Sympathy as cognitive impairment in Robin Jenkins’s The Cone-Gatherers: the limits of homo sacer
Gavin Miller [1]
The Scottish author Robin Jenkins’s 1955 novel, The Cone Gatherers, is an allegory of the Nazis’ persecution of the disabled that lends itself well to reading in terms of Giorgi Agamben’s account of homo sacer. The gamekeeper, Duror, who persecutes the mentally and physically disabled cone-gatherer, Calum McPhie, is analogous to Agamben’s medicalised sovereign, who issues biopolitical judgements on who has a life worthy of being lived, and who is a “subhuman” homo sacer. Agamben’s suspicion of sacrificial narratives of loss and restitution also resonates with The Cone-Gatherers, a text which subverts the idea that death, disability, and stoic endurance are inevitably redeemed. Jenkins’s novel, however, diverges from Agamben’s theories by offering a detailed representation of sympathy as a faculty that is regarded in contemporary Western culture as a variety of cognitive impairment (and, indeed, as a form of unmanliness). For Jenkins, the social construction of sympathy as a form of disgusting mental disability is the means by which the political and juristic logic outlined by Agamben can overcome our capacity for universalistic moral relations.
The Scottish author Robin Jenkins (1912-2005) has a significant place in contemporary Scottish culture. Although little known outside Scotland, Jenkins was the author of around thirty novels; of these, The Cone-Gatherers (1955), is seen as one of his finest, and as a canonical work of twentieth-century Scottish literature. The Cone-Gatherers uses its setting in rural Scotland during the Second World War to stage an allegory for the persecution by the Nazis of disabled persons (and, by extension, of other varieties of alleged Untermenschen, such as homosexuals, the Jews, the Roma and Bolshevists). In his introduction to the 2004 Canongate Classics edition, Cairns Craig argues that Jenkins’s novel anticipates the strategy employed by another Scot, Muriel Spark (1918-2006), in her internationally-known The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961):
Like Spark’s novel, it addressed the horrors of twentieth-century history by seeming to ignore them. Spark presented the rise and collapse of fascism through the life of a Scottish schoolteacher; Jenkins dramatised the evils of Nazism through the lives of two brothers, gathering cones in a forest because they were physically and mentally incapable of participating more usefully in the war effort. (Craig, Introduction vii)
In Jenkins’s novel, the analogue to the Nazis resides in the figure of the local gamekeeper, John Duror, a man who has been driven to despair by his deeply troubled relationship with his paraplegic wife, Peggy, and her vindictive and belittling mother, Mrs Lochie. The place of the Nazi’s ‘sub-human’ victims is taken by the two McPhie brothers, Neil and Calum. The latter, who is both a “dwarf” (55) and regarded in his 1940s West-of-Scotland community as an “imbecile” (64, 124), arouses in Duror a visceral disgust and an obsessive hatred. Calum is especially vulnerable to Duror’s machinations not so much because of his physical disability, but because—by the standards of his community—he is abnormally sensitive to the sufferings and feelings of others, including animals. Duror exploits this putative weakness by drafting Calum into a deer hunt in the hope that the sight and sound of the animals’ deaths will cause him to break down in front of the local gentry. The gamekeeper’s belief is that Calum’s display of “drivelling” compassion (39) will so disgust the local landowner, Lady Runcie-Campbell, that she will demand the removal of such an “obscenity” from her woods (39). The plan, however, does not fully succeed: although Lady Runcie-Campbell is embarrassed and disgusted by Calum’s indecorous behaviour, she is eventually dissuaded from expelling the cone-gatherers. But Calum’s respite is only temporary: events come to a head when Neil, who has increasingly come to dislike Lady Runcie-Campbell, refuses to rescue her son from a tall tree which he has climbed. Duror, with this refusal as spurious legitimation for his pathological hatred, confronts the brothers, shoots Calum dead, and then kills himself.
Jenkins’s text seems tailor-made for theorisation in the conceptual scheme developed by Giorgi Agamben. Calum, who is to Duror a “subhuman” fit for extermination, is a good example of what Agamben calls homo sacer. This archaic legal term is used by Agamben to refer to those whose purely biological or “naked” existence is outside of the political community and the protection it affords. Homo sacer, Agamben tells us, was defined under Roman law, according to Pompeius Festus in his De verborum significatu, in the following way: “It is not permitted to sacrifice this man [homo sacer], yet he who kills him will not be condemned for homicide” (qtd. in Homo Sacer 71); violence against the merely zoological “bare life” (8) of homo sacer “is classifiable neither as sacrifice nor as homicide” (82). Although the term itself may not endure in modern legal and political discourse, the phenomenon of homo sacer persists, Agamben argues, and may be seen in events such as the Holocaust, where Jews, disabled persons, and so forth, were afforded the same subhuman status. Indeed, all political sovereignty, according to Agamben, resides in the power to classify human life as homo sacer, and to act accordingly (Homo Sacer 83).
