Folklore's Pathetic Fallacy

[Editor's Note: This article is the first in a series of articles that we hope to publish in JAF in a new section we have entitled "Dialogues." We have initiated this section in order to publish articles and commentaries that are different from "Notes" and somewhat different from the regularly published articles. We will place essays here that we hope will invoke and provoke readers to write responses, to be published in the next issue. For this section, we invite serious rejoinders or extensions of thought on social, political, and disciplinary grounds.]

Ruskin asks, what is "the difference between the ordinary, proper, and true appearances of things to us; and the extraordinary, or false appearances, when we are under the influence of an emotion, or contemplative fancy; false appearances, I say, as being entirely unconnected with any real power or character in the object, and only imputed to it by us[?]

"For instance, in Alton Locke,—

"They rowed her in across the rolling foam—

"The cruel, crawling foam."

"The foam is not cruel, neither does it crawl," Ruskin writes. "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 . . . produce in us a falseness in all our impressions of external things, which I would generally characterize as the 'pathetic fallacy.'"

The pathetic fallacy, Ruskin goes on, is "eminently characteristic of the modern mind. . . . For instance, Keats, describing a wave breaking out at sea, says of it—

"Down whose green back the short-lived foam, all hoar,

"Bursts gradual, with a wayward indolence."

". . . Homer would never have written, never have thought of, such words. He could not by any possibility have lost sight of the great fact that the wave, from the beginning to the end of it, do what it might, was still nothing else than salt water; and that salt water was neither wayward or indolent." But "Homer has some feeling about the sea; a faith in the animation of it much stronger than Keats's. But all this sense of something living in it, he separates in his mind into a great abstract image of a Sea Power. He never says the waves rage, or the waves are idle. But he says there is somewhat in, and greater than, the waves, which rages, and is idle, and that he calls a god.

"With us, observe, the idea of the Divinity is apt to get separated from the life of nature; and imagining our God upon a cloudy throne, far above the earth, and not in the flowers or the waters, we approach those visible things with a theory that they are . . . governed by physical laws. . . . But coming to them, we find the theory fails . . . that, say what we choose about them, the instinctive sense of their being alive is too strong for us; and in scorn of all physical law, the wilful fountain sings, and the kindly flowers rejoice . . . we fall necessarily into the curious web of hesitating sentiment, pathetic fallacy, and wandering fancy, which form a great part of our modern view of nature. But the Greek never removed his god out of nature at all; never attempted for a moment to contradict his instinctive sense that God was everywhere. . . . But in thus clearly defining his belief, observe, he threw it entirely into a human form, and gave his faith to nothing but the image of his own humanity" (Rosenberg 1963:64-79).

This curious snare of hesitating sentiment and "contemplative fancy," Ruskin's "pathetic fallacy," is precisely the epistemological predicament of the folklorist, who, more than either anthropologist or sociologist, finds herself caught in a participatory indeterminancy rooted in folklore's ontological relativity; neither objectively discoverable nor altogether "constituted," seldom present to investigation independent of any a priori representation, virtually impossible to perceive much less analyze absent a background radiation of anxiety, nostalgia, interest, advocacy, even personal identification, its derivative "theory" rarely more than an extrapolated and rationalized justification of "practice" (often itself an opportunistic adjustment to an ever-shifting configuration of political, economic, and historical contingencies), folklore...