Desiring Difference: Sympathy and Sensibility in Jane Eyre

In this scenario, the past, to which Jane turns to clarify her present position, does not answer her questions by revealing itself but instead tells a story that simply echoes her own. The future tells not her story, which she herself cannot read, but that of another; that is, in the act of figuring her, the future disfigures her, eclipses, veils, forgets her. The past in fact remains unreadable, undeciphered; determined by the present, it cannot determine it. Moreover, the present will be misread by the future, its errors and failures not recuperated, their truth not recovered; the experience of the past will have not resulted in the knowledge of the future.

But if the present will never have been understood, what is the relation between written and writing selves? Paul de Man proposed that written and writing selves do not stand in a chronological relation at all; rather, autobiography expresses the relation between two separate, mutually exclusive sides of the self: the self that experiences and the self that interprets. Between the self that acts and the self that understands lies a caesura or a "trope," a turn. Experience does not lead, in a chronological progression, toward understanding; in fact, it excludes understanding and vice versa. The relation between the selves is synchronic, not diachronic; it is also a relation of chiasmic exchange, like that between eye and text, or voice and ear. To posit a moment of symbolic death at which the written self will become the writing self is to project a synchronie subjective predicament-an irreducible discrepancy within the act of understanding-onto a time line. On this reading, the "death" that separates written and writing selves is not a state the subject of autobiography moves toward; "death" is (in) the moment, a caesura within the subject.

"To speak of the past ... becomes nearly inconceivable," Leo Bersani writes in another context, "once it is no longer merely a question of describing other customs, other systems of justice, other sets of beliefs, but rather the lost capacity of consciousness to place itself in relation to history" (48). As a moment in which the sympathetic trajectory of the plot deconstructs itself, Jane Eyre's return to Thornfield Hall can be understood as a frontal encounter with the problem of placing oneself in relation to history. Yet this breakdown of the narrative's history machine may not be solely an error, an unintended, unconscious, and undesired failure. It is possible that this jamming serves desire, is in fact produced by desire. Drawing on theories of sexuality that contest the Freudian monopoly and render non-sympathetic dynamics legible as such, it is possible to argue that the act of disjoining written and writing selves creatively singularizes both past and present, making it possible to re-frame the question of how consciousness can place itself in relation to history and to time.