverbials that might suggest it. It ends, anyway, in a kind of stalemate: neither of the participants, in fact, has any tenable evidence. Hester appears to be speaking from pure prejudice, believing that Anna has had, at any rate, welcomed unfortunate influences from the ‘niggers’; of Anna’s feelings we, as always, know nothing of any value. What Rhys does here with such extraordinary – and perverse – power is to forbid us from indulging in our most simple, most primitive feelings: we do not immediately feel pity ourselves for Anna, who continually resists such approaches. Instead we feel Anna as something alien moving in our midst; something creepily rational, willing to return exploitation with exploitation, and yet, as I have said, always fatally tired, unable

Jean Rhys and Stevie Smith    ­121

to muster a response which lasts for more than a few seconds, always trying our patience – as though Rhys is asking, how far can you last with this frustration before you start inhabiting the ghastly racist mantle of Aunt Hester? Anna, we will not be surprised to learn, drinks too much. The heroine of Good Morning, Midnight (1939) does too, but in her case spectacularly. Temporarily self-exiled to Paris, with apparent intentions of making a new start – we might almost say that she is trying to begin again where Anna left off, gave up trying – Sasha repeats the same sad cycle. The ending is one of the most calamitous, the most immiserating, of any I know of in English fiction. But before that, there are many moments of pity. Here are three. In the house of a painter who is, in fact, trying to cheer her up – we can only infer her constant depression from other people’s reactions to her – she asks for a drink, but what he produces is not serious, not what she wants or needs, the remains of a mostly empty bottle of port poured into a tiny saké cup. ‘I have an irresistible longing,’ Sasha says, ‘for a long, strong drink to make me forget that once again I have given damnable human beings the right to pity me and laugh at me’.3 ‘Damnable’; it is worth saying that the word ‘damn’ tolls like a death knell through both of these books: in its colloquial form, obviously, but we gradually begin, as readers, to experience it more deeply, as a report from the soul of the damned. Here the ‘right to pity me’ stems from her tears, from her unaccountable (to her) fits of crying, from the long sobbing which has now come to make up her life. And so there is here a tension of the most blatant kind between crying and laughing, both equally unpredictable outcomes of a human encounter, neither of them avoidable; and at the heart of this is the notion of pity, the terror of being pitied, as though whatever the circumstances, whatever the fear of the night, the fear of the other, it is the fear of being pitied which reminds her of her position, her status – and pitied, we notice, by ‘damnable human beings’. Of course, this linguistic gesture both connects her to the human lot as she sees it, which is to be damnable, to be constantly, vulnerably available for damnation, as though damnation hovers in the air about her, provides the dark background to all her attempts to escape, to figure a different life for herself; while at the same time it separates her in the most extreme of gestures. These, after all, are not ‘other’ human beings, these are ‘human beings’ who participate in a common mode of existence from which she is excluded – by virtue of her addiction, her alcoholism, certainly, but also by virtue of her inability – which is also a weird talent, a dark gift – to stand outside the species, to look upon them – like Kafka, for example, or Søren Kierkegaard in his most revelatory moments4 – as inhabitants of a

­122    The Literature of Pity foreign country, occupying a different terrain, the generators of actions and behaviours she can only observe with an uncanny lack of familiarity, an extremity of alienation. Every word I say has chains round its ankles; every thought I think is weighted with heavy weights. Since I was born, hasn’t every word I’ve said, every thought I’ve thought, everything I’ve done, been tied up, weighted, chained? And, mind you, I know that with all this I don’t succeed. Or I succeed in flashes only too damned well [. . .] But think how hard I try and how seldom I dare. Think – and have a bit of pity. That is, if you ever think, you apes, which I doubt.5

And so here, inevitably, we come to that dangerous border with selfpity. Our heroine is drunk in a bar; she has no idea whether the gesture of the waiter, filling her glass to the brim, is an act of generosity or pity – or maybe, as she says, it is simply that ‘the bottle slipped’.6 At all events, the notion of pity here is at least double-edged. We might read these remarks as thoughts on the condition humaine, but better as the aftereffect of the inevitable sinking into language, as the fall into the words of others which is the unavoidable concomitant of our induction into the world of language. None of the words I use is original – we know this – and neither is any of the words you use. If they were, they would be completely unintelligible, and the end-point of the slide away from recognisable language is the madhouse. The end-point; but it would come very fast, almost immediately, if you or I were to utter the unintelligible, if our unconsciously watchful grasp on the language were to slip even for an instant. Foucault says that, of course; but then, Foucault was cognisant, even if at second hand, of the rhetoric of the madhouse.7 Or was he? Or was he constantly attempting a series of acts of translation which, in the end, ran the risk of performing the very process of recuperation against which he railed? If we ‘understand’ Foucault, then are we not precisely participating in the very activity of subjection that he purports to criticise? And in either case – or on either view of the act of reading – are we not placed in an unenviable and difficult, even precarious, position with regard to pity? Perhaps the very process of subjection to language should invite our pity, but in that case surely pity gets spread a bit thinly, a bit too evenly: there are – and surely Foucault is right about this – languages of power, languages of impotence. This is not a question of pure subjection: it is also a question of resistance. ‘Only too damned well’: the measure of our heroine’s power of resistance is reinforced in the act of damnation, but obviously only as filtered, as reduced, as pared down to a colloquial swear word from which most if not all power has drained away.

Jean Rhys and Stevie Smith    ­123

‘I succeed in flashes’: well, these are the flashes which come from an addict, an alcoholic at the height of their game, a short, ill-sustained moment when pity is no longer necessary – or is it that the process of pity is reversed for that crucial moment, which we might also refer to as a moment of sublimity, that moment when, to use a more contemporary drug rhetoric than that used by S.T. Coleridge or Thomas De Quincey on similar occasions, we are ‘held’; between the last high and the next high,8 or more prosaically between our last and next encounter with the dealer, waiting for, as Leonard Cohen puts it, ‘the card that is so high and wild he’ll never need to deal another’.9 The third mention of pity in Good Morning, Midnight is difficult to explain (perhaps all pity is difficult to explain; perhaps difficulty of explanation is, like the mute animals, what invites our pity). There is a gigolo; he believes our heroine has money, which she doesn’t. In an attempt (probably) to make her part with some of this he claims to have wounds (although, Rhys says, he pronounces the word ‘wounds’ ‘so oddly that I don’t understand what he means’10 – a moment, for me, oddly connected with that extraordinary moment in Bret Easton Ellis where Patrick Bateman sees a picture of his father and declares that he has something the matter with his eyes. What does that mean?). These are moments of strange aporia. The point here is that he, the gigolo – for that is what she knows he is, although I have, I confess, little idea what it really means – shows her one of these wounds, which is described as ‘a long, thick, white scar’ across his throat, ‘from ear to ear’. It later turns out (again only probably) that it is merely painted on; at all events, it doesn’t seem to have interfered with his vocal cords. But our heroine, at least, believes that he is asking for her pity. ‘It isn’t boastful,’ she says, ‘the way he says this, not complaining. It’s puzzled, puzzled in an impersonal way, as if he is asking me – me, of all people – why, why, why?’ ‘Pity you,’ the text continues, ‘Why should I pity you? Nobody has ever pitied me. They are without mercy.’ I intend to pick up this point about mercy a little later when I say something about Stevie Smith; but for now what seems to be the point here is that the feeling of pity would imply a certain fellow experience which I can only describe in that complicated term ‘consanguinity’. Our blood mingles; this provides us with evidence of how another human being might feel, but it also means our individuality seeps away, risks contamination. Perhaps there is no way through this conundrum; perhaps empathy and seepage, grand imaginative entry and disgusting cloacal exit, are inseparable (actually, in the real world, whatever that might be – and I suspect we shall never be sure – we know they are). And so to Wide Sargasso Sea (1966). I hesitate to say anything about

­124    The Literature of Pity this book; it is so well-known, so over-taught, although rereading it in the light of thinking about pity one might be struck once again by the extraordinary power of the ending of Part Two and, indeed, the whole of Part Three. But what one might be even more struck by is the only overt mention of pity, which occurs during the unnamed male protagonist’s reflections while he is preparing to leave the Caribbean and take Antoinette with him. ‘Words,’ he says, ‘rush through my head (deeds too). Pity is one of them. It gives me no rest.’11 And then, like so many others before him, he half-quotes Macbeth: ‘Pity like a naked new-born babe striding the blast’, before going on to say that ‘I read that long ago when I was young – I hate poets now and poetry. As I hate music which I loved once,’ and adds ‘Pity. Is there none for me? Tied to a lunatic for life – a drunken lying lunatic – gone her mother’s way.’ Of course the notion of Antoinette as a ‘drunken lying lunatic’ is his own fabrication in both of the more important senses of that word – his own lie, and also his own construction – but the word ‘pity’ serves here as an uncanny hinge: who is he describing when he refers to the ‘new-born babe’, himself seen in the deranged light of a kind of self-pity, or a vision of Antoinette, wrenched from all she holds most dear in order to fit into his previously established plot? Imponderable; but the point is that it is the very word ‘pity’, he says, which gives him no rest: once one has conceived of, articulated the idea of pity, the image of pity, then the world sways, between courage and dissolution there can be no clear path, as there is no clear path through the astonishing beauties of the rainforest for one who has become committed to hatred, to contempt, to despisal. And we too could follow this path through others of Rhys’s works; but space is always in short supply, and so I will turn to another of the twentieth century’s great writers of pity (as I see it), Stevie Smith. And here I want to follow a rather different trajectory, as I shall in various other later parts of this book, for I am not sure that the occasional mention of pity in Smith’s work traces the full elaboration of the feeling; we may need to deal with a certain level of obliquity, of evasion, or perhaps (more charitably) of elaboration. For whereas, to put it very crudely, it may have been possible in the eighteenth century, at least among a certain literate class, to have been quite sure and firm about the spread of a certain nomination, categorisation, taxonomy of feeling, such matters have become more fluid; under conditions of modernity, all that is solid dissolves, as many have said, and our descriptions and attempted definitions of the emotions are not exempt from this process. And so in the case of Stevie Smith I want to look briefly at three poems. The first, which returns us to the overlap between pity and mercy, is ‘A House of Mercy’:

Jean Rhys and Stevie Smith    ­125 It was a house of female habitation, Two ladies fair inhabited the house, And they were brave. For although Fear knocked loud Upon the door, and said he must come in, They did not let him in. There were also two feeble babes, two girls, That Mrs S. had by her husband had, He soon left them and went away to sea, Nor sent them money, nor came home again Except to borrow back Her Naval Officer’s Wife’s Allowance from Mrs S. Who gave it him at once, she thought she should. There was also the ladies’ aunt And babes’ great aunt, a Mrs Martha Hearn Clode, And she was elderly. These ladies put their money all together And so we lived. I was the younger of the female babes And when I was a child my mother died And later Great Aunt Martha Hearn Clode died And later still my sister went away. Now I am old I tend my mother’s sister The noble aunt who so long tended us, Faithful and True her name is. Tranquil. Also Sardonic. And I tend the house. It is a house of female habitation A house expecting strength as it is strong A house of aristocratic mould that looks apart When tears fall; counts despair Derisory. Yet it has kept us well. For all its faults, If they are faults, of sternness and reserve, It is a Being of warmth I think; at heart A house of mercy.12

What is most remarkable about this poem, how can one possibly say? Is it the sudden introduction of the ‘we’ in ‘And so we lived’? Is it the extraordinary agility with which the unpromising name ‘Martha Hearn Clode’ is woven into the poem’s rhythms? Is it the strange, superliterary inversions of lines like ‘That Mrs S. had by her husband had’? Is it, perhaps, the uncanny, inexplicable transitions of other lines, lines like ‘Also Sardonic. And I tend the house’, with the half-hidden, longstretching backdrop of despair and disappointment which is nevertheless almost entirely occluded by the sprightliness, the refusal to abandon hope which is characteristic of other parts of the poem? What, we might alternatively ask, is mercy? Blake couples it with

­126    The Literature of Pity pity, of course, as we have seen; it would be possible to go into a long disquisition on the etymology of ‘mercy’, but I will resist the temptation; it would be possible to say ‘thank-you’ for that (small mercy) because ‘mercy’ of course also means ‘thank-you’. However, I mean here only to point to the remarkable deftness with which the poet fends off what appears to be an always hovering fear of self-pity. Indeed the ‘Fear’ which is spoken of in the third line, although it may of course reflect something more entirely practical and reasonable which will, horrifically, perhaps always attend on a ‘house of female habitation’, may also be thought of as precisely this fear, a fear of falling into the trap of pity – which refers one at once, of course, to the peculiar gesture in the second stanza evidenced in ‘she thought she should’. Where does the narrator stand here? Is she belittling her mother’s supine submission to her husband’s obviously entirely unreasonable demand? Or is she rather participating in a certain language, a certain discourse, a certain convention, within all of which a pitiable act becomes strangely justified, perhaps even transformed, ‘sublimated’ in the full sense of that contestable word? Perhaps the term we need here could be self-sacrifice, but I do not think that particularly convincing; it appears far too grand to describe an unthinking capitulation to some version of the social norm. In Smith’s poetry, the suburban net curtains are never far away, and neither are the pitiless judgements of those who sit behind them. The case of ‘Childe Rolandine’ is perhaps even more stark – as, incidentally, are the Blakean echoes which seem never far from Smith’s rhetoric. How to describe this rhetoric? A word that comes to mind is ‘plaintive’, but that would always need to be qualified: if Smith’s poetry is plaintive, if it cries out for pity – and the terms could well be linked – then it is also always interwoven with a strenuousness, with a force of resistance, with a contempt for pity itself – where are we when we are feeling contemptuous of pity? What voice are we using – or, perhaps better, through whose voice are we speaking for, seen in another light, Smith is, I think, a mistress of ventriloquism – although perhaps this too is an inadequate label, for ventriloquism, obviously, means speaking from the belly, and I do not think that is the part of the body from which Smith speaks. Does she indeed speak at all? Personally I attended only one of her performances, and that was many years ago, and she did not speak: she sang, or perhaps better, chanted. Perhaps we might imagine a grown woman in a little girl’s party frock singing in a shaky voice as we read on: Dark was the day for Childe Rolandine the artist When she went to work as a secretary-typist

Jean Rhys and Stevie Smith    ­127 And as she worked she sang this song Against oppression and the rule of wrong: It is the privilege of the rich To waste the time of the poor To water with tears in secret A tree that grows in secret That bears fruit in secret That ripened falls to the ground in secret And manures the parent tree Oh the wicked tree of hatred and the secret The sap rising and the tears falling. Likely also, sang the Childe, my soul will fry in hell Because of this hatred, while in heaven my employer does well And why should he not, exacerbating though he be but generous Is it his fault that I must work at a work that is tedious? Oh heaven sweet heaven keep my thoughts in their night den Do not let them by day be spoken. But then she sang, Ah why not? tell all, speak, speak, Silence is vanity, speak for the whole truth’s sake. And rising she took the bugle and put it to her lips, crying: There is a Spirit feeds on our tears, I give him mine, Mighty human feelings are his food Passion and grief and joy his flesh and blood That he may live and grow fat we daily die This cropping One is our immortality. Childe Rolandine bowed her head and in the evening Drew the picture of the spirit from heaven.13

Again, where to start? Not, perhaps, from the word ‘exacerbating’, because it has always seemed to me that Smith actually meant to write ‘exasperating’, but whether this was (a) an error of hers; (b) an added complexity of hers; or (c) an example of the kind of typing mistake which Childe Rolandine might well make considering the internal and external pressures under which she is labouring, has always appeared to me a moot point. Neither do I want to say too much about the second stanza, which is a marvellously reconstructed version of Blake’s various reflections on the ‘Tree of Mystery’,14 and would also seem to encapsulate various things Derrida, Abraham and Torok have to say about the concept of the secret.15 We do need, though, perhaps to remember what Freud said about the secret, and about the absolute paradox which occurs when one child says to another, ‘I have a secret.’ What would happen, Freud in effect asks, if the second person simply said ‘Jolly good, hope you enjoy it’ and walked away?16 The disclosure that one has a secret is

­128    The Literature of Pity s­ imultaneously an invitation to display, and perhaps that process is not confined to childhood. But again, this is not the main point. The main point (for me) is about this ‘spirit’ which feeds on human feelings, and I suggest that this is a motif that runs through Smith’s writing – ‘cropping’ is a very deliberately sour word, suggesting some contented ruminant who daily devours our most powerful and intense feelings and, for all we know, may later regurgitate them, free from savour and taste. But what kind of pity do we feel for Childe Rolandine? At first, of course, everything is simple: we do not know in what sense she is an ‘artist’, but the fact that she, presumably, considers herself one is enough to encourage us as readers – because we all consider ourselves as artists at least manqué, do we not? – to sympathise with her plight as fodder for the ‘ruminant’ world of the office. Yet what happens later in the poem? Certainly she summons the courage to speak out (through the bugle) against the situation in which she finds herself, but her attitude towards the Spirit is ambivalent; indeed in the end she bows her head, and at that point it becomes unclear what the value of submission to a higher being can mean. She draws, it is true, the ‘spirit from heaven’. Assuming for a moment that the word ‘draw’ refers to an artistic activity rather than a ‘pull’ or ‘tug’ (although both, I think, are equally plausible), then this would appear to suggest a positive valuation of a certain act of submission; that by bowing the head one may become freed to draw, to paint, or whatever the relevant artistic activity is – to write, for example – and that one is thus freed in some sense from the necessity of pity. Marx on ideology is clearly relevant here, as he always is: the taking up of one’s own burden willingly, despite the objectively disastrous circumstances which enjoin such a task upon us.17 In this world there is not really any pity: one might succumb to a wider notion of reward or relief, but in the end that will only reinforce the ideological force under which we labour, only bring the weight of the superstructure more fully to bear on our bowed shoulders. Pity is, we might say, endlessly subornable: we might feel that it is at our disposal, even that it may be available to us, but in fact it has no more quasi-universal purity than any of the other feelings or passions, it is endlessly contingent. Who will understand the conditions of work of a secretary-typist in twenty years’ time? Who understands them now? The obvious parallel would be with Dickens’s clerks toiling and scribing away on their high stools; but is what we now as readers feel for them pity, in any useful sense of the term, or merely a historical quizzicality? Is, we might then continue to ask, pity always at the mercy of a historical supersession? This, of course, has huge cultural and political ramifications for the contemporary culture of memoration

