Consciousness, Literature and the Arts

Archive

Volume 6 Number 2, August 2005

Special Issue: Literary Universals

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Somatic Marking, Ethical Sense, and Practical Reason: The Political Economy of Literary Universals from Richardson and Austen to Dostoyevsky and Grass 

by

Donald R. Wehrs

Auburn University

            Recent work on literary universals (e.g., that of Patrick Colm Hogan) suggests that there is a deep, cross-cultural concern with the place of empathy and bodily feeling—what Antonio Damasio calls “somatic marking”—as a counterforce to in-group identification. However, the precise delineation of this universal concern changes historically and culturally. One significant parameter affecting such variation is political economy. In the following pages, I consider what difference the rise of capitalism makes to the cultivation of somatic marking in relation to in-group identification. Specifically, the first section takes up, synthesizes, and extends work by Damasio, Hogan, and others on empathy, and work by Giddens and others on modern political economy. The purpose of this section is to establish a general account of the phenomena that is sensitive to both universal and variable features. The second section considers exemplary works from the early period of capitalism, taking up novels by Richardson and Austen. The final section moves to the period of “mature” industrial capitalism and “late” capitalism, examining works by Dostoyevsky and Grass.

Empathy and Political Economy 

Consistent with much research exploring the neurological and developmental interrelatedness of cognitive and emotional faculties, Damasio has presented clinical findings suggesting that humans cannot process mental images of violence or suffering without being physiologically disturbed in ways measurable through monitoring the autonomic nervous system (2003: 147-55; 1999: 40-49; 1994: 174-206); such mental images are “somatically marked.” Damasio found exceptions only in two sets of subjects—those suffering from patterns of brain damage that deaden emotions and debilitate practical reasoning, and those previously diagnosed as sociopaths. Patients in whom such emotions “as embarrassment, sympathy, and guilt” appeared “diminished or absent” had histories of poor decision-making (2003: 144-45).  Joseph LeDoux notes that “Damasio and colleagues interpreted their results in terms of an inability of patients with orbital cortex damage to use emotional information to guide action, and have proposed that emotional information or knowledge normally biases reasoning ability by influencing attention and working memory processes,” but suggests that since “the orbital cortex is part of working memory circuitry, and is especially involved in working memory about emotional information,” Damasio’s results may “show a dissociation between cognitive and emotional aspects of working memory” (2002: 253).

Separately or in combination, the work of Damasio and many others reveals how “crucial internal coordination between brain systems is in maintaining the unity of mind and behavior” (LeDoux 2002: 306), implying species-wide biological bases for literary depictions of how absence of empathy yields not only morally abhorrent behavior, but also self-impoverishing, self-defeating judgments. Although this theme is a literary universal recurring in historically and geographically diverse literatures worldwide (cf. Hogan 2003b: 17-30), the advent of capitalist societies and the modern nation-state alters significantly how the issue is framed. Rather than presenting the dissociation of practical judgment from affective life as a “missing the mark” (hamartia), a constitutive vulnerability of the human condition and a “flaw” to which the most successful among warrior elites were particularly prone, nineteenth and twentieth-century fiction becomes increasingly concerned with how the ideological and material conditions of modernity invite, coerce, or naturalize the stripping away of somatic marking from mental images. Concurrently, that fiction becomes increasingly diffident about literature’s ability to repair the psychic and social damage inflicted by culturally induced distortions of emotion’s proper role in guiding attention and shaping memory.

Damasio observes that the "effect of a 'sick culture' on a normal adult system of reasoning seems to be less dramatic than the effect of a local area of brain damage,” but then adds, “there are counter-examples," such as Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia, and he notes, "I fear that sizable sectors of Western society are gradually becoming other tragic counter-examples" (1994: 178-79). In pre-modern cultural contexts, and thus in literature reflective of those contexts, the threat of forfeiting practical rationality through losing affective receptivity to the suffering of others is tied to the exigencies of political economies in which wealth-creation and material, social well-being are inseparable from successful exercises of direct violence.¹ Such states, as both classical Western history and precolonial African or Indian history attest, were nearly always at war, with war both consolidating and decomposing the state.² People were thus exposed to direct violence (from raiding, conquest, subjugation, internal lawlessness--as in private armies, piracy, banditry). Significant differences in the felt texture of daily life and in habitual relations among people follow from political economies structured around the coercion of the lash as opposed to the coercion of increasing or decreasing wages.

To distinguish, as Anthony Giddens does, between “direct” and "indirect" violence or coercion does not imply that the latter is characterized by an absence of violence or coercion, nor does it suggest that capitalism's extension or operation need be devoid of recourse to "direct" methods: the British opium wars and de facto child slavery in sweatshops illustrate that capitalism may indeed underwrite direct violence. Nonetheless, it is analytically useful to distinguish between daily exposure to death, abduction, robbery and daily exposure to administrative or social pressures.

A society’s patterns of accumulation and authority may delimit and distort receptivity to somatic marking, either by encouraging us to discount emotional influence in guiding attention or by encouraging us to segregate emotional and cognitive working memory. However, the way stories engage and hold interest, binding together affective and cognitive aspects of mental life through reinforcing and playing upon involuntary, empathetic identification with the imagined experience of others, seems to work against such segregation. In The Mind and Its Stories (2003), Hogan argues that similarities in plot and theme from historically, geographically disparate cultures reflect universal patterns of prototypical narratives that “are, in their broad structure, expansions of the micronarratives that define our emotion terms” (88). When characters are depicted in certain circumstances, we imagine the emotions those circumstances would elicit from us, drawing upon working memory of what experiencing the given emotion “feels like,” and then associate that “feeling” with a mental image of the character. Consequently, “the proximity of a literary narrative to prototype cases of eliciting conditions” for emotions in our own lives “facilitate[s] the immediate, unself-conscious lexical identification of the emotion, which is a crucial part of empathic identification” (89).

Empathetic identification with elicited emotion, however, may also reinforce appropriative and ethnocentric forms of identity. In his survey of worldwide narrative patterns, Hogan argues, drawing on the work of Keith Oatley and Philip Johnson-Laird, that “emotion is the product of an agent’s evaluations of his/her success or failure in achieving particular goals within what is, in effect, a narrative structure” (76). The goals an agent pursues relate to happiness—that is, our own personal flourishing and that of groups or ideas with which we identify. Hogan observes, “romantic union and social or political power are the goals sought by protagonists in prototypical narratives” (94, Hogan’s italics). While the romantic union prototype associates happiness with personal flourishing or fulfilled desire, the social or political power prototype encourages empathetic identification with “in-group domination” and would seem to naturalize an “entire society aspir[ing] to (deserved or rightful) domination over other societies” (111). The second prototypical narrative would thus seem to facilitate delimitations of somatic marking encouraged by political economies predicated upon direct violence.

Both forms of happiness may be seen as reflecting the origins of emotional-cognitive interconnectivity. Damasio identifies the “narrative structure” of pursuing happiness with Spinoza’s notion of conatus, “the relentless endeavor . . . of each being to preserve itself” (2003: 36), or the quest of organisms for “what we as thinking and affluent creatures identify as wellness and well-being” (35). The remarkable number of culturally central narratives that render problematic triumphant in-group domination, however, suggests that the very blunting of affective responsiveness to others—especially to ethnic, class, and gender others—that facilitates military and social domination undermines the kind of practical reasoning that sustains individual and group conatus. Hogan notes the worldwide pattern of “the epilogue of suffering,” in which narratives built on plots of power do not end with the protagonist’s victory but go on to describe the “pain following the achievement of social dominance” (123) [Hogan’s emphasis]. Arguing that when we attend to narratives, “[e]thical enjoyment is a sort of second-order enjoyment,” predicated upon “ongoing ethical evaluation of actions guided by other sorts of goals [romantic union, power]” (132), Hogan suggests that “epilogues of suffering” negotiate tensions between two kinds of ethical prototypes drawn upon for evaluating narrated action—“the prototype of group defense” and “the prototype of compassion” (136-37).                                

