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

Abstract

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.

The Pragmatics, Poetics, and Ethics of Pronouns in Ford Madox Ford’s War Prose

“…The specific enunciative frame of No Enemy, with its layering of narrative-and readerly-instances that highlight both the process of witnessing and storytelling and that of receiving this testimony, demonstrates Ford's intent commitment to and experimentation in transmitting his experience to the reader in as close and vibrant a manner as possible. Laura Colombino has investigated the way in which No Enemy explores and foregrounds the role of Ford's experience of the war in his development of "empathy" (Colombino 2019). I would argue that one of the main markers of this empathy is the fluctuation between pronouns, especially the use of "you" and "one".…”