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and apology. To take only one example, what do we actually feel when we do what we do to provide memorials for those lost in past wars? ‘We shall remember them’, so the rhetoric goes, and that may or may not be true: but with what affect, and what kind of pity do we feel when, for example, we see on television, or live in Wootton Bassett, the terribly damaged ones returning from Iraq or Afghanistan? Smith, in fact, asks virtually the same question, in a short poem called ‘I Remember’, which I think is very difficult to read without sobbing. It was my bridal night I remember, An old man of seventy-three I lay with my young bride in my arms, A girl with t.b. It was wartime, and overhead The Germans were making a particularly heavy raid on Hampstead. What rendered the confusion worse, perversely Our bombers had chosen that moment to set out for Germany. Harry, do they ever collide? I do not think it has ever happened, Oh my bride, my bride.18

I suppose it is Smith’s customary bizarre rhymings which form the commanding impression of the initial part of the structure here: ‘seventythree’, ‘t.b.’; ‘overhead’, ‘Hampstead’; ‘perversely’, ‘Germany’, ‘collide’, ‘bride’ – the last of which returns us to the ‘bridal night’ of the first line. But the pity, if we are looking for it, is jammed together, is stacked impossibly – like the bombers, perhaps – in the final line, which confronts us as readers with an undecidable conundrum. How can we read this line, how can we read any such line, where shall we find the words of affect with which to describe? Are we talking here about naïvety; about condescension; about longing, even a longing which transcends the always imminent possibility of death; or perhaps indeed about delusion, but in that case whose delusion – the delusion of the husband that he can keep his bride safe, the delusion of the girl that she can rely on his strained and archaic resources, a shared delusion, a folie à deux, which might, after all, not be a delusion if it can keep us safe and warm while we are, if only, as always, temporarily, in life? Or perhaps I am entirely wrong; perhaps there is no ‘focus’ for pity in this poem, and perhaps pity has indeed begun to divide and spill before our eyes. Perhaps instead pity, whatever it is or was, is always scattered, disseminated throughout. Perhaps even in the first line, with its refusal to provide the discriminating comma, the punctuation mark which would serve to mark off the past from the present, we are already in a haunted textual space, a place where what we think we ‘remember’

­130    The Literature of Pity is always bracketed; and yet even in supposing that, we are not on safe terrain, the un-safety of the situation is replicated, redoubled through and through by our un-safety as readers, for there is, perhaps, nobody here (in this poem, in this temporary interpretative community which is what we are, in relation to this book) with safe memory: Harry (if that is his name: who knows? what or who else might the young girl herself be remembering?) is committed to reassurance, yet even he, of course, feels victim to the outrage of circumstance. What do we do as we comfort each other when we wake in the so-called small hours, in the hour of the wolf? How do we keep ourselves safe from the incipient predator, how do we pity ourselves and others who may become unwitting prey to it? What I have tried to do in this chapter, apart from providing some commentary on Jean Rhys and Stevie Smith, is to suggest that our thinking about pity needs to continue and perhaps to diversify. Perhaps it is indeed not the only term that might help us in our present plight, whatever you might think that plight to be; perhaps ‘indignation’ might be equally good, as dozens if not hundreds of postcolonial writers constantly remind us, but I do suspect that ‘pity’ has occupied and continues to occupy a specific – albeit specifically shifting – place in the cultural vocabulary for a very long time, not confined by historical period, or indeed by boundaries between west and east, neither, furthermore, by the false boundaries which religions try to set up among us. No terms of affect, or of passion, or descriptions of emotion, are universal or transcendent: to believe such would be foolish. Nothing at all, I suspect, is universal or transcendent; but as a haunting presence, as a promise, a fulfilment and fear, I suspect that something akin to pity might be a key to some of the ways in which we look at life and its writing, which perhaps forms it; and I hope to have shown in this chapter – and perhaps I am now curling back on what I said just now! – at least something of how the term might be relevant to an appreciation of Jean Rhys and Stevie Smith.

Chapter 12

Reclaiming the Savage Night

In this chapter I want to return to the Gothic, or at least to considerations of terror alongside pity, as I did in relation to Algernon Blackwood, but this time in a more contemporary context, and a more geographically specific one. I want to talk about some texts, some novels, which one might consider under the heading of contemporary Scottish Gothic, even if, under current conditions of globalisation, it might not be entirely simple to understand what such a description might mean.1 The first text to which I want to turn is Iain Banks’s Complicity (1993), a novel in which pity and terror are writ large. The terror, if it has been simmering beneath the surface all along like a programme running while we have our attention turned to other things, comes out most starkly at the end: But in those moments of blackness you stood there, as though you yourself were made of stone like the stunted, buried buildings around you, and for all your educated cynicism, for all your late-twentieth-century materialist Western maleness and your fierce despisal of all things superstitious, you felt a touch of true and absolute terror, a consummately feral dread of the dark; a fear rooted back somewhere before your species had truly become human and came to know itself . . . you glimpsed – during that extended, petrified moment – something that was you and was not you, was a threat and not a threat, an enemy and not an enemy, but possessed of a final, expediently functional indifference more horrifying than evil.2

This terror is of the blank indifference of the universe; it is also a terror related to those moments in which we may glimpse something inhuman looking out from the eyes of what we may have previously assumed to be a fellow-creature, moments when the psychopathic takes over and surfaces crumble. For, as Banks implies earlier in the novel, we are in fact not made of stone; we are made of flesh, which is resilient up to a point yet never heals, which continues to the point of death, or of the close anticipation of death, to carry the scars of earlier encounters. In

­132    The Literature of Pity the case of Complicity the most significant of such encounters concerns a paedophile rape, which the protagonist has witnessed but about which he sees himself as having been able to do nothing. ‘I just have to escape,’ he says, I race away through the woods, tears burning on my face, sobbing hysterically, the breath whistling and whooping in and out of me, hot and desperate and livid in my throat; ferns whip at my legs and branches lash at my face.3

There is pity here in abundance, super-abundant, supernumerary pity; pity in particular for the protagonist – a child himself at the time – and pity for his friend, to whose appeals for help he can respond only by flight; the terror is intimately bound to these endless repetitions of a pity which (in the end) starts to become inseparable from its despised, abjected opposite: self-pity. As we have previously glimpsed, we might say that a treatise could be written on the difference between pity and self-pity, between what we take to be sincere sympathy with the plight of another and that most contemned of emotions, an inflated sense of the injustice of the world towards oneself in particular. And yet perhaps it could not actually be written: the terrain is too difficult, the obstacles too mutinous. Who – or what – is to arbitrate? Who is going to say where our pity for an other shades into our own recognition of what it would have been like to have been in his or her situation? The most extreme argument here would be that all pity is self-pity: that as we empathise with an other what we are doing is putting our self in their place, and that that suffering body, that traumatised mind is really only our own, our one and only. There is here the limning of a fatal recognition that to move beyond the confines of the self is one step too far, always one step too far: the face of the tortured boy or girl in the undergrowth is always our own, and the welling of tears reflects only the depth of our own primal sorrow, the always suspected limitations of the good in the world. In his more recent book A Song of Stone (1997) Banks (as I interpret him) approaches this question again; we have a curiously self-pitying protagonist (who attracts very little if any readerly sympathy) whose finest moment perhaps comes at the very end after the bloodshed, the violence, the collapse of the last remaining Gothic castle, when he utters the words ‘We who are about to die despise you.’4 And this curiously deflected phrase, with its connotations of a misdirected war (and we might further say that all wars are misdirected, deflections of some unnameable other), might suggest to us that the peculiar recalcitrance of our dealings with pity, our inability to meet the other face to face with the dread message that pity brings, has all along a partially

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occluded connection with some metaphorical notion of the castle: the castle of our self-esteem, the castle from the fortifications of which we hope (even though such hope is defied time and time again, not least in Gothic fiction) to defeat the myriad insecurities of the flesh. It remains difficult to define the opposite of pity: terror will certainly not really do, for a variety of reasons, but perhaps a suitable word, a suitable description, a suitable feeling (or enactment of a feeling) might be defiance. This would clearly fit with mythological constructs from Prometheus and Icarus onwards: in A Song of Stone a relevant question would be whether the protagonist is capable of such defiance or even of any empathy. Of the ‘soldiers’ (if that is in fact what they are, we never fully comprehend their provenance) who come to end his world, he says, ‘I do not understand their war, nor know now who fights whom for what or why. This could be any place or time, and any cause would bring the same results, the same ends, loose or met, or won or lost’;5 a moment of Brechtian revelation, perhaps, or a realisation that there is only so much pity to share around, that what it is precisely not is a bottomless well, no matter where the tears might come from.6 Yet earlier, during the course of the most repellent scene in the book, our ‘hero’ specifically acknowledges that his fantasies are ‘pitiful’; and here we again come inexorably up against the echoic ambiguities of pity’s many adjectival forms. ‘Pitiful’? ‘Pitiable’? ‘Piteous’? Each is radically different. There are Ann Radcliffe’s heroines, for example, who may be overcome with piteous tears, but we are not thus enjoined to find them pitiful – or if we do, we are misreading the texts in ways which might, after all, serve to protect our readerly selves, to invite us to share the mastery of the castle without having to deal with the weeping of the exile, of the powerless. Irvine Welsh’s Filth (1998) may fairly be called a ghastly, indigestible novel. It is (almost) literally indigestible because it deals in enormous, coprophiliac detail with the central relationship between a man (in this case a corrupt, vicious, self-deluding Edinburgh policeman) and his closest, most intimate friend, the tapeworm in his bowels – although the friendliness felt is, it has to be said, all on the side of the worm, who burrows through the text offering words of consolation, wisdom – and sometimes, in the imminent presence of laxatives, desperation – while his human host remains, for the most part, oblivious (if suspicious) of its existence. There would, however, be a sense in which one might say that the novel is constructed around a series of levels of pity, which range from the self-pity which the policeman feels, more or less constantly and despite his vast array of devices for explaining it away, to the pity the worm feels for his more or less hospitable host. For it is the worm, and the worm only (and this is not Blake’s invisible

­134    The Literature of Pity worm, nor is it Poe’s worm of death, nor Beckett’s endlessly spooling tape),7 which carries the secret that has ruined Detective Sergeant Bruce Robertson’s life (and therefore, through a revolting osmosis, the lives of almost everybody he has come into contact with): namely his suppressed memory of the culpable manslaughter of his brother. But the way the worm recites it, it is surely not so bad, it can be pitied; the worm, after all, understands: But you hear him shouting, Ah’m the king o’ the castle and you’re the dirty wee rascal! Stevie bawls that at you, looking down on you, his face set in a caricature of a cruel and despotic monarch. The wee boy’s faster and he’s beaten his older brother to the top. The wee boy is better at everything. He’s more outgoing, has more personality, everybody says, than the quiet, brooding boy, than the other laddie. That was how they referred to you both in the village: wee Stevie Robertson and the Other Laddie. You are angry at this humiliation.8

Of course you are; naturally, you would be. So would we all; we would all want to be pitied for such humiliation and yet, apparently, here we are playing at castles again; there is nothing directly to be owned to, nothing to be pitied in a straight sense of that word (if such a straight sense were to exist in some other, ideal linguistic register), instead there are boys’ games, evasions, in this case (as in so many cases involving people who might be the avatars of Banks’s suspect soldiers) murderous, or at least deathly. It is perhaps at this point that one might begin to suspect that pity cannot be ‘expressed’ in either of the two major senses of that term (not even through Bruce’s tapeworm), as articulation or as physical expulsion: it can only coil itself, sit at the heart of the mountainously constipated castles of defence, or self-defence, insisting all the time that, to quote the parodically self-pitying title of a novel by Christopher Brookmyre, ‘A big boy did it and ran away.’ Indeed it may have been thus, it may always have been thus, and the provenance of our childhood ‘crimes’ may forever remain uncertain; and so it may be said that we deserve pity as a result, but the question of whether pity has anything to do with ‘deserving’ is a highly complex one. Perhaps we are now beginning to suspect that when it comes to pity, there is no easy directionality on which to rely. We may pity others because we dare not own to pitying ourselves; or we may pity ourselves because we feel we are not getting enough pity (although, probably, we would call it sympathy because otherwise we would be walking on coals, heaping coals of fire upon our heads) from others; even more probably, we cannot tell the difference. Pity, then, would seem to be a terrain where direction is suspended; more, perhaps, of an enveloping halo or penumbra, some Conradian mode of narration which reveals

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even as it conceals . . . And this could bring us to Michel Faber’s magnificent Under the Skin (2000), where pity is indeed spread everywhere (as is nationality – in what sense(s) is Faber Scottish?). A beautifully articulated satire on factory farming, where humanity constitutes the animal, the novel reverses the flow of pity (perhaps pity is a flow rather than a halo or penumbra?) as humans (‘vodsels’ as they are called) become the mere objects of attention of extraterrestrial farmers, the chief of which is nonetheless the more or less constant object of our readerly pity as she mourns her exile, the loss of everything she understands when she is set down on this inhospitable, incomprehensible planet, uncertain even of what her exertions are supposed to produce in terms of the greater good for her homeland. The terror of loneliness, but here transposed onto the utterly alien, at moments when, for example, she awakes from sleep believing herself to be back in her natural form rather than the – pitiful? – simulacrum of a human shape into which her hidden masters have forced her. Perhaps, if we cannot think of pity in terms of simple directionality, it would be better again to think of it as a kind of matrix within which subjects, even while they might imagine themselves to be separate, are in fact intricately and fatally involved, and this might take us back for a moment to the conventional Gothic. In reading Radcliffe, for example, we are probably at all times engaging in an activity of suppression: to admit to being in the position of her major heroines Emily or Ellena would be one step too far, would be to invite an ‘accusation of innocence’, of naïvety, which would immediately reduce us to the abjected status of a suffering victim. But most aptly (and frighteningly) of all, it would reduce us to the status of a child; it would place us decisively outside the castle within which alone we can lay claim to the status of maturity – though only, of course, if we consider maturation to be precisely the process of evolving massive defences – so that the tears (of pity?) might not flow, or might, at least, flow only unseen.9 Isserley, the non-human protagonist of Under the Skin, is torn between pity for the human cattle whom she is helping to breed and the sense of a destiny, a ‘greater good’, which renders these activities pointful. Our own pity – or sympathy, if the word ‘pity’ is still too difficult, too threatening, too naïve to have purchase – is spread across the text, magnetised from time to time by different characters, different viewpoints; and yet one might fairly ask whether it is indeed ‘to the point’ to attempt to discriminate among these functions of pity. For one thing which I hope has become clear about pity is that it is always and intrinsically linked with a notion of dependence; and such dependence, even while it continues to haunt and inflect our every dream, nevertheless cannot be allowed

­136    The Literature of Pity to see the light of day if we are to carry on with our everyday business, without the continuing presence of, as it were, disabling reminder. In a story published in Alan Bissett’s collection of Gothic tales, Damage Land (2001), Jackie Kay addresses the issue directly: The light was strange in her street; Kenmuir Street looked different to her now. Her whole street was full of sadness, hidden behind the curtains. She knew it for certain now. Her own unhappiness allowed her to see everybody else’s.10

In the land of pity, we might say, all differentiations go down (‘curtain’/ ‘certain’): we are reduced to the status of the childlike self we believed we had previously abjected, the wound will not heal, and as it remains with us it lets in the painful remembrances of others, but only, of course, ‘behind the curtains’: it would never do to be seen crying. Perhaps especially, of course, for men, or so the conventional wisdom has gone; but perhaps not, for much of this will depend on family structure, on where the ‘centre of gravity’ is supposed to lie – unemployed, disheartened, dissolved men may not be the issue here. But they may nonetheless be symbolic of the all-important question of who is supposed to provide the strength that will prevent us from being engulfed by what we might reasonably now call the terror of pity. It can be done, of course, by jokes, by the temporary supremacy of the comedic;11 but in the end, as a further story in Damage Land, by Andrew Murray Scott, shows us, the denied infant will always threaten to return to overcome the defences, to remind us of what it felt like to be toppled from the battlements, lost in the matrix of pity. Thus Elena, we are told, ‘looked like a lost child in the middle of the huge concourse, her eyes wet at the inexplicable loss of her suitcase’;12 how endlessly might we spin out the echoes in these words? The suitcase itself is, perhaps, unimportant (even if it suits the case): what it signifies is the loss of attachment (the disappearance of an attaché case), the loss of the essential reminder of who one is, the loss of ‘grip’ on the world, the relapse into the sea of undifferentiation. Within this absence Elena is trapped; Dilys Rose’s story ‘Mazzard’s Coop’, in the same collection, develops this theme of entrapment, partly through a rhetoric of animals – cage birds, cats, rabbits – but thus as an extended set of metaphors for previous catastrophes, catastrophes which Mazzard may have caused but which are in any case only the signifier, in turn, for the death of a mining village – ‘around here, around pits, every day’s a day of the dead’.13 This is, then, a trapper’s story, but it is also a story of an apparently unwilled entrapment – Mazzard, we learn, after his great betrayal, ‘should have made a clean break’,14 tried his luck elsewhere, but was unable to: trapped within his own self-pity,

