Sympathy Time: Adam Smith, George Eliot, and the Realist Novel Rae Greiner (bio) [N]ineteenth-century realist fiction makes most sense when it is viewed as an attempt to deal with situations which involve partial knowledge and continual approximation . . . Harry Shaw, Narrating Reality (29) Sympathy and Knowing Talk about novel-reading and sympathy and you are likely to spend some of that time talking about omniscience. If your subject is the nineteenth-century realist novel, you will probably have something to say about the relationship between ethical feeling and free indirect discourse which suggests that peering into the secret hearts and minds of characters enables our sympathy for them, and thus that “sympathy” names that special ability to cultivate our identification with others through feeling what they feel and knowing what they know, or what they are thinking about. In this vein omniscient narration, shrinking the distance between ourselves and others, encourages sympathy: the assumption is that by knowing more—of what others know or think along with what they don’t—we draw closer and more inclined to sympathize with their conditions. The link between sympathy and knowledge is all but guaranteed in this formulation, as indeed it regularly goes without saying that facilitating our sympathetic identification with characters is what many English realists’ experiments in omniscience were designed to do. Sympathy in such novels, so the story goes, results from both seeing and knowing: the unique seeing into and knowledge of interiors afforded by the nineteenth-century novel’s most celebrated [End Page 291] technical innovation, free indirect discourse.1 According to a standard claim, FID produces the effect of simultaneity by blending characters’ voices with that of the speaking narrator. Dorrit Cohn refers to the narrator’s “identification” with a “character’s mentality” as one so complete that “narrated monologue” replaces FID as the preferred term of analysis (112). Simultaneity emerges as the temporal equivalent of “identification,” those brief pockets of time in which the voices of narrator and character merge into one, or where readers, in a taken-for-granted formulation, sympathize by identifying with characters, particularly those whose feelings are judged appropriate and can thus comfortably be shared. That “identifying with” should depend on the sort of knowing involved in “seeing into” is taken to mean that seeing and knowing a character’s “inside” point of view requires a position outside it, one that (at least temporarily) must also be overcome. In a discussion of Jane Austen’s Emma, Wayne Booth, by way of complicating this view, exemplified it. His comment that “only immature readers ever really identify with any character, losing all sense of distance and hence all chance of an artistic experience” carries the implicit charge that it’s hard to resist the pull of identification and that plenty of readers aren’t quite up to the effort (248). The suggestion is borne out in his account of the novel’s transition from Austen to Henry James. Where Austen’s “implicit apology for Emma said, in effect, ‘Emma’s vision is your vision; therefore forgive her,’” the modernist layers his characters with an irony so thick that ordinary readers, bound “tightly to the consciousness of the ambiguously misguided protagonist,” cannot see beyond it (324). Many of these readers “will go sadly astray,” missing ironies they ought to discover or discovering ones not there (325). By the time we get to modernism, in other words, the novel’s sympathy-generating machinery has traded total knowledge for radical unknowing, figured as that “sense of distance” necessary to “artistic experience”: omniscient “seeing into” from some outside position gives way to the “deep plunges of modern inside views” (324). Modernist not-knowing, the ironic effect of “deep” immersion in a character’s consciousness, dispenses with the middle-man and exposes the fraud at the heart of omniscience, or at least in the naïve confidence that similitude and proximity engender sympathy best. Not much has been said to upset the conventional wisdom that nineteenth-century realism patterns sympathy on an identificatory model in which social feeling flows from the ability to stand beyond while “seeing into” others, and if modernists rejected the safety of the outside position...
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