To the extent that the registering of somatically marked images upon consciousness precludes affective indifference toward what is processed cognitively, both images of another’s suffering and a story’s calling our attention to them may be experienced as disruptive challenges to the habits of cognition underlying an ethics of group protection, and so a potential threat to conatus (hence the hostility Euripides, for example, provoked in his fellow Athenians). The absence of such susceptibility, however, may constitute no less a threat, for hardening the self against destabilizing affective appeals invites ethical insensibility and political obtuseness. Unchecked egotism and rage in The Illiad nearly undo the Greeks. Cultural acknowledgement of the value to individual and group conatus of even abrasive literary challenges to in-group moral and political complacency underlies the preservation of such tragedies as The Trojan Women, however ambivalently contemporaries may have viewed Euripides.³

            When pre-modern narratives acknowledge that the socio-political order seems to demand, even reward, affective insensibility, they often acquire the tonalities of tragedy, portraying what seems an intractable double-bind: pursuing and securing power is inherently damaging to affective life, but a damaged affective life is inherently unstable, joyless, and materially-politically destabilizing. Such a basis for tragedy remains in place as late as Racine’s Phèdre (1677), especially in the portrait of Theseus, but there tragedy is presented as adhering to a material, political, ideological past disjunctive with the world inhabited by Racine’s audience, a world whose twin pillars are the nation-state and mercantile capitalism. 

The great political appeal of capitalism, as both the rhetoric of Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations (1776) and the analysis of Giddens make plain, rests upon its promise to dissociate wealth-accumulation from direct exercises of violence and so make expanding commercial networks the means of securing stability within and peace among nations. The natural efficiency Smith ascribes to capitalistic wealth-creation had a sharply ethical dimension. It was to distance everyday life from habitual fear of, and coarsening by, violence, and it was to “refine” manners so that they would cease to reflect “archaic” systems of violent accumulation and authority. Significantly, Smith wrote The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) before turning to economics, and belonged to the Scottish Enlightenment, whose accounts of history defined progress as the reordering of ambitions and passions away from tragically repeated cycles of “in-group domination” yielding not happiness but the fruits to “darkened” practical reasoning—exploitation, tyranny, fanaticism, and thus fractious, ruinous civil disorder.⁴ Whig rewritings of the West’s, and especially Britain’s, story into narratives of progressive refinement of morals, expansion of liberty, and flourishing of commerce are, of course, highly problematic. Nonetheless, the ideal or possibility of dissociating empathetic identification with “in-group domination” from complicity with “in-group” violence and subjugation shifts the focus of anxieties about culturally induced damage to affective and reasoning faculties from the structural conditions of power and prosperity to the seductive appeal of forms of conceptual rigidity and somatic atrophy that normalize indirect violence. By describing pre-modern history—Western and non-Western—as vicious cycles of blunted affectivity and defective practical reasoning, writers as diverse as Voltaire, Montesquieu, Hume, and Robertson advocated the legitimacy—indeed, the ethical imperative—of overthrowing forms of thought that initiated or recuperated such cycles.

Empathy, Early Capitalism, and the Novel from Richardson to Austen

The novel, as pioneered by Richardson, creates protagonists who, unlike Achilles or Theseus, seek forms of empowerment ideally conducive to progressive excisions of vestiges of direct violence from material and social life. The primary obstacles confronting them highlight the dangers posed by ideologically articulated conceptual rigidity and somatic atrophy. As Anna Howe tells Clarissa, a woman’s defense of sociable, civilizing power in private, domestic life becomes inescapably a public concern: “Every eye, in short, is upon you with the expectation of an example” (Letter 1, 40). If the world transformed by capitalistic accumulation and the nation-state’s administrative structure cannot provide a credible space for bourgeois feminine narrative agency, then its pretensions to separate authority from triumphant arbitrary violence and material well-being from coercive appropriation risk being exposed as frauds.

Although the notion that the novel was created in England in the 1740s has rightly been modified to acknowledge that Richardson’s and Fielding’s relations to their (largely female) predecessors were both complex and vexed,⁵  it is important to recognize that their narratives did in fact strike contemporaries (female no less than male) as something fundamentally new. Sarah Fielding notes in 1749 that “the Author may thank himself for” Clarissa’s being “treated like an intimate Acquaintance by all her Readers,” whereas “the Authors of Cassandra, Clelia, with numberless others I could name, were never in any Danger of having their Heroines thought on, or treated like human Creatures” (14-15).  Similarly, Diderot in 1761 argued that Richardson’s “personnages ont toute la réalité possible” (31) and claims, “J’ai entendu disputer sur la conduite de ses personnages, comme sur des événements réels; louer, blâmer Paméla, Clarisse, Grandisson, comme des personnages vivants qu’on aurait connus, et auxquels on aurait pris le plus grand intérêt” (37). Sarah Fielding, imagining a series of dialogues on Clarissa, constructs fictional versions of just such kinds of discussions.

Richardson and Fielding create fictions that represent in private, domestic life patterns quite similar to those delineated by Whig historiography’s accounts of public life: stunted affective responsiveness and defective practical reasoning do in the world of novels what provincial dogmatisms and irrational consistencies do in national histories. Indeed, Fielding correlates Squire Western’s Jacobite sympathies with his propensity for domestic patriarchal tyranny. Both writers suggest that specific ideas—associated with socio-historically specific political, religious, ethnic self-understandings and interests—encourage self-enclosed, asocial conceptual rigidities. Their novels imply that if such notions become embedded in core dispositions, they will work to block “natural” moral imperatives, communicated somatically and involuntarily, from shaping judgment and guiding conduct. The quintessential example is Lovelace’s repeated recourse to the slogan, “Once subdued, always subdued,” to argue himself out of the feelings Clarissa’s presence and discourse elicit (430-31). In Letter 187: 1-4, the editor describes Lovelace as being “upon the point of making a violent attempt” when “he was checked . . . by the awe he was struck with” in “seeing as he thought her spotless heart in every line” of her “terrified but lovely face” (602). Lovelace seeks to evade by interpretative revision the ethical claims enunciated by his own flesh’s somatic responsiveness to the image of her suffering. He recasts his own sensations in terms of mock personification and apostrophe: “Oh virtue, virtue! . . . what is there in thee that can thus affect the heart of such a man as me, against my will!--Whence these involuntary tremors, and fear of giving mortal offence?” (602). Forced to acknowledge that he has been “exceedingly affected,” finding himself  “ashamed to be surprised by her into such a fit of unmanly weakness,” he immediately resolves “to subdue it at the instant, and guard against the like for the future.” 

On the one hand, as the first generation of novel readers frequently stressed, the new fiction solicited an unprecedented intimate and sustained affective immersion in the sensations, sentiments, and experiences of fictional characters.⁶ On the other hand, critical approbation of Richardson’s and Fielding’s works depended upon viewing them as distinct from the novels of amatory intrigue of Behn, Manley, and Haywood, which were widely perceived as encouraging uncritical empathetic identifications with unprincipled characters’ pleasures and worldly successes.⁷  Readers who approved of Richardson and/or Fielding did so by affirming that entering vicariously into what another’s life must feel like yields a visceral ethical concern that anchors rather than suspends critical judgment. Diderot argues that because the reader, despite himself, participates in Richardson’s work (“on se mêle à la conversation, on approuve, on blâme, on s’irrite, on s’indigne”), “Richardson sème dans les coeurs des germes de vertus qui y restent d’abord oisifs et tranquilles,” virtue being understood as “un sacrifice de soi-même,” so that “on se sent porter au bien avec une impétuosité qu’on ne se connaissait pas. On éprouve, à l’aspect de l’injustice, une révolte qu’on ne saurait s’expliquer à soi-même” (30-31). 

Diderot’s account of reading the new fiction also describes much of its content. The obtuseness of Clarissa’s parents’ and uncles’ letters, the self-satisfied smugness of Rev. Brand’s discourses, as well as the weak, cowardly, trite locutions of a host of minor characters underscore with encyclopedic relentlessness all the ways that people misapply and hide behind culturally sanctioned notions to evade being unsettled by somatically impressed ethical sense.⁸ Despite pronounced formal and thematic differences, both Richardson’s and Fielding’s novels insist that somatic responsiveness to images of another’s suffering awakens rational deliberation and calls us to our best selves by binding together emotional and cognitive aspects of working memory. Thus in Tom Jones, when Tom would urge Nightingale to divest himself of conventional ideas of “honor” in relation to Nancy Miller, he invites him to contemplate a succession of mental images modeled upon Hogarth prints: “[S]ee this poor, unhappy, tender, believing Girl . . . . Paint to your Imagination the Circumstances of her fond, despairing Parent . . .” (768).

