Consciousness, Literature and the Arts
Archive
Volume 9 Number 3, December 2008
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Ratcliffe, Sophie. On Sympathy: Oxford English Monographs. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2008. 266 pages, ISBN: 978-0-19-923987-0, £50.00 (Hardback)
Reviewed by
Wilkes University
Tracing sympathy in the works of Robert Browning, W. H. Auden, and Samuel Beckett, Sophie Ratcliffe’s monograph, On Sympathy, offers a compelling and detailed trajectory of the sympathy in the authors’ allusions to Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Arguing that “[t]he thought that we may change by or through our encounters with art is both tempting and terrifying,” Ratcliffe sets out to “trace the ways in which we think about ethics and sympathetic understanding, randing from the manner in which people comprehend each other to the ways in which they think about God” (2). The Tempest, then, is Ratcliffe’s measuring rod for gauging the simultaneous attraction and fear of sympathetic relationships, both within and outside of the text. As such, she takes on Robert Langbaum’s The Poetry of Experience (1957), in which Langbaum offered what Ratcliffe calls “a very simple association of the dramatic monologue with a transparent sympathetic understanding” (4). Although Ratcliffe’s project is primarily useful to students of Browning, Auden, and Beckett, along with those interested in the influence of Shakespeare, her first chapter on sympathy and its literary applications presents a balanced and clear definition and unpacking of the term that is useful to any scholar interested in studies of emotion.
The first chapter, “Understanding Sympathy and Sympathetic Understanding” takes students of sentimental literature through familiar territory. Ratcliffe cites the major names in studies of emotion—George Eliot, Martha Nussbaum, Suzanne Keen, David Hume, Adam Smith, Arthur Schopenhauer, and Frank Kermode—as she sets up her primary argument against Langbaum, an argument she then uses as a springboard into her own examination of the poets and their use of sympathy.
The richness of Ratcliffe’s first chapter begins with a discussion of Eliot’s “The Lifted Veil” and its problematic portrayal of Latimer’s empathic abilities. By explicating Eliot’s own questions about sympathy embedded within the story—“How can one find oneself ‘giving sympathy’ when it is, at heart, a concept that is not fully understood? Are the explanations of sympathy gained through knowledge missing something crucial? … ‘[w]ould sympathy necessarily accompany keenness of insight’?”—Ratcliffe sets out on her own investigation into the relationship between sympathy and knowledge (7). Anticipating the difficulty of definition, Ratcliffe then offers a distinction between sympathy, empathy, and knowledge so as to deal with the humanist and often-anticipated connections between sympathy and altruistic behavior. This discussion is particularly important as both a way to clarify terminology and as a model for other critics working with complicated terms with similar synonymnic difficulties. Furthermore, Ratcliffe goes on to detail the limitations associated with particular strains of sympathetic studies, namely that of the “cognitive-evaluative view” and “sympathetic alternatives” (13, 16). Such attention to detail suggests that On Sympathy is a balanced examination of the psychological and humanist underpinnings of sympathy and its depiction in the works of Browning, Auden, and Beckett. Moreover, she offers her own definition of sympathy, noting that she uses the term “with an awareness of the more mystical and ideal notions of sympathy that appear, implicitly, in seemingly rational discussions of the term” (19).
The chapter continues, then, with Ratcliffe’s own reading of The Tempest in terms of both art and analogy, examining its allegorical possibilities and aesthetic implications. She asserts, “For Browning, Beckett, and Auden, the question of whether allegory acts as an analogical route to a transcendental signified, or whether they are condemned to an infinity of analogues, is crucial, because, as religious writers, they are all concerned with presence or absence of ‘abstract’ or ‘Platonic’ entities such as ‘Goodness’ and ‘Truth’” (29). This nod towards the reader, then, enables Browning, Beckett, and Auden to address concerns with benevolence, goodness, artistic pursuits, and interpersonal relationships.
In chapter two, “Browning’s Strangeness,” Ratcliffe scrutinizes Robert Browning’s work, beginning with a look at his letters to Elizabeth Barrett that unpacks his “balance between sympathetic touch and distance” (72). Ratcliffe asserts, “Such tensions are part of Browning’s understanding of what it is to be a human creature” (72). Ratcliffe ties this conflict to Browning’s developing sense of modernity and the ways that industrialization, often negatively, impacts sympathetic relationships. Browning’s favored poetic form—the dramatic monologue—allows him to imitate the ambiguity of human contact due to the influences of modernity.
So, too, W. H. Auden sees the relationship between humans and the divine to be necessarily impacted by the modern world, particularly as affected by World War I. In chapter three, “W. H. Auden: ‘as mirrors are lonely’,” Ratcliffe writes about Auden’s struggle with “questions about the ethical responsibility of the artist” as evidenced in Auden’s final lecture on The Tempest, recorded by Donald Pearce in 1941 (123). In her assessment of Auden, Ratcliffe draws on his “existential questionings” to comment on the growing sense of alienation prevalent within the early twentieth-century (131).
Chapter four, “Samuel Beckett: ‘humanity in ruins’,” looks at a time after World War II, beginning with a radio broadcast during which Beckett “makes some observations about sympathy and understanding” (169). These observations indicate a concern with what Ratcliffe calls “institutionalized compassion” (169). Beckett’s seemingly mocking position on sympathy and any institution claiming sympathetic motivation reveal, for Ratcliffe, Beckett’s difficulty with understanding God’s will about suffering in the world. By invoking the figure of Miranda in his writing, then, Beckett “continually plays on the ways in which emotion both can and should be made concrete in art—and the ways in which one can understand the emotions of another” (178). In other words, Beckett’s interest in sympathy and emotion suggest that he is approaching something that might be worth salvaging in humanity despite the all-encompassing advances in technology that are forever part of the modern world.
Finally, Ratcliffe offers a glimpse of contemporary representations and uses of sympathy in her Epilogue: “Sympathy Now.” Here, she provides an overview of studies about sympathy in art and literature and the connections forged between sympathy and goodness to look at occasional poetry and writing, which, she believes, may be the genre in which sympathy is most prevalent. She concludes with a brief examination of the poetry of Geoffrey Hill and his attempts to note the connections between sympathy and altruism.
Overall, Ratcliffe’s text is a valuable resource as a study of sympathy and emotion in literature, as she not only offers a rich bibliography but also an interesting examination of the function of sympathy as a vehicle for connecting the writer to his or her text, the reader to the writer, and of the text to another text, as in Browning, Beckett, and Auden’s use of The Tempest.