Narrative Emotion: Feeling, Form and Function

Introduction

While all would agree that emotions are a component part of some narratives, that assertion only begins to address the complicated relations between feeling and form. Emotions are a primary feature of our reactions to, or interactions with, narrative, yet this dimension of feeling's relation to narrative has often been treated as something of an embarrassment by critics. Emotional responses are often seen as less rational and mature than other responses, and hence traditionally associated with "lesser" sorts of readers (children, women, the working class, etc. . .), or with subsidiary stages or procedures of a reading experience (for example, as an aid to "getting into" a book or the basis of a compulsion to turn pages). As features of a text itself, emotions are generally seen in terms of psychological expression, either of the characters or the author herself; in either case, we rarely find emotion understood as content to be the subject of much critical interest. As tears indicate sadness and laughter pleasure, emotions are worn on sleeves—they are too easily readable.

Although it is a process naturalized to the point of invisibility, it is worth reminding ourselves that we are drawn to the aesthetic again and again because its impact is registered affectively and somatically, as well as via rational cognition. Emotions exert a gravitational pull on us that derives not simply from their immediacy; rather, as the essays in this volume attest, it is their complex variation and articulation that attracts our attention. In other words, emotions have forms. What are the formal relationships emotions may have with narrative? Are emotions, experienced and recalled in time and space, inherently narrative in character? At the very least, expressed emotions may become narratives, and thus bear in the materiality and structure of their expression, which is to say in their textuality, the imprint of the emotions that motivated their production. Far from assuming emotions to be transparently available content, then, we might assume their articulation to take complex forms appropriate to expressing equally complex modes of consciousness and disposition. Our relation as readers to narrative emotion we should expect to be no less complex.

In this special issue, we have collected a body of work that might begin to establish the study of narrative emotion as an interdisciplinary field, drawing from the diverse methods of such discourses as textual criticism, philosophy, history and psychology. At their intersections, these approaches may generate insights into the history of the emotions, the viability of a poetics of feeling, and the impact different media and narrative modes have upon affective experience. As the study of affect and emotion begins to occupy thinkers from a variety of orientations, it is fitting that these essays share only the loosest affinities; they indicate more the variety of directions future research and writing could pursue, rather than privileging a particular avenue.

Christine Chaney's essay examines the rhetoric of emotions as an authorial device that operates in the register of persona. Mary Wollstonecraft's Letters Written in Sweden was a widely successful work that established its author's fame and credibility precisely, Chaney argues, through producing in its readers a sense of a personal relationship with an admirable woman whose feelings, experiences and insights they could trust. Wollstonecraft's facility at the rhetoric of emotion—in particular, her effective elaboration of her own ethos—produces an effect of authenticity. She does not simply confess feelings, but titrates apparent disclosures in a carefully controlled fashion, so that her text succeeds both as a straightforward travel narrative and as a vehicle to establish her significance in the eyes of her readers. In a formula that will become and remain powerfully influential in the West, this impression of authenticity provides grounds for the author to press against moral and social strictures of her place and time.

History and melancholy are the subjects of Eluned Summers-Bremmer's essay. Reading W.G. Sebald's peripatetic fictions as enactments of a mourning for the dissolution of history, Summers-Bremmer finds affinities with Lacan's own explorations of a lost, but profoundly generative, traumatic past in...