Novelistic depictions of how somatically registered ethical sense progressively refines practical rationality become increasingly subtle once Jane Austen develops, through indirect free style, a technique evoking felt experiences of intercommunication and mutual modification between what Damasio terms “core consciousness” and “extended consciousness” (cf. 1999: 168-233).⁹  Core consciousness occurs whenever “the brain forms an imaged, nonverbal, second-order account of how the organism is causally affected by the processing of an object” (1999: 192). By contrast, extended consciousness involves memories, projects, habitual dispositions, all of which together generate what Damasio calls “an autobiographical self,” so that the “imaged, nonverbal, second-order accounts” of core consciousness are put in dialogue with a particular temporally-extended sense of, and practice of, being an autobiographical self: “Extended consciousness occurs when working memory holds in place, simultaneously, both a particular object and the autobiographical self, in other words when both a particular object and the objects in one’s autobiography simultaneously generate core consciousness” (1999: 222, Damasio’s emphasis).

Damasio argues that in humans “the second-order nonverbal narrative of consciousness can be converted into language immediately,” but consciousness precedes language, not only because “babies and animals” have consciousness, but also because “the very nature of language argues against it having a primary role in consciousness. Words and sentences denote entities, actions, events, and relationships. Words and sentences translate concepts and concepts consist of the nonlanguage idea of what things, actions, events, and relationships are” (1999: 185). Such an account of language’s structure as non-arbitrary and non-self-referential, as grounded upon embodied experience of material realities, is consistent with developmental psychological studies of how pre-verbal infants generate emotional and cognitive concepts from abstracting prototypical schemas or memory structures from repeated experiences (Bucci 1997: 138-51). While not denying either the structural modeling of language upon nonverbal embodied experience or the evolutionary priority of nonverbal working memory, LeDoux stresses the transformative effect of language upon human working memory, noting that “the human prefrontal cortex has . . . access to a processing module specialized for language use,” and that language “radically alters the brain’s ability to compare, contrast, discriminate, and associate on-line, in real time, and to use such information to guide thinking and problem-solving. The difference between having only nonverbal working memory and having both verbal and nonverbal working memory is enormous for how the cognitive system works” (2002: 197). LeDoux highlights how what Damasio describes as “conversion” or “translation” of nonverbal narrative into language transforms cognitive capacities, yielding “a revolution rather than an evolution of function” (198).  

Jane Austen finds ways to represent in words the dialogues between core and extended consciousness, nonverbal and verbal working memory, that bind the pulsations of immediate sensory awareness to a continuous, individuated, reformative, and principled sense of self. By dramatizing the interplay between a character’s core and extended consciousness, Austen puts in play the reader’s own relation between core and extended consciousness. The experience of mentally processing an Austen novel is necessarily one of participating in the protagonists’ refinement of, or reparation of, bonds between somatic responsiveness and practical rationality—in Austen’s language, bonds between feeling and reason, sensibility and sense. For example, in Chapter 6 of Pride and Prejudice (1813), Austen interrupts the reader's congealing identification with Elizabeth to describe briefly Darcy's evolving reflections. While Darcy had "at first" looked at Elizabeth "without admiration," and "when they next met, he looked at her only to criticise," he begins to find her face "was rendered uncommonly intelligent by the beautiful expression of her dark eyes. To this discovery succeeded some others equally mortifying. . . . [H]e was forced to acknowledge her figure to be light and pleasing; and in spite of his asserting that her manners were not those of the fashionable world, he was caught by their easy playfulness. Of this she was perfectly unaware;--to her he was only the man who made himself agreeable no where, and who had not thought her handsome enough to dance with" (15).

            Austen's abrupt shift in point-of-view forces upon us an evaluation that pulls us away from empathetic identification with Elizabeth’s perceptions and thus disturbs our participation in her appraisal of her “success” in measuring the worth of others, and so our sharing in the pleasurable emotions Elizabeth’s appraisal generates. We learn that, as she suspects, Darcy did indeed originally grasp her as an object of cognition and rendered her an item consistent with his assumptions, habits, and self-importance; she was inscribed into a haughty, self-satisfied, “imperialistic” extended consciousness, one shaped by the indirect violence of class and gender privilege. He regards her as a type, and one he is “in no humor at present to give consequence to” (7), for, like Lovelace, he has internalized expectations that those outside his circle cannot “touch” or modify him, much less “give” him something of “consequence.”

However, in the passage above we see that Darcy's narrative self-consciousness can be interrupted precisely because core consciousness—registering bodily affective vulnerability, including erotic receptivity—may "speak back" to conceptuality, and so complicate and refine judgment. Involuntary, embodied cognitions address us, as it were, behind the back of ideology, undercutting our efforts to simplify our inner life by delimiting affective responsiveness to those of our own group. "Forced to acknowledge" that her figure was "light and pleasing," "caught" by her manners' "easy playfulness," Darcy encounters "discoveries" that are "mortifying." Austen links the language of sense with the sense of language. Somatically articulated interruptions of on-going narrative self-consciousness initiate an ethical calling of the self to account, but interruption alone, as Lovelace’s case dramatically illustrates, cannot sustain such a process. Darcy is described as seeking the language that will do justice to his own sensations, which "surprise" his intentionality by challenging his quick, automatic assimilation of Elizabeth to a category of outsiders (poorly bred young ladies aspiring to advantageous marriages) threatening to his conatus and that of the groups and ideas with which he identifies. Darcy has reasons to be on guard, for, as Austen shows through the example of Charlotte Lucas, many young ladies were susceptible to considerable indirect coercion to “market” themselves advantageously. But through experiencing "surprise," Darcy knows that he has been unjust in some respects (and thus possibly in others), and his sense of the justice owed Elizabeth is inseparable from his quest for the proper words, words that might do better justice to sensory, non-verbal, "felt immediacy." While Darcy’s pride is certainly implicated in his experience of “mortification,” of recognizing a mistake in judgment, what gives that cognitive mistake ethical significance for Darcy is the conscious, continuous moral self-evaluation integral to his extended consciousness. Indeed, Austen almost always reserves the term “mortifying” and its variants for morally sensible characters. Wickham and Mr. Collins, Mrs. Elton in Emma (1816) and the Crawfords in Mansfield Park (1814), may occasionally make discoveries, but rarely “mortifying” ones. Wickham and Lydia’s behavior upon their return to Longbourne after their scandalous marriage is representative: their “easy assurance”  “disgusted” Elizabeth and “even . . . shocked” Jane; Elizabeth had not believed Wickham “equal to such assurance,” but resolved “to draw no limits in future to the impudence of an impudent man. She blushed, and Jane blushed; but the cheeks of the two who caused their confusion, suffered no variation of colour” (216).     

While the body's openness to affect means that our words are about something other than themselves, their degree of adequacy is an ethical as well an epistemological issue only if the extended consciousness processing the images delivered by core consciousness experiences itself as obliged to do justice. Darcy is emotionally affected, feels “mortification,” because he “is forced” to evaluate negatively in the case of Elizabeth his success in pursuing a particular goal—justice to others.

Much Austen and novel criticism of the past twenty years, under the sway of various theoretical reductions of moral life to effects of power or desire, seeks to interpret the impress of ethical sense upon characters and readers as strategic hegemonic manipulation.¹⁰ Such a sense of obligation must indeed be cultivated intentionally and inculcated culturally if it is to adhere to verbal working memory (in Austen’s language, if it is to act as a “principle”). Both Austen’s depictions of ethical subjectivity and contemporary cognitive science research, however, offer good reasons to believe that such a sense of obligation, however verbally codified in consciousness as “principle,” is not imposed by arbitrary cultural conventions upon subjectivity (as an effect of hegemonic ideology or a “duping” by morality), but rather is rooted in pre-intentional, transcultural, bodily registerings of ethical significance. Austen describes characters who habitually integrate such registerings into extended consciousness as “sensible,” and those who will or cannot as “insensible.” Her insistence that genuine human well-being (conatus) depends upon affective receptivity to ethical significance modifying practical reason may therefore be seen as a prescient anticipation of contemporary research into the role that registering ethical significance plays in biologically normative human cognitive and affective life. Reciprocally, this role may reflect the evolutionary anteriority of ethics to human development (Damasio 2003: 160-75), and so support, on scientific, materialist grounds, the humanistic contention, at the heart of Austen’s work, that an insufficiently developed ethical sense deprives one of a life of full human flourishing. When Elizabeth hears of Charlotte Lucas’s mercenary acceptance of Mr. Collins, “to the pang of a friend disgracing herself and sunk in her esteem, was added the distressing conviction that it was impossible for that friend to be tolerably happy in the lot she had chosen” (88). Elizabeth’s judgment is confirmed not just by the portrait of Charlotte’s married life in Kent, but also by her perception, upon parting with Charlotte, that “though evidently regretting that her visitors were to go, she did not seem to ask for compassion. Her home and her housekeeping, her parish and her poultry, and all their dependent concerns, had not yet lost their charms” (149). In that “not yet lost” is inscribed a chilling future. 

