‘To Inhabit in Tranquility’: Landscape, Vision and Empathy in Ford Madox Ford’s No Enemy

Abstract

I: Abstract II: In Ford Madox Ford’s No Enemy, the mortal threat posed by the war affects the forms and even the possibility of empathy. After showing how he participates in contemporary discourses on Einfühlung, I investigate his musings on the distortions of his sympathetic imagination and his grief for mutilated territories. The aim is to show how rare surreal visions of landscapes untouched by the war offer him the possibility of reconnecting himself with the deepest thoughts, fears and longings of his fellow beings. Recent psychological research on different levels of empathy and its impairment under stress provide the conceptual framework of my analysis. In No Enemy di Ford Madox Ford, la minaccia mortale rappresentata dalla guerra influisce sulle forme e sulla possibilità stessa di provare empatia. Dopo aver mostrato come Ford si inserisca nel dibattito coevo sulla Einfühlung, l’articolo approfondisce le riflessioni dell’autore sulle distorsioni subite dalla sua “immaginazione simpatetica” e sull’angoscia per i territori mutilati dalla guerra. L’intento è di mostrare come le rare visioni surreali di paesaggi inviolati concedano a Ford di riconnettersi con i pensieri, le paure e i desideri più profondi dei suoi simili. I recenti studi di psicologia sui diversi livelli di empatia e sulla sua compromissione in situazioni di stress forniscono il quadro concettuale dell’analisi.II: In Ford Madox Ford’s No Enemy, the mortal threat posed by the war affects the forms and even the possibility of empathy. After showing how he participates in contemporary discourses on Einfühlung, I investigate his musings on the distortions of his sympathetic imagination and his grief for mutilated territories. The aim is to show how rare surreal visions of landscapes untouched by the war offer him the possibility of reconnecting himself with the deepest thoughts, fears and longings of his fellow beings. Recent psychological research on different levels of empathy and its impairment under stress provide the conceptual framework of my analysis. In No Enemy di Ford Madox Ford, la minaccia mortale rappresentata dalla guerra influisce sulle forme e sulla possibilità stessa di provare empatia. Dopo aver mostrato come Ford si inserisca nel dibattito coevo sulla Einfühlung, l’articolo approfondisce le riflessioni dell’autore sulle distorsioni subite dalla sua “immaginazione simpatetica” e sull’angoscia per i territori mutilati dalla guerra. L’intento è di mostrare come le rare visioni surreali di paesaggi inviolati concedano a Ford di riconnettersi con i pensieri, le paure e i desideri più profondi dei suoi simili. I recenti studi di psicologia sui diversi livelli di empatia e sulla sua compromissione in situazioni di stress forniscono il quadro concettuale dell’analisi. Impressionism and the Sympathetic Imagination In Joseph Conrad’s oft-quoted definition of literary Impressionism, writing “must make its appeal through the senses”: “My task which I am trying to achieve”, he claims in the Preface to The Nigger of the Narcissus (1897), “is by the power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel – it is, before all, to make you see” (Conrad 1979: 147). Such vicariousness, the ability to make the imagination of the reader respond to the world created by the author, was at the core of Impressionist writing, a style which gained momentum between the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century. Beside Conrad, a considerable number of writers have been associated with, or discussed in terms of, literary Impressionism, among them Arthur Symons, Stephen Crane, Katherine Mansfield, D. H. Lawrence, Dorothy Richardson and Virginia Woolf. Yet Ford Madox Ford was by far the most central figure of this movement: despite his manifold experimentations throughout his long and prolific career, he always styled himself as an Impressionist and more than any other con-