Empathy is a hot topic. Recently attracting the attention of many scholars, it has been studied in numerous disciplines, from philosophy of the mind, through developmental and behavioural psychology, to cognitive science, ethics, and aesthetics. As a result, there are now as many definitions of empathy as there are theoretical frameworks for its study, leaving one to conclude, as does Amy Coplan in the introduction to Empathy: Philosophical and Psychological Perspectives (2011), that “whatever empathy is, it’s important.”
In literary studies, it was Suzanne Keen who first expressed this view in her foundational study Empathy and the Novel (2007). Unlike scholars such as Martha Nussbaum and Wayne Booth, who have advocated the social value of empathically reading literature and its beneficial effects on emotional intelligence, Keen offered a more neutral conception of empathetic reading as a matter of affective sharing rather than a correlative of improved moral or prosocial behavior. Since the publication of Keen’s book, empathy has been picked up in many different branches of literary studies, and its reception has broadened to the extent that it no longer includes only the apprehension and sharing of affective states, but addresses mental states too. As such, empathy now seems to belong to the sphere of intersubjectivity and is related to what is known as the problem of other minds which stands at the center of Meghan Marie Hammond’s Empathy and the Psychology of Modernism.
As the title of the book signals, Hammond’s interest is in the various psychological theories that arose at the turn of the twentieth century during a time when psychology was only just beginning to come into its own as an academic discipline separate from the branches of philosophy. However, instead of focusing on the litany of thinkers so commonly associated with the aesthetics of literary modernism, such as Freud and Bergson, Hammond introduces a number of lesser known psychologists and aesthetic theorists whose names have found only a marginal place in literary studies thus far. In each of her five chapters Hammond pairs one already well-known literary figure with one or two of these thinkers: Henry James with his brother William and the psychologist E. B. Titchener, the last of whom coined the term “empathy” as translation of the German Einfühlung in 1909; Dorothy Richardson with Robert Vischer, an expert on optical theory among other things, and the psychologist Theodor Lipps; Katherine Mansfield with the philosopher Max Scheler; Ford Maddox Ford with the aesthetic theorists Wilhelm Worringer, Vernon Lee (Violet Paget), and T. E. Hulme; and, finally, Virginia Woolf with phenomenologists Edmund Husserl and Edith Stein.
The sheer number of names and the various theoretical backgrounds brought together in Hammond’s study accounts for the kaleidoscopic nature of the book; it is a sprawling examination held together by the author’s steady focus on the problem of other minds. According to Hammond, modernism saw the question of whether and how we can access the minds of others emerge as an “epistemological crisis,” pushing psychologists in new directions, and prompting many to think more acutely about the nature of “fellow feeling,” which in turn led to innovations in literature, such as in narrative technique. When Hammond uses it, the term fellow feeling invokes the tradition of eighteenth-century moral theory generally associated with the works of David Hume and Adam Smith, and recalls the notion of sympathy. Indeed, sympathy, which is the etymological precursor to the later term empathy, looms large within empathy studies; although when it is used, the antecedent term serves primarily as a counter-example to empathy within literary and other discourses. As Hammond avers, sympathy may be understood as a form of fellow feeling that relies on the distance between the self and other, whereas empathy strives for something closer, seeking to obliterate this distance in an intersubjective merging. In fact the opposition of the sympathetic “feeling for” and the empathic “feeling with” has had a direct bearing, Hammond suggests, on how the concepts of sympathy and empathy contribute to literary aesthetics.
As scholars such as Rae Greiner have shown, Victorian realism can be understood as a heavily sympathetic textual mode, since the genre is itself built around the axiomatic recognition that the other is ineluctably foreign to the self, as well as around the notion that others can become only the patient objects of an intersubjective encounter with the reader. By contrast, modernist writing seeks new representational forms that allow for a more immediate sharing of inner experience between the reader and character, one that is less sympathetic than empathic. Although to juxtapose realism and modernism in this way has only a technical and heuristic value — an observation that Hammond fully acknowledges — the comparison also serves Hammond’s study, allowing her both to investigate the nexus between empathy and modernism, and to ask how the two might “work together to usher in narrative paradigm shifts.”
The shifts themselves are manifold but they have in common a striving for the mental, affective, and interior immediacy associated with literary modernism. Discussing Henry James’s late autobiographical text A Small Boy and Others (1913), Hammond demonstrates how James employs a highly wrought and difficult style in order to lay open a narrating consciousness — in this case James’s own consciousness — to the empathic reader. By slowing down the speed of reading and comprehension, Hammond argues, James spatialises the narrator’s ontology, “making us feel like we are ‘in’ the represented space — that is, ‘in’ James’s own mind in the act of memory — rather than observing it from outside, thus disrupting our sense of ourselves.” But slow pace also takes the reader out of their own time and aligns them with the time of the narrator, establishing an intersubjective encounter that is non-hierarchical, and thus more empathic than sympathetic.
