Viet Thanh Nguyen's Vietnam War novel, The Sympathizer (2015), opens onto a confession: “I am a spy, a sleeper, a spook, a man of two faces.”Footnote 1 We learn that the narrator, or captain, as he is known, serves in the South Vietnamese army and spies for North Vietnam. By revealing that he is the novel's eponymous sympathizer, he establishes a persistent tension between his seemingly forthright tone and long history of obfuscation. The story that follows plays on familiar themes of spy thrillers as hidden allegiances render the narrator vulnerable and powerful. From the title on, though, Nguyen's novel considers what it means to be not simply a spy, but a sympathizer driven foremost by illicit feeling. The captain deceives US politicians and Vietnamese military commanders on both sides of the war by displaying the sentiments that they expect of him, while covertly retaining bonds to the “enemy.” Thus the novel invites us to consider what the much-disparaged figure of the sympathizer – who surfaces in US literature from the nineteenth century to the present – suggests about the politics of feeling.
In particular, Nguyen elucidates the sympathizer's role as what Sara Ahmed calls an “affect alien”: a figure who fails either to feel culturally sanctioned sentiments or to direct these feelings toward the proper objects.Footnote 2 Yet where Ahmed examines depictions of affect aliens (from the feminist killjoy to the melancholy migrant) that imply that their unhappiness disrupts their communities, portraits of sympathizers instead assert it is their fellow feeling that threatens the country. Through this trope, Nguyen and his nineteenth-century predecessors offer a striking counterpoint to familiar critical narratives about sympathy and the state.
Scholars have persuasively demonstrated that early Americans often relied on fellow feeling to advance national interests. As Kristin Boudreau argues, prominent statesmen in the post-Revolutionary era invoked Adam Smith's theory that sympathy unites the nation as a family; they presumed that virtue prompts citizens to identify with one another, feel for each other as brothers, and act in their shared interests.Footnote 3 And across the nineteenth century, writers invoked sentimental language to explore who belongs to this national family and how feeling links Americans across differences of race, class, and gender.Footnote 4 In turn, idealizations of American domesticity and sympathy came to justify US imperialism.Footnote 5 While purporting to foster moral sensibility, though, national growth elicited unruly feelings. America's ongoing expansion westward and overseas fomented internal conflict, most famously in the US Civil War.Footnote 6 Sympathizers embody this history of conflict as their regional and foreign affinities complicate their brotherly bonds and alienate them from the state.Footnote 7
Nguyen explores how the shared feeling that Americans imagined as a foundation for national stability transforms into a national threat. In The Sympathizer, sentiment links the captain to his “blood brothers” Man (a leader of the People's Liberation Front) and Bon (a South Vietnamese soldier) and, by extension, to both North and South Vietnam. He spies for one “brother,” but disregards official orders in order to protect the other. Further, as a “Eurasian” born out of wedlock, he faces abuse that alienates him from Vietnam and America alike. The portrait of the captain's feeling – which prompts both his service to and crimes against the state – invites scholars to consider how writers assert sympathy's potential not only to foster US cohesion and reify borders, but also to unsettle the nation.
Nguyen's narrator resembles a line of state enemies who recur throughout nineteenth-century literature, especially literature of the Civil War. Through this resemblance, his Pulitzer Prize-winning, widely circulating novel can draw our attention to a gap in scholarship.Footnote 8 Despite the rich criticism on sympathy and spies, respectively, little work considers their intersection in the sympathizer. This figure proves distinct from the roles of traitor, collaborator, and spy that he often takes on, given that his title defines him primarily in terms of his illicit feeling for the “enemy.” The trope elucidates shared feeling's significance, particularly in times of war when the state further restricts citizens’ sympathy. Elizabeth Duquette's study of loyalty (one of the few extended discussions of sympathizers) argues that during the Civil War, “Rather than a measure of moral excellence, sympathy became for Union partisans not merely dangerous but potentially treasonous.”Footnote 9 And Nguyen's novel reminds us that unruly feelings continued to elicit national anxiety in the Cold War era, as Vietnamese and US governments alike sought to regulate citizens’ feeling for the enemy and to determine who was loyal.
