Chapter 2
The Compassion Machine
Theories of Fellow-Feeling, 1570–1692
How do we imagine the relation between political life and poetic representation? In Jean de La Taille’s “Art de la tragédie,” written between 1570 and 1572, the Huguenot playwright notes that the French court is surrounded by horror “si pitoiable” [“so pitiful”] that tragedy risks being too much after “les piteux desastres advenus nagueres en la France par nos guerres civiles” [“the pitiful disasters which came about of late in France because of our civil wars”].1 La Taille’s essay, reprinted three times before the end of the wars, insisted that tragedy’s goal is to move its audience through emotion for the “piteuses ruines des grands seigneurs” (226) [“pitiful ruins of great lords”] but that what we see on stage must be distanced from us, depicting someone else’s suffering instead. La Taille’s observations make brief reference to Aristotle and Horace, but he assures his dedicatee Henriette de Clèves that he is suiting his discourse to her ears and not those of the erudite alone. This is a domesticated discourse; it proposes a new commonsense language for writing about tragedy, and it is also bound up in France’s domestic piteousness even as it seeks to distance it. This careful affective distancing will be central to the French stage in the century to follow.
Yet La Taille did not succeed in distancing the memory of the wars, and he did not succeed in distancing Aristotle either.2 In this chapter I trace a seventeenth-century story about tragedy, ethics, and pity, showing how a particular Aristotelian formulation about pity comes to structure a century’s reflection on both tragedy and moral life. In the Rhetoric Aristotle maintains that pity is “a certain pain occasioned by an apparently destructive evil or pain’s occurring to one who does not deserve it, which the pitier might expect to suffer himself or that one of his own would.”3 These terms suggesting that pity is a form of fear for ourselves, along with the insistence that the sufferer must not deserve their suffering, are repeated in the Poetics, whose passages on the question provoked vigorous debate in France (even before the text itself was translated into French later in the century). Some early moderns insisted that theatrical pity and terror purged all passions, others that they addressed only the smaller and more precise emotional machinery pertaining to pity and terror themselves.4 Yet the Aristotelian formulation was to be found on both sides of that argument and throughout a very broad range of reflections on tragedy or ethics. The standard seventeenth-century reading of pity sees it as never entirely disinterested since the pity one feels for another stems from a fear for one’s own interests, and in describing this position early moderns pulled on one or the other of the Aristotelian source texts, as their interests or professional obligations dictated. The seventeenth century’s reflections on Aristotle sought to theorize suffering in the context of a particular classical tradition and perhaps to hold its horror at bay in so doing.
In this chapter I draw together moral and dramatic theory, two different sorts of accounts that draw on Aristotle’s conception of pity. (I take up more explicitly theological discussions of compassion in Chapter 3; these categories overlap to some extent, but the texts of this chapter draw on a classical as well as a Christian vocabulary and direct themselves more to civility than theology, even if they sometimes imagine the two hand in hand.) In the first section of the chapter I read a series of essayists and moralists in dialog with Aristotle, with slantingly different relations to him; in the second, I ask how dramatic theorists elucidated the Aristotelian formula differently and consider what sort of moral theory they propose. Many of these writers are reading each other. To try and bring out that reading and reflection, I have staged the series chronologically, although they do not form a progression as much as a continual oscillation around two affective positions.
Both moral and dramatic theory often revolved around the affective draw of literary forms. In dramatic theory, of course, the imagined emotional relation between stage and spectator is central to any argument. Moral theory frequently references a staged scene but also calls on a different sort of scene of reading, in which a relation to a literary text brings about a different relation to compassion. In both cases, these reflections on the emotions of aesthetic response gesture to new imaginings of civility and sociality. How does this ideal literary response, either reading or spectating, shape the structures of compassion?
Compassion and the Self: Michel de Montaigne, Pierre Charron
For some commentators of the period, the observation that pity indicates a concern with the self suggested that pity could be only a narrow and almost mean response to suffering, prompted by the self-love so key to the thinking of seventeenth-century moralists. For others, the ritual observation of this same pairing leads to a broader reflection on pity that understands the connection to mark a human vulnerability that cannot be dismissed as mere weakness. Some writers move across this affective spectrum and even mock it. Montaigne clearly draws on the familiar pairing of pity and fear when he notes lightly of his kidney stones that his mind tells him, “La crainte et pitié que le peuple a de ce mal te sert de matiere de gloire.” [“The fear and pity that people feel for this illness is a subject of vainglory for you.”]5 Elsewhere he comments on this desire to turn the pitiful self into a spectacle for others, something he describes as “cette humeur puerile et inhumaine, qui faict que nous desirons d’esmouvoir par nos maux la compassion et le deuil en nos amis” [“that childish and inhuman humor that makes us want to arouse compassion and mourning in our friends by our misfortunes”].6 Montaigne’s insides are not just pained by kidney stones, for even in the generous movements of compassion, he notes the sharp interior turn of a less pleasing and less definable emotion: “Au milieu de la compassion, nous sentons au dedans je ne sçay quelle aigre-douce poincte de volupté maligne à voir souffrir autruy.” [“In the midst of compassion we feel within us I know not what bittersweet pricking of malicious pleasure in seeing other suffer.”]7 Yet Montaigne puts his bittersweet interior into necessary consideration with the wider world. Jean Starobinski argues of “Des coches” that “it is Montaigne’s initial attention to his own bodily discomfort that prepares and makes possible the lively sympathy he feels with the suffering endured by other men, inhabitants of a remote corner of the earth.”8 Despite his sharp attention to the self, or rather because of it, Montaigne essays the space for a more supple and generous compassion, as we also saw in the previous chapter.
In contrast, seventeenth-century responses tend to demarcate more sharply the borders between responses to self and others. In the Tusculan Disputations, Cicero suggests that some people are prone to pity as others might have a proclivity to infirmity; seventeenth-century accounts eagerly subdivide and catalog the various causes of such proclivities, often attributing them to different social types or to different genders.9 The neo-Stoic Pierre Charron, usually a keen recycler of Montaigne, sets out these social variants neatly in one small chapter of De la sagesse which seems to draw on Aristotle and Cicero rather than Montaigne as reader of them:
Nous souspirons avec les affligez, compatissons à leur mal, ou pource que par un secret consentement nous participons au mal des uns des autres, ou bien que nous craignions en nous mesmes ce qui arrive aux autres.
Mais cecy se fait doublement, dont y a double misericorde: l’une fort bonne, qui est de volonté, et par effect secourir les affligez sans se troubler ou affliger soy-mesme, et sans se ramollir ou relascher de la Justice ou de la Divinité. C’est la vertu tant recommandée en la Religion, qui se trouve aux Saincts et aux Sages: l’autre est une passion d’ame foible, une sotte et feminine pitié qui vient de mollesse, trouble d’esprit, loge volontiers aux femmes, enfans.10
[We sigh with the afflicted and compassionate with their suffering either because through a secret consent we participate in the sufferings of others, or because we fear for ourselves what is happening