Similarly, Hammond reads the self-effacing narration of Richardson’s Pilgrimage, the first volume of which appeared in 1915, through the perceiving mind of Miriam Henderson as a form of “cognitive training in which we feel ourselves into Miriam’s way of thinking and suspend certain knowledge that we are looking at her from across an intersubjective divide.” Whether this empathic merging is an effect of abandoning the reader to the seemingly unmediated narrative — a technique David Foster Wallace memorably describes as “being left narratively alone in the self-sufficiency of… narrative” — or not, is of course difficult to ascertain; but Hammond’s claim that Richardson’s stream-of-consciousness narration offers a different mode of relating to a character than techniques traditionally associated with Victorian realism, such as free indirect discourse, is convincing — albeit not necessarily new. Generally, Hammond reads certain literary techniques as affording a particular type of empathic response, which is completely feasible, but will not satisfy every reader equally. Consider, for example, her reading of the following passage from Ford’s Parade’s End in which the protagonist Tietjens describes being bombed at the front line:
He was looking at Aranjuez from a considerable height. He was enjoying a considerable view. Aranjuez’s face had a rapt expression — like that of a man composing poetry. Long dollops of liquid mud surrounded them in the air. Like black pancakes being tossed. He thought: “Thank God I did not write to her. We are being blown up!” The earth turned like a weary hippopotamus. It settled down slowly over the face of Lance-Corporal Duckett who lay on his side, and went on in a slow wave.
Hammond compares the slowing down of time to James’s use of pace in his autobiographical texts and concludes that Ford allows readers to “feel into this traumatic moment” and that “we come to learn something about Tietjens’s experience.” Both claims are plausible but betray a problem involved in the attempt to establish a stable relationship between a literary representation and its effect. Ultimately, despite the fact that certain techniques can successfully induce empathy in the reader, what the quality of the “feeling into” is and what exactly one can learn from such a moment will always remain a matter of speculation. This problem does not apply exclusively to Hammond’s study, however, but inheres generally in the murky territory of literary effect and reader reception. Much more central to Hammond’s study, though, is the problem of other minds and how it shapes the efficacy and possibility of empathy.
Hammond’s reading of Mansfield, whom she posits as a counterpart to Richardson, focuses on the former’s proclivity for shifting between various perspectives and focalisations, which do not allow, she writes, “the kind of sustained perspective-sharing of cognitive overlap” that can be located in A Small Boy and Others and Pilgrimage. However, rather than offering Mansfield merely as a counterpoint to these writers, Hammond demonstrates how her interest in the “ephemerality” of moments of consciousness destabilises empathy as a form of fellow feeling. After all, if states of mind are constantly passing one into the next in the stream of consciousness, empathic sharing runs the risk of fixing a state in time, and thereby distorting its very nature, all in an attempt to manifest an illusory moment of fellow feeling in which the subject projects her own state of mind into the other rather than truly sharing in their inner experience. This is the basic crux of the problem of other minds and the one that becomes increasingly more prominent in the last two chapters of the book, dedicated to Ford and Woolf.
Although Hammond finds empathic tendencies in both of these authors, she likens Ford’s literary impressionism to Richardson’s attempt to obliterate the mediating voice of the narrator; in Woolf’s late writing Hammond finds the desire to achieve “oneness” with another for the specific purpose of gaining self-knowledge and political agency — her readings lay open the writers’s skepticism towards empathy. This skepticism is inherent in the modernist tension between the celebration of the individual and the desire for its dissolution within a collective subjectivity or voice. In particular, Hammond argues that both writers are keenly aware of the potential violence done by empathic encounters, a violence which, in the case of Richardson, Mansfield, and Woolf, is rendered real by the gendered and classed nature and form of the demands for fellow feeling expressed by upper-class males — demands that abnegate the possibility of reciprocation. More generally, Hammond claims that Woolf’s political writing seeks a new form of relating to others that is located somewhere between the distance of sympathy and the immediacy of empathy, a form of experiencing foreign consciousness that “does not make two into one” and does not compromise the integrity of the empathising subject or its object.
If the problem of other minds and its concomitant anxieties about empathy sufficiently justifies the selection of writers whose work Hammond examines in the book, her approach to theory will find its critics. Aside from the pairing of William James and E. B. Titchener (whose professional association is well documented) with Henry James, or the nexus between Ford and Vernon Lee (where the former is familiar with latter’s work), Hammond’s rationale for coupling certain thinkers with writers bears no obvious rationale of directness. Instead of a model of direct influence, that is, Hammond relies on a “contagion” model, arguing that certain ideas and theories were “in the air” (borrowing a phrase from Judith Ryan). While this approach may irritate some readers, it may be of little consequence for others. And in any case, her book is proof of the fact that straying outside the established narratives of influence can be highly productive. Even if Hammond’s readings of her authors do not radically reconfigure the way in which they can be interpreted — and novelty or radicality alone should not be the measurement of a work’s achievement — her study opens modernism to a myriad of new psychological, phenomenological, and aesthetic approaches.
Empathy and the Psychology of Literary Modernism is a highly engaging study that will establish Hammond as a prominent voice in the study of literature and empathy. This is a prospect made all the more likely by the publication of her co-edited collection of essays on the subject in 2014, Rethinking Empathy Through Literature, which includes contributions by such eminent figures as Keen. Thom Gunn once complained that empathy is “too big a word” and recommended that we stick to the much more practicable and realistic “sympathy.” It is thanks to studies like Hammond’s, however, that empathy remains not just available as a productive concept for literary studies, but that its “bigness” represents less a foil than an incentive to empathy scholarship. Whatever empathy will turn out to be for literary studies in the long run, Hammond’s study makes sure that it is indeed important.