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Desiring Difference: Sympathy and Sensibility in Jane Eyre
Novel: A Forum on Fiction, Fall 2003 by Nandrea, Lorri G
The second scene, by contrast, tries to propagate a sense of being not at one, being at variance. It spreads tension without giving the tension a vector-in other words, without making the removal of tension the point of having created it. The passage produces a disequilibrium that is pleasurable and sexual without having an object other than its own propagation. In this sense, subject/object relations are not the locus of pleasure; pleasure is located not in having one's identity confirmed, or having mastery over an object, but in the experience of sensory variation, intensity, physical dissolution, becoming matter and motion. Here, desire seems to be oriented toward opening the fractures in and among selves rather than closing them and prompting a process of repetition in which this desire can propagate and differentiate itself. This trajectory would account for a textual practice that prompts a series of readers with their particular constitutions to embody the desire it traces, to produce it in an "impetuous" or extraconscious manner. In this light, one might see the passage as a kind of machine that works with the material reader to produce (sexual) sensation or susceptibility (to make every body vary).
I want to suggest that this second understanding of the production of affect, the textual practices that inscribe it, and the desire that would account for these practices have been submerged historically; sympathy (and its textual practices and the desire that accounts for them) has dominated literary, critical, and cultural discourse. In recent decades, "sympathetic" processes in narrative have been effectively analyzed and critiqued from several theoretical angles; psychoanalysis, in particular, has been used to examine the ways the structures and subjects of narrative fiction reproduce dominant patterns of identification and "othering," as well as hegemonic sexual and gender identities.6 As these critics have pointed out, sympathetic representations-like the socio-symbolic systems they reproduce-channel desire into dialectical configurations that promote the imperialist and capitalist acquisition of possessions, the treatment of others as objects, the drive for mastery and comprehension, and the inability to recognize difference as anything other than a negative quality in relation to the self-same. In fact, these "sympathetic" dynamics have sometimes been taken as definitive characteristics of narrative per se, with fiction that does not follow these patterns viewed as aberrant, outside tradition, an idiosyncratic deviation from the norm. Yet, if it is possible, as R. F. Brissenden claims, to trace "the central tradition in English fiction" (97) forward from the paradigm of sympathy popularized by Samuel Richardson, it is also possible to trace an impure, interlusory, and subterranean history of sensibility forward from those eighteenth-century writers who experimented with the materiality of text, such as Laurence Sterne.
Where sympathy centers on identification, sensibility centers on susceptibility, particularly on the self's ability to be differentiated via the jar and jangle of sense. Drawing on the work of Gilles Deleuze, I will show that sensibility produces and is produced by dynamic repetition, a repetition of the act or process of differing. Dynamic repetition cannot be effectively portrayed, but can be performed in or by a literary text; in the place of mimesis, the literature of sensibility strives to develop such a performative aesthetic. Bypassing imaginative identification, sensibility "communicates" emotion or excitation the way a virus is "communicated": spread infectiously from one to another. Where sympathy facilitates the misrecognition of otherness in relation to the same, sensibility makes alterity itself the basis for encounter. Rather than mapping difference between identity and otherness, sensibility differentiates identities into "singularities": specific features, forces, and capacities whose relations transgress established social and symbolic categories (male and female/ self and other).7