Agamben’s ideas inherit the work of two quite different political thinkers. The first of these is Michel Foucault, who furnishes the notion of “biopolitics”, defined as “the endeavour, begun in the eighteenth century, to rationalize the problems presented to governmental practice by the phenomena characteristic of a group of living human beings constituted as a population: health, sanitation, birthrate, longevity, race” (“Biopolitics” 73). With the development of biopolitics, according to Foucault, there comes a redefinition of political sovereignty, and its power over life and death. If the sovereign power takes life, this is no longer the exercise of a self-sufficient prerogative. Instead the right to kill derives from a more fundamental “right of the social body to ensure, maintain, or develop its life” (Will to Knowledge 136). Killing is now legitimated by the biopolitical defence of the population as a whole; so that, for instance, capital punishment is no longer justified by the enormity of the criminal’s misdeeds, but by society’s supposed “right to kill those who represented a kind of biological danger to others” (Foucault, Will to Knowledge 138).
Agamben’s account of homo sacer combines such Foucauldian ideas with a quite different tradition of ideas on sovereignty—namely, those developed by the German legal theorist Carl Schmitt. Schmitt argues that—like art, science, and morality—the political realm is an autonomous domain with its own particular kind of validity claim: “The specific political distinction to which political actions and motives can be reduced is that between friend and enemy”, an opposition which “corresponds to the relatively independent criteria of other antitheses: good and evil in the moral sphere, beautiful and ugly in the aesthetic sphere, and so on” (26). Agamben, however, finds in homo sacer a political distinction “more original than the Schmittian opposition between friend and enemy, fellow citizen and foreigner” (110). In his development of Schmitt’s thesis, the more fundamental political distinction is not between friend and foe (be the latter external to the nation, or internal to it); rather, it is between properly human life and its biopolitical enemy, homo sacer. “The fundamental categorical pair of Western politics”, insists Agamben, “is not that of friend / enemy but that of bare life / political existence, zoē / bios, exclusion / inclusion” (Homo Sacer 8).
Political theories that locate sovereignty in the people, rather than in the ruler or the state, may be seen under Agamben’s scrutiny as a ruse: behind such apparent enfranchisement, resides the biopolitical power to decide whether a particular individual or group is, or is not, bare life. Only by such a decision may a person in fact be taken out of the realm of homo sacer and admitted to the supposedly sovereign populace: “In modern biopolitics, sovereign is he who decides on the value or the nonvalue of life as such” (Agamben, Homo Sacer 142). As a corollary to his thesis on the illusoriness of popular sovereignty, Agamben argues that ruler sovereignty in the contemporary biopolitical state may—logically enough—devolve to medical doctors: “the physician and the sovereign seem to exchange roles” (Homo Sacer 143) because the former can often have an autonomous role in deciding when a patient’s existence has become a bare life that may be ended without homicide (or, indeed, without sacrifice). The medical profession under the Nazi regime is thus for Agamben the ideal type of the sovereign power of the medic in modern society. The Nazi doctors’ decisions over who numbers amongst the lebensunwerten Lebens [lives unworthy of being lived] “is clearly not an ethical one, which would involve the expectations and legitimate desires of the individual. It is, rather, a political concept in which what is at issue is the extreme metamorphosis of sacred life—which may be killed but not sacrificed—on which sovereign power is founded” (Homo Sacer 142).
Agamben’s thesis immediately suggests a reading of The Cone-Gatherers in which Duror, as a gamekeeper charged with managing an animal population, represents metaphorically the biopolitical power of the sovereign leader. In conversation with Lady Runcie-Campbell, for instance, Duror insists that the local deer, who threaten the trees needed for the war effort, are an internal political enemy:
[Lady Runcie-Campbell:] “I won’t have it, Duror. Whatever any government says, I refuse to call deer vermin. They’re far too beautiful.”
“They’re enemies, my lady.”