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returning to the scene of the previous crime. ‘Let those birds out. Let them sing a requiem, before the heavens open,’15 the story concludes; but such an escape, such a release remains impossible, there can be no reaching out towards a salvation of the birds because the secrets have been locked away, covered over with a patina of pity within which the only thing the characters can do is endlessly re-enact the crimes of the past, seeking our pity for the ways in which they have played their roles – or have been played with by their roles, because at the root of this kind of pity lies a belief, real or more usually fake, that we have been the mere playthings of destiny, there was never a moment when we could have taken a free decision. And Linda Cracknell’s ‘Kiss of Life’ presents us with the trapping of (and by?) children par excellence – we have a dead child and a survivor who is left, traumatised and evasive, to secure something from an experience of terror: The ambulance siren and the sobs ebb away, leave me alone in the field as the day softens to dusk. I lie on my back on the mound of the dead, my arms and legs seeping into the shared bed. The hills and sky lurch over me in a protective arch. Swifts shriek, scooping the air inches from my head. My hand strays into a pocket. I place a strawberry against my lips and kiss its flesh entirely away from the spidery stalk. Sweet. So sweet. The best sort of kiss.16

Better, presumably, than the ‘kiss of life’ he has failed to offer to the drowning girl, better because this ending is at every level a fake ending, a cover-story. Yet what is also here is another shading of pity, a reminder of the difficulty we encounter when we try to think of how to separate pity from sentimentality, and this is a theme, if we can bear to think about it, that runs like a vein through many of the stories in Bissett’s collection. We might say that such a separation can be achieved through a certain starkness of writing, and there is plenty of evidence for that in Damage Land; but we might consequently find ourselves asking whether there could ever be a ‘novel of pity’ as there are (perhaps) ‘novels of terror’. Let us try another image for pity: not as a halo or penumbra, or as a flow, or as a matrix, but rather as a pearl lodged in an oyster, the tears (in the sense of sobbing) which are also ‘tears’ (in the sense of ‘rips’) in the fabric of fictively mature life, moments which affect through their narration whole areas of subjectivity, and particularly the roots of how we hold subjectivity together, moving (as we imagine we do) from moment to moment. Much of this could be seen to come together in the horror of the grave in Chris Dolan’s ‘The Land of Urd’, but even more so in a resonant phrase from the opening of Christopher Whyte’s ‘Stifelio’: ‘I rarely feel pity for the people I kill,’17 for this is a story that we might

­138    The Literature of Pity read as one about the inner, fantasised assassin, free from emotion, liberated into a darker world. We can see these particular ‘lineaments of gratified desire’18 also in Raymond Soltysek’s ‘The House outside the Kitchen’, where the dying man is an emblem for a kind of pity that can never be acknowledged, but which needs to be deflected instead onto the petty details of the scene as a way of alleviating a burden that is too difficult to bear: I edged round [. . .] and found my uncle. He had shrunk so much. The sheets were pink, and he was propped up against a dozen pink cushions. He wore cream-coloured pyjamas. Plastic tubes connected him to [. . .] black canisters, feeding him oxygen, and his face was indistinct behind a translucent mask.19

In the moment of pity, we might say, strange and evasive things happen: the irrelevant detail looms large while the face, the signifying, individuating mark, becomes, as in so many pietàs, ‘indistinct’, merges into a generalised faciality, prefigures the loss of detail in imminent death.20 At this point I need to remind the reader (or perhaps I need too to be reminded) that all of these writers, all of these texts, are in some sense Scottish, although perhaps what that means is permanently sous rature, and I have no wish to develop the thought here, although it would lead to the fields of lamentation so familiar to Scottish writers and readers since at least the time of Dunbar. At any rate, Welsh’s Porno (2002) is, again, a disgusting novel, structured around various types of selfpity among the group of Edinburgh characters we know so well from Trainspotting (1993) and also, I would say, around a terror of the other, emblematised in the always excluded psychopath Begbie (the one who has gone beyond, the outsider, the beggar at your door – and this would take us into another whole stream of representations of pity involving, for example (and as we shall in part see later), the ‘poor immigrant’, pity for the psycho, sympathy for the devil). However, at a crucial and surprising moment in the novel, we learn something about Kant and the moral law,21 and yet this is on reflection entirely appropriate, because Porno takes place largely on the terrain of the addict and reminds us of the crucial argument that there is a certain starkness, a defining ‘moment’ in the exercise of the productivities and sinuosities of power, in the clash between the regime of the moral law and the regime of addiction.22 Who is going, to put it one way, to pity the addict; or rather, with what range of inflections will that pity come – will it always have to do with moral self-righteousness, with the assertion, or assumption, of a certain kind of superiority? ‘I’m not a loser’, runs a constant refrain throughout Porno;23 because to admit to being a loser would involve an appeal for pity, and that would be to risk unmaking the carefully

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wrought carapace under cover of which, and under that cover only, we can make an approach to the world. The underworlds of Welsh’s fiction are sites simultaneously of power and powerlessness: as with any gang culture, relations secured by violence can only exist in a kind of parenthesis, in the gaps where the superior violence of the State does not run. While we feel aghast at the casual manipulations, the moments of fury, the badly laid schemes and plots which are doomed to failure, we are also aware that all this is conducted only by permission of the State: as in A Clockwork Orange (1962), there is a sense in which these actions are, in the end, not subversive, rather they go along with the State’s script, with the isolation of terror, and thus pity is involved in relation to those scrabbling, against terrible odds, for some kind of dignity which turns out not to be dignity at all. Dignity, defiance: perhaps there is a link here, such that we are reminded again of childhood omnipotence, those moments which seemed at the time to be assertions of power and individuality yet which turn out later to have been experienced merely on the sufferance of a higher, more organised power, be it God or the Edinburgh police. If not all of these examples bring the question of pity back home to Scotland, that certainly happens in James Robertson’s Joseph Knight (2003), the story of a black slave (this has been called a ‘real-life’ story, as though there were any such thing) brought back to Scotland and of a famous Edinburgh court case which, it could be – and has been – said, tackled and determined fundamental issues of human freedom. There is throughout, of course, a seam of pity for Joseph, which is to be expected; it would take a brave, or possibly unhinged, writer to place the blame for slavery upon its victims, although recent attempts by historians to found the practice of western slavery on African man’s inhumanity to his fellow-man go some way to fitting this bill. But there is also a powerful spreading of pity between slave and master: Joseph felt something stir in his heart. That this other man should tend him, should so devote himself to his needs, was remarkable. Out there in the Atlantic, master and slave were reduced to this simple humanity: one man caring for another. Wedderburn the master did not chastise, did not curse, did not neglect: as if he were his father, the father Joseph did not remember, he cared for him. Lying unable to speak, Joseph saw that Wedderburn was desperate to love and be loved; but he was denied those things because of the way he was. And Joseph was touched, since it was the same for him: he had been torn from love, and he did not know how to give or receive it. For a moment there on the ship, they were two sides of the same coin.24

Amid the terror of the Atlantic crossing, redolent of so many slave narratives, there appears here to be a sharing of minds, of feelings, albeit

­140    The Literature of Pity under the sign of a certain inarticulacy; and yet one might still wonder what exactly is going on here. Are we, for example, in the midst of that dreaded emotional swamp known as the culture of apology? Is the subtext to do with the way in which, so we might be led to suppose, the master himself is as trapped by the exigencies of cultural convention as the slave? Are we supposed to share our pity around, and thus implicitly to bow to the demands of an unnamed and unseen higher power which prohibits a specificity of blame, which asserts that power relations are merely incidental, accidental? Part of another subtext of the novel would seem to assert that for Scotland, a ‘small country’, such matters are inevitably different from the way in which they might notionally obtain in the English heartland of imperialism, that the operations of the Scottish law, however complexly they may seem to grind, will nevertheless represent or reflect the sympathy of one small nation for another, and that therefore the operation of pity will be different, differentiated, that histories of oppression and marginalisation will somehow speak to each other, even, as it were, across oceans. The whole novel could be read as a vindication of the Scottish legal system: the terrors of slavery are mitigated by a certain fellow-sympathy, even if the master Wedderburn’s actions are in some ways overtly condemned; our sense of pity is to evade its usual confines, to encompass a wide vision of ‘suffering humanity’, even if Wedderburn’s motives are venal or self-serving. Pity figures as the natural emotion of the ‘humane master’, and this is intended to remind us of what the relations might be between what we might term an ‘independent’ nation and a ‘dependent territory’ – by which route we might again consider ourselves to be returned to central issues of dependence, for example our fear of owning, even in retrospect, to past states of dependence, even if physically inevitable, from a supposedly adult perspective. To turn from Joseph Knight to Allan Guthrie’s Savage Night (2008) (and perhaps here is not the place to dwell on their curiously echoic titles) is to enter a different world, a world comprised of six hours in contemporary Edinburgh, hours which are marked by family and gang rivalry, revenge, murder – in fact, by all the trappings which we more usually associate with Jacobean revenge tragedy, although probably a more suitable precursor to the violence, the lack of feeling, the exaggeration of feud might be found in the bastard child of tragedy, Victorian melodrama. What, however, is very strange – indeed one might say uncanny, a word that could have been used in connection with earlier instances of pity – about the book is that the main protagonist, Andy Park, a criminal and a killer, is afraid of blood. Clearly in a man of

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action of Park’s type this is a major drawback, although it is one which he overcomes in various increasingly convoluted ways. This haemophobia serves as a way of gaining sympathy for Park: it is as though we are drawn into seeing him as a person to whom some pity is due even as he rampages through the pages executing all those who figure as aggressors in his personal mythology. Except that it is not exactly a personal mythology: rather it is a family mythology, where any slight offered to a family needs be avenged with – precisely – blood. If in Dracula the blood is the life, here the blood is also the death, yet it is obviated as a spectacle as Park symbolically turns away from the consequences of his actions. The pun in the novel’s title hinges on the fact that Park’s main opponent is called ‘Savage’; but savagery is also the major motif, except that neither of the major characters entirely foresees the extent to which women and children might be drawn into the blood-feud. The reticulations of the significance of blood run through and through the book: blood relations, blood fear, bloodshed, all are intimately linked in this narrative of a ‘hard man’ who is also, at all times, endeavouring to protect his ‘soft centre’, trying to hide his weakness from the marauders of the night. And so we might see Andy Park and his world of blood as a kind of composite emblem. At the heart of terror, according to this reading, there is lodged a sense of pity: within the machinery of death, the killing machine, there is a trapped, crying child who cannot come to terms with the violence which, we fear, is at least in part engendered by his/her own vulnerability. And so we might return to a wider question of the Gothic (and to the ‘piteous cries’ of Gothic heroines), and say that through the lens of pity we would need to see Gothic not so much as a mode of history as a means of self-fashioning, and thus, inevitably, as a set of defences, since it is through the evolution and consolidation of defences, the purported strength and invulnerability of the inner castle (whether that be outered as a historical artefact or as a suburban domestic scene) that the passage to maturity occurs – or does not. And so in these narratives, we might say that pity is not overcome, for perhaps it never can be; rather, it is displaced, decentred so that the inner child can sleep at night. We may think we wish to escape from the castle; but, as in the emblematic case of Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast trilogy (1946–59), all we then find ourselves doing is wondering what we are to do next. The danger, the fear is that we will simply find ourselves alone on the concourse, having lost our suitcase, all of the papers, the documents, which have previously assured us of our identity. Or perhaps we will find ourselves in the position of the crying child, confronted and affronted by the unintelligible spectacle of our wounds.

­142    The Literature of Pity Compassion, sympathy, empathy: these may all be questions, reticulations of fellow-feeling; but in the presence of pity, as it may be that Aristotle saw, we stand alone and aghast. We might then say that there is something in pity which is truly of the uncanny, at least in the sense that something has been revealed that should not have been revealed:25 but what has been revealed is not some secret of the outer world, some fell design which has been practised on us since the day of our birth (although this might be the essence of the specific pity of the changeling), but rather the painful and embarrassing circumstance of our own weakness, the way in which all of our ‘writing out’, our narrative of life and progress, is simply the efflorescence of a ‘minor literature’, a literature of minority in so many senses of that word.26 The sense of pity, of course, is painfully obvious in the title of Bissett’s collection, Damage Land; not ‘damaged land’, or even a land in which damage might be caused, unwittingly or not, but rather a land (in this case Scotland) where the effects of damage can always be seen; and yet, to conclude, where is the land in which the effects of damage are not to be seen? Or where they are unavailable for articulation, in even the most recondite and concealed of circumstances? Or, to put it another way, by focusing critically on terror in the Gothic, have we been colluding in a reconstruction of the past from which pity is (perhaps as always) exiled – a term, an emotion, a feeling which is too painful to be owned, too all-encompassing to be restricted to the mere operations of one individual (or class, region or nation) upon another, but which forms the screen onto which our most vital yet fatal fears cannot escape from being, against our will and to our dreadful shame, as we are reminded of our childhood fears and embarrassments, projected?

Chapter 13

‘Pity the Poor Immigrant’: Pity, Diaspora, the Colony

The links between pity and what we might loosely call the diasporic are perhaps all too obvious. There is, for example, the major locus of pity which we have come across before in Owen’s ‘war, and the pity of war’, for behind – and not far behind – much diaspora lie the stark, often hideous realities of war, although it remains true that diaspora can be driven by many things: not only by war but by persecution, by the realities of economics and relative economic deprivation, by psychological terror. Or it can be driven by the realisation of previously unrealised oppression, by the possibility of new openings, or by escape from past or present collapse – of nation states, of societies, of local communities. What we can say with certainty about diaspora under present conditions is that what has in the past been – or been regarded as – an exception is rapidly becoming the rule. The absolute dominance of US-led commerce has pointed up more sharply than ever the global disparity between wealth and poverty, while the exigencies of climate change will render it increasingly imperative for those from physically low-lying countries, which include many of the poorest, to make their way as best they can towards what we may call, both geographically and economically, ‘higher ground’. In many ways we can see that what is happening today under conditions of so-called ‘advanced’ global capitalism is precisely as the old scandal-monger Marx had predicted, namely, the increasing development and subjugation of an alienated labour force in the name of the extraction of surplus profit. What Marx did not foresee – and neither did any of his nineteenth-century contemporaries, although H.G. Wells certainly had some inkling of what was to come1 – was that these developments would take place on a worldwide scale, so that entire countries and regions would find themselves pushed into the position of an industrial or post-industrial proletariat.2 There remain many questions to be asked about diaspora. If we think of the diasporic trend in Jewish, Filipino and Chinese communities, to

­144    The Literature of Pity take but three examples, we find radically different patterns, so different, in fact, that we might well find ourselves asking whether the term ‘diaspora’ can be properly used in the singular (if ‘singular’ is the issue) at all. One of the most complex of all diasporic patternings, of course, concerns the Caribbean, and one example among many is the ‘return’ of West Indian inhabitants to Britain. The great poet Derek Walcott obliquely addresses this issue in many places. There is, for example, the poem ‘Negatives’ (1969): A news clip; the invasion of Biafra: black corpses wrapped in sunlight sprawled on the white glare entering what’s-its-name – the central city?         Someone who’s white illuminates the news behind the news, his eyes flash with, perhaps, pity: ‘The Ibos, you see, are like the Jews, very much the situation in Hitler’s Germany, I mean the Hausas’ resentment.’ I try to see.3

‘Perhaps, pity’: here on this complex terrain of sympathy and prejudice, expressions, whether verbal or otherwise, are hard to read – like the news – yet some symbolisms, the repertoire of colour, are all too easy to read, all too obvious even – or perhaps especially – in the blinding glare of the sun. ‘Pity’ here cannot find its own object: it needs to be given alternative exemplars, situations, even catastrophes, which the reader or viewer will recognise. The threat behind this is that pity never arrives unashamedly at its goal; it arrives, if it arrives at all, by comparison, by finding, if you like, an ‘objective correlative’. And this, of course, is especially the case when the dealings with the emotions try to cross ethnic and cultural divides: the definitiveness of ‘black corpses’ contrasted with the accidentality of ‘someone who’s white’ – as though that were indeed an accident, as though the bulk of global news is not filtered through, adjusted (whether consciously or not) by white consciousness. Pity will always be adjusted, it would seem, through the relative powers (or dominations, or thrones) of different cultures; and thus we can turn to the twenty-third poem from Walcott’s sequence Midsummer (1984), which begins with a magnificently challenging equation between rioters in London and past imperial notions of the failings of the ‘native’: With the stampeding hiss and scurry of green lemmings, midsummer’s leaves race to extinction like the roar of a Brixton riot tunnelled by water hoses;

‘Pity the Poor Immigrant’    ­145 they seethe towards autumn’s fire – it is in their nature, being men as well as leaves, to die for the sun.4

Certainly there is pity here for the rioters, who imagine, at whatever level of consciousness, that they are striking a blow for freedom while all the time they are merely being ‘tunnelled’, channelled, both physically but also through the gross operations of stereotyping, into a place where death clearly lurks. What renders this particular poem so startling, though, is that the dread realities of racism are expressed through a phrasing which has constant recourse to Shakespeare, and indeed this strange melding of violence and beauty runs right through the poem, as do questions of nationality and belonging:            And, for me, that closes the child’s fairy tale of an antic England – fairy rings, thatched cottages fenced with dog roses, a green gale lifting the hair of Warwickshire.

The all too common imagining by the immigrant of the beauty and superiority of the ‘host culture’ which she or he is in some sense revisiting yet which has also always figured as an ideal to be achieved, to be striven towards, has been dissolved: the believability of the diasporic experience, when confronted with the mean realities of the policing of the Brixton riots, collapses and with it takes down the entire superstructure of culture on which the immigrant has been relying. ‘But the blacks can’t do Shakespeare, they have no experience,’ the poem continues: This was true. Their thick skulls bled with rancour when the riot police and the skinheads exchanged quips you could trace to the Sonnets, or the Moor’s eclipse.

