Wonderful, wonderful discussion Kate. I learnt a lot here and loved the history and all the quotes/passaged you've included. Ever since you first mentioned this term last year I'd wondered on why it was named such, yet I failed to go look it up, waiting patiently instead for you to write and narrate this essay 😄
I feel educated now. Also, I happened to read "I wandered lonely as a cloud" in detail recently, as part of Brian Funke's series on poetry here.
I did think it was an odd term -- it sounds somewhat offensive toward the writer -- but the history clarifies all of that and I really appreciate the thoughts from Peter Wise here too.
Having no knowledge of the device, my usage in my own fiction came from one of wanting to express emotion primarily from the weather. In my fragments from Precipice, the world essentially weeps for what has been befallen it and this gets intermingled with Jisa's (the protagonist) thoughts and interactions. I don't claim to have any real skill with this though, and certainly no education in its use (I feel more equipped now though from listening to your podcast).
//We begin to descend, plunge into the clouds at speed, into a darkness where all that remains is the soft blue of the ship’s lights. And with the dark so too comes the rain, the steady tears of the world.//
//She stopped and wiped at her eyes with the back of her hand, then looked up at the bank of trees, as though worried that in these short moments they may have pulled themselves free, to walk away on creaking roots.//
I've just been writing the next fragment of Precipice due tomorrow or Friday, and I realise there is this line:
//The wind—perhaps unhappy it cannot shift this creature clinging helpless in its path—drops to near nothing, affording me a few haggard breaths, letting me shift my position.//
Thank you, Nathan! It was your work and those comments that inspired me to put these notes together into a post. Happy you've shared more specifics of your work here. You certainly have a knack for it.
I'm excited to read the book Peter mentioned and his explanation of the term is 💯! Always evolving through these great comments. 🙏
The pathetic fallacy isn’t really a fallacy of course other than for a certain nineteenth century European elite view of the world that insisted on human exceptionalism (whether granted by a god or not). Ruskin introduced the term in 1856, not long before the meaning of the word anthropomorphism shifted in English from endowing gods with human attributes to endowing the natural world with those attributes (taken as a negative tendency). These were last gasp efforts to hold onto that exceptionalism before Darwin collapsed the distinction between human and animal being.
I was at a discussion recently when the Lion Man figure from the Stadel Cave in Germany (dated as forty thousand years old) came up. There are cave and other paintings of similar antiquity in various places around the world that do similar things in conflating human and animal forms. Exchanges between the human and natural worlds are also all over the place in stories. Ovid for example in the western tradition, but narratives doing similar things are part of folk cultures and anthropological societies for however long we don’t know. In Australian Indigenous societies, stories (which are often indissociable from artwork) may be thousands and thousands of years old and these rely on exchanges between human, animal and ancestor (spirit for want of a better word) worlds as well as the natural world. Also, if you don’t know them, see if you can find some of the Swampy Cree (Manitoba) poems in which exchanges between humans and all sorts of objects take place. Apart from anything else they’re wonderfully funny.
I like to think of the pathetic fallacy especially in its use by the Romantics as part of this tradition, not so much metaphoric relations with the natural world but metamorphic ones (or as Deleuze & Guattari call them becomings). A couple of references I’d throw in: you mention Hardy, check out The Woodlanders, a virtual prose poem to place and its interactions with the human. And one that works in the other direction: The Story of the Weeping Camel (film) in which the exchange of ‘meaning’ passes from the human to the animal.
Fantastic Peter. Thank you for adding a lot of depth to the Ruskin reference. Clearly you've engaged with this concept in several meaningful ways. I love the way Deleuze and Guattari move from the initial relationship as you mention. You manage to succinctly move us through some wonderful references and movements of thought here. Thank you! I am not familiar with the Lion Cave or The Story of the Weeping Camel. I'm currently compiling recommendations from this 10 week series and have included your texts.
Fascinating. I don't think I had heard of this device explicitly, although obviously I've encountered examples of it. Thanks for such a rich tapestry of illustrations. I like darkness and winter as well, and the bleakness of places like the Yorkshire Moors.
I have yet to visit the Yorkshire Moors and look forward with melancholic enthusiasm!
Thanks Terry, and I hope it gives you some new ideas to think about! It is a favorite of high school English teachers...and we can take it to many levels beyond.
First time I hear of this strangely worded literary form, but how lovely the meaning is at least. Thank you for showing us some wonderful examples. Wuthering Heights is one of my most beloved books. It took my breath away.
Heavens, Kate. This is a masterclass. I have heard of the concept of pathetic fallacy but I didn't know what it meant. Good ol' Ruskin! The example from Frozen was super clear, and took me right back! Brilliant, brilliant, brilliant stuff.