To understand how feeling shapes people's relations to the state, this essay analyzes three nineteenth-century portraits of sympathizers: Edward Everett Hale Jr.’s story “The Man without a Country” (1863), Loreta Velazquez's memoir The Woman in Battle (1876), and Walt Whitman's poem “The Wound-Dresser” (1865, retitled 1876). Velazquez offers an expansive depiction of a sympathizer who unsettles national borders, and so I devote particular attention to her narrative of a young Cuban woman who cross-dresses to fight for the Confederacy and then resumes her female identity to spy on the Union. Her work's resonance with that of Hale and Whitman highlights patterns in this trope. While we might presume that their use of disparate genres evokes different expectations as to how they should be read, they all promise to reveal illicit feelings and invite readers to watch how the sympathizer's regional bonds or foreign ties upend national cohesion.Footnote 10 Hale and Velazquez explore how the state responds by striving to reform American sentiments. Yet proscribing feeling proves difficult, even impossible. Indeed, Velazquez and Whitman suggest, sympathizers’ very confessions highlight the limits of government influence and invite readers to share their feelings. My point here is not that they provide unmediated access to what sympathizers felt. After all, Jesse Alemán notes that while reviews often expressed belief in Velazquez's “authenticity,” historical records of her life remain ambiguous.Footnote 11 Nonetheless, the memoir “enacts the prevailing beliefs and anxieties of its historical context.”Footnote 12 Thus reading these texts together lets us explore how the sympathizer evokes cultural fears and fantasies of power.
Returning to Viet Thanh Nguyen's work in this essay's final section, I suggest that the sympathizer remains a relevant, provocative figure today. His narrator likewise embodies persistent tensions between personal affinities and national loyalty that arise from global politics – in this case, French and US intervention and civil war in Vietnam. While confessing to sympathy that crosses national borders, he resists affective reform. More broadly, then, the sympathizer highlights both a long history of violent state efforts to regulate sentiment and the specific shifts in national borders and foreign bonds that elicit transgressive feeling.
THE (UN)FEELING STATE
In striving to understand what this trope says about the relation between the state and sentiment, Edward Everett Hale Jr.’s “The Man without a Country” (1863) offers a useful starting place. The tale's extensive circulation and “almost mythical pedagogical status” hint that Americans afforded particular importance to this portrait of national feeling.Footnote 13 In it, Hale responds to the Civil War by imagining how an unruly citizen became a loyal patriot during the early national era. The story revisits accusations that Aaron Burr committed treason by plotting to establish a new country; in Hale's fictional version of these events, Burr “seduce[s]” a young US officer, Philip Nolan, to gain his support.Footnote 14 Positioning Nolan as a susceptible naïf, the story emphasizes that he fails to direct his feelings toward a proper object, which divides him from his countrymen. The young man becomes an affect alien as his “affection” for Burr incurs his garrison's mockery, elicits officers’ suspicions, and quickly leads to his conviction for treason.Footnote 15 Rather than defend himself at trial, Nolan embraces his alienation by damning the country and declaring he hopes never to hear its name again.Footnote 16
When the court fulfills his wish by sentencing him to live out his days aboard a series of naval ships, where he is allowed neither to see nor hear of the United States until his dying moments, the sympathizer belatedly learns to love his country. Nolan's growing patriotism and homesickness offer a cautionary tale for the “young Nolans” of Hale's era – Confederate sympathizers.Footnote 17 At first glance, the narrative might seem to resolve the tensions that sympathizers evoke: Hale locates this figure's transgressions in the past and devotes much of the story to envisioning his affective reform, which proves so successful that he fights for America in the War of 1812. Yet as prior readings of the story note, illicit feeling remains a messy problem. For instance, Carrie Hyde argues that Hale's use of a “negative exemplar” created ambiguity: would inviting readers to identify with Nolan teach them to emulate him or avoid his errors?Footnote 18 Moreover, critics note that Hale offers conflicting perspectives on how national expansion shapes American sympathies. As Hsuan Hsu writes, the tale portrays the “various extra-national and sectional loyalties that threatened the nation's integrity,” such as Nolan's affinity for the foreign territory of Texas, while emphasizing that his travel abroad with the navy also shapes his development into a patriot.Footnote 19 The ambiguity of how best to foster patriotism complicates the story's promise to model how Americans ought to feel.