The clinical evidence Damasio presents that we are biological programmed to be somatically responsive to mental images of human suffering and Harold Scheub’s demonstrations of how African oral storytellers communicate significance by "eliciting and ordering emotion-evocative images” (14-15) suggests that narratives address their readers' freedom by soliciting affective responsiveness to verbal images crafted to simulate immediate, "sensible" visual and other sensory images. We accept as proper Darcy’s mortification over finding he has not done another justice because Austen’s depiction recalls to working memory our own similar sensations (cf. Hogan 2003b: 45-75; 2003a: 140-65). We must, of course, actually have such emotional schemas available to working memory (cf. Bucci 1997: 127-37) and must be adept at processing how language elicits them. Not everyone can “get” it: Mrs. Bennet, Mr. Collins, Miss Bingley, Lady Catherine would no more understand Darcy’s mortification than they do his humor. Nor is it simply a matter of intelligence or even a kindly nature, as the portrait of Mary Crawford in Mansfield Park particularly attests. However, what this lack of universality illustrates is not the arbitrary nature of compunction or humor, but rather that if we have no access to, or are induced to block access to, all that works to revise previous judgments and to make our self-images and conceptualities answerable to justice, then we are unable to distance ourselves from the side of our conatus that “automatically” registers those “unlike ourselves” as potentially threatening outsiders (Damasio 2003: 163; LeDoux 2002: 220-21). We become estranged from full human well-being to the extent that we become unable to register our own cognitive violence to the Other. This is most forcefully illustrated in the letter Mary Crawford writes Fanny speculating “playfully” on how the death of the gravely ill Tom Bertram would enhance the appeal of his younger brother Edmund: “Fanny, Fanny, I see you smile, and look cunning, but upon my honour, I never bribed a physician in my life. Poor young man! –If he is to die, there will be two poor young men less in the world; and with a fearless face and bold voice would I say to any one, that wealth and consequence could fall into no hands more deserving of them” (423). That Mary cannot gauge the rhetorical effect of such discourse upon Fanny and Edmund suggests not that their restraint reflects stuffiness or hypocrisy, but that Mary’s habituated inability to hear accents of cognitive violence in her own words and thoughts disempowers her, betrays her to an impolitic, imprudent volubility that follows naturally from, and so documents with merciless clarity, an extended consciousness that is morally tone-deaf.

            Once registered, however, awareness of our own participation in cognitive violence cannot but be felt as "mortifying”—if we resemble Darcy rather than Mary, if we have not, through miseducation or emotion-blunting circumstances, lost the capacity for ethical evaluations of the narratives of our own lives. Mr. Collins, Mrs. Bennett, Miss Bingley, Lady Catherine, Lydia, and Wickham are of course paradigms of such culturally induced or accommodated “brain damage.” The indirect violence structuring the English gentry world Austen portrays, in which those financially or socially marginalized can normally hope to gain a degree of power or security only through cultivating patrons or gaining husbands with fortunes, subtly but insistently coerces a veiling of motives from oneself as well as others and a disinclination to allow any somatic registering of ethical significance to disconcert extended consciousness. Mr. Collins’ groveling flattery, for instance, is uninhibited by a sense of shame that would be, for the purposes of insinuating himself into the good graces of Lady Catherine, dysfunctional. Such social coercion, however, is ethical violence.  

Lydia likewise illustrates how the mechanisms of indirect coercion in the emerging capitalist nation-state depend upon and naturalize self-indulgent and self-regarding forms of value—money, social status, fashion (as in Lydia’s mania for new hats)—that work against conceiving one’s goals, one’s “narrative structure,” in ethical terms. As the portrait of Lydia’s “wild volatility” and “disdain of all restraint” (159) attests, unless one is so educated as to integrate ethical consideration into intentional subjectivity, and thus inscribe the sense of “principles” into verbal working memory, whatever original embodied, involuntary capacity one may have had for somatically registering ethical sense will atrophy; one will become “beyond the reach of amendment” (159). In Mary Crawford, Austen presents a more intelligent and kindly, but older and so calcified version of Lydia. Edmund breaks with Mary once he hears her condemn her brother Henry’s seduction of Edmund’s married sister as merely “folly” and joke that, had Fanny accepted him, Henry would have been “too busy” to think of the sister (441-42). Edmund notes that Mary’s making light of the matter denotes not “cruelty” but rather “total ignorance, unsuspiciousness of there being such feelings,” a “perversion of mind which made it natural to treat the subject as she did,” faults not “of temper” but of “principle, . . . of blunted delicacy and a corrupted, vitiated mind” (442)

By suggesting that a “natural” ethical subjectivity must be acculturated, and that Lydia’s “wild” lack of compunction, Collins’ weakheadedness, Lady Catherine’s arrogance, and Wickham’s egotism are natural and yet products of culturally induced “brain damage,” Austen is not guilty of incoherence, but anticipates the principle of “plasticity” in cognitive science, which has displaced nature/nurture dualism with notions of what LeDoux calls “nurturing nature”: “Most systems of the brain are plastic, that is, modifiable by experience, which means that the synapses involved are changed by experience,” while “Plasticity in all the brain’s systems is an innately determined characteristic” (2002: 5, 8-9). Synaptic pathways that are not activated are not conserved, and the more synaptic pathways are employed the stronger their connections will become; one must, LeDoux notes, “use it or lose it” (75-96). “Genes, environment, selection, instruction, learning—these all contribute to the building of the brain and the shaping of the developing self by wiring synapses” (96). In portraying the insensible “natures” of her less admirably characters, Austen shows us the chilling consequences of a cultural violence that, by encouraging identification with debased values, normalizes benign neglect as a parenting style, and naturalizes a screening off of extended consciousness from disturbing impressions registered upon core consciousness, thereby debilitating practical reason.     

For Darcy, Elizabeth, Emma Woodhouse, and other positive characters, however, affective, somatic interruption by core consciousness initiates a process of cognitive, ethical reconfiguration of extended consciousness motivated by the desire not to be inconsistent to the "ideal" self he would construct through habitual practice. In the passage from Chapter 6 (15), well-being (conatus) is defined in a way that shifts the group whose dominance one identifies with happiness from an ethnic or class order to a community of the sensible and rational—which thrives on differences of temperament and background (as the novel’s concluding image of the society of Darcy, Elizabeth, and the Gardiners indicates). Thus, the ability to be “touched” by another’s word or look is central to the capacity to perceive one’s own cognitive violence, as the description of Emma’s reflections upon Mr. Knightley’s reproach of her joke at Miss Bates’ expense attest: “Never had she felt so agitated, so mortified, grieved, at any circumstance in her life. She was must forcibly struck. The truth of his representation there was no denying. She felt it in her heart. How could she have been so brutal, so cruel, to Miss Bates! How could she have exposed herself to such ill opinion in any one she valued! And how suffer him to leave her without saying one word of gratitude, of concurrence, of common kindness!” (299). As the prominence of the romantic union prototype in Austen’s fiction suggests, such a shift of group identification from ethnic or class communities to the community of those one rationally values is not only consistent with “moral” concern for benefiting one’s own genes, but also exposes the violence and self-impoverishment of what Austen describes as our lapses in “prejudice,” which we may perhaps see as an evolutionarily derived predisposition to suspect outsiders.

Notably, at the point in Pride and Prejudice when Austen allows us to glimpse Darcy’s mortification, Elizabeth, as yet uninterrupted by an equivalent somatic responsiveness, is borne along by the conventional consistencies of Merryton social judgments. Elizabeth's thinking at this juncture not only echoes her mother's; it lapses into the kind of impersonal generality Heidegger associates with "das Man." By concluding the paragraph with such a barbed portrait of her heroine, Austen seeks to stimulate in her reader an interruption akin to Darcy's, not only by breaking in upon Elizabeth as the "center-of-consciousness," but also by breaking in upon the genre conventions, gender identifications, and market expectations of courtship novels—ultimately rooted in empathetic identifications with the happiness of protagonists seeking romantic unions and power.¹¹ But, as Austen is quite aware, such interruptions often need frequent reiteration before their "mortifying discoveries" can be acknowledged. If students' responses are any guide, most people, upon first reading the novel, notice this paragraph's interruption as little as they notice the narrative's intimations that Darcy and Wickham are not as Elizabeth construes them. Austen works self-consciously against the naturalization of complacency that identifications with novelistic heroines induce in less demanding fiction. Her narrative invites the extended consciousnesses of her readers to “enjoy” Elizabeth’s and Emma’s delight in their own powers of discernment in order to make the narrative's interruptions of that enjoyment inaugurate an imaginative, hermeneutical labor analogous to, and preparatory for, the ethical labor of allowing somatically registered disruptions of complacency to chasten and reform practical rationality. The happiness such a process opens is ideally figured in Elizabeth and Darcy's conversation, courtship, and marriage.