Wonderful discussion encompassing so many authors - it changes the way I will read characters and their settings, with a contemplation of the social and environmental histories of the land they walk on.
Wow, so good! Inanimate objects, used to convey emotion. Of course. I have not heard of the term per se but it all makes sense when you describe it. Do I use it often? All on purpose... subconsciously 😅 But yes, sometimes it is indeed planned, but not always. Sometimes it just happens. Like today when editing Carter, I added a sensory detail to a scene: "Through the window, he could see snowflakes tumbling from the sky, sparkling with excitement, curious spectators drifting inside, eager to see before melting away." A sneak preview for tomorrow's post! Maybe you have some examples in mind as well, I would be curious what you’d pick! Off to record Carter now. I'll link it once it's live!
I wonder if there is a related term in any of the languages you speak? I don't know even in French what is said and the term is (unusually) English from the start (ie Ruskin).
I like your example! There are many in your works. Everyone should just subscribe and they will experience it weekly. :)
Really impressive, Kathleen, so many strands to pull together, which you've done in an admirably coherent way. I'll add a comment on the pathetic fallacy a bit later but I just want to suggest to you in light of your coda on Hong Kong an Australian novel called The Layers of the City by Antoni Jach. It's a 'vertical' investigation (about Paris) while you're looking more at 'horizontal' markers but I think you might find it interesting. I've only been to HK once, for about a week and in summer. The way it teems with human life is amazing, but there are also still points where nature persists whether the tigers are gone or not. If I were writing about HK the one overwhelming impression in terms of weather was the humidity ... because I didn't expect it (I thought I came from a place where we knew about humidity).
We could do a second podcast all on the vertical (city or Anthropocene). Fantastic. Yes, this was more focused on horizontal, which I guess you need to solidify before moving up. But the history of Paris's buildings and Hong Kong's have many interesting intersections as well as great divergences. I would love to check this out and will look for it in the UK. Thank you for such a great recommendation, Peter, and for your kind words.
I can pick up a second hand copy here if you need me to. Jach is a criminally under-appreciated writer in this country and I'm not surprised his profile overseas is low. I'm happy to extend his readership.
I hope you can find a copy Nathan. It's scary how quickly books go out of print. I thought Kindle was going to take care of all that but apparently not.
I've had a quick look, it's out of print and near you Abebooks has an outrageously expensive second hand one so I've picked one up here quite cheap. If you let me know your address at my can't-be-compromised email address: geontologies@gmail.com I'll arrange to send it to you.
Finally had a chance to listen to this (yes, I’m a week behind). It’s so good, and very much connected to my own interests over the past few years. Last year, I taught a class on Ecology and Narrative, in which we read Wuthering Heights and Austen (though Persuasion rather than Northanger). And this semester, my course focuses on ecology as well. The pathetic fallacy, of course, figures prominently in all of this. I’m enjoying all of these episodes so much, Kate. They always give me so much to chew on.
This is another fun one, thanks for all the links and the engagement; I love the historical debate over the application pathetic fallacy in literature and the suggestion it diminishes rather than enhances both poetry or fiction. Im reminded of The Jungle (1906) and Sinclair's aperture opening up as the train leaves the countryside and heads towards the stockyards of Chicago in the beginning of the novel: the landscape sickly turning from green to brown, a cancerous type of odor, the chimney stacks drawing black smoke as if from the center of the earth. While Sinclair fails to provide agency to the natural resources generally, and privileges only human interaction with human, I always felt that if he had spent a bit more time on the impact to natural resources or non-human agents (ie. animals) rather than focusing on exploitation and the damage to only the human family only, it could have been a splendid addition to the work and added an additional layer that would resonate more in contemporary eco-criticism. Thanks as always for the time and effort to produce these DKW! I suspect one day these could be part of a well tuned masterclass!
It has been ages since I read The Jungle but that is a great connection. Thanks for adding some ideas for us! I also like the way you would change or extend his book. Maybe that's a project for you??
Thanks for the kind words, Brian! Happy it's 'fun' for you :)
Wonderful, wonderful discussion Kate. I learnt a lot here and loved the history and all the quotes/passaged you've included. Ever since you first mentioned this term last year I'd wondered on why it was named such, yet I failed to go look it up, waiting patiently instead for you to write and narrate this essay 😄
I feel educated now. Also, I happened to read "I wandered lonely as a cloud" in detail recently, as part of Brian Funke's series on poetry here.
I did think it was an odd term -- it sounds somewhat offensive toward the writer -- but the history clarifies all of that and I really appreciate the thoughts from Peter Wise here too.
Having no knowledge of the device, my usage in my own fiction came from one of wanting to express emotion primarily from the weather. In my fragments from Precipice, the world essentially weeps for what has been befallen it and this gets intermingled with Jisa's (the protagonist) thoughts and interactions. I don't claim to have any real skill with this though, and certainly no education in its use (I feel more equipped now though from listening to your podcast).