“Yes, call them that. Not all our enemies are ugly, cruel, savage, and beastly; some are beautiful and gentle.” (57)
Duror seems to regard the biopolitical relation to such “vermin” as the primary form of the friend-enemy distinction. He specifically refuses—in the name of an international humanity—to accept the jingoistic assumption that the Axis powers are an alien Other. He does so, however, by replacing the traditional inter- or intra-national political enemy (as described by Schmitt) with the “sub-human” life of the cone-gatherers: “he thought how incomprehensible and unjust it was that in Europe, in Africa, and in China, many tall, strong, healthy, brave, intelligent men were killing one another while in that dirty little hut those two sub-humans lived in peace, as if under God’s protection” (22). Calum, who is to Duror “a half-man, a freak, an imbecile” because of his disabilities (21), should therefore be exterminated precisely because, in an era of universal human rights, the sub-human homo sacer becomes the enemy: “He [Duror] had read that the Germans were putting idiots and cripples to death in gas chambers. Outwardly, as everybody expected, he condemned such barbarity; inwardly, thinking of idiocy and crippledness not as abstractions but as embodied in the crouchbacked cone-gatherer, he had profoundly approved” (21-22). “Surely”, reflects Duror, the deaths of Calum and Neil “could not be called murder” (22).
The symbolic equivalences set out by The Cone-Gatherers would be clear without Agamben’s theory. But Agamben’s account of homo sacer also undermines readings that might be inclined to put a sacrificial gloss upon the death and suffering that occurs in this novel. Cairns Craig, for instance, develops a reading of The Cone-Gatherers by drawing upon its apparent intertextual relation with J.G. Frazer’s descriptions of primitive religious and sacrificial rituals in The Golden Bough. To Frazer, myths and legends could be understood as folk memories that contained traces of early religious practices such as human sacrifice. He infers for instance the existence of “divine kings on whose life the fertility of men, of cattle, and of vegetation is believed to depend, and who are put to death […] in order that their divine spirit may be transmitted to their successors in full vigour” (Frazer 269). Duror, to Craig, is exactly such a divine king; and his hatred of Calum is akin to the so-called “mitigation” of sacrifice—in the manner also described by Frazer—by its displacement onto “social outcasts that did not matter” (Frazer 582). “Duror’s heart”, writes Craig, “is the heart of an ancient mystery which is to be re-enacted in the wood in the sacrificial destruction of those who are substitutes for himself, in the hope of bringing life back to himself, the failing king of the wood who can endure no longer. Calum, shot by Duror, will hang on the tree in an inverted crucifixion” (Modern Scottish Novel 148). Calum’s death is, in this reading, a return of the repressed in which primitive rituals of sacrifice re-appear, mocking modern narratives of Enlightenment. By analogy, the slaughter of the Second World War is also an expression of a repressed drive to human sacrifice: “Duror is the resurrection of an ancient, mythic force […] the eruption of the primitive back into the modern world, requiring a vast sacrifice of innocents in order to appease it” (Craig, Modern Scottish Novel 148).
Yet it is far from clear whether the text itself enforces such a reading. A macro-historical analogy may here prove useful. As Agamben reminds his readers, “The wish to lend a sacrificial aura to the extermination of the Jews by means of the term ‘Holocaust’ was […] an irresponsible historiographical blindness” (Homo Sacer 114); “The truth—which is difficult for the victims to face, but which we must have the courage not to cover with sacrificial veils—is that the Jews were exterminated not in a mad and giant holocaust but exactly as Hitler had announced, ‘as lice’, which is to say, as bare life” (Homo Sacer 114). The problem with “the term ‘holocaust’”, elaborates Agamben, is that it has acquired “the meaning of the ‘supreme sacrifice in the sphere of a complete devotion to sacred and superior motives’” (Remnants of Auschwitz 30); “the term impl[ies] an unacceptable equation between crematoria and altars” (Remnants of Auschwitz 31). The same point is made by Dominick Lacapra, who remarks that the word “‘Holocaust’ connotes a sacrificial offering, and its use threatens to sacralise events” (813). This is why, from a perspective informed by Agamben’s writings, “shoah”, which means “catastrophe” in modern Hebrew, may be preferable to the word “holocaust”. The alternative nomenclature of “Shoah” does not imply, as “Holocaust” might, that the genocide of the Jews by the Nazis was an unwitting sacrifice that had to take place for some higher purpose (for example, in order to establish the state of Israel).
