“the pathetic fallacy”

Thanks to the many people who sent in very useful suggestions for my colleague’s literature class on suffering. The backstory is that she dropped by the office yesterday wanting to know of at least one good piece of fiction that depicted inanimate suffering. Many readers of this blog sent in excellent suggestions.

What I found truly bizarre, while attempting to help her with various searches, is how often they led to the phrase “the pathetic fallacy.”

Consider, for example, these lines by Shelley: “The stars will awaken / Though the moon sleep a full hour later.” This is supposedly an example of the pathetic fallacy, since it supposedly projects human thoughts onto non-human things. There are a number of things to say in response to this.

1. First and foremost, it is idiotic to treat Shelley’s line as though it were a propositional claim, as if Shelley were saying: “Just like humans, the moon and stars fall asleep and then wake up.” He would have to be a psychotic to think this in any straightforward sense. So, where is the “fallacy” in Shelley’s metaphors?

2. Working in the opposite direction, if you’re going to call something a “fallacy,” you’d better have a pretty good idea of what the truth is. In everyday life, it certainly does seem like people can think and sleep and dream and inanimate objects cannot. But that’s hardly sufficient grounds for establishing a basic ontological dualism between thought and non-thought. There’s also a very basic difference between vertebrate and invertebrate animals, but no one thinks of designing an ontology that divides between the two as a basic distinction in the cosmos.

Finally, even if you think that the human/non-human distinction is ontologically absolute and irrefutable, what’s wrong with literature about inanimate suffering? This reflects a rather impoverished view of literature– as if its goal were to echo the scientifically established truths of any age.