And so there is experience and there is experience: on the one hand, triumphal experience sanctioned by the machinery of the State, on the other the pitiful experience of being at the receiving end of State violence. Was this addressed by Shakespeare? The poem leaves the question open as to whether even Shakespeare’s powers to invoke pity (and where could pity be more startlingly evoked than, for instance, for another poor immigrant in The Merchant of Venice [1598]), or other feats of British culture including J.M.W. Turner’s paintings, can adequately represent the bitter options – of rejection or assimilation – facing diasporic subjects in their continuing engagement with the host culture: Praise had bled my lines white of any more anger, and snow had inducted me into white fellowships,

­146    The Literature of Pity while Calibans howled down the barred streets of an empire that began with Caedmon’s raceless dew, and is ending in the alleys of Brixton, burning like Turner’s ships.

And thus one can fairly say that there is pity everywhere in Walcott, whether it is specifically named or not: a pity which, among other things and due to the general bleeding or leaching of human feeling which is so often Walcott’s topic, threatens to unman, to reduce one’s individuality as a human and, in this case, as a male, to force one to return alone to the swamp. In that swamp, which Walcott so frequently depicts, there are all sorts of relics of diaspora, pre-eminently among them those which remind us of the slave trade, that enforced diaspora which forms the model for so many diasporas, and imaginings of diaspora, since.5 At the end of ‘The Hotel Normandie Pool’ (1981), though, he returns to an idea of pity. The poem has been about barriers between cultures, about colonial incursion, about the always difficult exercise of keeping some place open within which a culture might manage to make its own space; but this possibility, for Walcott and the Caribbean, is obviously very bleak, and thus we come to a terrible (and repetitive, for that is the meaning of ‘envoi’, and the terror is, as perhaps always, in the repetition) conclusion, if there is any conclusion to be had:                 For an envoi, write what the wrinkled god repeats to the boygod: ‘May the last light of heaven pity us for the hardening lie in the facts that we did not tell.’ Dusk. The trees blacken like the pool’s umbrellas. Dusk. Suspension of every image and its voice. The mangoes pitch from their green dark like meteors. The fruit bat swings on its branch, a tongueless bell.6

Pity and lies; pity and a certain suspension, perhaps even a certain condition of dusk, where things may not be perfectly seen: in order to be pitied, we need to be seen not clearly, but opaquely, so that we may not be reduced in our selves by the exercise of pity, so that we may survive the dying of the night and yet be reborn to fight another day; the alternative would be indeed terrifying, a slow petering out amid the dulling fires of the night. We would not want that; we would find ourselves suffering, indeed, from self-pity if it were revealed to us that our snuffing out were so simple, as though we were in time of war. However: the St Lucian Walcott’s touch upon these problems, however poised and deep, is often deceptively light and ironic, at least as compared with the Antiguan writer Jamaica Kincaid. In A Small Place (1988), Kincaid provides

‘Pity the Poor Immigrant’    ­147

one of the most powerful and damning indictments of colonisation yet written; yet in terms of diaspora and pity, it necessarily raises definitional questions.7 Should the ceaseless attempts of European powers to subjugate in order to exploit poorer areas of the world be regarded as a diaspora of European citizens in its own right, or is the term best attached only to those who are forced from their locality by the incursion of a higher power? The answer is perhaps not as simple as it might at first appear, if only because the movement towards empire resulted in many people being sent out to wholly inhospitable and unsuitable environments in complete despite of their own wishes; but Kincaid’s concern, all too naturally, is with pity for those who have suffered, and continue to suffer, from these incursions. This concern emerges in a particular way in Kincaid’s 2002 book, Mr Potter – a book which one hesitates to call a novel because at the end (although most readers will have suspected this all along) it emerges that Mr Potter is in some (perhaps incompletely specified) way the narrator’s father, which complicates the (auto)biographical levels of the text. However, this ‘revelation’ simply intensifies the complicated pity we may feel for Mr Potter, a character who, like so many similar ones in the work of postcolonial writers such as Naipaul (‘Nightfall’ as Walcott calls him), is unable to emerge from the anonymity in which he is sunk – paradoxically, of course, in light of the book which bears his name – and whose life is oddly summarised in the moment and circumstances of his death and burial: Hear Mr Potter wending himself through the maze of his life in complete innocence, without ever knowing how like everyone else he was and without recognising how ordinary is the uniqueness of life as it appears in each individual. Hear Mr Potter, who was my father; hear his children and hear the women who bore those children; hear the end of life rushing like a predictable wave in a known ocean to engulf Mr Potter. Hear Mr Potter dead and lying on a cold slab of something and then his body placed in a wooden box but the wooden box cannot be placed in its grave, for the grave has filled up with water.8

The cry here is for a life to be heard; it is for pity, in a sense, even though that pity is born and can only survive amid Kincaid’s agonising tears of anger, tears of rage (for yes, there are indeed such things – think of the bitter European tears of Petra von Kant)9. It is for pity for all those lives which are lived in absentia, as it were, lives like driftwood, to use a Walcottian image, which have no fixed location and which are unrecognised. This is one of the true kernels of the pity of diaspora, of homelessness: the sense that there is no belonging, there is never any possibility of belonging, there is only death and the pre-imagining of death, an inability to rise above the surface of a river which is always rushing

­148    The Literature of Pity onwards and whose course and flow the immigrant cannot discern or understand. And here it is the immigrant, and her/his experience, which is all-important to our developing understanding of pity. But then, we might fairly ask, can anybody understand these vast forces of displacement, forces that move whole populations and produce conflicts and misunderstandings which striate the world? One of the questions that the supposed arch-imperialist Rudyard Kipling asked was whether there was in fact anybody in control of these movements, these oppressions, these sufferings, or whether what we were seeing, what we were trying to make sense of in the elaboration and then the critique of empire, was the ceaseless, irrepressible expression of some animal instinct, something territorial and fatal, which affected all within its reach. How, then, would we know whom to pity, how could we judge who or what was following a sense of preordination, where or how might we discern whether there was any kind of infringement (of the rules, for example, those all-important imperial rules) going on, or whether all players in this violent game were simply acting according to their own scripts? These, it seems to me, are among the many questions he is posing in one of his most remarkable poems, ‘The Hyenas’ (1919): After the burial-parties leave   And the baffled kites have fled; The wise hyenas come out at eve   To take account of our dead. How he died and why he died   Troubles them not a whit. They snout the bushes and stones aside   And dig till they come to it. They are only resolute they shall eat   That they and their mates may thrive, And they know that the dead are safer meat   Than the weakest thing alive.10

If we think of Walcott primarily in terms of the title of one of his most brilliant and effective poems, ‘A Far Cry from Africa’ (1962), then we might fairly say that this is a far cry from the jingoistic Kipling of popular repute; this is instead a Kipling who is seeing ‘war, and the pity of war’ – if not in a directly diasporic context, then certainly in the context of those who die in ‘some corner of a foreign field’,11 where they have been sent to fight and die for reasons which, we can only assume, are no more comprehensible to them than to the carrion-eating hyenas. Power, flight and the ubiquity of death are the keynotes here, as they are at the end of the poem when the hyenas

‘Pity the Poor Immigrant’    ­149 Take good hold in the army shirt,   And tug the corpse to light, And the pitiful face is shown again   For an instant ere they close; But it is not discovered to living men –   Only to God and those Who, being soulless, are free from shame,   Whatever meat they may find. Nor do they defile the dead man’s name –   That is reserved for his kind.

The combination here of pity, the ‘pitiful face’, and shame runs through and through imperial and postcolonial writing, from the fear of shame endemic in Victorian Boys’ Own books through to Salman Rushdie’s Shame (1983), signifying the multifarious ways in which pity operates to spread a burden – of course in some sense the self-proclaimed ‘white man’s burden’ – that might otherwise be too terrifying to be borne. Pity, we might say, paraphrasing and in the process rather altering Aristotle’s reflections on tragedy, is a response to or a response alongside terror; but the question of whether this terror can be truly selfless or remains a reflection of our own all too vivid imaginings of our helplessness, our vulnerability – in the end our fear of being returned to a childhood state of incomprehension and fear – remains open, and so therefore does the address of our own pity, its imbrication within any group of whom we feel we may, or must, be a part. After Kipling, Paul Scott, author of The Jewel in the Crown (1966– 75) and Staying On (1977), may now seem the least acceptable of white writers of empire, and there may be good reason for this. He begins the Prologue to The Day of the Scorpion (1968), the second in the Jewel in the Crown tetralogy, by describing an ‘encounter’ (although it seems merely to have been that they passed each other by) with a Muslim woman in a mainly Hindu town, in a quarter inhabited by moneylenders: The feeling he had was that she was coming in search of a loan. She wore the burkha, that unhygienic head-to-toe covering that turns a woman into a walking symbol of inefficient civic refuse collection and leaves you without even an impression of her eyes behind the slits she watches the gay world through, tempted but not tempting; a garment in all probability inflaming to her passions but chilling to her expectations of having them satisfied. Pity her for the titillation she must suffer.12

The most remarkable thing about this passage in the context of the ‘pity’ which the narrator claims, somewhat off-handedly, to feel for this passing street apparition with whom he has no actual contact of any

­150    The Literature of Pity kind, is the degree of inversion. He knows, of course, nothing of the reasons why she might be in this street (which, no doubt, might lead to other, quite different streets). The mention of ‘unhygienic’ presumably means that he is already treating this woman as a physical object, considering her in the context of those bodily functions in terms of which she does not want to be considered; he is thus precisely invading the world of the burkha, feeling the frustration of a type of imagination which (like, it has to be said, most of the British romantic poets) he considers to be a God-given patriarchal right. Such feelings among western men are, obviously, not uncommon; indeed, in such countries as France it appears that they are in the complex process of achieving lasting institutional sanction. However, the implicit comparison here between a burkha-clad woman and a pile of rubbish is extreme by any standards, and makes one wonder about the exact force of the term ‘refuse’. Perhaps we should repronounce it: is it after all more about ‘refusal’, the woman’s refusal to accede to the power of the male gaze, than about ‘refuse’ – or is the (occluded) point that they are both the same – that she who ‘refuses’ is consigned to become ‘refuse’, discarded matter? And in what way, one might similarly ask, does the narrator suppose this ‘garment’ to be ‘inflaming to her passions’? Is this a cheap jibe at the way in which he is imagining that the burkha might chafe a woman’s body, a kind of sidelong joke at the expense of female native customs, or is it again an inversion? It seems – or should seem even on a moment’s reading – perfectly clear to everybody except the narrator that it is in fact the narrator’s passions which are thus ‘inflamed’ – inflamed through refusal, through implicit rejection, through the absence of power over that which cannot be approached in the usual terms of gender-based reduction to a scopic object. ‘Pity her for the titillation she must suffer’: who, we might then ask, is ‘destined’ to ‘satisfy’ these fantasised passions? Why, the narrator himself, we must presume; and thus we could, and surely should, also pass the notion of ‘titillation’ on to him, and we can immediately see how this purported ‘pity’ has turned already into an exalted, domineering but rather peculiar form of ‘self-pity’. It has turned into a sorrow for a desiring self lost in a world whose desires (if they exist at all) cannot be comprehended, a world which holds itself in reserve, a world where one’s own quasi-diasporic presence does not receive the valuation it believes it should and where one might find oneself adrift in a sea of absence of meaning. This would be the reverse, perhaps, of Rushdie’s ‘sea of stories’, a sea instead where there are no stories, no narratives, and where those one tries to make up only rebound on oneself, so that in

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the end one collapses in self-pity, disallowed from providing the ‘proper’ exercise of pity through domination.13 Perhaps the most extreme of all examples of this collapse would be Paul Bowles’s terrifying novel The Sheltering Sky (1949), where all hint of redemptive attempt is sunk in the desert, in the incomprehensibility of a world where no translation, and thus no fellow-feeling, could ever be possible.14 Yet Scott, only a few pages later, is capable of seeing some of these issues from a different angle as he writes a diary in the voice of imprisoned ex-Chief Minister Mohammed Ali Kasim. ‘The English,’ he writes, send Kasim to prison. But it is Kasim who goes to prison. The prisoner in the zenana house is a man. But who is his jailer? The jailer is an idea. But in the prisoner the idea is embodied in a man. From his solitude the man reaches out to others [. . .] But he cannot reach them as people. They are protected from him by the collective instinct of their race [. . .] I understand [. . .] why this should be. But to understand does not warm the heart.15

At first glance, this description may seem to resemble a Foucauldian analysis of discipline and punishment, but in fact it is quite differently focused. The emphasis here is not on the need to display sovereignty through the usual historic means of, for example, torture and the display of the body in extreme pain;16 it is rather on a more insidious requirement of submission, in which the terms are unequal for the different but specific reason that the exercise of power is in the hands of those who have lost, or rather submerged, their individuality within an imperative of racial superiority. Pity, the passage seems to suggest, might be expected from individuals, even though that expectation may be constantly defeated; but can it be expected from a group, race, society, culture? If that were to be a possibility, what indeed then would be the relationship between pity and that equally ambiguous term, strung as it is between theology and jurisprudence, ‘mercy’? However: to see the connections between diaspora and pity in greater fullness, we can turn above all to the work of Joan Riley, who has documented the fate of Jamaican immigrants into the UK through a series of novels, including The Unbelonging (1985), which relentlessly depict the complex traps that beset diaspora and that place the reader in ever-increasing complications and convolutions of pity. In Waiting in the Twilight (1987), for example, the central figure Adella is a cleaner in London. In Jamaica, where she has come from, she had valued skills; but she has attracted a series of chronically unreliable lovers who have fathered her children and then abandoned her. Partially disabled now by a stroke, she needs to be reliant on her children, who themselves demonstrate different degrees of assimilation to the England which is all

­152    The Literature of Pity they have known as (a kind of) home; she is also bitterly determined to remain independent despite her multiple disabilities. But our pity is most enjoined by the consequences of Adella’s displacement; by the ways in which she is unable to accept the sins, crimes and infidelities of her former partners, particularly Stanton, whose return (impossible as the reader knows it to be) she has been in a sense awaiting all these years. Even on her death bed she imagines his return: Everyone was there. All the children smiling at her. Loyal now. They had never blamed her, kept telling her how great she was, how much she did for them . . . Stanton had come back, just like she knew he would. He had come back and she had kept faith; and now he knew she had waited. The images flickered, faded slowly as her eyes dimmed.17

Stanton, it goes without saying, is not there; neither has he ever fulfilled any of his responsibilities as a partner or as a father. Yet the ending of the novel leaves the reader with a series of enduring questions: they have to do with diaspora, and they have to do with pity. The questions to do with diaspora are perhaps the more obvious ones. Adella is profoundly caught between nostalgia for her homeland, a nostalgia continually shown to be utterly without foundation, and a surviving sense that, somehow, her old faith in England as a country which will promise her justice and freedom may yet come through with the results of these promises, despite the ever-present realities of injustice, racism and insult which are all that seem to proffer themselves in practice. Even on her deathbed we are made aware, through the more worldly voices of her children, that she is still being treated as, at best, a second-class citizen, and this is set off with the utmost pain against the fantasy world which she comes to inhabit as the terrible realities of her illness and imminent death overwhelm her – or rather, and perhaps this is the point, they do not overwhelm her; she remains in a strange sense protected from them, while it is we the readers who have to endure the terrible circumstances amid which she is dying. The treatment meted out to Adella – by her bosses, by her fellowworkers, by her past partners, and even in some cases by her children themselves – makes for almost unbearable reading; one could conclude that she is kept going only by these fantasies in which Stanton, in particular, remains true to the promises he made. Yet the question inevitably arises as to whether pity is the right response to these issues. Adella is determined to the end to remain in some sense independent: although ceaselessly disappointed by the actions of others, she refuses to believe that her adopted homeland can be as cruel and heartless as it indeed appears to be. So she takes refuge in fantasy; but the question remains

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as to whether we, as readers, are to despise this as a retreat from what is going on around her, as a refusal to see the obvious as she is continually maltreated by the agencies of the State, or on the other hand to see this as the only sane recourse for someone who has been defeated in all her life’s objectives, been stripped of her expertise, her hope and eventually her life by an uncaring society. The tremendous skill of Waiting in the Twilight (and it is true of others of Riley’s works as well) is that it leaves us in a zone of response where all is uncertain. We feel the bitterness, certainly; we feel the pang of loneliness, of misunderstanding, of being unable to escape from the trap of stereotype (‘you people’, as her young white supervisor addresses her near the beginning of the story).18 Yet (some of) her children are impatient with her response to the world around her: they consider that perhaps she has not made sufficient effort to adjust, and so we are back again with the question, posed above by Walcott, of whether assimilation or rejection are valid alternatives. In the end, we might say that what happens to Adella is indeed ‘pitiless’, in the sense that her fate is made to appear an inevitable consequence for the diasporic stranger, and therefore our pity may seem pointless, always already too late. Within the crevices, the haunted nooks and crannies of the host society, stories like Adella’s, we suppose, are going on all the time while a kind of willed cultural amnesia (as again Walcott put it) is being practised, and the danger for the reader is that the sense of pity might mutate into a useless crying over a situation that demands active political intervention rather than compassion for those who are excluded, indeed extruded, from the societal norm. But would this be the end of the story? The question we might ask – or be forced to ask – is whether political change can occur without, as it were, a prior ground of pity; whether we would ever be moved to action were it not for hearing, and sensing, stories like that of Adella. Or is the story of Adella, who in the end compromises with the terror around her by moving into fantasy, an example of how difficult, if not impossible, it is to effect political movement if we continue to reside in the movement of pity, which is, according to some accounts, necessarily ultimately self-absorbed, self-obsessed, self-defeating, fatally lacking in the will to move beyond the isolation of despair and into a more collective arena where pity will itself be rejected in favour of a more strenuous and defiant stance that will prevent us from falling again into the trap of self-loathing which can only play into the hands of the existing selfperpetuating power structures?19 At all events, one of Adella’s memories as she approaches the end is of the possibility that the flow of pity might be reversed and even turned

­154    The Literature of Pity into a kind of triumph. She recalls the point at which Stanton sent her money for the passage to England: She had been so full of joy, packing and taking the first bus back to Beaumont, loving the importance as her news went round the village like wildfire. All the people who had pitied her, talked about her husband’s desertion – they all had to eat their words, admire her because she was going abroad, and her husband had made it rich enough to send money for her passage and for new clothes.20

As things work out, of course, all this hope turns to dust and ashes; but the notion of success as somehow reversing the experience of being pitied, whether in reality or in fantasy, remains to escort Adella to her pitiable death.

