The literature of pity

205 Pages·2014·1.05 MB·English

by  Punter

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
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and printed and bound in Great Britain by
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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 iv
Preface v
Acknowledgements vii
1. Distinguishing Pity 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, there-
fore, 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 philo-
sophical 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
necessary. It may be (it probably is) a personal vanity, but I would
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’ confer-
ence at the University of Bristol, 2011.
D.P.
Acknowledgements
I would like to acknowledge the help and co-operation of the Royal
Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium (photo: F. Maes, RMFAB); the Van
Gogh Museum, Amsterdam; Tate Images, London; and Anna Chromy.
Also, the Churchill Fund of the Department of English, University of
Bristol, for financial assistance.
I would also particularly like to thank Jimmy Packham, who has been
thorough and perceptive in his assistance with the final stages of this
manuscript, and specifically in his dealings with the complex world of
art permissions, one which I myself find a little intimidating.
Also by David Punter
The Literature of Terror: A History of Gothic Fictions from 1765 to the
Present Day
Romanticism and Ideology: Studies in English Writing 1765–1830 (with
David Aers and Jonathan Cook)
Blake, Hegel and Dialectic
The Hidden Script: Writing and the Unconscious
Introduction to Contemporary Cultural Studies (editor)
William Blake: Selected Poetry and prose (editor)
The Romantic Unconscious: A Study in Narcissism and Patriarchy
Notes on Selected Poems of Philip Larkin
The Gothic Tradition (Vol. I of The Literature of Terror, 2nd edn)
The Modern Gothic (Vol. II of The Literature of Terror, 2nd edn)
William Blake: The New Casebook (editor)
Romanticism (CD-ROM: Annotated Bibliography of English Studies,
Vol. 306)
Notes on William Blake’s ‘Songs of Innocence and of Experience
Gothic Pathologies: The Text, the Body and the Law
Spectral Readings: Towards a Gothic Geography (editor, with Glennis
Byron)
Companion to the Gothic (editor)
Writing the Passions
Postcolonial Imaginings: Fictions of a New World Order
The Gothic (with Glennis Byron)
The Influence of Postmodernism on Contemporary Writing: An
Interdisciplinary Study
Metaphor
Modernity
Rapture: Literature, Addiction, Secrecy
A New Companion to the Gothic (editor)
The Encyclopaedia of the Gothic (editor, with William Hughes and
Andrew Smith)
Poetry
China and Glass
Lost in the Supermarket
Asleep at the Wheel
Selected Short Stories
Foreign Ministry
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 rela-
tion 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 for-
mulation ‘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