Citing a passage from one of Alton Locke’s poems (“They rowed her in across the rolling foam – / The cruel, crawling foam.”), John M. Ruskin argues (in Modern Painters, 1856) that regarding material objects as living entities is a general pattern of pathetic fallacy. “The foam is not cruel – he claims –, neither does it crawl. The state of mind which attributes to it these characters of a living creature is one in which the reason is unhinged by grief. All violent feelings have the same effect. They produce in us a falseness in all our impressions of external things, which I would generally characterize as the ‘Pathetic fallacy’” (Ruskin 159). The figuration of nature
as a “living creature” is pathetic: it is “eminently poetical, because passionate” (Ruskin 160). But it is also a fallacy: the mind and the body of the poet is “in some sort too weak to deal fully with what is before them or upon them; borne away, or over-clouded, or over-dazzled by emotion” (Ruskin 160). This weakness is used frequently by those “who feel strongly, think weakly, and see untruly (second order of poets)”
(Ruskin 163), whereas those who can get their emotions under control with intellect belong to the first order of poets.
Thus, Ruskin does not reject the use of pathetic fallacy, for it can be the expression of true feelings as well as the source of great readerly pleasure (Kriesel 1). What is condemned by him is “projective fallacy” – expressing false impressions without emotional motivations, i.e. without true or authentic feelings (Kriesel 2).
Unfortunately, however, the interpretation of the notion of pathetic fallacy has become over-simplified in literary studies: it signifies only the personification or anthropomorphization of inanimate natural objects (Abrams and Harpham 241, Kriesel 2), though the term refers originally to the attribution of any quality of animate entities to natural objects. In other words, the scope of the figure has narrowed down to human capabilities. Moreover, the reception of the term only highlights a derogatory attitude towards pathetic fallacy (see e.g., Abrams and Harpham 242, Kriesel 1) regardless of the complexity with which Ruskin described the phenomenon.
The “neutralization” of the term to simple personification may be the result of the broad (and hence vague) definition given by Ruskin. Also, the negative evaluation of the figure results partly from the imprecise description of an “acceptable” pathetic fallacy: since “[t]he difference between the pathetic fallacy proper and other attributions of false properties does not reside in the literary device itself, but in the poet”, the question arises as to “how are we to know which instances of the fallacy are due to strong emotion on the part of the poet and which are due to artistic manipulation?” (Kriesel 2).
Yet, there is another, deeply rooted ontological principle in the background of the critical attitude towards pathetic fallacy (which presents itself in the rejection of the figure in modern elegiac poetry): it is the objectivizing view of nature, its separation from the cognizing mind, i.e. the Cartesian idea of subject–object dualism.
As Schiller defines the realm of nature in his essay On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry (1795), “nature is for us nothing but existence in all its freedom; it is the constitution of things taken in themselves; it is existence itself according to its proper and immutable laws” (Schiller 151). In this approach a natural object is independent from the mind and its products, and elegiac poetry “opposes nature to art, and the ideal to the real, so that nature and the ideal form the principle object of his [the poet’s – G.S.] pictures, and that the pleasure we take in them is the dominant impression” (Schiller 169). Consequently, in elegies the real aesthetic pleasure comes from an authentic or true description of nature, and it is self-evident from this
perspective that any kind of pathetic fallacy counts as a false picture of the natural environment, which cannot cause any pleasure.2
At first sight Ruskin’s theory of pathetic fallacy (especially its careful rejection) can be considered a legacy of Schiller’s aesthetics as well as its dualistic ontology, and it is beyond dispute that the simplifying reception of the notion in literary studies is motivated by this philosophical perspective. For this very reason, it is essential to note that Ruskin’s ontological assumptions were far from a dualistic view of cognition and living in the world in general. As Branka Arsić explored it through a meticulous examination of the original chapter on pathetic fallacy, the division of living entities into subjects and objects is “a mere metaphysical bluff ” (123) that is rooted in the philosophical system of Kant’s idealism.