What is true for the macro-history of the real Shoah holds also for the fictional micro-history of The Cone-Gatherers. To sacralise Calum’s destruction is to collude in a narrative game in which murder is a sacrifice that serves some hidden or higher motive and purpose. Although Calum’s death does not (as with the Shoah) found a new political community, and although modern readers presumably would not look forward to the renewal of the woods through human sacrifice, there are other possibilities for a supposed “higher meaning” that might be offered to the reader. There is, for example, the attitude of Lady Runcie-Campbell toward Calum’s murder. As the latter’s corpse hangs from a pine tree, and just after a second shot announces Duror’s suicide, Lady Runcie-Campbell finds a kind of cathartic significance in these events: “she went down on her knees, near the blood and the spilt cones. She could not pray, but she could weep; and as she wept pity, and purified hope, and joy, welled up in her heart” (223). Lady Runcie-Campbell’s response drapes an aesthetic, dramaturgical veil over Duror’s murder of Calum: the “pity, and purified hope, and joy” that “welled up in her heart” is identifiably the tragic catharsis of Aristotelian poetics; it is emphatically not moral outrage at the extermination of a powerless human being. Regardless of the text’s own logic and hierarchy of voices (which may or may not authorise Lady Runcie-Campbell), and regardless of Jenkins’s own intentions for his novel, there seems little wisdom in this redemptive gloss upon Calum’s destruction. If Neil and Calum do indeed represent those oppressed under the Nazi regime (and, in particular, those persecuted because of their disability), then to aesthetically “sanctify” Calum’s death as a tragic spectacle is to obscure his more fundamental status as an insignificant social outcast.
Agamben’s suspicion of the sacrificial narratives that may be woven around bare life holds further lessons for a reading of The Cone-Gatherers, since the experience of disability per se also seems particularly vulnerable to consolatory and redemptive narratives. Paralysis—to take one example—may be cast as a loss or sacrifice (of the power of voluntary movement) which is redeemed by the acquisition of a more developed spiritual condition (of bodily disengagement). G. Thomas Couser describes this religious narrative: “One significant pattern […] is the redemptive shifting of emphasis from the body to the mind. Self-rehabilitation involves in large part redefining the self as more a function of mind and spirit than of the flesh” (185); in this way, there arises out of paralysis “a narrative of restitution where none would seem possible” (186).
To compare Peggy Duror with the figure of Clifford Chatterley in D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928) may provide an instructive contrast, and a sense of the way in which Jenkins refuses to collude with additional possibilities for a sacrificial narrative. Although Lawrence’s novel is immensely critical of Clifford Chatterley and his circle, it nonetheless presents his disability as the separation of mind from body, and the cultivation—indeed, the hypertrophy—of the former. Clifford Chatterley, “the lower half of his body, from the hips down, paralysed for ever” (5), suffers from an “insentience”, from “the slight vacancy […] of a cripple” (6). This leads him to an entirely cerebral existence: Clifford’s paralysis is a metaphor for the “life of the mind” (36) led by his social circle, one of whom remarks, ‘“We’re only cerebrating make-shifts, mechanical and intellectual experiments”’ (75). It is this life of “stubborn stoicism” (62) into which Connie Chatterley is being inducted, at least before her redemptive encounter with Mellors and his fully-functioning lower body.
Peggy, by contrast, is not used by Jenkins as a symbol for Stoic ataraxia. This does not mean that his representation of her disability is entirely innocent, since the third-person narrative discourse of The Cone-Gatherers never focalises upon Peggy. The story is instead told through the consciousness and perceptions of the other characters (including even Lady Runcie-Campbell’s dog). Peggy, by virtue of her disability, remains somehow unrepresented as an agent, and is only the object of other people’s reports and inferences. But, whatever the supposed invitation to disembodiment offered by paralysis, Peggy is represented as obstinately attached to her corporeal existence. As the opening of The Cone-Gatherers makes clear, she still sexually desires her husband, enjoys food, longs for children, makes herself up, and listens to lively dance music even though dancing itself is now impossible for her (29-32).
Jenkins’s resistance to narratives of sacrifice and restitution also extends to Duror, who does not find himself improved by the experience of being for twenty years a carer to his paralysed spouse. This is despite the “sacrificial veil” that obscures the perceptions of Duror’s friend, Effie Morton, who offers him a sexual affair, thinking to herself that “suffering had brought to him distinction of body and mind” (48). Duror, though, is on the verge of a homicidal outburst; his quiet endurance hides the recognition that these redemptive narratives are delusions: he feels that “in his heart and brain were thorns bitterer than those that bled the brow of Christ” (48)—that, in other words, there shall be nothing to redeem his sufferings (and so establish them as genuinely sacrificial).
