Blog #2: Jaffe and Representation

            In what follows, I will first briefly unpack Jaffe’s conception of sympathy and then interrogate its problematic ambiguity. Implicit in her account is an opposition between direct or non-representational sympathy and indirect or representational sympathy. She asserts that the latter is what characterizes the “sympathetic exchanges” in Victorian literature. An important resource for her argument is Adam Smith: “Smith depicts sympathy not as a direct response to a sufferer but rather as a response to a sufferer’s representation in the spectator’s mind. As Peter de Bolla points out, for Smith, “sympathetic sentiment is, in the last analysis, ‘imaginary’” (4). Rather than one human being genuinely sympathizing with another human being, then, the “scene of sympathy in effect effaces both its participants substituting for them images, or fantasies, of social and cultural identity” (4). This scene is representational because both participants relate to each other and to themselves purely through images or fantasies of social-cultural identity (either ideal or degraded). When one participant looks at the other, s/he does not and cannot see who the person truly is but rather what society defines him or her as. How the two participants respond to each other therefore depends on “cultural fictions and self-projections,” which are always already bound up in a socio-political narrative. As both are irreducibly embedded in a society, the “actual bodies” of the participants are superseded by the external identities it imposes on them. These identities not only precede and structure every social interaction, but also constitute the “imaginary” representations through which participants view each other. This is why Jaffe claims that “the distinction between sympathy for fictional characters and sympathy for actual people dissolves” (7). In the sympathetic exchanges she analyzes, actual people are reduced to fictional characters. “[S]ympathy is fictional, in the sense that it is fundamentally involved with representation; in both, sympathetic representation takes place within and constitutes a cultural narrative about the identities of sympathetic object and subject” (7-8).

Now, I agree that sympathy is “fundamentally involved with representation,” but I disagree with Jaffe’s assertion that it is consequently “fictional.” To argue that sympathy is fictional because it is representational implies that “real” sympathy would not be representational. In contrast, I would maintain that every form of sympathy—even if it were to be freed from the socio-political context in which it is immersed—is representational. Jaffe’s mistake is to think representation as secondary to reality, which is a common metaphysical assumption: “The texts discussed in this book repeatedly stage sympathy as representation, as if the attempt to feel for another across a social divide is necessarily mediated by the image of the self as image: the self perceived as an effect of social determinants. . . . a perception of the self as representation” (10). The mode of representation, however, is the only way to relate to oneself, to another, or to anything at all. To be sure, Jaffe is correct to say that “sympathy is always embodied,” always social. But when she asserts that “sympathy ‘does away’ with bodies in order to produce representations, replacing persons with mental pictures, generalized images of ease and of suffering,” she fails to realize that bodies and persons require representations (or “mental pictures”) to take on any signification whatsoever. This is not to suggest, of course, that there cannot be ideological or false representations (e.g., “cultural ideality and degradation”). But such representations are no more fictional than non-ideological or true representations.

On the one hand, Jaffe seems to be perfectly aware of what I am putting forth here. For example, she rightly holds that subjects are always represented by “socioeconomic and bodily markers that signify difference”—difference that sympathy in Victorian literature often tries to negate “with assurances of mutual feeling and universal humanity” (15). On the other hand, she contends that these sympathetic encounters “fall into representation” (19), implying that they were once non-representational and that if they were genuine, they would not be representational. I find both these claims untenable, since sympathy is on my account inconceivable without representation and representation has no value in itself (i.e., it can be good or bad).

Jaffe’s conception of sympathy appears to be diametrically opposed to the scenes of personal interaction we see in North and South (especially Margaret’s interactions with Bessy and her family as well as Thorton proposing the dinner idea after seeing what the laborers are forced to eat at home). In her words, “Sympathy thus conceived grounds the self in the dissolution of the social, doing away with representation in order to reach a common ground of feeling—as if the only escape from social difference were in a common humanity attained in dissolution and death” (15-16). Although I agree with Jaffe that universalist language is dangerous when it effaces socio-economic differences, I think that her position here falls prey to the essentialist logic she is attempting to critique. It is true that socio-economic factors partly define who people are, but who people are cannot be reduced to these factors. Moreover, a form of sympathy grounded in the idea of a common humanity does not do away with representation for the precise reason that such an idea necessitates representation. If characters like Margaret and Hale do sympathize, it is because they find in the idea of a common humanity representations that are other than the ones society imposes.