Chapter 14

Lyric and Pity

This is the last chapter, and it is about Bob Dylan, who I think is one of the great writers of pity of our time. In ‘Chimes of Freedom’ (1964), for example, he refers to pity for the homeless, for the ‘countless confused, accused, misused, strung-out ones an’ worse’,1 for the refugee, for the victim; and this might serve to introduce his texts, complex as they are, as among the most significant writings of pity, or perhaps more appositely, great songs of pity. The examples are legion, and run right through the work, no matter what the societal or religious framework. ‘Chimes of Freedom’ itself, of course, with the bells ‘tolling for the deaf an’ blind, tolling for the mute / Tolling for the mistreated, mateless mother, the mistitled prostitute’, is a tremendous work of pity. But also, outstandingly, we might think back to ‘Ballad of Hollis Brown’ (1963), with its ‘seven breezes a’blowin’ / All around the cabin door’,2 and the catastrophic deaths which ensue. Or we might include in the repertoire ‘The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll’ (1964), when it takes so agonisingly long for it to be finally time to ‘bury the rag deep in your face’ because ‘now’s the time for your tears’.3 And far later in the canon, there are for example ‘Mississippi’ and ‘Po’ Boy’ from Love and Theft (2001), or that terrible paean of pain and doubt on the album Time out of Mind, ‘Tryin’ to Get to Heaven’ (1997): People on the platforms Waiting for the trains I can hear their hearts a-beatin’ Like pendulums swinging on chains When you think that you’ve lost everything You find out you can always lose a little more I’m just going down the road feeling bad Trying to get to Heaven before they close the door. I’m going down the river Down to New Orleans

­156    The Literature of Pity They tell me everything is gonna be all right But I don’t know what all right even means [. . .]4

It could be argued that even this very brief list demonstrates something of a reversal of the social commentary of Dylan’s earlier work into a more personalised concern later on in his corpus, but I think that has to be thought through very carefully. Although it may be technically and grammatically true that Dylan’s later work tends towards a greater predominance of the first-person pronoun, a question remains as to how this first person functions – is it simply the writer, or has it become expanded such that, when we hear lines like ‘I’m going down the river / Down to New Orleans / They tell me everything is gonna be all right / But I don’t know what all right even means’, the inclusivity is such that the compassion, the sense of hesitance, the fear and courage in the face of oblivion, are spread out beyond the risk of self-pity?5 No doubt there are many judgements that could be made. My first major example of Dylan’s explicit use of ‘pity’ points up this issue, which is to do with how lyric works and with what audience involvement is at stake. It is from ‘It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)’, which is in turn from Bringing it all Back Home (1965), and it is the third stanza: Temptation’s page flies out the door You follow, find yourself at war Watch waterfalls of pity roar You feel to moan but unlike before You discover that you’d be just one more Person crying.6

This, of course, is not actually first-person: indeed, this stanza, and in fact large parts of the song (except, at least, for the chorus) is in that rarest and most difficult of forms, second-person narrative. Yet secondperson narrative goes well with song, because for narratological – and indeed psychological – reasons it is extremely difficult to sustain over any length of time: if you are told for too long what is happening to you, and how you are meant to be responding, there is a real prospect of emotional alienation. However: ‘waterfalls of pity’. This, of course, is part of a work in which we see Dylan at his most florid; closest, we might say, to his namesake Dylan Thomas, although perhaps with further echoes of what psychiatrists might call a florid array of symptoms, a term used most often of the complexities of the presentation of psychosis.7 Here the words flow; they overwhelm; they gather and produce continually added force. Some of the time, we might say, they become almost lost

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in the flood, before the flood – in the face of the flood. But here what is important is that this mention, this extrapolation of pity goes beyond the individual; what we are pointed to is a realm in which pity itself becomes the object, becomes a passion, in one of the many senses of passion: something which is not under the control of the self, but which comes to overtake the self, to remind us of a kind of individual insignificance.8 We are reduced to mere spectators, observers, watchers, so that, as so often in Dylan, the extremity of an emotion is subtly displaced, becomes something which happens to us, rather than something which we can originate for ourselves in the world. To put it a different way, which perhaps owes more on the one hand to Blake and on the other to Deleuze and Guattari, it is not as though we are the authors of, or the authorities on, our own feelings: they come from quite elsewhere.9 In relation to them, we are perhaps at best strangers; in a more uncanny formulation to which I shall return in a moment, perhaps we are mere immigrants. ‘Just one more person crying’: and this is also, in some sense, the fate of the character in Dylan’s most obvious meditation on pity, ‘I Pity the Poor Immigrant’ (1968). This is a work that appears only to be vestigially about the ‘immigrant’ as we might normally conceive him (and I am afraid I do mean ‘him’ here – this a masculinist work, and I have nothing to say about this pervasive accent throughout the oeuvre). Here is part of it: That man whom with his fingers cheats And who lies with ev’ry breath, Who passionately hates his life And likewise, fears his death.10

This appears to me to be less about a concern for the immigrant himself than about the plight into which his situation places all of us: it is not that the immigrant is a cheat, but that when we contemplate the position of the immigrant, then the notion of cheating appears on the horizon as part of a constellation in which we are all involved. I am not sure what the ‘all’ here actually involves, because I have never been sure to what audience Dylan is speaking: is it to the western world; is it to (to use a famous or infamous example) US farmers; is it, by now, to his own followers; is it still (as it was) to fellow folkies in Greenwich Village – or is it now (again) to the people left behind in the vicious cycle of depression in the old northern iron towns – I do not know (as one can never be sure of any writer’s imagining of his or her own actual or implied audience), but one thing I am quite sure of is that what we have here is not some kind of simplified ‘universal’ vision, because Dylan is, I think, very clear

­158    The Literature of Pity about the limits of that fake westernised assumption of universalism. And this can take us back to the opening lines of the song: I pity the poor immigrant Who wishes he would’ve stayed home, Who uses all his power to do evil But in the end is always left so alone.

Here we seem to be in the presence of a kind of depthless irony: we are not, surely, supposed to mistake the immigrant for a terrorist, but instead to sense the interior struggle of resentment, and hence a questioning of what this ‘evil’ might actually be: an evil emanating from the immigrant, or more probably the impossibility of escaping from prejudice, of always being ‘pre-judged’ and feeling the distorted need to live up to these negative expectations. Being treated as ‘different’, as Dylan often seems to say, forces us into a position of being different, of living up to exactly those scripts which are expected of us but which in the end – as we also know even as we enact them – will end up by doing us harm and by further isolating us even at the moment when we most yearn for acceptance. And so, it surely cannot be that it is the immigrant himself who ‘fills his mouth with laughing / And who builds his town with blood’; rather it is that the trope of the immigrant brings to mind a whole series of ­associations which remind us of a complex history of violence, of defamiliarisation – ‘Blind Willie McTell’ (1991) would be another example – where entire eras and arrangements of history are dragged back up to the light, from under the surface: here, we might say, within the regime of pity, as in ‘Blind Willie McTell’ and its unique recapitulation of the trajectory of America, they fall under the sign of the blind poet/ prophet.11 Either way, they tell parts of the story of the wanderer, the rider of freight trains, the individual with no place to call home; it is in this sense that we might validly refer to Dylan’s art as an art of the diaspora. The notion of diaspora, as we have already seen, is not simple: it refers to a people which is spread out, dispersed, unable to ‘bring it all back home’, but it also refers to the ways in which those people with settled lives regard the presumed dangers of such others, those without clear nationality, without solid investment in space or place, those who could at any moment decide to pick up their scanty belongings and move on. Of course in Dylan, right through from his early involvement with Woody Guthrie and all that Guthrie’s repertoire and its forebears entails, there is a moment of appreciation, of admiration, even of fascination with this travelling life-style; but there is also a questioning of

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how far this phenomenon is actually willed, how far it is the outcropping of the desire, the need for settled communities to have their own other. One obvious example can be found in the relationships between gypsy/ travelling communities and their own ‘others’: it is, perhaps, clear that any nomadic life represents a threat to the neat borders of the nationstate, but this perhaps does not fully explain the venom with which such communities have been treated across the ages, across Europe, and even wider afield. ‘Settled’ life cannot afford to tolerate its other: in Australia and in North America the colonising (‘settling’) impulse served, as we are all now well aware, to eradicate the threat.12 But in using these examples I am probably dodging the main issue about pity and Dylan: for the prime example of diaspora is to be found in Jewish history, and it is entirely possible that, although such matters are rarely directly mentioned in the oeuvre, a great deal of Dylan’s attention to the issues of ‘moving on’ are less specific to the American ideal of not being bound down to a specific place, an ideal which nowadays provokes elements of the survivalist movement, the anti-statist rhetoric that fuels complicated disasters such as Jonestown and Waco, than to a half-repressed version of what we might loosely term ‘exodus’, of being continually moved on, of having no place to call home. Would this be, for example, the subtext of the fate of the ‘lonesome hobo’ (1968)? Well, once I was rather prosperous, There was nothing I did lack. I had fourteen-karat gold in my mouth And silk upon my back. But I did not trust my brother, I carried him to blame, Which led me to my fatal doom, To wander off in shame.13

And if so, would this be a displaced version of the fate of the Jew in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Europe, to be blamed for amassing vast wealth and then to be perceived as treacherous, to be banished, eventually, of course, in the final stanza, to ‘pass on’, to be condemned, yet again, to moving on, to having to take to the road (if one has survived at all) in the hope of finding some other place, some other space, where one can be pitied, taken in? The poor immigrant, we are told, also falls in love with ‘wealth itself’, but this does not prove to be his salvation: all the hopes of security, of solidity, of compensating for lack of home by building up material gain, are proven ineffectual. It needs to be emphasised – perhaps time and time again – that this account of diaspora, exploitation and wealth is not, of course, a true

­160    The Literature of Pity story. It is a myth. And it is a myth which has served to justify killings, pogroms, massacres, outrages of all kinds. But the cultural work, even the cultural imperative, which this myth exists to serve could be seen as precisely the prevention of pity.14 We cannot pity, so the story goes, those who are rich; and so the vast mass of the exiled are hidden away beneath the few examples of those who have acquired wealth – Jewish bankers, certainly, in terms of this European history, wherein the Jew also signifies the terror of the ‘oriental’ other – but also, for example, contemporary Russian oligarchs. How easy it is to say that if ‘these people’ (and what a hateful, hate-filled phrase ‘these people’ so often is) can flourish, why then should we feel pity for their impoverished, desperate fellow countrymen (and women). And so the myth of the outsider turns full circle, and even the possibility of ‘making good’ becomes a further excuse for withdrawing mercy and charity from those left behind, or outside, the smug solidarity of the nation-state. All of this, I think, is something that Dylan is hinting at; and so the pity felt for the ‘poor immigrant’ is shared around. It is pity for the immigrant himself, if such a figure is ever fully incarnated in the work. It is pity for the recording, observing self (‘And turns his back on me’), for having to respond to this tumult from the skies, or from the waterfall; pity, we might say, at a much lower level – pity for the poor individual on his way to work in the morning and finding his charitable emotions churning as he tries to decide to give money to this or that indigent – precisely the process, often ending in utter impotence on the part of the potential giver, which The Big Issue project, for example, was designed, worthily, to circumvent. But it is also pity as an organising principle which can envelop us all, and can enable us, if such a thing is possible, to perform acts of miraculous identification. It is here that we might need to remind ourselves again of Aristotle on tragedy and the key terms of pity and terror, and suggest that this is perhaps what poetry and song are all about. And indeed we might go even further and suggest that this is what pity is, why it is such a powerful and at the same time such a suspect emotion: it invites us into a deranged proximity, a problematic intimacy, with the apparent object of our feelings, and perhaps the very uncertainty which attends the dissolution into the (water)pitfall of selfpity is also, uncannily, its strength: that in the throes of pity, under the waterfall, which we might consider to be a key trope in Dylan, we find our selves dissolving as we feel the tears – which ‘are like rain’ – that remind us of what we might call our own immigrant, unhoused status, our own uncertainty of anything we might justly call home. These acts of miraculous identification are one way of approaching, or experiencing, Dylan. ‘Spanish Harlem Incident’ (1964) is, at one level,

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a conventional tale of desire, and especially of the desire for the exotic (‘The night is pitch black, come an’ make my / Pale face fit into place, ah, please!’),15 and thus far an account of the always difficult relationships between the settled, settling, rich community and that which inevitably has preceded it – on the vast prairies, or way down in Mexico, or on the Texan/Mexican border (which is no border) so beloved of Cormac McCarthy,16 or in these surviving tracelands of Spanish Harlem with their hints of prostitution, of the purchase of flesh, of the corrupted will to please or to be pleased at all costs. But the last lines, although in one sense they only take this scenario to its obvious conclusion, also gently push the debate in a different, a further direction: I got to know, babe, will you surround me? So I can tell if I’m really real

It goes without saying (so many things in Dylan go without saying) that this is another myth, a myth of dominance and subservience which plays along with the apparently endless imperial narrative of sexual exploitation – we need only think of ‘Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues’ (1965), to which I shall return below – but it might not be going too far to suggest that ‘really real’ plunges us into a kind of mise en abyˆme: what would it be like, could it be truly possible, to be ‘real’ on this stage where all is invested in simulacra, where every individual, every subject, serves merely to represent him- or herself, where everything is pre-judged (which only means the same thing as ‘prejudiced’) and therefore there can be no true idea of where tears might fall, where pity might be genuinely felt? Do we really wish, to alter the rhetoric for a moment, to escape from or to Desolation Row? However: for the moment, I want to turn to ‘Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues’. Some of the cast of characters in this curiously staged song are in need of some kind of pity: our narrator (certainly), the sergeant-at-arms, Angel. Others, perhaps – Saint Annie, Sweet Melinda – may seem less so, but the boundary is far from clear. In this world of encounters predicated on deprivation and need, only the ‘authorities’ might be exempt: those who represent a useless ‘stability’ (‘They just stand around and boast’).17 Everybody else participates in the general life of the underworld, a life which is crawling with fear and danger, corrupt, exploitative, but which may nonetheless be closer to the ambiguous roots of pity (after all, you’re ‘careful not to go to her too soon’) than that other life on the hill of plenty.18 On the hill of plenty, what is wielded is, for example, the assimilation of the diamond and the cane, of wealth and violence, which recurs from ‘The Lonesome

­162    The Literature of Pity Death of Hattie Carroll’ (the ‘cane that he twirled around his diamond ring finger’) to ‘Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts’ (1974), where Big Jim, owner of the town’s only diamond mine, wields a silver cane. Carroll’s killer William Zanzinger, as it happens, has been recently invoked in connection with the, to say the least, ultra-privileged French politician Dominique Strauss-Kahn. However: Dylan speaks directly of pity on only a handful of occasions, and another one of those is in the third stanza of ‘No Time to Think’ (1978): In the Federal City you been blown and shown pity, In secret, for pieces of change. The empress attracts you but oppression distracts you And it makes you feel violent and strange. Memory, ecstasy, tyranny, hypocrisy Betrayed by a kiss on a cool night of bliss In the valley of the missing link And you have no time to think.19

Here again we are in the presence of what I think of as the ‘flooding’ Dylan, the Dylan after the levee has burst, the mad enjambements and juxtapositions of words, often based on rhyme and alliteration, which can sometimes make us feel quite adrift, as though we are, for example, in a time of high water. And here I want to offer an aside: which is that rhyme in itself (and Dylan is a master of rhyme) is quite mad. That is to say that rhyme circumvents all etymology: it challenges and often destroys all possibility of meaning. It asserts, we might say, the predominance of musicality: while it appears to bespeak an extremity of arrangement, what it actually does is to reinforce our sense of linguistic disarray. If we are looking for connections, then it continually sends us down side-paths, it suggests that despite all we think we know, we are in fact not masters of language, instead language asserts its mastery over us. Yes, of course we can arrange rhyme, and most poetry, most song, does just that; but in doing so it continually short-circuits our pathways to sense, it connotes a certain arbitrariness. So what would it mean to show, or to be shown, pity – for this is a phrase of quite extraordinary duplicity. Does it mean, on the one hand, to demonstrate pity; or does it, on the other, mean to objectify the need for pity, to stand out as a pitiable object? Object and subject are here placed in a certain relationship and, without wishing to play too much on these terms, when we are speaking of pity it involves not only the subject and the object but also, as we have seen before, the abject, and here it might be as well again to define this as the term for the process