The “sacrificial veil” is becoming increasingly transparent and tattered. What is gradually revealed, as Duror descends into madness, is Peggy’s status as homo sacer. The wish to exterminate Peggy lurks in the edges of Duror’s mind, and is recognised only by his mother-in-law, who taunts him, “‘It’s a pity isn’t it, […] she doesn’t die and leave you in peace?’” (30). Duror’s killing of a deer during the hunt is, as the text makes clear, a displacement of his wish to kill Peggy as he might a wounded animal, as if she were indeed homo sacer. He pursues the deer, “laughing in some kind of berserk joy”, “cut[ting] its throat savagely” (89), as he acts out his displaced fantasy of slaughtering Peggy. His misery returns though, as the realisation gradually dawns on him that “his wife was not dead, killed by […] hunting knife” (92).
Agamben’s account of homo sacer clarifies Duror’s metaphorical role as biopolitical sovereign, and it challenges readings that might see Jenkins’s novel as supporting, rather than subverting, narratives of sacrifice and restitution. However, The Cone-Gatherers also offers materials that are resistant to Agamben’s account of Western political and legal structures, because Jenkins presents as a counterweight to Duror’s destructive impulses a universalistic moral psychology based on the cultivation of sympathy. Of course, to imply that moral psychology can oppose Agamben’s juristic theory may well seem a non sequitur. To Agamben, legal mechanisms are independent of morality: “Law is solely directed toward judgment, independent of truth and justice. This is shown beyond doubt by the force of judgment that even an unjust sentence carries with it. The ultimate aim of law is the production of a res judicata, in which the sentence becomes the substitute for the true and the just, being held as true despite its falsity and injustice” (Agamben Remnants of Auschwitz 18). Agamben, in other words, endorses what is known as the “separation thesis” in the debate over legal positivism: namely, “the thesis that there are no necessary moral constraints on the existence of legal systems or legal norms” (Murphy 25-26). (In fact, Agamben goes beyond positivism in his assertion that a legal judgement may even be based on factual falsehood, and not merely counter to morality.)
Yet Jenkins himself would have found it difficult to accept the positivist separation of law from morality, for he was a conscientious objector during the Second World War. As he comments in retrospect, “I keep reading now about how this was a good war [the Second World War]; about how this was a war to destroy evil. Now I wasn’t concerned about objecting to this war or that war; I was objecting to war: I’m still objecting to war” (Murray 117). His objections were not religious (he had been brought up in an atheistic family), but political, historical, and ultimately moral. In his response to the first tribunal that assessed his claim to be an objector, Jenkins refused to acknowledge historical parallels that might have cast the Second World War as a morally justified conflict; he argued, for instance, that the American Civil War was fought to unify the USA rather than to abolish slavery (Murray 122). Although Jenkins was offered a non-combatant role in the Pioneer Corps, he requested a second tribunal, where he received “conditional exemption, if I took up forestry or agriculture or something or other” (Murray 122). It was in his experience as a forestry worker that he found the setting for The Cone-Gatherers.
Jenkins’s scepticism about the morality of war might seem congruent with the critique developed by Schmitt, and inherited (with modifications) by Agamben. But Schmitt’s intent is quite unlike Jenkins’s. Schmitt does not consider war immoral; rather he considers it to be separable from morality, much as a legal positivist believes law to be conceptually independent of moral rightness. Jenkins, on the other hand, finds morally repugnant the putative legal obligations of the citizen to the state or sovereign in time of war. He considers the example of an “airman dropping bombs on a city not knowing who is down there”, and the supposed legitimacy of this act when “it’s your country that orders you to do that!”: “What is a country? It’s a collection of people, how many millions? It’s not really a collection of people like that, it’s just a government, but how many people have to be there so that it becomes morally right?” (Murray 133). For Jenkins, the friend-foe distinction, like law, cannot be autonomous of morality; there is no “higher loyalty” to one’s country which “discounts everything else” (Murray 134).