Without going into the details of ontological premises, it is worth emphasizing that Ruskin disagrees with Kant on the nature of perceptions. The German philosopher claims that the perceiver cannot be emancipated from her perspective, thus we cannot reach the objects of the world in themselves; consequently, percep-tion is a subjective and hence a purely mental act. “The word ‘Blue,’ say certain philosophers, means the sensation of color which the human eye receives in looking at the open sky, or at a bell gentian” (Ruskin 156). But Ruskin repudiates this view of perception, claiming that “the word ‘Blue’ does not mean the sensation caused by a gentian on the human eye; but it means the power of producing that sensation; and this power is always there, in the thing, whether we are there to experience it or not”
(Ruskin 157, emphasis in the original).
There is an important parallel between the Ruskinian theory of perception and the ecological theory of visual perception elaborated by James J. Gibson. For the latter, “perception is not a mental act. Neither is it a bodily act. Perceiving is a psychosomatic act, not of the mind or of the body but of a living observer” (Gibson 239–240). Moreover, Gibson assumes an interaction between the observer and the environment: the objects provide affordances (potential activities to be done with the objects, “possibilities or opportunities”) based on their characteristics. Gibson describes the role of objects in perception as follows. “Inanimate detached objects, rigid or nonrigid, natural or manufactured, can be said to have features that distinguish them. The features are probably not denumerable, unlike the objects themselves. But […] they are compounded to specify affordances” (Gibson 241).
Put simply, the interaction between the observer and her environment, and the notion of affordances have the same role in Gibson’s theory as the power of objects to produce sensations under Ruskin’s assumptions: “it suggests that the absolute duality of ‘objective’ and ‘subjective’ is false. When we consider the affordances of things, we escape this philosophical dichotomy” (Gibson 41).
2 It is not by chance that Ruskin warns the readers against enjoying pathetic fallacy: “I sincerely hope the reader finds no pleasure here, either in the nimbleness of the sail, or the laziness of the wind” (Ruskin 161).
Although Gibson’s theory does not go so far as Ruskin, since the latter proposes a new taxonomy with “doers” and “nondoers”, equating human interactions with interactions among nonhuman beings (and attributing activity to objects in the process of perception in the same way as to animate participants, see Arsić 125–126), his view of the human–environment relationship as a mutual interaction gives evidence of shared philosophical foundations. Moreover, recognizing the similar points in a non-dualistic ontology and an interactive model of perception in Ruskin’
essay on the one hand, as well as in the ecological theory of visual perception and the notion of affordances on the other makes it evident that (i) modern and contemporary cognitive science serves as a productive vantage point for the reinterpretation of canonical concepts and principles in literary studies; (ii) this promising endeavor is in accordance with the beliefs and philosophy of the theorists of modernism; (iii) the simplistic approach to pathetic fallacy as a “false” way of cognition and rejecting it as a device of elegiac poetry is no longer tenable.
How can it be that the man who provides a new and radical perspective on perception goes on to consider the animation of objects as a weakness of description?
One argument goes that Ruskin’s negative attitude towards pathetic fallacy “is itself a conceptual artifact generated by the metaphysics of Immanuel Kant’s speculative idealism” (Arsić 123). In other words, whereas the philosopher Ruskin proposes the radicalism of a new taxonomy of entities, the aesthete cannot endorse the ontological system’s adaptation to the evaluation of arts. However, we can assume that he condemns some cases in which the environment is personified because they maintain the subjective character of perception implying the dualistic division of subject and object.3
Finding an answer to the question above is beyond the scope of the present paper.
But the presumptions about cognition underlying the notion of pathetic fallacy motivate the aim of refining it and elaborating a new model of the device on the grounds of an alternative view of cognition.
3 David Klugman criticizes the psychoanalytic approach to pathetic fallacy as a “mode of representation characterized by the mechanism of projection” (Klugman 662, emphasis in the original), since the term projection presupposes an external reality and its subjective representation (hence a Cartesian ontology). I cannot go into the details of Klugman’s proposal in this paper, but it is worth mentioning that he regards pathetic fallacy as a way of “figuration”: a process of “marking” the world through perceiving it, which claims a “vital” relationship between the observer and the observed. This approach is compatible with the rejection of “projective fallacy” in Ruskin’s theory (Kriesel 2).