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by which we ‘throw off’ or ‘throw down’ our concerns for our own deficiencies, our own always imminent humiliation, and thereby construct an ‘other’ which is constantly to be pitied, in need of our pity. Even as we are doing this we know, at one or another of the many levels of knowing, that that which is abjected is also a part of our self, that part which is constantly in need of pity, in need of reassurance that our personal plight is not being passed over in the ‘general run’, that we are allowed to make our plea, even if we feel sure that such a plea, embarrassing as it will always be (especially here within the multiple possible resonances of ‘blown’), will not be answered, that it can never even be addressed because to do so would be to support and sustain our own feared position of inferiority. This may also be part of the message of the mention of pity at the close of ‘Thunder on the Mountain’ (2006). The difference between these stances may be minimal; but it is important to remember yet again that the adjectives ‘pitiable’ and ‘pitiful’ are remarkably different. Is the provider of charity – and here we might refer yet again back to Blake – any more or less in need of our pity than its recipient? At all events, pity can make us feel violent and strange: I think that seems right. It can make us feel violent because pity reminds us of our own dereliction, our neediness, and this conduces to violence; it also conduces to our own estrangement – after all, if we are to be the mere objects of pity, then all our personal, individualistic myths of strength, stability, selfhood, all the enduring investments we have placed and must continue to place in the security of the ego, go down, all are borne away by the waterfall. At this point, there is something about which it is necessary (for pity’s sake) to be clear, and it is this: it sometimes seems impossible to have any idea whether Dylan knows what he is doing, where (if anywhere) his control mechanisms might be. I am not suggesting for a moment that he is some kind of naïf; not at all. But there is what we might loosely call a surreal quality to some of these more flooding, or flooded, works. I do not have space to demonstrate it in more detail here, but it needs to be noted that sometimes the syntactical arrangements of the songs are merely the simulacra of syntax, that the words chosen operate against each other in ways of which the syntax cannot take account. ‘You been blown and shown pity’ would be a case in point: exactly what part of speech is ‘shown’ here – have you indeed shown pity, whatever that might mean, or have you been shown it – and consequently, again, we are introduced to the vertiginous doubt as to what the difference would be. When we ‘show’ pity, is it that we are showing it to ourselves, that we are embarking on a reticulated process of demonstrating to the world at large what it would be like to be shown pity ourselves, to experience

­164    The Literature of Pity the world making up (at last – perhaps at the very last, at the bitter end) for all the deficiencies it has constantly shown in its dealings with us? My final example of Dylan working directly with the word ‘pity’ is part of the fourth stanza of ‘Tight Connection to My Heart (Has Anybody Seen My Love)’ (1985). Madame Butterfly She lulled me to sleep, In a town without pity Where the water runs deep. She said, ‘Be easy, baby, There ain’t nothin’ worth stealin’ in here.’20

‘A town without pity’ is a resonant phrase;21 but what interests me more here is the continuing connection between pity and water, which seems to be reversed from the ‘waterfalls’, but perhaps is not, when we inspect it, so different. If the water runs deep, then perhaps it cannot return to the surface – indeed obviously it cannot. And so the continuing passional moving which is pity cannot operate. I mean, of course, the word ‘moving’ in both of its major senses: as physical motion, and also as the ability to be moved emotionally. If there is nothing worth stealing (as also perhaps in, for example, ‘Visions of Johanna’ (1966)), then perhaps this constitutes a kind of rest of the soul, such as, to take another example, when riding into town and cursing Isis, or when, in that same song (‘Isis’, 1975), finally abandoning the search to resurrect the already stolen body. While it is clearly possible to be lulled to sleep in a town without pity, one is entitled to ask what kind of awakening would await. Without pity there would only be the ‘cold coming we had of it’; with pity there is the danger of being swept away ‘upon the sweeping flood’.22 One further address to this question might be found, as I momentarily suggested above, in ‘Desolation Row’ (1965), which is, as I see it, a drama of reanimation. The characters in it are weirdly distinguished by being characters who have already had previous lives: they have found their place, or at least they are under the continuing illusion that they have found such a place, but in fact here they are cast adrift, they have to find or refind their footing in a flooded landscape where they are known, and know themselves, only by echoes, by attempts to revisit their former selves. A case in point would be: Now the moon is almost hidden The stars are beginning to hide The fortune telling lady

Lyric and Pity    ­165 Has even taken all her things inside All except for Cain and Abel And the hunchback of Notre Dame Everybody is making love Or else expecting rain And the Good Samaritan, he’s dressing He’s getting ready for the show He’s going to the carnival tonight On Desolation Row23

Everybody on Desolation Row, of course – and even, in some stanzas, everybody anywhere near it – has some call on our pity: Romeo, stuck in the wrong place at the wrong time; Ophelia, abandoned within the bonds of a myth of virginity not of her making; Casanova, forced to repeat himself endlessly; even Dr Filth’s nurse, ‘some local loser’ – all of these make some claim upon us which even the apparent assimilation of their language to ours cannot forego. Yet Desolation Row is also the forbidden source of redemption: what would it be like if the letters from there had not been purloined in the first place, had finally got through? Would this give us some final consolation, or would we wake up sweating, in terror, now at last certain that there is no pity to come, no possibility that our plight might still be understood, that the ‘doorknob’ might at last be mended? The stanza quoted above is about exploitation: most of the stanzas in ‘Desolation Row’ are, and here the major symbol of such exploitation is the Good Samaritan who, we suspect, is not going to have a good time at the carnival: he does not know, again as most of the characters do not, what awaits him. But of course, with Dylan it is always possible to take matters too seriously: what are Cain, Abel and the hunchback of Notre Dame doing here except filling out the line, the rhyme, the metre? But let us reread that thought: what are any of us doing ‘here’ (whatever ‘here’ might mean) but filling out the line, the rhyme, the metre? Are any of us, as it were, filling out, or fulfilling, our own scripts, scripts which we believe we have ourselves written, or are we instead acting in accordance with rules and scenarios already laid down?24 This seems to be something of the mystery of ‘Desolation Row’; but more intrinsic, more resonant, more echoic, seem the lines ‘Everybody is making love / Or else expecting rain’. Behind this surrogate equivalence seems to me to lie the real essence of desolation: the sense that any one thing can be seen – perhaps under conditions of extreme depression? – as equivalent to any other, that there is no balance, no harmony, even no assured contradiction to be found, only a numbness. Along the centuries we have known many words for this plight, the most recent including

­166    The Literature of Pity depression, dejection, melancholia; but the point here would be that under such conditions, in a world where ‘everything is broken’, then the exercise of pity would come under inspection, under scrutiny. How can one feel, but perhaps more to the point how can pity be experienced, in a ‘world gone wrong’? I am not sure that I know. Perhaps what one can do is protect oneself, and I sometimes think that Dylan’s songs, like most psychological symptoms, certainly, but perhaps like all poetry, all writing, are a form of protection – self-protection originally, perhaps, but it would now go much further than that. Much psychoanalytical interpretation relies on the supposition that psychotic thinking is essentially protection and defence: if we did not engage in this or that behaviour, no matter how bizarre, then the hidden door would open and the demon would come in. I seem now to be talking about Dylan; but I am talking about pity too. I am sure that I am not saying that Dylan’s work is psychotic, other than in the sense that all music, all poetry, is ‘psychotic’ in that it engages in a type of thinking, expressing, which is not readily available to the commissars of sense. Yet maybe, despite Dylan’s own protestations, all his work is some form of ‘protest’: but then, that would be true of Dylan Thomas as well – and John Donne, and Blake, and Kafka. It thus seems inevitable that Dylan’s lyrics have had so much to say about pity, and about the relations of power and powerlessness within which pity is inextricably bound.

After Thought: Under the Dome

Under the Dome (2009) is not Stephen King’s best novel; indeed, it is distinctly ramshackle. Although it brings to something of a climax King’s dealings with small-town USA, it sets out far too large a cast of characters, and eventually we lose effective sight of most of them, and the writing is occasionally rushed and clunky; however, it does in its closing pages provide a significant view of pity. The plot, fantastical as it is, is easily told. An invisible but unbreakable dome descends one day over a small town in Maine; in doing so, it cuts various people and animals in half, but the principal effect is to provide an almost literal ‘hot-house’ within which existing rivalries and secrets move towards increasingly violent fruition. Although in some respect this is a typical small town, in others it is not: not many small towns in Maine, one may justly suspect, have a senior town official who is the kingpin in an international trade in hard drugs. The nature and function of the dome are gradually revealed; it has been placed by a group of alien children who are using it in much the same way – in a metaphor which is stretched to its limit – as human children might torment and torture insects and small animals, regarding them – as the alien children regard us – as insensate and therefore unable to experience anxiety or pain. How to explain what happens next? One of the characters, Julia, trying to force a telepathic appeal through to the aliens, begins to relive an episode from her past, an episode which involved her in the utmost humiliation; she sees herself then as subjected to the same dispassionate gaze as that which is now being visited on the whole town’s inhabitants by the aliens. She is, temporarily, lost in this past, lost in a swamping recollection of abjection (King suggests that it might be called ‘abasement’, which is also an interesting word). But then, in her memory of her earlier state, one of the girls who has been tormenting her does a peculiar thing. Julia by this time has been

­168    The Literature of Pity virtually stripped naked; she has no idea how she is going to get home; she is in floods of tears. And the other girl, Kayla, looks down at her without doing anything. Then she crosses her arms in front of her – they are human arms in this vision – and pulls her sweater over her head. There is no love in her voice when she speaks; no regret or remorse. But there might be pity.1

They are ‘human arms’ because by this time Julia’s visions have amalgamated this past scenario with the ‘present presence’ of the aliens; the gesture of removing the sweater is a prelude, as we know from earlier on in the novel, to giving it to Julia to hide her nakedness. But here there is no love; no regret; no remorse. There is only pity; and yet it is pity that saves Julia. How are we to cope with this? We might say, well, it is not asking for much, is it? It is not asking for any involvement, indeed for the taking of any risk, as love, regret, remorse might do. At the very end, the suggestion seems to be, there remains something that lies below these engagements, these passions, something residual, some relation to the actual, suffering flesh; something, as these actions seem to imply, almost automatic, almost robotic. Perhaps pity is not an emotion at all. Or perhaps, as we read on through this endgame, it is something that cannot be shared by others. Much is made of the fact that Julia has only succeeded in appealing to the alien world because, as it happens, she has caught one of the alien children alone; had a whole group of them been there, we are told, her appeal would have fallen on deaf ears. Why? We might refer to ‘gang culture’, not only as described by sociologists but as conceived in psychoanalytically-inflected group dynamics; we might think that, for any individual to own to the sort of pity being talked about here would involve her (and yes, this alien child is a ‘her’) in her own humiliation: showing weakness for the wounded enemy would be seen as soft, would open up further possibilities for abjection, for abasement. What Julia says is that ‘there was only one [. . .] If there had been more, it never would have worked. I don’t think you can fight a crowd that’s bent on cruelty. And no – she wasn’t sorry. She took pity, but she wasn’t sorry.’ In the course of the novel, we have seen several crowds ‘bent on cruelty’; we have seen extreme violence as upsurging emotions run riot through the hot-house. Now, in the endgame, we come across another character with a view. It is not a very well respected view; it is the view of Sam Verdreaux, the town drunk, who has managed, against all the odds, to do the driving on this last expedition which has culminated in the lifting of the dome, and who is now coughing up his lungs; he is about to die. But he has the breath – almost his last – to respond

After Thought: Under the Dome    ­169

to Julia’s remark, ‘She took pity, but she wasn’t sorry.’ ‘Not the same things, are they?’ he whispers. ‘No. Not at all,’ Julia replies. ‘Pity’s for strong people,’ says Sam.2 Pity, then, can only be exercised by those who have power; and yet at the same time it affirms the most basic of all commonalties. Perhaps this is the closest it is possible to get to the conundrum, the rebus of pity. Sam, he himself says, has been a weak man, not a strong one – of course he has, he is an addict – and so all he can feel is sorrow for his past actions – one of which has indeed, earlier in the novel, been cataclysmic in its effect; it is not for the likes of him to be able to feel or exercise pity. The novel ends sentimentally; that is King’s gift and problem as a writer. But as it ends, it recapitulates pity. The ‘hero’, Dale Barbara, known throughout as ‘Barbie’, may or may not be going on to a bright new future with Julia; we have no evidence. But what we do have is, as it were, a final reflection on, or of, pity, the strange, inexplicable pity which has been shown them by one alien child and which may, it would seem, have actually been quite pitiless in our usual understanding of that term: They walked back into the world together, wearing the gift that had been given them: just life. Pity was not love, Barbie reflected [. . .] but if you were a child, giving clothes to someone who was naked had to be a step in the right direction.3

‘Pity was not love’; well, as I hope we have seen, the relations between pity and love are complicated indeed. And so are the relations between pity and charity, the giving of clothes, the provision of the essentials so that ‘just life’, bare life, can continue. I have tried, then, in these pages to indicate many writers’ and some artists’ views of pity; it seems reasonable to conclude, extremely briefly, with my own. I think that pity does remind us of our real or fantasised humiliations; but I also think that it reminds us of our ‘humbleness’, which is quite a different thing. It connects us – painfully, unwillingly, sometimes agonisingly – back to something which is not entirely human, back to the animal, to the ‘dumb brute’. This, I take it, is the meaning of the animals in the stable at the birth of Jesus; it is also the meaning of the not-quite-human status of some of Brecht’s figures; it is the appalling death of horses in Owen, Jones, Pablo Picasso. And thus I think it is fair to say that there is a sense in which pity, which may seem the most human of emotions, is in the end strangely, uncannily not-human, or trans-human; it is such as one might feel for a fellow suffering animal, not one bound by bond of blood, for that would transform itself into love; but one whom one has not known and will

­170    The Literature of Pity now probably never know because they – or he, or she, or it – are on the verge of death or extinction. Yet perhaps this is true of all the emotions: we like to think that they are emanations of our selves, but it is probably more accurate to say that we constitute our ‘selves’, from time to time, out of the emotions, and sometimes the passions, which play through us – and, indeed, play us, as in the classical myths of the lyre, or as hinted in Coleridge’s thoughts on the Aeolian harp. Which would bring us to a final ‘reflection’ (all the emotions are perhaps reflections, they are learned as is the repertoire of the expressions on our faces through being caught in our mother’s gaze), which is about the relation between word and feeling – which is in fact, dear reader, if you can remember that long ago, where we came in, the point at which we entered the stage, the stage at which we no doubt began to think about the point. What do our attempts to capture feelings, our attempts to designate passions, really signify? There should not be a final question without an attempt at an answer; and no doubt such an answer will or can be made; but for the moment, here is not the place; for pity, I suspect, is endless.

Notes

Chapter 1   1. Attributed to Maximilien Robespierre, speech to the National Convention (February 1794).  2. See, e.g., Pity and Power in Ancient Athens, ed. Rachel Sternberg (Cambridge, 2005); David Konstan, Pity Transformed (London, 2001); Douglas N. Walton, Appeal to Pity: Argumentum ad Misericordiam (Albany, 1997).  3. See David Hume, ‘Of Self-Love’, in An Enquiry into the Principles of Morals, in Enquiries, ed. L.A. Selby-Bigge (Oxford, 1966), pp. 295–302; Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin and Basis of Inequality among Men, ed. Greg Boroson (New York, 2004); Immanuel Kant, The Doctrine of Virtue, trans. Mary J. Gregor (New York, 1964); Friedrich Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ, trans. R.J. Hollingdale, intro. Michael Tanner (Harmondsworth, 1990).   4. Cf. Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ, in ‘Twilight of the Idols’ and ‘The AntiChrist’, trans. R.J. Hollingdale (Harmondsworth, 1968), p. 119.   5. Robert Lowell, ‘Florence’, in For the Union Dead (London, 1965), p. 14.  6. See Sigmund Freud, e.g., New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis (1933), in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey et al. (24 vols, London, 1953–74), XXII.   7. See Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon Roudiez (New York, 1982).  8. Eugène Ionesco, The Chairs, in Plays, trans. Donald Watson (12 vols, London, 1958), I, p. 75.   9. See, e.g., Samuel Beckett, Endgame, preface by Rónán McDonald (London, 2009). 10. Graham Greene, The Heart of the Matter, intro. James Wood (London, 2004), p. 111. 11. Greene, quoted in Bernard Bergonzi, A Study in Greene: Graham Greene and the Art of the Novel (Oxford, 2006), p. 124. 12. See Stefan Zweig, Beware of Pity, trans. Anthea Bell (London, 2011), e.g., pp. 234 ff. 13. Samuel Daniel, The Queenes Arcadia, in Three Renaissance Pastorals: Tasso, Guarini, Daniel, ed. E.S. Donno (Binghamton, 1993), p. 196.

­172    The Literature of Pity 14. See G.W.F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind (1807), trans. James Baillie (London, 1931), pp. 228–40. 15. See David Punter, Writing the Passions (London, 2001), pp. 1–29. 16. Paolo Bacigalupi, The Windup Girl (London, 2009), p. 88. 17. Dean Koontz, Velocity (New York, 2005), p. 357. 18. John Gay, Dione, in Dramatic Works, ed. John Fuller (2 vols, Oxford, 1983), I, p. 296. 19. See Jean Baudrillard, The Gulf War Did Not Take Place (Bloomington, 1995). 20. See, e.g., Robert Coles, Anna Freud: The Dream of Psychoanalysis (Reading, MA, 1992); Robert Hinshelwood, Clinical Klein (London, 1993). 21. Sri Chinmoy, Twenty-Seven Thousand Aspiration-Plants, www.shortpoems.org/2010/03/02/poems-on-self-pity (accessed 08/04/2013). 22. Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ, in trans. Hollingdale, p. 118.