Regardless of the competing virtues of the positions held by Agamben and Jenkins, it is the latter’s conviction that law should be inseparable from morality that informs The Cone-Gatherers. What Jenkins represents as an explanation for the improper separation of the two, and for the ascendancy of a biopolitical logic, is a quite particular discourse of disability. In The Cone-Gatherers, a quasi-medical and pseudo-psychological vocabulary of denigration and stigmatisation constructs sympathy as a disability (and, as I shall show, a particularly disgusting one). Although Duror, as noted above, frequently refers to Calum as an “imbecile”, this categorisation is as much due to the latter’s inordinate capacity for empathetic fellow-feeling as to his putative lack of intelligence. The text divides between those who see such sympathy as an impairment of cognition, and those who are more charitable: “‘It’s not for us, Neil […] to say that it’s a mistake to break your heart over an injured and dying creature, even if that creature’s only a deer’” remarks Tulloch, the cone-gatherers’ employer, and a member of the latter group (96). In the former class is Lady Runcie-Campbell, who, as well as being repelled by Calum’s “‘abnormal squeamishness’” (62), also finds a focus for her anxieties in the “‘over-sensitive conscience’” of her son, Roderick (163). To Lady Runcie-Campbell, the equation of sympathy with mental disability is axiomatic: she thinks of her son as “puny in body and backward in mind” (139); frets over the “mawkish debilitating stuff in his mind” (173); and recalls her husband’s warning that Roderick is “faulty in mind” (114). After Roderick rebels against her expulsion of the cone-gatherers from a beach hut in which they have taken shelter during a storm, she resolves “to have a long talk with her son on this subject of pity”, in the hope that his heart may yet be “fortified with a robust and intelligent appraisal of humanity” (163).
The putative opposition between sympathy and intelligence is clarified by Roderick’s perceptions. On an abortive trip to deliver a cake to the cone-gatherers, he mentally re-enchants the world: “The wood was […] full of terrifying presences. A knot in a tree glowered like a green face. Low hanging branches were evil birds” (145). In similar fashion, when Calum sympathises with the hunted deer, his empathy overlaps with an animistic expectation:
Calum […] was a deer hunted by remorseless men. Moaning and gasping, he fled after them, with no hope of saving them from slaughter but with the impulse to share it with them. […] all the time he felt, as the deer must have, the indifference of all nature […]: presences which might have been expected to help or at least sympathise. (88)
Sympathy is in one way (pseudo‑)irrational because it seems to lead the mind back toward animism, rather than forward to the disenchanted nature of modernity. Indeed, Jenkins’s text even plays with its readers’ expectations, derived from John Ruskin’s aesthetics, that good literature is sparing in its use of such cognitively impaired representations. By the standards of a readership who have been warned against the pathetic fallacy, the opening paragraphs of The Cone-Gatherers seem wilfully perverse in their use of anthropomorphic devices: “Seals that had been playing tag in and out of the seaweed under the surface had disappeared round the point, like children gone home for tea” (7); “daylight announced it must go” (8); “Dusk like a breathing drifted in” (8). For Ruskin, who coined the term “pathetic fallacy”, the over-use of this device was found in the work of poets “too weak to deal fully with what is before them or upon them” (Ruskin pt. 4 ch. 12 par. 8), those “men who feel strongly, think weakly, and see untruly” (Ruskin pt. 4 ch. 12 par. 9). To escape such impairment of cognition, there must occur “a grander condition when the intellect also rises, till it is strong enough to assert its rule against, or together with, the utmost efforts of the passions” (Ruskin pt. 4 ch. 12 par. 8).
Ruskin’s language indicates the familiar model of a war in the soul between reason and the passions, in which the intellect must overcome the urge to attribute a psychic life to inanimate objects. Yet Ruskin was not so rash as to argue that the attribution of psychic life to living things arises also in the impairment of cognition by strong feeling. The Cone-Gatherers, however, was published in a century, and indeed a particular period, when sympathy was assigned a limited, almost non-existent, role within epistemology and moral philosophy. In post-war positivist philosophy, sympathy (or more precisely, Verstehen, or “understanding”) was permissible as a heuristic device in social science; but any hypotheses so generated were to be validated by the observation of statistical correlations (see, for instance, Abel). In other contexts, such as B.F. Skinner’s behaviourism, the very idea of a sympathetic relation to another mind was regarded, according to İlham Dilman, as “the last ditch into which the animism of primitive people has retreated in the civilised world. People used to think that such an inner agent, modelled on themselves, was responsible for the rain and the wind. They no longer think so, but they still think of such an agent as being responsible for human actions” (15). For a consistent strong behaviourist, as R.D. Laing remarks, the “sympathetic compassionate bond between different creatures” could only be “a relic of our prescientific human mentality” (31); the observer who allowed himself to believe in the suffering of a lab rat or a human being was subject to the same delusion by which a primitive tribesman sought to propitiate the angry heavens. To be sympathetic was indeed to be imbecilic.