I've had a look of where you first mentioned this to me, and it was in this piece: https://slake.substack.com/p/to-lament-the-sky
Probably elicited by this line perhaps:
//We begin to descend, plunge into the clouds at speed, into a darkness where all that remains is the soft blue of the ship’s lights. And with the dark so too comes the rain, the steady tears of the world.//
Maybe there's also this in Brae's meteorite (https://slake.substack.com/p/its-not-safe-for-you), though perhaps it's more anthropomorphising something than pathetic fallacy per se?
//She stopped and wiped at her eyes with the back of her hand, then looked up at the bank of trees, as though worried that in these short moments they may have pulled themselves free, to walk away on creaking roots.//
I've just been writing the next fragment of Precipice due tomorrow or Friday, and I realise there is this line:
//The wind—perhaps unhappy it cannot shift this creature clinging helpless in its path—drops to near nothing, affording me a few haggard breaths, letting me shift my position.//
Thank you, Nathan! It was your work and those comments that inspired me to put these notes together into a post. Happy you've shared more specifics of your work here. You certainly have a knack for it.
I'm excited to read the book Peter mentioned and his explanation of the term is 💯! Always evolving through these great comments. 🙏
That's so lovely to hear!
The pathetic fallacy isn’t really a fallacy of course other than for a certain nineteenth century European elite view of the world that insisted on human exceptionalism (whether granted by a god or not). Ruskin introduced the term in 1856, not long before the meaning of the word anthropomorphism shifted in English from endowing gods with human attributes to endowing the natural world with those attributes (taken as a negative tendency). These were last gasp efforts to hold onto that exceptionalism before Darwin collapsed the distinction between human and animal being.
I was at a discussion recently when the Lion Man figure from the Stadel Cave in Germany (dated as forty thousand years old) came up. There are cave and other paintings of similar antiquity in various places around the world that do similar things in conflating human and animal forms. Exchanges between the human and natural worlds are also all over the place in stories. Ovid for example in the western tradition, but narratives doing similar things are part of folk cultures and anthropological societies for however long we don’t know. In Australian Indigenous societies, stories (which are often indissociable from artwork) may be thousands and thousands of years old and these rely on exchanges between human, animal and ancestor (spirit for want of a better word) worlds as well as the natural world. Also, if you don’t know them, see if you can find some of the Swampy Cree (Manitoba) poems in which exchanges between humans and all sorts of objects take place. Apart from anything else they’re wonderfully funny.
I like to think of the pathetic fallacy especially in its use by the Romantics as part of this tradition, not so much metaphoric relations with the natural world but metamorphic ones (or as Deleuze & Guattari call them becomings). A couple of references I’d throw in: you mention Hardy, check out The Woodlanders, a virtual prose poem to place and its interactions with the human. And one that works in the other direction: The Story of the Weeping Camel (film) in which the exchange of ‘meaning’ passes from the human to the animal.
Fantastic Peter. Thank you for adding a lot of depth to the Ruskin reference. Clearly you've engaged with this concept in several meaningful ways. I love the way Deleuze and Guattari move from the initial relationship as you mention. You manage to succinctly move us through some wonderful references and movements of thought here. Thank you! I am not familiar with the Lion Cave or The Story of the Weeping Camel. I'm currently compiling recommendations from this 10 week series and have included your texts.
Fascinating. I don't think I had heard of this device explicitly, although obviously I've encountered examples of it. Thanks for such a rich tapestry of illustrations. I like darkness and winter as well, and the bleakness of places like the Yorkshire Moors.
I have yet to visit the Yorkshire Moors and look forward with melancholic enthusiasm!
Thanks Terry, and I hope it gives you some new ideas to think about! It is a favorite of high school English teachers...and we can take it to many levels beyond.
Just don't go digging in those Moors ...
First time I hear of this strangely worded literary form, but how lovely the meaning is at least. Thank you for showing us some wonderful examples. Wuthering Heights is one of my most beloved books. It took my breath away.
Isn't it gorgeous?
Thanks for listening!
Heavens, Kate. This is a masterclass. I have heard of the concept of pathetic fallacy but I didn't know what it meant. Good ol' Ruskin! The example from Frozen was super clear, and took me right back! Brilliant, brilliant, brilliant stuff.
Thanks Victoria!
The term certainly has strange origins. Happy to have made a connection with Frozen :)
Wonderful discussion encompassing so many authors - it changes the way I will read characters and their settings, with a contemplation of the social and environmental histories of the land they walk on.
Thank you, Jane!
I think we can take this issue of the land in so many directions. Would love to read something Austen-related on the topic.