Despite all the forms of naturalized indirect violence Austen portrays as adhering to English gentry life, she suggests that the best aspects of that society—a certain cultural attentiveness to consideration, a sense of gratitude to others and of obligation implicit in privilege, a cultivation of wit and delight in good humor—make possible sufficient affective responsiveness that personal and communal moral growth are, if not normative, at least imaginable. By inspiring admiration and imitation of her heroines and heroes, by effecting the integration of affective and cognitive working memory in the course of reading, Austen’s fictions seek to render what is imaginable increasingly possible.

Literature and the Fate of Somatic Marking in Mature and Late Capitalism

In contrast to the cultural optimism that ultimately underlies Austen’s social criticism, Dostoyevsky in Crime and Punishment (1866) anticipates much twentieth-century and contemporary fiction by suggesting that Western modernity makes normative the stripping away of somatic marking from mental images so as produce the kind of “sick” cultures that Damasio fears “sizable sectors of Western society are gradually becoming” (1994: 179). However, Dostoyevsky does not share later writers’ crisis of confidence about either the irreparability of cultural damage to affective and rational life, or their doubts about literature’s efficacy in redressing the harm done. Through Raskolnikov, Dostoyevsky suggests that "understanding" (ponimanie) derives from "immediate" (neposredstvenoy) ethical, natural "sensation" (oshushchenie), which is able to "touch" us (oshupivat) in ways that disrupt ideological self-enclosure, opening extended consciousness to intermittent but insistent reformative interruptions that only the most obdurately willful egoism can ignore.

            After visiting the pawnbroker to "rehearse" his murder, Raskolnikov is "decidedly confused" (reshitelnom smushchenee) by an upsurge of disgust: "Oh God! How loathsome [otvratitelno] all this is! . . . No, it's nonsensical, it's absurd! . . . Yes, that's what is it is: filthy, mean, vile, vile! [gryazeno, pakostno, gadko, gadko!]" (39-40/9). Martha Nussbaum notes that disgust "has a close relationship to shame's concerns about bodily insufficiency," that it "expresses a refusal to ingest and thus to be contaminated by a potent reminder of one's own mortality and animality," and that "[a] ubiquitous reaction . . . is to project the disgust reaction outward, so that it is not really oneself, but some other group of people, who are seen as vile and viscous . . ." (2001: 201, 205). Through the word “vile” (gadko), Raskolnikov expresses visceral repugnance both toward his own half-playacting planning of the murder and toward the pawnbroker’s predatory manner and milieu, implicitly identifying his projected self with her actualized self. To the extent that Raskolnikov would appropriate the pawnbroker’s wealth, he identifies happiness with the prototypic plot structuring her grasping identity and actions, but such identification, linking his conatus with hers, strikes his core consciousness over and over again as appallingly vulgar and terrifyingly invasive. He fears losing his boundaries, his integrity, being “swallowed up” by the very forces, attitudes, and narrative structure that his imagined crime would protest against and lift him above. His involuntary ethical intuition and bodily disgust, directed at both the pawnbroker and himself, block agency: Raskolnikov can only move "as if irresolute" ["kak bj v nereshimoste" (4)]

Unable to imagine happiness apart from an increasing acquisition of power, Raskolnikov is drawn to murder in part to deny, in part to punish himself for being unable to deny, identification with the plot of power realized with coarse frankness by the pawnbroker: rather than “bleeding” people continually, he would shed blood once; rather than taking whatever one can get from anyone, he would take only what he needs from one person who is without redeeming social or moral qualities. But Raskolnikov’s very need to distinguish his pursuit of happiness from the pawnbroker’s suggests that he cannot help knowing that such claims are delusive. He seeks to persuade himself that his intended violence follows “logically” from a practical reason “unprejudiced” by conventional pieties, that it is anchored in a “higher” or more authentic moral sense, and so, like the “indirect” violence of capitalism or nation building, is defensible, even commendable. What inhibits an easy conscience, however, stands outside the ideological frameworks that abstract violence into a calculus of utility. As long as extended consciousness remains “in dialogue” with a core consciousness that involuntarily registers somatic marking, unexpected or unregulated feelings will inform an understanding of ethical significance too immediately merged with bodily sensation to allow uncomplicated identification with a “happiness” of personal or in-group dominance won at the expense of others, even one other. Raskolnikov’s abiding susceptibility to ethical embodied sensations and their retrieval of affective memories is most clearly manifest in his dreams of the old mare and then the landlady being beaten (89-95/35-38, 157-58/71). As Robert L. Belknap notes, the subconscious Dostoyevsky portrays, unlike Freud’s, “is deeply moral; Rasknolnikov’s dreams and impulsive actions struggle against his rational mind’s rejection of moral values” (2002: 136).       

 In the absence of cultural discourse reinforcing intuitions of ethical understanding, however, natural physiological defenses against dissociations of emotional and cognitive working memory may be progressively undermined. Notably the murder becomes a live possibility for Raskolnikov, as opposed to a self-tormenting mental game, only after he receives his mother's letter rationalizing his sister's self-sacrificing engagement to the egotistical businessman Luzhin.¹²   There Dostoyevsky presents conventional, self-sacrificing, nineteenth-century maternal speech as both willfully self-deluded and suffocating in its total subservience to a son who is "everything" ["u nas vse"] and loved "infinitely" ["bespredelno"] (73/27). Raskolnikov's mother’s discourse encourages him to avert his gaze from his sister’s compromising of herself for his benefit by inviting him to share the “story” the two women have arranged in their minds, that Dunya’s actions are defensible, even commendable, because conducive to the long-term “happiness” of the family, and especially of Raskolnikov. Such maternal discourse constitutes an apology for “indirect” violence and a model for hardening oneself against the discomfort of somatic marked images that would disrupt identification with the forms of “happiness” in “dominance” that modern society grants the beneficiaries of indirect mechanisms of accumulation and authority. The mother’s letter reveals how normative indirect violence has become in “respectable” society, and how indirection, permeating private as well as public life, does not diminish the actuality of violence. Raskolnikov is disgusted, viscerally repulsed, by simply picturing to himself what his mother and sister would make of him. On the one hand, he does not want to be incorporated into maternal plans consistent with a natural order governed by rapacious self-interest; on the other, he is revolted by the injustice of taking his place in the sun at the expense of others (78-79/29-30). 

The “advanced,” “scientific” theoretical discourses that shape Rasknolikov’s intellectual life conspire with the ideology behind his mother’s discourse to marginalize or “explain away” somatically mediated ethical unease in the name of a nature without God, in which "justice" and “love” have been displaced by the highly “indirect” mechanisms of socio-cultural “progress” or “rationalization” allowed by Whig-Hegelian historiography and capitalist-utilitarian theory. After coming to the aid of a victimized girl, Raskolnikov, upon reflection, repudiates the unmediated ethical feelings that led him to concern himself with her, because he finds such feelings intellectually indefensible, and thus cognitively unaccountable: "They say that each year a certain percentage has to go off down that road . . . in order to give the others fresh hope and not get in their way" (85/33). Dostoyevsky portrays a world in which what "they say" (govoryat) and what mothers say dovetail sufficiently to induce estrangements of extended consciousness from somatically impressed ethical sensations. As a result, subjectivity is internally split (raskol) and prone to depressive violence.¹³

            Dostoyevsky's novel constitutes an effort to reconnect conceptual, verbal symbolization to pre-conceptual, nonverbal sensory experience, and so to undo the estrangement of practical reason from somatic responsiveness that both public and private life, both intellectual and domestic discourse, were, in his view, making increasingly normative. Fashioning a narrative in which terms denoting "feeling," "sensible," "sensitivity," "sensual" (tieuvstviovat) consistently indicate the body's abiding access both to a world outside subjective, ideological constructions and to ethical intuitions anterior to intentional consciousness, Dostoyevsky opens readers, through their empathetic identification with Raskolnikov, to experiencing the re-integration of receptivity to somatic marking and extended consciousness in ways that allow transformative interconnections with others (preeminently figured in the relationship with Sonya and the other Marmeladovs) to lead one ultimately to spiritual and moral “rebirth.”¹⁴  