Jenkins’s novel suggests, though, that sympathy was ejected from rationality, and reduced to cognitive impairment, on grounds other than simply the (mistaken) claims of scientific reason, for The Cone-Gatherers represents an association between normative masculinity and a resistance to sympathy. This is apparent, for instance, in Jenkins’s depiction of the woodland in which Duror and the cone-gatherers move. To Lady Runcie-Campbell, the trees seem something like a patriarchal community: they are “silent aloof giants which represented the barren past and the anguished stunted present rather than the green abundant future” (141). The presence of the sympathetic, sensitive, empathetic Calum within the woods—“He was now in the wood, protected, not to be driven out or shot at or trapped or trampled on”, reflects Duror (18)—therefore affronts and insults the standards of masculine relationships. Even Neil finds himself compelled to represent tender feeling as unmanly and cognitively immature. While sheltering in the beach hut near the woods, Calum and Neil find a cache of broken and abandoned toys:
It was a small wooden doll, naked, with a comical red-cheeked face; one leg was missing. Calum held it tenderly.
“It’s broken,” he murmured. (158)
To take the broken doll would be more than a theft; it is also unmanly: for according to Neil, “‘It would be stealing. Put it back. In any case, it’s just a doll, fit for a wee lassie. Put it back’” (158).
Calum’s tender relation to the doll is—like his sympathy with animals—both unmanly and childish, and it is accordingly discouraged by Neil. Such repression of tenderness was identified in the 1930s by the psychoanalytically oriented psychiatrist Ian D. Suttie (1889-1935), whose monograph The Origins of Love and Hate may be regarded as an avant la lettre manifesto for object relations psychoanalysis (Rudnytsky 6). Jenkins may or may not have known of Suttie’s work (both were Scots), but the latter’s analysis of Western cultural norms is certainly consonant with The Cone-Gatherers. Suttie argues that “there is a taboo on tenderness or anything else that smacks of infantility. A man may take a condescending interest in children (under the guise of amusing them); but how many men exhibit a real tenderness for babies?” (83). Indeed, says Suttie, masculinity is constructed upon the repression and ejection of tender feeling. The process begins with “the ‘gang’ of larger or smaller boys who idealize what is called euphemistically ‘manliness’, in contradistinction to ‘babyishness’ and ‘girlishness’” (Suttie 81). And it continues into adulthood, for “[t]hese little boys when grown up and ‘civilized’, have no less inhibition in expression and embarrassment in receiving cordial regard. Sentiment makes them ‘squirm’. ‘It is simply not done.’ It is ‘wet.’” (Suttie 82). The result is a masculinist society in which “[e]conomic practice and the ideals of daily life express our admiration for ‘hard shell’, hard-boiled, hard-bitten men who have ‘steeled their souls’” (Suttie 85). Suttie’s paradigm of pathological masculinity is the template from which Duror is cut. The gamekeeper’s damaged capacity for sympathy—the deep-seated taboo on tenderness apparent in the “savage callousness” (27) of his personality—is the real cognitive impairment in the text, as he persists in what the local doctor identifies as a “pretence of self-possession and invulnerability” (27).
The Cone-Gatherers therefore diverges from Agamben by insisting that law and morality have only come to be speciously separated because sympathy—which Jenkins presents as the foundation of moral relations—has become something that must be ruthlessly extirpated. Sympathy must be socially constructed as a cognitive impairment precisely because it debilitates and disables the political and juristic logic of homo sacer, and its intellectual antecedent, the friend-foe distinction posited by Schmitt. Jenkins’s valorisation of sympathy is, however, somewhat unfashionable, at least in the discourses of literary criticism, and perhaps especially within disability studies, where it may be viewed as a diversion from serious socio-cultural analysis. “Disability seems so obvious”, writes Lennard J. Davis, “What could be simpler to understand? One simply has to imagine the loss of the limb, the absent sense, and one is half-way there” (xvi). Sympathy may thus be an ideology, in which the imaginative reconstruction of suffering stands in for genuine testimony from disabled persons. But there are more optimistic accounts of sympathy within disability studies. Susan Wendell, for instance, seems to concede the potential moral significance of sympathy, but argues that disability may present an emotional barrier to the sympathetic reconstruction of another’s experience:
it is not simply because they are in able bodies that the able-bodied fail to identify with the disabled. Able-bodied people can often make the imaginative leap into the skins of people physically unlike themselves […] Something more powerful than being in a different body is at work. Suffering caused by the body, and the inability to control the body, are despised, pitied, and above all, feared. (248)