Building on prior readings, I want to consider how the story represents the state's role in recognizing and grappling with unsettling sentiments. Critics often read Nolan as a traitor and exile; yet the story emphasizes his role as a sympathizer by refusing any description of specific actions Nolan might have performed as a traitor, while detailing how his feelings alienate him from the country. Hale highlights the threat of emotion in depicting how government officials respond. When Nolan “damns” the United States, the colonel presiding over his court martial is “shocked,” “terribly shocked.”Footnote 20 He could “not have felt worse,” for “half of the officers who sat in [the court] had served through the Revolution, and their lives … had been risked for the very idea which [Nolan] had so cavalierly cursed.”Footnote 21 Refusing to share his countrymen's feelings not only provokes a strong affective response, but also prompts the colonel to invent a new sentence for Nolan. Exiling Nolan seems to fulfill his wishes. Yet this punishment prompts a love for the country so powerful that, on his deathbed, all Nolan wants is to learn how the country has grown in his absence. His feeling for America moves officers to feel for him and to ask whether the government might end his sentence. In brief, Hale turns to the language of feeling to explain what motivates Nolan, to demonstrate that this deeply affects the state, and to attest to the state's success in rehabilitating him.
Hale's fantasy of a state powerful enough both to prevent active rebellion and to transform the affect alien's sentiments raises the question of why the government starts refusing to acknowledge Nolan so that he dies in exile. As Hyde notes, readers struggle to make sense of the severity of his sentence, which arguably constitutes a failure of democracy.Footnote 22 I suggest we might read the government's response as a sign of how unsettling his feeling proves. Perhaps attempting to secure his release “was like getting a ghost out of prison,” because his unruly sentiments haunt the nation.Footnote 23 His feeling for the country and ability to elicit compassion from his countrymen not only signal that sympathy can unify the nation, but in so doing also underscore the stakes of Nolan's earlier challenge to state-sanctioned emotion.
Further, when Hale frames the story as a warning to potential southern sympathizers, he reminds us that this context might have made government control over sympathy both appealing and difficult to imagine succeeding. After all, the Union used sympathy to justify the war and argue for foreign aid, while fearing that feeling would move ostensibly loyal citizens and friendly empires to support the Confederacy. Concern over secession sympathizers was strong enough that the Union redefined treason. Broadening this term from the US Constitution, the Union criminalized various actions and “justified confiscation of rebel property,” “allowed soldiers to arrest women who taunted them,” “caused thousands of arrests by the military in the loyal states for … ‘treasonable behavior,’” “enabled soldiers to prevent people from voting … [and] allowed authorities to … arrest editors who criticized the Lincoln administration.”Footnote 24 This capacious definition heightened the stakes of shared feeling: “In occupied zones, military officers use the term ‘latent treason’ to include the Confederate sympathizers who … required careful vigilance.”Footnote 25 The state thereby established standards for citizens’ appropriate sentiments and monitored who violated these criteria.
Even as the sympathizer proved an especially fraught figure in mid-nineteenth-century America, Hale's choice to set his story in the early national era suggests that unruly feeling had emerged with the nation's founding. Hale's narrative hints that stories about feeling for the enemy circulated not only because of actual Confederate sympathizers, but also because the trope embodies a mesmerizing power that pre-dates the war. In particular, the narrator conveys this figure's potent hold on audiences’ imagination by declaring that the story's purpose is to correct the “legion” “traditions,” “myths,” and “lies” that circulate around Nolan's life.Footnote 26 Fascination with Nolan in the tale is matched by both the wide circulation of Hale's story and, more broadly, the recurrence of the sympathizer across nineteenth-century literature. As in Hale's story, the trope embodies American fantasies of how the nation might command citizens’ affect and how Americans’ feeling could unsettle the state.
Notably, Hale's exploration of the sympathizer – as an affect alien whom the state strives to reform – resonates with work by his contemporaries, particularly Velazquez's The Woman in Battle. Alemán's work contextualizing the recently recovered memoir deploys a hemispheric approach to relate the Cuban narrator's commentary to US perspectives on the Civil War; and indeed, the memoir parallels Hale's tale. Of course, there are clear generic and political differences between these texts: Velazquez's memoir claims to provide a factual account of the war as seen by a Confederate sympathizer, in contrast to Hale's pro-Union fiction. Nonetheless, both writers focus on efforts to regulate the sympathizer's feeling. Where earlier readings of the memoir elucidate the gender politics of Velazquez's cross-dressing, I am interested in how – even when she casts off her male guise – she masks her sentiments to move undetected through the United States and broader Atlantic world.Footnote 27 Indeed, her disguises mean that her memoir does not simply reprise Hale's portrait of how sympathizers evoke state anxiety, but rather details the government's daily efforts to surveil and discipline sentiments, even as she exemplifies the persistence of illicit feeling.