Chapter 2   1. See Raymond Williams, Modern Tragedy (London, 1966).  2. See Slavoj Žižek, Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture (Cambridge, MA, 1991).  3. Aristotle, On Rhetoric: A Theory of Civic Discourse, trans. George A. Kennedy (New York, 1991), p. 152.   4. See, e.g., Peter W. Halligan, ‘Phantom Limbs: The Body in Mind’, Cognitive Neuropsychiatry 7.3 (2002), 251–68.  5. Aristotle, Poetics, ed. Stephen Halliwell, in Aristotle, Longinus, Demetrius (Cambridge, MA, 1995), pp. 69–71.  6. Aristotle, Poetics, p. 75.  7. See Melanie Klein, ‘The Importance of Symbol-Formation in the Development of the Ego’, in Love, Guilt and Reparation, and Other Works 1921–1945 (London, 1975), pp. 219–32; Leo Bersani, The Culture of Redemption (Boston, MA, 1990), pp. 7–28.  8. Aristotle, Poetics, p. 75.   9. Freud, ‘The “Uncanny”’, in Standard Edition, XVII, pp. 217–56. 10. Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, in Standard Edition, VII, pp. 192–3. 11. See, e.g., various essays in The Blackwell Companion to the Sociology of Families, ed. Jacqueline Scott, Judith Treas and Martin Richards (London, 2004). 12. Freud, Instincts and their Vicissitudes, in Standard Edition, XIV, p. 129. 13. See Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness, ed. Paul O’Prey (Harmondsworth, 1983), pp. 74–7. 14. Freud, From the History of an Infantile Neurosis, in Standard Edition, XVII, p. 88. 15. See Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilisation: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, trans. Richard Howard (New York, 1965). 16. Charles Daniels and Sam Scully, ‘Pity, Fear and Catharsis in Aristotle’s Poetics’, Nous 26.2 (1992), 205–6.

Notes    ­173 17. Sophocles, King Oedipus, in The Theban Plays, trans. E.F. Watling (Harmondsworth, 1947), p. 64. 18. See Paul de Man, Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism (Minneapolis, 1983). 19. Sophocles, King Oedipus, p. 61.

Chapter 3  1. Examples are many and various: key works are by Giotto di Bondone, Ugolino Lorenzetti, Ambrosius Benson, Albrecht Dürer, Peter Paul Rubens.   2. The section of T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land (1922) called ‘What the Thunder Said’ is especially relevant: see Eliot, Collected Poems 1909–1962 (London, 1963), p. 76.   3. See Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford, 1998).   4. I am thinking of Munch, The Scream, of course, but also of Vampire and Madonna.   5. What also comes to mind is Walter Benjamin’s famous image of the ‘angel of history’, itself based upon Paul Klee’s 1920 painting Angelus Novus; see Benjamin, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’ (1940), trans. Harry Zohn, in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt (London, 1999), pp. 245–55.   6. See, e.g., Henrik Ibsen, Ghosts, in Plays, trans. James Walter McFarlane (London, 1961), pp. 195–270; August Strindberg, Miss Julie (New York, 1992); Anton Chekhov, The Cherry Orchard, in Plays, trans. Elisaveta Fen (Harmondsworth, 1959), pp. 331–98.   7. Sylvia Plath, ‘The Moon and the Yew Tree’, in Collected Poems, ed. Ted Hughes (London, 1981), p. 173.  8. See www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/fairhurst-pieta-first-version-p79794/ text-summary (accessed 10/04/13).   9. See Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, trans. Dana Polan (Minneapolis, 1986). 10. See Carol Ann Duffy’s magnificent poem, ‘The Dolphins’, in Selected Poems (London, 1995), pp. 25–6. 11. See, e.g., Thinking with Animals: New Perspectives on Anthropomorphism, ed. Lorraine Daston and Gregg Mitman (New York, 2005). 12. See Anna Chromy, My Life: The Early Years and Influences of a European Artist (London, 2010).

Chapter 4  1. Shakespeare, Henry the Sixth, Part Three, IV, viii, 37–46, in The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans (2nd edn, Boston, 1997), p. 738.  2. Shakespeare, Richard the Third, I, iv, 262–7 and 257–60, in The Riverside Shakespeare, p. 764.   3. See Freud on the double, in ‘The “Uncanny”, in Standard Edition, XVII, pp. 233–7.

­174    The Literature of Pity  4. Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, III, i, 265–75, in The Riverside Shakespeare, p. 1166.   5. See, e.g., Linda Woodbridge, English Revenge Drama: Money, Resistance, Equality (Cambridge, 2010).   6. See David Punter, ‘Hearing the Case: Freud’s Little Hans’, Foreign Body (Spring, 1994), 14–21.  7. Shakespeare, Timon of Athens, III, v, 1–3, in The Riverside Shakespeare, p. 1507.   8. See Freud, The Ego and the Id (1923), in Standard Edition, XIX, pp. 3–66; and Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen, The Freudian Subject, trans. Catherine Porter (Stanford, 1988).   9. See Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice, IV, i, 3–6, 20–1, 26 ff., in The Riverside Shakespeare, p. 309. 10. The most obvious comparison here is with Edgar Allan Poe; see, e.g., ‘Ligeia’, ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’, ‘The Black Cat’ and ‘The Imp of the Perverse’, in Selected Tales, ed. David van Leer (Oxford, 1998), pp. 26–39, 193–7, 230–8, 283–8. 11. Shakespeare, King Lear, IV, vii, 29–32, in The Riverside Shakespeare, p. 1337. 12. Shakespeare, King Lear, V, iii, 232–3, in The Riverside Shakespeare, p. 1342. 13. See David Punter, Modernity (London, 2007), and Shakespeare and Modern Theatre: The Performance of Modernity, ed. Michael Bristol and Kathleen McLuskie (London, 2001). 14. Shakespeare, Macbeth, I, vii, 10–25, in The Riverside Shakespeare, p. 1365. 15. See, e.g., Cleanth Brooks, ‘“The Naked Babe” and the Cloak of Manliness’, in Shakespeare’s ‘Macbeth’: A Casebook, ed. John Wain (London, 1994), pp. 192–210. 16. See Freud, ‘The “Uncanny”’, in Standard Edition, VII, pp. 217–33. 17. Shakespeare, Sonnet 112, in The Riverside Shakespeare, p. 1863.

Chapter 5   1. See Ann Jessie van Sant, Eighteenth-Century Sensibility and the Novel: The Senses in Social Context (Cambridge, 2004).   2. William Collins, ‘Ode to Pity’, in Odes on Several Descriptive and Allegoric Subjects (London, 1747), pp. 1–4.  3. See, e.g., Margaret Anne Doody, The Daring Muse: Augustan Poetry Reconsidered (Cambridge, 1985), esp. pp. 232–64.   4. Otway is, of course, also eulogised in S.T. Coleridge, ‘Dejection: An Ode’ (1817); see Poems, ed. John Beer (London, 1993), p. 357.  5. See, e.g., Paul S. Sherwin, Precious Bane: Collins and the Miltonic Legacy (Austin, 1977), pp. 49–51; Richard Wendorf, William Collins and Eighteenth-Century English Poetry (Minneapolis, 1981), pp. 97–102.  6. http://graduate.engl.virginia.edu/enec981/termpages/spirit.html (accessed 15/4/13).  7. Smollett, The Adventures of Roderick Random, ed. Paul-Gabriel Boucé (Oxford, 1979), pp. xliv–xlv.

Notes    ­175  8. Smollett, Random, p. 3.  9. Smollett, Random, p. 114. 10. On secrets, see, e.g., Frank Kermode, The Genesis of Secrecy (Cambridge, MA, 1979) and Esther Rashkin, Family Secrets and the Psychoanalysis of Narrative (Princeton, 1992). 11. Smollett, Random, p. 133. 12. See, e.g., Revisions in Mercantilism, ed. D.C. Coleman (London, 1969). 13. On this issue, see Punter, Writing the Passions, esp. pp. 1–29. 14. See James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson, ed. George Birkbeck Hill (6 vols, Oxford, 1934–50), I, p. 437. 15. The Works of Samuel Johnson, ed. Arthur Murphy (12 vols, London, 1823), V, p. 400. 16. On altruism, see, e.g., The Altruism Reader, ed. Thomas Oord (Philadelphia, 2007). 17. Fielding, The History of the Adventures of Joseph Andrews, in ‘Joseph Andrews’ and ‘Shamela’, ed. Arthur Humphreys (London, 1993), p. 52. 18. Fielding, The History of Tom Jones, intro. Donald Thomas (London, 1992), p. 91. 19. Fielding, Tom Jones, p. 175.

Chapter 6  1. Blake, ‘The Divine Image’, Songs of Innocence, in Blake: Complete Writings, ed. Geoffrey Keynes (London, 1967), p. 117.  2. See Blake, ‘Holy Thursday’, Songs of Innocence, in Complete Writings, pp. 121–2.   3. Blake, ‘The Human Abstract’, Songs of Experience, in Complete Writings, p. 217.  4. On the Songs of Innocence and of Experience, see particularly Stanley Gardner, The Tyger, the Lamb and the Terrible Desart: ‘Songs of Innocence and of Experience’ in its Times and Circumstance (London, 1998) and Heather Glen, Vision and Disenchantment: Blake’s and Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads (Cambridge, 1983).  5. See Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The German Ideology, ed. C.J. Arthur (London, 1970) and Louis Althusser, For Marx, trans. Ben Brewster (London, 1969).  6. Blake, Visions of the Daughters of Albion, in Complete Writings, p. 195.  7. Blake, The First Book of Urizen, in Complete Writings, p. 224.  8. Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, in Complete Writings, p. 151.  9. Blake, Urizen, in Complete Writings, p. 230. 10. Blake, Urizen, in Complete Writings, p. 231. 11. See in particular Helen P. Bruder, William Blake and the Daughters of Albion (London, 1997). 12. Blake, Urizen, in Complete Writings, p. 235. 13. Blake, Vala, or the Four Zoas, in Complete Writings, pp. 264–5; see also Andrew Lincoln, Spiritual History: A Reading of William Blake’s ‘Vala, or The Four Zoas’ (Oxford, 1995). 14. Blake, The Four Zoas, in Complete Writings, p. 273.

­176    The Literature of Pity 15. See the first part of Christine Brooke-Rose’s account of Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw, in A Rhetoric of the Unreal: Studies in Narrative and Structure, especially of the Fantastic (Cambridge, 1981), pp. 128–57. 16. Blake, The Four Zoas, in Complete Writings, p. 302. 17. See Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen, The Emotional Tie: Psychoanalysis, Mimesis and Affect, trans. Douglas Brick et al. (Stanford, 1993). 18. Blake, The Four Zoas, in Complete Writings, p. 336. 19. Blake, The Four Zoas, in Complete Writings, p. 341. 20. Blake, Milton, in Complete Writings, p. 488; on Milton, see also Thomas A. Vogler, ‘Re: Naming MIL/TON’, in Unnam’d Forms: Blake and Textuality, ed. Nelson Hilton and Thomas A. Vogler (Berkeley, 1986), pp. 141–76. 21. See Freud, Mourning and Melancholia (1917), in Standard Edition, XIV, pp. 237–58. 22. See Hegel, Phenomenology of Mind, pp. 642–79. 23. Blake, Milton, in Complete Writings, p. 490. 24. See Blake, Marriage of Heaven and Hell, in Complete Writings, p. 150. 25. Blake, Milton, in Complete Writings, p. 499. 26. Blake, Milton, in Complete Writings, p. 523. 27. Blake, Jerusalem, in Complete Writings, p. 626. 28. Blake, Jerusalem, in Complete Writings, p.  632; see also, e.g., David Erdman, ‘Infinite London’, in William Blake, ed. John Lucas (London, 1998), pp. 51–9. 29. Blake, Jerusalem, in Complete Writings, p. 640. 30. See, e.g., www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/FWWfeather.htm (accessed 19/4/13). 31. Blake, Jerusalem, in Complete Writings, p. 723. 32. Blake, Jerusalem, in Complete Writings, p. 723.

Chapter 7   1. See Nicholas Royle, Veering: A Theory of Literature (Edinburgh, 2011).   2. See W.S. Graham, e.g., Malcolm Mooney’s Land (London, 1970).  3. See Herman Melville, Moby-Dick, ed. Hershel Parker and Harrison Hayford (New York, 2002), e.g., pp. 246, 274.   4. Jane Austen, ‘Ode to Pity’, in Juvenilia, ed. Peter Sabor (Cambridge, 2006), p. 97.   5. See, e.g., Peter Hunt, Children’s Literature (Oxford, 2001), pp. 33–6, on Judy Blume.  6. See, e.g., Alan Richardson, ‘Apostrophe in Life and in Romantic Art: Everyday Discourse, Overhearing, and Poetic Address’, Style (2002), 363–80.  7. See Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), in Standard Edition, pp. 14–17.   8. Jane Austen, Emma, ed. Robert Clark (London, 1995), p. 9.  9. Charles Dickens, Nicholas Nickleby, ed. Paul Schlicke (Oxford, 1990), p. 713. 10. The reference, of course, is to Dickens, Our Mutual Friend (1864–5). 11. Dickens, Oliver Twist, intro. Humphrey House (London, 1966), p. 41.

Notes    ­177 12. Dickens, Twist, p. 302. 13. See, e.g., Fred Kaplan, Sacred Tears: Sentimentality in Victorian Literature (Princeton, 1987). 14. Dickens, Twist, p. 216. 15. Dickens, Twist, p. 217. 16. George Eliot, Middlemarch, ed. David Carroll (Oxford, 1988), p. 170. 17. Eliot, Middlemarch, p. 230. 18. Eliot, Middlemarch, p. 232. 19. Eliot, Middlemarch, p. 301.

Chapter 8  1. There is not a good general book on soliloquy; but see Glennis Byron, Dramatic Monologue (London, 2003).  2. See Bertolt Brecht, The Messingkauf Dialogues, trans. John Willett (London, 1965).   3. Anton Chekhov, Ivanov, in Plays, trans. Fen, p. 44.  4. Chekhov, Ivanov, p. 66.  5. Chekhov, Ivanov, p. 86.  6. Chekhov, Ivanov, p. 88.  7. Chekhov, The Seagull, in Plays, p. 176.   8. See Didier Anzieu, The Skin Ego, trans. Chris Turner (New Haven, 1989).  9. Chekhov, Uncle Vania, in Plays, p. 204. 10. See, e.g., Paul Marcus, Being for the Other: Emmanuel Levinas, Ethical Living and Psychoanalysis (Milwaukee, 2008). 11. Chekhov, Uncle Vania, p. 213. 12. Chekhov, Uncle Vania, pp. 231–2. 13. Chekhov, Uncle Vania, pp. 244–5. 14. Chekhov, Three Sisters, in Plays, p. 307. 15. Bertolt Brecht, The Good Woman of Setzuan, in Parables for the Theatre: Two Plays by Bertolt Brecht, trans. Eric Bentley (Harmondsworth, 1966), p. 104. 16. See Brecht, Messingkauf Dialogues, e.g., pp. 92–5. 17. See Marx, The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, ed. Dirk J. Struik (New York, 1964), pp. 106–19, 147–64. 18. See, e.g., the complex and interesting arguments in Philip Thomson, The Poetry of Brecht: Seven Essays (Chapel Hill, 1989), pp. 1–24. 19. Brecht, ‘Sonnet No. 1’, in Poems Part One 1913–1928, ed. John Willett and Ralph Manheim (London, 1976), p. 151. 20. W.H. Auden, ‘The Shield of Achilles’, in Collected Poems, ed. Edward Mendelson (London, 1976), pp. 454–5. 21. Brecht, ‘Report on a Castaway’, in Poems Part Two 1929–38, ed. Willett and Manheim (London, 1976), pp. 304–5. 22. It is perhaps especially interesting that Richard Hoggart’s magisterial The Uses of Literacy (London, 1957) refers from the very outset to the relation between the literati and the working classes as one of ‘pity’ (p. 14). 23. I have in mind Edwin Morgan, e.g., ‘From the Domain of Arnheim’ (1968), in Selected Poems (Manchester, 1985), pp. 43–4.

­178    The Literature of Pity Chapter 9   1. Wilfred Owen, ‘Preface’, in Collected Poems, ed. C. Day Lewis (London, 1966), p. 31.   2. See Paul Virilio, e.g., Bunker Archaeology, trans. George Collins (Princeton, 1994).   3. Owen, ‘Strange Meeting’, in Collected Poems, p. 35.  4. See, e.g., James Hillman, The Dream and the Underworld (New York, 1979), pp. 23–67.   5. Sylvia Plath, ‘The Moon and the Yew Tree’ (1961), in Collected Poems, p. 173.   6. Owen, ‘Greater Love’, in Collected Poems, p. 41.   7. See Philip Larkin, ‘The Explosion’ (1970), in Collected Poems, ed. Anthony Thwaite (London, 1988), p. 175.   8. Owen, ‘Disabled’, in Collected Poems, p. 68.   9. The immediate reference, of course, is to Shakespeare, Sonnet 29, in The Riverside Shakespeare, p. 1848. 10. Owen, ‘Insensibility’, in Collected Poems, p. 38. 11. David Jones, In Parenthesis, intro. T.S. Eliot (London, 1937), pp. 29–30. 12. Jones, In Parenthesis, p. 47. 13. Jones, In Parenthesis, p. 66. 14. David Punter, ‘Memoirs of a Contra’, in Asleep at the Wheel (London, 1996), p. 7. 15. Jones, In Parenthesis, p. 111. 16. The reference is to Jon McGregor’s extraordinary novel, Even the Dogs (London, 2010). 17. Jones, In Parenthesis, p. 153. 18. Yeats, ‘Long-legged Fly’, in The Poems, ed. Daniel Albright (London, 1990), p. 386. 19. Jones, The Anathemata (London, 1952), p. 105. 20. Jones, Anathemata, p. 179. 21. Cf. some of A.C. Swinburne’s poetry, e.g., ‘Dolores (‘Notre Dame de Sept Douleurs’)’ and ‘Before a Crucifix’, in Selected Poetry and Prose, ed. John D. Rosenberg (New York, 1968), pp. 145–59 and 181–7. 22. Primo Levi, If Not Now, When?, trans. William Weaver (London, 1986), p. 164. 23. Levi, If Not Now, When?, p. 265. 24. See J.G. Ballard, Empire of the Sun (London, 1984), e.g., p. 111 ff. 25. See Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Nomadology: The War Machine, trans. Brian Massumi (Seattle, 2010).