Another proponent of sympathy, Martha Nussbaum, sees “empathy” (her preferred term) as neither sufficient nor necessary for compassionate relations: a skilled torturer may empathise with his suffering victim, but without feeling inclined to relieve the latter’s agonies; and we may behave compassionately towards creatures with whom we have no significant empathetic bond (Upheavals of Thought 328-30). But empathy, thinks Nussbaum, is still an important part of compassionate relations in their everyday form. In her writings on disability and animal rights, Nussbaum argues that we should use “sympathetic imagining, despite its fallibility, to extend and refine our moral judgements” (Frontiers of Justice 355). Like Jenkins, and unlike Agamben, she analyses Nazi genocide in terms of obstructed sympathy rather than by using political or juristic categories such as homo sacer:
empathy does count for something, standing between us and a type of especially terrible evil—at least with regard to those for whom we have it. The habits of mind involved in this exercise of imagination make it very difficult to turn around and deny humanity to the very people with whose experiences one has been encouraged to have empathy. Thus the Nazis […] went to great lengths […] to portray Jews as a separate kind, similar to vermin or even inanimate objects. (Upheavals of Thought 334-35)
By arousing disgust through, for instance, representations of the Jew as “a being disgustingly soft and porous, receptive of fluid and sticky, womanlike in its oozy sliminess, a foul parasite inside the clean body of the German male self” (Nussbaum Upheavals of Thought 347), the Nazis “obstructed compassion […] by blocking empathy” (Nussbaum Upheavals of Thought 335). Disgust, elaborates Nussbaum, “expresses a refusal to ingest and thus to be contaminated by a potent reminder of one’s own mortality and animality” (Upheavals of Thought 205), and it “easily takes as its object other persons and groups, who come to represent what is avoided in the self” (Upheavals of Thought 347).
If we follow Nussbaum’s analysis, then we might ask what would happen if sympathy itself became an object of revulsion. The idea is hinted at in Suttie’s description (above) of masculine discomfort at tender feeling: sentiment makes grown men “‘squirm’. ‘It is simply not done.’ It is ‘wet’” (it is, we should note, both squirm-inducing and fluid). This alarming possibility is what The Cone-Gatherers represents when Duror attempts, with some success, to make Calum, by virtue of his sympathy, an object of revulsion in his community. Duror, from childhood, has found physical disability disgusting: he “had been repelled by anything living that had an imperfection or deformity or lack: a cat with three legs had roused pity in others, in him an ungovernable disgust” (19). It is such disgust—which he understands as a barrier to sympathy—that Duror hopes to inculcate in Lady Runcie-Campbell: “the dwarf, who slobbered over a rabbit’s broken legs, must be driven by the sight of butchered deer into a drivelling obscenity. Lady Runcie-Campbell, in spite of her pity, would be disgusted. She would readily give him permission to dismiss them from the wood” (39). His partial success is made clear in the narrator’s description of the deer hunt’s aftermath: “Lady Runcie-Campbell came forward, with involuntary grimaces of distaste. She avoided looking at the hunchback, seated now against the bole of a tree, sobbing like a child, his face smeared with blood” (90). As Nussbaum’s theory would suggest, Duror tries to promote disgust towards Calum by forcing onto others his own perception of the latter as “slobbering” and “drivelling”—as incontinently secreting compassion like some foul fluid. He tries, for instance, to convince Effie Morton that he has seen Calum masturbating in the woods: “‘I saw that imbecile exposing himself,’ he said; ‘and worse.’ He described it briefly, enjoying her fascinated embarrassment” (52); “‘Seed,’ he murmured, with quiet intense disgust; and then he smiled” (52).
Sympathy per se may be constructed as a disgusting impairment. This latter possibility is what The Cone-Gatherers represents, and it is why this text, though it may benefit from the application of Agamben’s concepts, ultimately diverges from them, and enters into the terrain mapped out by Laing, Suttie and Nussbaum (among others). The Cone-Gatherers certainly represents in allegory something like the biopolitical extermination of homo sacer; and, indeed, the novel also to some extent subverts the cultural mythology of redemptive narratives that may be cast over the persecution of homo sacer, the suffering of disabled persons, and the painful burden placed upon carers. However, Jenkins’s novel places far more explanatory weight upon sympathy, which it represents as a psychological capacity opposed to Duror’s genocidal mentality: for Jenkins, as for Nussbaum, the frontiers of justice expand and contract according to our greater or lesser capacity for sympathy.
Notes
[1] Dr. Gavin Miller, English Research Institute, Manchester Metropolitan University.
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