Creature Comforts

At school, some of my peers were intermittently concerned about the usefulness of what they were being taught. A hand would shoot up, a teacher, mildly disgruntled, would nod, and a familiar question would follow: 'Sir, what's the point of learning such and such?' Maths teachers would relish this, as they revealed that their subject underpinned the functioning of almost every aspect of the modern world. History teachers replied with worthy bluster about the importance of learning the lessons of the past. But English teachers often seemed to fare worse and be reduced to muttering something woolly about books helping us to understand others.

A version of this answer to the schoolchild's age-old question has risen to prominence in recent years in the popular literary press. For instance, Zadie Smith, in a 2003 newspaper article in praise of the fiction of E. M. Forster, asserted that, 'When we read with fine attention, we find ourselves caring about people who are various, muddled, uncertain and not quite like us (and this is good).'¹ And it is not only novels that are getting in on the act. Poetry is also being offered as a force for good in anthologies and handbooks with titles such as The Poetry Cure and 52 Ways of Looking at a Poem: Or, How Poetry Can Change Your Life.²

This offering up of literature as an ethical guide and philosophical consoler may have links to developments in academia. Indeed, Smith's piece praises the philosopher Martha Nussbaum for making arguments about the ethical value of reading no longer subject to ridicule. A key figure in the humanities' recent 'ethical turn', Nussbaum is just one of several philosophers and critics interested in the links between ethics and literature, as evidenced by several recent anthologies.³ But Nussbaum, while proceeding with the rigour of the professional philosopher, has made some particularly bold claims for the ability of literature to assist us in working out how we should live, including the statement that 'There is something about the act of reading that is exemplary for conduct.'⁴

The difficulties of this kind of ethical approach to literature are, in part, a target of Sophie Ratcliffe's On Sympathy. It is a study of the dramatic monologue that challenges 'critical assumptions about sympathetic engagement and ethical progress' that have, following Robert Langbaum's seminal The Poetry of Experience: The Dramatic Monologue in Modern Literary Tradition (1957), 'characterized discussions of the genre' (p. 4). Individual chapters focus on three dramatic monologues that allude to Shakespeare's The Tempest: Robert Browning's 'Caliban upon Setebos; or, Natural Theology on the Island' (1864), W. H. Auden's The Sea and the Mirror (1942–4), and Samuel Beckett's How It Is (1964). The Tempest has, of course, haunted the imagination of scores of writers and artists from Dryden on, inspiring countless adaptations. However, Ratcliffe argues that this 'chain of remembrance is analogous to the difficulty of understanding others' and therefore allows 'us to see the ideals and the fractured actualities of feeling and understanding' (p. 3). But before discussing the monologues, the book makes 'a general survey of the relationship between analogy, allegory, sympathy, and theology from which Browning, Beckett, and Auden work' (p. 4). As a whole, the book aims to 'trace the ways in which we think about ethics and sympathetic understanding, ranging from the manner in which people comprehend each other, to the ways in which they think about God' (p. 2).

If all this sounds over-ambitious for a 200-odd-page monograph of literary criticism, then it has to be admitted that On Sympathy is occasionally over-ambitious. However, it does offer an original approach to the dramatic monologue and an unusual perspective on The Tempest's extra-ordinary afterlife, as well as fine readings of its three main authors and their work. Indeed, it is at its strongest when focusing on particular texts, rather than in its more theoretical opening section. Furthermore, it is a notable attempt to mount...