As the opening chapters explore, her own southern sympathies violate the Union's demands on her feeling, along with her father's expectations of her loyalty to Cuba, and her American husband's belief that she should feel too disgusted by the crudeness of soldiers to enlist. While her father and husband prove easy to evade, the memoir's drama lies in state efforts to unveil her and proscribe her feeling. She conveys state pressures to sympathize with the Union, for instance, when she deflects suspicions of her work as a spy in federal-occupied New Orleans. Pretending to be a widow from the North, she laments her suffering at the hands of “wretched rebels, who have destroyed my property, and robbed me without mercy.”Footnote 28 The scene implies that Union officials are more likely to aid her if she claims a northern identity. Further, she must display her alienation from southerners: “While indulging in this recital of my troubles I wiped my eyes with my pocket handkerchief, tried my best to squeeze out a tear or two, and looked as sorrow-stricken as I possibly could.”Footnote 29 She thus transforms herself into a “deserving” object of Union sympathy – a wealthy northern widow suffering under the Confederacy – and emphasizes that this performance requires labor.
According to Velazquez, she plays the role effectively: “The provost marshal, if he did not exactly overflow with sympathy, appeared desirous of doing what he could for me.”Footnote 30 Beyond demonstrating her skill as a spy, this scene implies that she succeeds because she recognizes the principles that underlie federal sympathy: officials direct it at particular types to ensure that it does not “overflow.” Were she to appear less loyal and femininely vulnerable, the military would refuse her aid. Yet state efforts to delimit sentiment ironically enable Velazquez to dupe the provost marshal into feeling for a foreign subject and southern sympathizer.
While dissembling helps her advance her cause and escape detection, this affective disguise can also serve narratives of national cohesion. Here, for example, her request for sympathy could bolster Union claims that the federal government protects people from southern lawlessness. Her desire to contest pro-Union narratives may explain why Velazquez masks her sentiments even when they meet Union expectations. Following Abraham Lincoln's assassination, she refuses to mourn him publicly, though she has earlier recounted his kindness to her. At first her lack of grief affirms her commitment to the Confederacy: “Mr. Lincoln was the enemy of the cause I loved … and it would have been intensely repugnant to my feeling to have made any outward manifestations of mourning.”Footnote 31 Nevertheless, she concedes, “I may have mourned in my heart.”Footnote 32 What she resists is the cultural imperative for an “outward manifestation” of her feeling, to signal that she identifies with “those who were making a greater show of their grief.”Footnote 33 The sympathizer again disrupts national unity based in shared emotion, as when Nolan shocks Revolutionary War veterans by refusing their patriotic devotion.
Given this emphasis on representing and resisting state-sanctioned feeling, portraits of the sympathizer let us take up a recent call to rethink sympathy's relation to the nation. Glenn Hendler invites scholars to shift our attention from familiar questions of how literary texts foster citizens’ feeling for one another to consider Americans’ “affective relation to the state itself.”Footnote 34 He models this turn by arguing that writers of the Civil War era engaged in formal experimentation, for instance in depictions of draft riots, to imagine identifying with government agencies and emulating the disinterested sympathy they extend to citizens. Velazquez repeatedly defines herself against such state impersonality. But as her position in the Confederate army renders her increasingly aware of the Union's view of soldiers, her descriptions of the state's perspective periodically blur into her identification with it.
The Woman in Battle repeatedly laments how an unfeeling state facilitates mass death. Describing a retreat of Union soldiers during one of her early battles, she writes, “Over the Bluff they went, pell-mell, leaping, rolling, and tumbling, more like a herd of frightened buffalo fleeing from the savages of the plains, than human beings, hundreds being shot down while attempting to cross … I was sick with horror.”Footnote 35 Here the men are reduced to a moving mass, which resembles terrified animals in random flight. While we might read this scene as criticizing Confederate violence, Velazquez more commonly criticizes Union policies. For instance, she excoriates the Union for recruiting immigrants: “the poor foreigners, who came over here to better their fortunes, had but little chance to become anything but food for Confederate bullets.”Footnote 36 Her compassion thus lets her dissent to Union policies that transform men into “buffalo” and bullet fodder, and elevate herself above the “poor foreigners” susceptible to the Union, despite her own foreign origins.