For most of Crime and Punishment, however, the kind of dialogical interactions between somatic responsiveness and practical reasoning that Austen depicts in Pride and Prejudice remain blocked, not because Raskolnikov is "insensible” in the ways that Mr. Collins or Luzhin are, but because repeated incursions of somatically-mediated sense into Raskolnikov's extended consciousness do not re-form Raskolnikov's sense of self, as opposed to disrupting and convulsing it, until the end of the novel. Each time "life" seeks to come to Raskolnikov's aid by so affecting him somatically that he will be "forced to acknowledge" what is from the perspective of ideology, pride, and self-love "mortifying," he takes the embodiment of ethical sense to be a violation of his freedom. Even audacious, prideful Raskolnikov, however, cannot ultimately resist a natural (and, in Dostoyevsky’s view, divinely ordained) “healing” intercourse between somatic responsiveness and practical reasoning. In the final paragraphs, when "In the place of dialectics life had arrived" (630) ["Vmesto dialektiki nastupija zeizei" (331)], the narrative describes Raskolnikov with terms in which natural, organic "fruition" and sustained, conscientious application ["virabotatsja" (331)] combine to allow the employment of the adjective "gradual" to Raskolnikov, as in "a man's gradual renewal, his gradual rebirth" (630) ["postepennogo obnovjenija cheloveka, . . . postepennogo pererozedenija ego" (331)]. But, as Dostoyevsky emphasizes, that would be a "new" ["novogo"] story.

Nevertheless, the ending of Crime and Punishment affirms Dostoyevsky’s confidence in the resiliency of healthy human instincts and so the efficacy of novelistic art in undoing the psychic, cultural damage wrought by “sick” societies. Such confidence is notably absent from Grass’s The Tin Drum (1959), in which the willfully stunted, obdurately three-year-old Oskar, like nearly all the other characters, is so self-enclosed, so somatically wounded, that the subject of literature becomes the loss of the subject. In The Tin Drum, the characters who populate Oskar’s lower middle class Danzig milieu resemble him just as he resembles his grandfather, Joseph Koljaiczek, who seeks refuge from an external world defined by politically violent, morally bankrupt power relations by hiding under "the wide skirts" of Oskar's grandmother. Koljaczek becomes a political outlaw when he sets fire to a sawmill where he works after his boss, enraged that Koljaczek paints a fence white and red (the national colors of a Poland then partitioned between Germany and Russia), beats him with a slat from the fence (27/19). Pursued by the police for a number of subsequent politically motivated arsons, Koljaczek finds nowhere to hide in an open potato field except under Oskar’s grandmother’s wide skirts, which “favored the same potato color” (18/11-12).

Linking capitalism (the sawmill) to imperialistic nationalism (the Prussian seizure of eastern Poland and establishment of German political-economic hegemony), Grass highlights both the predication of indirect modalities of violence (the authority of the sawmill boss, the administrative-surveillance machinery of the police) upon direct violence (military conquest), and the ways that pre-modern forms of in-group dominance are at once masked and articulated by industrialized political economies (through the disciplinary mechanisms of wages, property rights, etc.). Danzig and its environs rebut Whig-Enlightenment claims that uncoupling wealth-creation from direct violence will reform communal practical rationality by uprooting archaic “tribal” loyalties and break down “traditional” delimitations of affective responsiveness to one’s own group. By reworking the political trope of the highly organized, but unimaginative and repressive Germans (the police) battling a Polish resistance (Koljaiczek) marked by disorganization, grand but ineffectual gestures, mercurial courage and foolishness, Grass establishes the contrast, central to postmodern fiction, between an all-enveloping, soulless and inexorable System that circumvents or co-opts or subjugates all that would stand outside its sway, and a resistance that can only be uncompromised as long as it is anarchic, episodic, destructive, and so a “counter-force” ironically parasitic upon the order it subverts and thus doomed to self-marginalization.¹⁵

In the absence of a socio-economic, cultural-political order that can entice and sustain the kinds of subject formation that Austen and Dostoyevsky portray, social relations can hinge upon nothing more than asocial infantile regression. Oskar, whose narrative inverts the Bildungsroman’s pattern of progressive development,¹⁶ comes into existence thematically as well as biologically because his grandfather, "unable to tear himself away from her skirts, followed [his] grandmother" ["folgte (s)einer Großmutter, klein und breit Joseph Koljaiczek, der nicht von den Röcken lassen konnte"] (25/17).

Oskar's magical attributes—his refusal to grow up, substitution of drumming for speech, glass-shattering voice—entail a blunting of somatic responsiveness born of revolt against a public and private world that is incapable of engendering a sense of gratitude or connection. As Jürgen Rothenberg notes, Oskar’s self-isolation is “vor allem Negativentscheid, Aktion gegen etwas: Am Anfang steht der Protest!” [“above all negative decision, action against something: In the beginning is the Protest!”] (1976: 10). Such negatively instigated identity, evocative at once of German Idealist philosophy, Koljaiczek’s anarchic-quixotic nationalism, and existentialist-postmodern accounts of freedom, is deeply problematized by Grass’s novel. Oskar's affective impoverishment grants him a detached clarity of vision, but only at the price of rendering him, at best, intermittently and inconsequentially capable of being "touched" and thus moved by either the somatic marking of images or the sociability implicit in speech. Oskar describes himself as "one of those clair-audient infants whose mental development is completed at birth [‘deren geistige Entwicklung schon bei der Geburt abgeschlossen ist’] and after that merely needs a certain amount of filling in” ["sich fortan nur noch bestätigen muß"]. The moment I was born I took a very critical attitude toward the first utterances to slip from my parents . . ." (47/35). Grass's German stresses the ethical implications: "geistige" denotes "spiritual," "humane," as well as "mental"; "abgeschlossen" "closed up," "self-contained," as well as "completed"; "bestätigen" "confirm, verify, endorse." In the next clause, curiously not translated, Oskar describes himself as "[s]o unbeeinflußbar . . . als Embryo," so inaccessible to influence as an embryo, that in the womb he listened to and regarded only himself (35). Viewing his parents as "small, bent over, gummed up" (47/35), Oskar rejects "[his] father's projects" for him, the expectation that he will inherit and manage the family grocery store (48/37).

Of course, Oskar’s account is notoriously unreliable: it is fantastic, there are internal inconsistencies, and he is writing from a mental hospital (see Reddick 1974: 82-86). However, to the extent that sardonic dismissal structures Oskar’s relation to the world, such judgment involves a lucid assessment of the “gummed up” characters among whom he lives. Oskar’s two putative fathers, the German Matzerath and the Pole Jan Bronski, reveal their limitations by reenacting national stereotypes: Matzerath is dull but reliable, Bronski idealistic but ineffectual; Oskar’s mother, wife of the one and mistress of the other, finds neither capable of assuaging her inner hunger. Similarly, the neighbors and fellow lodgers are, with rare exceptions, self-involved and contracted. As Patrick O’Neill points out, “Oskar’s distorted refraction of German society strips away the façade of respectability and reticence veiling the rise of Nazism in Germany”; rather than following from “some kind of almost supernatural eruption of evil incarnate,” it “was the coordinated channeling, on a huge scale, of the petty viciousness, the petty hypocrisies, the petty greed and frustration and spite and boredom of very ordinary people . . .” (1999; 24). Oskar's refusal to grow up follows from there being little in the adult world around him to inspire affection, much less imitation, but it also involves refusing, or seeing no point in, participating in a dialogue between somatic, affective responsiveness and practical reason that might make life in the world, and connection with others, appealing.   

The much-noted scene in which Oskar, accompanied by his mother, Bronski, and Matzerath, sees a longshoreman fishing for eels using a horse’s head as bait underscores the disgust awakened by the spectacle of rapacious pursuit of well-being, conatus in its rawest form: the eels eat the horse’s head as humans eat eels, just as the gulls eat up the mother’s regurgitated breakfast (149-53/120-23).¹⁷ Matzerath’s affected indifference, though “green about the gills” [“der Käse in Gesicht”] (151/122), his cheerful eagerness to prepare eel delicacies, and his intellectualized complacency, “Don’t carry on so, pussycat. You’re always known how they catch eels and you’ve always eaten them just the same” [“Hab dich nich so, Mädchen. Hast doch gewußt, daß Aale da ran gehen und hast trotzdem immer, auch frische gegessen”] (153/123), recapitulates the pattern Raksolnikov follows in talking himself into indifference toward the distressed girl he encounters on the streets, as well as prepares us for Matzerath’s later easy acceptance of a Nazi ideology that extends to human beings the notion that creatures live naturally, and thus in a morally indifferent manner, from consuming one another. The “narrative structure” Matzerath embodies repels Oskar no less than the pawnbroker’s “narrative structure” repels Rasknolikov.