Yes, me too - I'll keep a lookout and send you anything I come across.
Wow, so good! Inanimate objects, used to convey emotion. Of course. I have not heard of the term per se but it all makes sense when you describe it. Do I use it often? All on purpose... subconsciously 😅 But yes, sometimes it is indeed planned, but not always. Sometimes it just happens. Like today when editing Carter, I added a sensory detail to a scene: "Through the window, he could see snowflakes tumbling from the sky, sparkling with excitement, curious spectators drifting inside, eager to see before melting away." A sneak preview for tomorrow's post! Maybe you have some examples in mind as well, I would be curious what you’d pick! Off to record Carter now. I'll link it once it's live!
Thanks Alexander!
I wonder if there is a related term in any of the languages you speak? I don't know even in French what is said and the term is (unusually) English from the start (ie Ruskin).
I like your example! There are many in your works. Everyone should just subscribe and they will experience it weekly. :)
It is now live here: https://alexanderipfelkofer.substack.com/p/carter-p2c6-the-ritual
:)
As for the term itself, the literary device of personification springs to mind, attributing human characteristics to inmate objects and animals.
And yes,
10 Print "Hello World!"
20 Print "Subscribe now to Tales from the Defrag"
30 Goto 10
;)
Really impressive, Kathleen, so many strands to pull together, which you've done in an admirably coherent way. I'll add a comment on the pathetic fallacy a bit later but I just want to suggest to you in light of your coda on Hong Kong an Australian novel called The Layers of the City by Antoni Jach. It's a 'vertical' investigation (about Paris) while you're looking more at 'horizontal' markers but I think you might find it interesting. I've only been to HK once, for about a week and in summer. The way it teems with human life is amazing, but there are also still points where nature persists whether the tigers are gone or not. If I were writing about HK the one overwhelming impression in terms of weather was the humidity ... because I didn't expect it (I thought I came from a place where we knew about humidity).
We could do a second podcast all on the vertical (city or Anthropocene). Fantastic. Yes, this was more focused on horizontal, which I guess you need to solidify before moving up. But the history of Paris's buildings and Hong Kong's have many interesting intersections as well as great divergences. I would love to check this out and will look for it in the UK. Thank you for such a great recommendation, Peter, and for your kind words.
I can pick up a second hand copy here if you need me to. Jach is a criminally under-appreciated writer in this country and I'm not surprised his profile overseas is low. I'm happy to extend his readership.
Not heard of Antoni Jach so appreciate the mention here, Peter. You are extending his readership!
I hope you can find a copy Nathan. It's scary how quickly books go out of print. I thought Kindle was going to take care of all that but apparently not.
Yeah it's a shame if it's not readily available on Kindle.
Well, I'm in Australia, so maybe I'll come across a copy.
I've had a quick look, it's out of print and near you Abebooks has an outrageously expensive second hand one so I've picked one up here quite cheap. If you let me know your address at my can't-be-compromised email address: geontologies@gmail.com I'll arrange to send it to you.
Wow Peter that is so kind of you! I shall write. Thank you!
Finally had a chance to listen to this (yes, I’m a week behind). It’s so good, and very much connected to my own interests over the past few years. Last year, I taught a class on Ecology and Narrative, in which we read Wuthering Heights and Austen (though Persuasion rather than Northanger). And this semester, my course focuses on ecology as well. The pathetic fallacy, of course, figures prominently in all of this. I’m enjoying all of these episodes so much, Kate. They always give me so much to chew on.
Thanks so much, John. (Ahhh, I am also behind; I appreciate your coming back to it!)
Your class sounds fantastic. You teach quite a range. I'll have to go back to Persuasion to take a look at the connections.
This is another fun one, thanks for all the links and the engagement; I love the historical debate over the application pathetic fallacy in literature and the suggestion it diminishes rather than enhances both poetry or fiction. Im reminded of The Jungle (1906) and Sinclair's aperture opening up as the train leaves the countryside and heads towards the stockyards of Chicago in the beginning of the novel: the landscape sickly turning from green to brown, a cancerous type of odor, the chimney stacks drawing black smoke as if from the center of the earth. While Sinclair fails to provide agency to the natural resources generally, and privileges only human interaction with human, I always felt that if he had spent a bit more time on the impact to natural resources or non-human agents (ie. animals) rather than focusing on exploitation and the damage to only the human family only, it could have been a splendid addition to the work and added an additional layer that would resonate more in contemporary eco-criticism. Thanks as always for the time and effort to produce these DKW! I suspect one day these could be part of a well tuned masterclass!
It has been ages since I read The Jungle but that is a great connection. Thanks for adding some ideas for us! I also like the way you would change or extend his book. Maybe that's a project for you??
Thanks for the kind words, Brian! Happy it's 'fun' for you :)