Chapter 10  1. See M.R. James, ‘Casting the Runes’ and Other Ghost Stories, intro. Michael Cox (Oxford, 1987), pp. 43–56, 78–96.   2. See De Man, Blindness and Insight.   3. Algernon Blackwood, ‘The Listener’, in The Insanity of Jones and Other Tales (Harmondsworth, 1966), p. 139.

Notes    ­179   4. Blackwood, ‘The Wendigo’, in The Insanity of Jones, p. 261.  5. Blackwood, ‘Clairvoyance’, in Tales of the Mysterious and Macabre (London, 1967), p. 237.   6. Blackwood, ‘A Psychical Invasion’, in The Tales of Algernon Blackwood (London, 1938), p. 339.   7. Blackwood, ‘The Woman’s Ghost Story’, in The Insanity of Jones, p. 70.  8. Blackwood, ‘The Kit-Bag’, in The Magic Mirror: Lost Supernatural and Mystery Stories, intro. Mike Ashley (Wellingborough, 1989), p. 29.   9. Blackwood, ‘May Day Eve’, in The Insanity of Jones, p. 184. 10. Blackwood, ‘The Camp of the Dog’, in The Insanity of Jones, p. 303. 11. Blackwood, A Prisoner in Fairyland (London, 1928), p. 329. 12. Blackwood, ‘The Dance of Death’, in The Insanity of Jones, p. 219. 13. Blackwood, ‘The Dance of Death’, in The Insanity of Jones, p. 225. 14. Blake, There is No Natural Religion (c. 1788), in Complete Writings, p. 97. 15. Blackwood, ‘The Glamour of the Snow’, in Tales of the Uncanny and Supernatural (London, 1962), p. 252. 16. Blake, Annotations to Wordsworth’s Poems 1815 (1826), in Complete Writings, p. 783. 17. Blackwood, ‘The Man whom the Trees Loved’, in Tales of the Uncanny and Supernatural, p. 143. 18. See Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis, 1987). 19. Blackwood, ‘’The Man whom the Trees Loved’, in Tales of the Uncanny and Supernatural, pp. 121–2. 20. In ‘The Ballad of Reading Gaol’; see The Works of Oscar Wilde (London, 1963), p. 742. 21. Blackwood, ‘The Willows’, in The Insanity of Jones and Other Tales, p. 50. 22. Blackwood, ‘The Lost Valley’, in Tales of the Uncanny and Supernatural, pp. 410–11. 23. See Naipaul, A House for Mr Biswas (London, 1961). 24. See Hegel, e.g., The Phenomenology of Mind. 25. Blackwood, ‘The Insanity of Jones’, in The Insanity of Jones and Other Tales, pp. 189–90. 26. Blackwood, ‘The Insanity of Jones, in The Insanity of Jones and Other Tales, pp. 214–15. 27. Blackwood, ‘The Touch of Pan’, in Tales of the Uncanny and Supernatural, p. 295. 28. See Boehme, e.g., The Signature of All Things: Signatura Rerum (London, 2008), and Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, The Wolf Man’s Magic Word: A Cryptonymy, trans. Nicholas Rand (Minneapolis, 1986).

Chapter 11  1. See Joan Riley, The Unbelonging (London, 1985) and Waiting in the Twilight (London, 1987), and Andrea Levy, Small Island (London, 2004).   2. Jean Rhys, Voyage in the Dark (London, 1934), p. 56.  3. Rhys, Good Morning, Midnight (London, 1939), p. 78.

­180    The Literature of Pity   4. See, e.g., Kafka, The Castle, trans. Willa and Edwin Muir (London, 1930), pp.  162 ff., and Søren Kierkegaard, The Sickness unto Death, in ‘Fear and Trembling’ and ‘The Sickness unto Death’, trans. Walter Lowrie (Princeton, 1968), pp. 141–262.  5. Rhys, Good Morning, Midnight, p. 88.  6. Rhys, Good Morning, Midnight, p. 88.   7. See Foucault, Madness and Civilisation.   8. See David Punter, Rapture: Literature, Addiction, Secrecy (London, 2009), esp. pp. 47 ff.  9. Leonard Cohen, ‘The Stranger Song’, www.musicsonglyrics.com/thestranger-song-lyrics-leonard-cohen.html, accessed 24/4/13. 10. Rhys, Good Morning, Midnight, p. 145. 11. Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea, ed. Angela Smith (Harmondsworth, 1997), p. 106. 12. Stevie Smith, ‘A House of Mercy’, in The Collected Poems of Stevie Smith, ed. James MacGibbon (London, 1975), pp. 410–11. 13. Smith, ‘Childe Rolandine’, in Collected Poems, p. 331. 14. See Blake, e.g., The Book of Ahania (1795), in Complete Writings, p. 252. 15. See Abraham and Torok, The Wolf Man’s Magic Word, and especially Jacques Derrida’s Foreword to it. 16. See Freud, e.g., The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), in Standard Edition, IV, pp. 245–6. 17. See, e.g., Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, On Ideology (London, 1977). 18. Smith, ‘I Remember’, in Collected Poems, p. 336.

Chapter 12   1. See Kirsty MacDonald, ‘Anti-Heroes and Androgynes: Gothic Masculinities in Contemporary Scottish Men’s Fiction’, The Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies 3 (2007), n.p.; Scott Brewster, ‘Borderline Experience: Madness, Mimicry and Scottish Gothic’, Gothic Studies 7.1 (2005), 79–86; and David Punter, ‘Heart Lands: Contemporary Scottish Gothic’, Gothic Studies 1.1 (1999), 101–18.   2. Iain Banks, Complicity (London, 1993), p. 310.  3. Banks, Complicity, p. 234.  4. Banks, A Song of Stone (London, 1997), p. 280.  5. Banks, A Song of Stone, p. 272.   6. See ‘The Well of Life’, in Punter, Rapture, pp. 95–112.   7. See Blake, ‘The Sick Rose’, Songs of Experience, in ed. Keynes, p. 213; Poe, ‘The Conqueror Worm’ (1843), incorporated in ‘Ligeia’, in ed. van Leer, pp.  31–2; Beckett, Krapp’s Last Tape (1958), in Krapp’s Last Tape and Other Dramatic Pieces (New York, 1960), pp. 7–28.   8. Irvine Welsh, Filth (London, 1998), p. 353.   9. See, e.g., Josef Breuer and Freud, Studies on Hysteria (1893–5), in Freud, Standard Edition, II, pp. 278–83. 10. Jackie Kay, ‘The Woman with Fork and Knife Disorder’, in Damage Land: New Scottish Gothic Fiction, ed. Alan Bissett (Edinburgh, 2001), p. 91.

Notes    ­181 11. See, e.g., Freud, Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious (1905), in Standard Edition, VIII, pp. 134–7. 12. Andrew Murray Scott, ‘Serving the Regent’, in Damage Land, p. 107. 13. Dilys Rose, ‘Mazzard’s Coop’, in Damage Land, p. 135. 14. Rose, in Damage Land, p. 133. 15. Rose, in Damage Land, p. 135. 16. Linda Cracknell, ‘Kiss of Life’, in Damage Land, p. 156. 17. Christopher Whyte, ‘Stifelio’, in Damage Land, p. 183. 18. Blake, ‘The Question Answer’d’, Poems from the Notebook 1793, in Songs of Experience, p. 180. 19. Raymond Soltysek, ‘The House outside the Kitchen’, in Damage Land, p. 195. 20. See, e.g., Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, pp. 167–91. 21. See Welsh, Porno (London, 2002), p. 245. 22. See Punter, Rapture, pp. 210–27. 23. See, e.g., Welsh, Porno, p. 67. 24. James Robertson, Joseph Knight (London, 2003), p. 367. 25. See Freud, ‘The “Uncanny”’, in Standard Edition, XVII, pp. 223 ff. 26. The reference is to Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka.

Chapter 13   1. See H.G. Wells, e.g., The Time Machine (1895) and The Shape of Things to Come (1933).  2. On this and many other issues to do with diaspora, see Sudesh Mishra, Diaspora Criticism (Edinburgh, 2006).   3. Derek Walcott, ‘Negatives’, in Collected Poems 1948–84 (London, 1992), p. 124.  4. Walcott, Midsummer, XXIII, in Collected Poems, p. 483.   5. See Walcott, ‘The Swamp’, in Collected Poems, pp. 59–60.   6. Walcott, ‘The Hotel Normandie Pool’, in Collected Poems, p. 445.   7. Jamaica Kincaid, A Small Place (London, 1988).  8. Kincaid, Mr Potter (London, 2002), p. 194.  9. Rainer Werner Fassbinder (dir.), The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant (1972). 10. Rudyard Kipling, ‘The Hyenas’, in Collected Poems of Rudyard Kipling (London, 1994), p. 328. 11. The reference is, of course, to Rupert Brooke, ‘The Soldier’ (1914), in 1914 and Other Poems (London, 1915), p. 15. 12. Paul Scott, The Day of the Scorpion (London, 1968), p. 9. 13. The reference is to Salman Rushdie, Haroun and the Sea of Stories (London, 1990). 14. See Paul Bowles, The Sheltering Sky (London, 1949), esp. pp. 337 ff. 15. Scott, Day of the Scorpion, p. 54. 16. See Michel Foucault, e.g., Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York, 1977). 17. Riley, Waiting in the Twilight, p. 165. 18. Riley, Waiting in the Twilight, p. 3.

­182    The Literature of Pity 19. See also on some of these matters Punter, Postcolonial Imaginings: Fiction and the New World Order (Edinburgh, 2000), especially pp. 45–60. 20. Riley, Waiting in the Twilight, p. 161.

Chapter 14   1. Bob Dylan, Lyrics 1962–1985 (London, 1987), p. 199.  2. Dylan, Lyrics, p. 130.  3. Dylan, Lyrics, p. 145.  4. Dylan, Time out of Mind (1997); on these matters, as on many others, see also ‘Do You, Mister Jones?’: Bob Dylan with the Poets and Professors, ed. Neil Corcoran (London, 2002) and Christopher Ricks, Dylan’s Visions of Sin (London, 2003).   5. See Nicholas Royle, After Derrida (Manchester, 1995), pp. 61–84.  6. Dylan, Lyrics, p. 275.  7. See, e.g., Daniel Schreber, Memoirs of My Nervous Illness (New York, 2000).   8. See Punter, Writing the Passions.   9. Cf. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus. 10. Dylan, Lyrics, p. 384. 11. As we have seen before in the emblematic work of Paul De Man. 12. See Punter, Postcolonial Imaginings, esp. pp. 174–89. 13. Dylan, Lyrics, p. 383. 14. See Konstan, Pity Transformed. 15. Dylan, Lyrics, p. 197. 16. See Cormac McCarthy, The Border Trilogy (London, 2002). 17. See Dylan, Lyrics, pp. 315–16. 18. See Hillman, The Dream and the Underworld, pp. 23–67. 19. Dylan, Lyrics, p. 568. 20. Dylan, Lyrics, pp. 679–80. 21. Cf. Gottfried Reinhardt (dir.), Town without Pity (1961). 22. The references are to T.S. Eliot, Journey of the Magi (1927), in Collected Poems, p.  109, and Joyce Carol Oates, Upon the Sweeping Flood (San Francisco, 1966). 23. Dylan, Lyrics, pp. 311–12. 24. See, e.g., Christopher Bollas, The Shadow of the Object: Psychoanalysis of the Unthought Known (New York, 1987).

After Thought   1. Stephen King, Under the Dome (London, 2009), p. 870.  2. King, Under the Dome, pp. 874–5.  3. King, Under the Dome, p. 877.

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Index

Abraham, Nicolas, 117, 127 Agamben, Giorgio, 26, 87 Althusser, Louis, 61 Anzieu, Didier, 87 Aristotle, 12, 14–21, 52, 68, 83, 95, 142, 149, 160 Auden, W. H., 92 Austen, Jane, 73, 75, 80 Bacigalupi, Paolo, 8 Ballard, J. G., 105 Banks, Iain, 131–2, 134 Baudrillard, Jean, 10, 33 Beckett, Samuel, 5, 17, 134 Benjamin, Walter, 75, 173n Benson, Ambrosius, 173n Bersani, Leo, 17 Bissett, Alan, 136, 137, 142 Blackwood, Algernon, 107–17, 131 Blake, William, 3, 9, 51, 59–63, 65–71, 89, 110, 111, 118, 125, 126, 127, 133, 157, 163, 166 Boehme, Jacob, 117 Bondone, Giotto di, 173n Borch-Jacobsen, Mikkel, 66 Bowles, Paul, 151 Brecht, Bertolt, 83, 88–90, 92–3, 133, 169 Brooke-Rose, Christine, 176n Brookmyre, Christopher, 134 Byron, Glennis, 177n Chekhov, Anton, 30, 83–8, 93 Chinmoy, Sri, 10 Chromy, Anna, 33–4 Cohen, Leonard, 123 Coleridge, S. T., 123, 170, 174n Collins, William, 47–51

Conrad, Joseph, 19, 20, 93, 134 Cracknell, Linda, 137 Daniel, Samuel, 7 Daniels, Charles, 21 De Quincey, Thomas, 123 Delacroix, Eugène, 29 Deleuze, Gilles, 32, 106, 111, 112, 113, 157 Derrida, Jacques, 127 Dickens, Charles, 52, 76–9, 128 Dolan, Chris, 137 Donne, John, 166 Duffy, Carol Ann, 173n Dunbar, William, 138 Dürer, Albrecht, 173n Dylan, Bob, 155–66 Eliot, George, 79–82 Eliot, T. S., 99 Ellis, Bret Easton, 123 Faber, Michel, 135 Fairhurst, Angus, 31, 32, 33 Fielding, Henry, 47, 55–6, 58 Foucault, Michel, 20, 122, 151 Freud, Anna, 10 Freud, Sigmund, 4, 10, 18, 19, 20, 21, 44, 67, 75, 108, 113, 116, 117, 127 Gay, John, 10 Goya, Francisco, 17 Graham, W. S., 72 Greene, Graham, 5, 6 Guattari, Félix, 32, 106, 111, 112, 113, 157 Guthrie, Allan, 140 Guthrie, Woody, 158

­190    The Literature of Pity Hayley, William, 71 Hegel, G. W. F., 7, 67, 114 Hoggart, Richard, 93, 177n Hume, David, 1 Ibsen, Henrik, 30 Ionesco, Eugène, 4–5 James, M. R., 108 Johnson, Samuel, 55, 56 Jones, David, 99–102, 169 Kafka, Franz, 17, 106, 121, 166 Kant, Immanuel, 1, 138 Kay, Jackie, 136 Kierkegaard, Søren, 121 Kincaid, Jamaica, 146, 147 King, Stephen, 167, 169 Kipling, Rudyard, 148–9 Klee, Paul, 173n Klein, Melanie, 10, 17 Koontz, Dean, 9 Kristeva, Julia, 4, 58 Lacan, Jacques, 12 Larkin, Philip, 98 Levi, Primo, 103 Levy, Andrea, 120 Lorenzetti, Ugolino, 173n Lovecraft, H. P., 107 Lowell, Robert, 3, 6 Machen, Arthur, 116 Mackenzie, Henry, 47 Marcuse, Herbert, 106 Marx, Karl, 61, 90, 128, 143 Maturin, C. R., 52 McCarthy, Cormac, 161 McGregor, John, 178n Melville, Herman, 72 Michelangelo, 24, 28–9, 33 Milton, John, 67, 82 Mishra, Sudesh, 181n Morgan, Edwin, 93, 177n Munch, Edvard, 29, 30, 173n Naipaul, V. S., 114, 147 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 1, 2, 3, 5, 9, 11, 21 Otway, Thomas, 50, 174n Owen, Wilfred, 94, 96–7, 99, 143, 169

Peake, Mervyn, 141 Picasso, Pablo, 169 Plath, Sylvia, 30, 97 Plato, 49 Poe, Edgar Allan, 134, 174n Radcliffe, Ann, 75, 133, 135 Rhys, Jean, 119–21, 123–4, 130 Richardson, Samuel, 47 Riley, Joan, 120, 151, 153 Robertson, James, 139 Rose, Dilys, 136 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 1 Roy, Arundhati, 62 Royle, Nicholas, 72 Rubens, Peter Paul, 173n Rushdie, Salman, 149, 150 Scott, Andrew Murray, 136 Scott, Paul, 149, 151 Scully, Sam, 21 Shakespeare, William, 14, 35–6, 38–41, 43, 45–6, 83, 98, 145 Shelley, Mary, 75 Smith, Stevie, 123–4, 126, 128–30 Smollett, Tobias, 47, 51–4 Soltysek, Raymond, 138 Sophocles, 18 Strindberg, August, 30 Swinburne, A. C., 178n Tennyson, Alfred Lord, 98 Thomas, Dylan, 166 Torok, Maria, 117, 127 Turner, J. M. W., 145 Van der Weyden, Rogier, 26, 28–9, 33 Van Gogh, Vincent, 29–31, 33 Virilio, Paul, 96, 106 Walcott, Derek, 144, 146–8, 153 Wells, H. G., 143 Welsh, Irvine, 133, 138–9 Whyte, Christopher, 137 Wilde, Oscar, 112 Williams, Raymond, 12 Yeats, W. B., 28 Žižek, Slavoj, 12 Zweig, Stefan, 7