But the alternative to Matzerath’s affected, intellectualized “manliness,” Bronski’s apparent affective responsiveness, is no less marked by rapacious feeding upon another. When Oskar sees Bronski so solicitous of the mother’s distress that he looks “as if he were going to cry” [“als wenn er weinen wollte”] (151/122), his heart is “full of praise for Jan Bronski,” but he soon notices that Jan and his mother want to take advantage of Matzerath’s preoccupation with cooking eels for engaging in amorous caresses: “Jan stared at me; I knew I was in their way” [“ich . . . ließ mich von Jan fixieren und spürte genau, wie ich den beiden im Wege war” (155/124). Retreating into a clothes’ closet, Oskar watches as equivalent spectacles (which he calls “Act Two, Act Three”) Matzerath’s cooking and Jan’s pleasuring of his mother (157-58/126-27). Because Bronski’s sensibility resolves itself into narcissistic indulgence, and because the mother’s lovemaking revolves around self-pleasuring, both the “narrative structures” offered by romantic union and by power resolve themselves into crass forms of conatus that disgust Oskar and find their most thorough-going, horrific realization in the Nazi adventure.

Just as Oskar here retreats from an inter-personal world offering no patterns for empathetic identification, withdrawing into the narcissistic enclosure of the clothes’ cupboard, so, at the very dawn of his existence, only the prospect of acquiring a drum keeps him "from expressing more forcefully [his] desire to return to the womb" ["dem Wunsch nach Rückkehr . . ."] (49/37). The drive for well-being bifurcates between aggressive appropriation (of which fascism and sentimentality are both alternative and complementary aspects) and an autarkic withdrawal ultimately no less imperialistic.

            The private symbolization of drumming, like his later erotic life, substitutes for Oskar's dominant desire—to retrieve prenatal self-enclosure, which entails abrogating any distance between himself and the object of desire—at once melting into her and incorporating her into himself. While his affective impoverishment—for the most part, people and objects engage his attention with identical levels of interest—secures him against being influenced by the dubious ideologies and fantasies that function as "wide skirts" for the adult characters, Grass insists that Oskar's anarchic activities not be understood as "resistance." Although he plays a fox trot to disrupt SA rallies, he also disrupts every other conceivable group (124/100), for his drum dismisses whatever others "might have to sing, trumpet, or proclaim" because they cannot compete with being beneath his grandmother's skirts (124-25/100-01). On the one hand, Oskar is unmoved by the social, political, cultural values circulating in pre-war Danzig because he is disgusted by the eel-eating greediness underlying every desire to be “filled up” with well-being; on the other hand, Oskar is unmoved because he believes that any “filling up” short of “wide skirts,” prenatal self-enclosure, will leave one hungry.

            Oskar's self-isolating obsession, exemplified by his preoccupation, as World War II erupts, with acquiring a new drum, the closest he can get to “Rückkehr,” is mirrored in the tranquilizing obsessions of the other characters. Describing the German assault on the Danzig’s Polish Post Office, Oskar observes, "We were all happy . . . Jan Bronski had found all his skat cards including the seven of spades, and Oskar had a new drum . . ." (235/191). Bronski's skat playing, Matzerath 's delight in his SA uniform, the neighborhood greengrocer Greff's frolicks with pretty boy scouts, and Oskar's drumbeating are equivalent substitutes for "wide skirts," equivalent means of seeking to be “filled up.” The prominence of smell in Oskar's erotic life underscores its narcissistic, regressive structure; just as the odor of rancid butter, like of the color of potatoes (the subsistence crop), is associated with the grandmother's skirts, so "the first time [he] breathed in the effluvium peculiar to Lina Greff," it "outshouted, engulfed, and killed all vanilla," associated with Maria (304/250), the shopgirl who initiates Oskar sexually and who Matzerath makes his second wife.

            John Reddick distinguishes between a “’brainbox’ Oskar” whose lack of affect makes him a modern picaro, able to delineate with great cognitive skill the fraudulence and delusions of a social world that does not “touch” him, and a “’tears’ Oskar,” who is “emotionally involved” with, and thus victimized by, the world he portrays (1974: 58-82). Reddick differentiates two aspects of the “tears” persona; “if it is unfulfilled love that first confounds him, it is a consuming sense of guilt and fear that finally drives him to despair” (77; also see Arker 1989: 179-90). Love objects “touch” Oskar because they become, like his drums, substitutes and metaphors for a desire coordinate with other rapacious forms of conatus—indeed, Oskar’s campaigns for Maria, Lina Greff, and the circus-entertainer Roswitha are repeatedly correlated with German military operations (266/217-18, 270-71/221-22, 305/250, 329/270). The touching of Oskar’s core consciousness by guilt, however, like the disgust informing his rejection of the adult world, suggests that recalcitrant, involuntary registering of ethical significance is universally tied to human embodiment, for Oskar, even more than Raskolnikov, strives to shield identity against destabilizing, reformative ethical sense.

Oskar first demonstrates a capacity for guilt after his mother dies following overeating and excessive lovemaking in the wake of the eel episode (implicitly, she “stuffs herself” because neither what Mazerath nor Bronski offers is consistent with genuine or sustainable well-being). Oskar asserts that he “drummed her into her grave. Because of Oskar she didn’t want to live any more; he killed her” (171/138). Immediately after this declaration, Oskar confesses that he was “exaggerating” to impress Roswitha, and the circus manager Bebra tells him that he wants to believe himself more important to his mother than he was, which suggests how easily “guilt feelings” collude with a sentimental narcissistic “feeding off of” others (see Reddick 78-79; Arker 237-60). Even so, the experience of guilt is irreducible to acting out. After noting that he used his size to escape capture by the Germans seizing the Polish Post Office while Bronski was sent to his death, Oskar describes himself as ‘filled with shame”  (247/201), and observes, “But on days when an importunate feeling of guilt, which nothing can dispel, sits on the very pillows of my hospital bed, I tend, like everyone else, to make allowances for my ignorance” [“Doch wie jedermann halte ich mir an Tagen, da mich ein unhöfliches und durch nichts aus dem Zimmer zu weisendes Schuldgefühl in die Kissen meines Anstaltsbettes drückt, meine Unwissenheit zugute . . .”] (248/ 201-02). Although guilt can often feed vanity, and though we seek to evade its pain, and so work against allowing “mortification” to reform extended consciousness, “Schuldgefühl” can be, as here, experienced as “unhöflich,” external to economies of desire and power, as impressed somatically into our processing of mental images—“in die Kissen . . . drückt.”

The possibility that such somatic responsiveness to ethical significance might—at last—yield moral development is glimpsed only once. Oskar begins, unexpectedly, miraculously, to grow physically after he renounces the consolations of drumming out of guilt over having occasioned Matzerath’s death at the moment of Nazi defeat (403-07/ 333-37). Oskar’s guilt-stricken renunciation of the instrument sustaining his self-involvement is notably linked to his repeating the phrase, “I should” (“Ich soll”), binding identity to the verb denoting ethical obligation. Both the renunciation and the verb suggest the possibility that the postwar era might be conducive to reformulating “well-being” in ways that, as in Pride and Prejudice, tie affective responsiveness to practical reason, repudiating the kinds of rapacious conatus that characterize the Nazi calamity, with its totalitarian combination of direct and indirect violence. However, Grass depicts such hopes as delusional. The postwar “economic miracle” returns rapacious conatus to the more “prudent” indirect coercion of capitalism, while postwar artistic, cultural liberation serves narcissistic, appropriative, consumerist desires.¹⁸ Renouncing drumming simply leads Oskar to invest more in an obsessive pursuit of the women—Maria, nurses, and nuns—whom he associates with his mother and grandmother. Like those of his fellow citizens, Oskar’s activities mirror fascistic yearnings to consume and to be fed by others, which in turn mirrors in the frantic postwar pursuit of material well-being, as though an “economic miracle” could assuage inner hunger and deaden guilt. Widespread capitalizing upon anti-human art likewise feeds upon the psychic trauma of Nazism.¹⁰   An artist, notably nicknamed Raskolnikov, who treats his models as instruments and paints Oskar as an epitome of deformity, urges him to return to his drum. When Oskar protests, “All that is ended,” Raskolnikov replies, “Nothing is ended, everything returns . . .’ (473/392). This Raskolnikov, unlike Dostoyevsky’s, denies that affective responsiveness might reform practical reason enough to allow gradual, narrative progress, and makes that denial the cornerstone of both his private tyrannizing and his remunerative, emotionally indulgent art. 

Oskar becomes a celebrity through resuming drumming in ways that induce infantile regression in others. He meets the needs of customers of the “Onion Cellar,” who artificially induce tears so that sentimental, self-important fine feelings can distance them from any real pangs of guilt over their pre-1945 activities. Notably his drumming, lionized by the postwar public, replicates the psychological effects of Hitler’s speechifying (see Arker 1989: 151-61). Similarly, his pathological pursuit of Sister Dorothea suggests, in its cartoonish exaggeration of Marcel’s drive to “know” Albertine absolutely, that the capacity to connect with another has been reduced to the compulsion to assimilate another into one’s own walled-off, “embryonic” identity. Emotional identification with the “happiness” whose pursuit, Hogan suggests, structures prototypic narratives universally becomes impossible. In the place of affective, discursive interaction with others, Oskar revels in possessing Sister Dorothea’s severed finger, which he places in a preserving jar. When the police seek him on suspicion of murder, he notes, "Political obstacles, the so-called Iron Curtain, forbade me to flee eastward. It was not possible to head for my grandmother['s] . . . four skirts, . . . although I told myself that if flight there must be, my grandmother's skirts were the only worthwhile ["aussichtsreiche"] destination" (577/482).

Oskar’s story announces the liquidation of the kind of subjectivity novelistic discourse was designed to delineate. In the place of pre-modern tragedy, the promise of “healthy” affective-cognitive integration and thus narrative agency as depicted by Austen and Dostoyevsky vanishes before the alternatives of two forms of stasis or atrophy—either the collapse of “narrative structures” eliciting empathetic identification into grim accounts of a rapacious conatus, increasingly divorced from all practical reason, or nightmarishly futile attempts to evade incorporation into either such a conatus or the frivolous, faddish freedoms of postmodern societies. This futility is depicted in The Tin Drum by Oskar’s increasing dread that the Black Witch, a malevolent persona from fairy tales suggesting death, meaninglessness, and blind materiality, is after him, is about to absorb him just as he cannot but long to absorb those he “loves” (577-89/482-91). While somatic marking remains integral to any cognitive processing not marked by biological “brain damage,” it appears so thoroughly blocked from reformative dialogue with extended consciousness that the present of the novel offers neither individuals nor societies much hope of a future that could be identified with what Damasio terms “wellness or well-being” (2003: 35).

Notes

1. Anthony Giddens notes that pre-modern polities have limited means of surveillance and administrative control (only in "military and religious settings and slave-labouring in mines and on plantations" does one find "anything resembling modern administrative power"), for there is neither territorial integration (clear boundaries, as opposed to vague, shifting frontiers) nor a vertical integration of classes into one "people": "Traditional states, especially the larger ones, contained many secondary settlement frontiers. . . . In conquest empires it was generally the case that indigenous populations would be left to carry on their pre-existing patterns of conduct--even their established administrative system being left largely untouched--so long as they paid their taxes or delivered the necessary tribute” (1987: 48, 51-52).     

2. "[T]he success of the state in claiming monopoly of the means of violence was limited by two factors: the manner in which the military was organized, and the relative slowness of transport and communication. . . . Since it was impossible in most circumstances for such recruits [ethnically heterogeneous and paid mostly through booty] to be welded into a 'bureaucratic army', the military preparation of such soldiery could easily rebound upon those who had instigated it, by creating potentially independent, rival sources of power within the state. On the other hand, without the capability of swelling whatever regular soldiery might exist, the state might either succumb to external attack, or face the internal decay of its rule” (56-57). Also see Giddens 1981: 49-68, 90-108.

3. Non-Western traditional literatures, no less than Greek tragedies and Hebraic prophetic scriptures, depict asocial egotism, deficient affective responsiveness, and conceptual rigidity as mutually reinforcing and harmful to practical reasoning (see Jackson 1982: 22-23). The West African Kuranko term hankilimaiye, like the Yoruba iwa, and the Akan nyansa, has in common with Aristotelian phronêsis and Ciceronian prudentia a semantically encoded insistence upon the positive relationship between receptivity to affect and successful exercises of practical reason (see Plutarch, Moralia 6:34-37). Jackson notes, "The Kuranko trickster, Hare, uses his superior intelligence to double-cross and dupe his status superior, Hyena” (92), but cleverness (hankili) is affirmed only when the hyena abuses hierarchical order to monopolize food or seek to reduce others to slaves (108). Moreover, conventionality and authoritarianism is frequently depicted as breeding a “political” stupidity born of lack of empathy (112).

4. For the application of this paradigm first to Scotland and then to non-Western societies, see Phillipson 1997; Carnall 1997; Kidd 1993.

5. See esp. Warner 1998; Doody 1996:15-32, 274-300; Brown 1996:11-43; Ballaster 1992; Spacks 1990; Todd 1989; Spencer 1986. For contrasting assessments of Eliza Haywood’s fiction’s relation to the later novel, see Backscheider 2000: 19-47 and Richetti 2000: 240-58.

6. See Sarah Fielding 1749: 8-9, 11, 12; Darnton 1984: 215-56; Sussman 2000:130-58; Coventry 1751.

7. Warner discusses the “absorptive reading” associated with the early 18th-century novels of amorous intrigue (88-127), arguing that such narratives present “sexualized bodies and amoral egos plotting to secure their own pleasures at the expense of others,” an “entertainment” whose popularity “seems to depend upon turning the empty ego of the central protagonist into a reader’s seat from which readers can follow a blatantly self-interested quest for victory on the field of amorous conquest” (92). Warner documents how the appeal of such “entertainment” provoked moral and cultural unease.

8. See esp. the letters of Clarissa’s mother (L 25. 2, pp. 124-25, L 41.1, pp. 188-90), John Harlowe (L 32.2, p. 150, L 60.1, pp. 253-54, L 62.1, p. 260, L 63.2, p. 267, L 63.4, p. 268, L 402, p. 1192), Anthony Harlow (L 32.4, pp. 154-58), Rev. Brand (L 444, pp. 1292-95. On the significance of the portait of Rev. Brand, see Weinbrot 1996: 117-40.

9. On the significance of Austen’s indirect free style for the novel’s generic evolution, see esp. Wiltshire 2001; Tuite 2002; Galperin 2003.

10. For the novel in general, see esp. Bender 1987); Armstrong 1987; Armstrong and Tennenhouse 1989: 1-26; Cottom 1987, 1989, 1991; Miller 1988. For Austen, see Galperin 2003; Tuite 2002, esp. 1-22; Johnson 2000: 25-44); Rajan 2000: 3-25; Smith 2000; Galperin 1997: 19-27; Brownstein 1994:180-92; Stewart 1993; Said  1993;  Sedgwick 1993; Litvak 1992; Fraiman  1989.

11. For Austen’s critical relation to contemporary women’s fiction, see Waldron 1999.

12. See Jones 1990: 79-82; Meerson 1998: 55.

13. Such “estrangements” are psychological equivalents, and consequences, of the deracination, or “uprootedness from the soil” (bespochvennost), that Dostoyevsky and other mid-19^th century Russian conservative thinkers attributed to Western secularizing, scientistic influences, and to the penchant for “theoreticism” on the part of Westernized Russian intellectuals. See Offord 2002: 111-30; Thompson 2002: 191-211; Bakhtin 1984: 78-100; Mochulsky 1967: 219-35. On the relation of disgust and estrangement to depressive violence, see Kristeva 1989.

14. On the relation of this view of the redemptive power of (verbal evoked) mental images and “incarnational reading” to Dostoyevsky’s religious thought, see Ziolkowski 2001: 156-70; Ollivier 2001: 51-68; Russell 2001: 226-36; Jones 2002: 148-74.

15. Striking thematic and structural parallels between The Tin Drum and García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) on the one hand and Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981) on the other are well delineated by Merivale 1995: 329-345. The battle between metastasizing all-absorbing Systems and anarchic, subversive, ludic “counter-forces” structures of Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), whose final section is entitled “The Counterforce,” the ineffectuality of which is underscored by an apocalyptic conclusion. Indeed, all four novels conclude with apocalypse—the foreclosure of any possible (or meaningful) future.

16. See Delaney 2004: 31-32; Rothenberg 1976: 25-26.

17. See Reddick 1974: 25-29. 

18. See Delaney 2004: 129-41; O’Neill 1999: 26-27; Rothenberg 1976: 18-26.

19. For the affiliations of Grass’ and Oskar’s art with such an ethically problematized aesthetics, see Minden 1993: 149-63.

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