Still Velazquez hints at how powerful the unfeeling government's perspective proves when her own view merges with that which she attributes to the Union. This slippage perhaps reflects a growing desire to distance herself from dying and defeated Confederates. Her shifting identification surfaces when she describes the Union's weapons: “There was something horrible, however, about the huge missiles hurled by the gunboats … These shells could easily be seen in the air for some seconds, and each individual that beheld them had an uncomfortable feeling that they were aiming directly at him, with a strong probability of striking.”Footnote 37 Here she portrays what it feels like to have government technology recognize you and decide on your death. Or, more precisely, Velazquez pictures what the soldiers feel as they imagine the shells’ murderous intentions. Thus she explores what it means to sympathize with the state by identifying with its weapons. The scene builds on earlier depictions of battle, wherein the state turns men into corpses to feed sentient bullets. She again acknowledges the horror of dehumanization and death, while distancing herself from it: “There was something almost comical in the way the soldiers, who had fought, without flinching, for hours in the face of a terrible artillery and musketry fire, attempted to dodge these shells.”Footnote 38 The scene's farcical violence attends to Confederate suffering by positioning her as an observer; she describes not how “we” felt, but how “the soldiers” reacted. Like the Union missiles, she transforms their terror into a spectacle.
Thus Velazquez explores how the sympathizer enacts a fantasy of power based in her ability to refuse state-sanctioned feelings, as well as to escape detection in a country surveilling Americans so intimately that even the missiles seem to be watching. Nonetheless, like Hale, she acknowledges the state's power to influence identification. Reading their work together highlights a broader concern with how the state proscribes feeling and how sympathy alienates people from the government. The figure of the sympathizer manages to suggest the power of the state to influence sentiment and of individuals to disrupt national community. This tension renders the trope flexible enough to serve both Union and Confederate narratives, while complicating efforts to celebrate patriotism or government resistance.
CONFESSING TO SYMPATHY
Whereas we gain a clear sense of how the government claims control by regulating sentiment and even exiling affect aliens, sympathizers may at first only seem powerful when their feeling leads them to take direct action, for instance as soldiers or spies. However, even the sympathizer's ostensibly passive feelings can prove potent. We can trace this significance to eighteenth-century theories of sentiment. Adam Smith argues that to feel for someone else's pain or pleasure requires that a spectator morally assess the object of his sympathies. The spectator thus claims authority to judge who merits his sympathy and demonstrates his own virtue by displaying compassion.Footnote 39 Such theories profoundly influenced US culture and politics, so that expressing sympathy remained a way for nineteenth-century Americans, including sympathizers, to affirm their status. Yet whereas Smith's spectator claims social capital by feeling for the “deserving,” sympathizers amplify this power by resisting state dictates that would delimit their feeling. Attending to this power can help us consider what this figure stood to gain by confessing to her feelings.
Recent studies of the Civil War take up the related question of what motivated people in the United States and abroad to assert southern sympathy. Historians examine how trade routes connecting the US South to other regions of the nation and cisatlantic world, from California to Halifax, fostered sympathy expressed via newspaper editorials, the display of flags, and even threats of taking up arms.Footnote 40 Further, Jennifer Weber argues that although Copperheads (or Peace Democrats) tended not to support secession, they evinced Confederate sympathy stemming from concerns about constitutional liberties and opposition to abolition.Footnote 41 To summarize more simply, scholars suggest that US northerners’ and foreign people's identification with southerners typically stemmed from shared financial, political, or racial interests.
Nineteenth-century literary depictions of sympathizers anticipate discussions of how racial, class, and regional identities influence feeling, as well as how individuals stood to gain not simply by feeling for the South but by articulating these sentiments. Writers explore what role cultural institutions, such as schools, play in shaping these sentiments or whether illicit feeling is less a product of education than a strategic means for characters to secure their interests. While such portraits differ on the degree to which the sympathizer reflects the influence of existing social structures or exercises agency, the sympathizer's feeling consistently renders her a potent figure in the cultural imaginary. Further, writers often deploy this figure's power to comment on who belongs to the nation and whom Americans should feel for. At times, the trope calls for expansive sympathy that blurs distinctions between Americans and national/racial others. Yet the affect alien does not always speak for liberation or inclusion, as the sympathizer may also reify US racial hierarchies and justify slavery.
Initially, The Woman in Battle focusses on how social institutions lead Velazquez to forge complex, transnational bonds. As Coleman Hutchinson argues, Velazquez highlights the foreign influences on the US Civil War as she imagines a “worldly Confederacy, one with international connections and imperial aspirations.”Footnote 42 Her self-portrait emphasizes how US–foreign ties foment southern sympathy, as she attributes her own affinities to her education in New Orleans and marriages to US officers. Though her bonds may seem an accidental or even natural outgrowth of her daily life, her identification with and appropriation of a white southern masculinity elevates her status.Footnote 43 The value of these sympathies crystallizes in a scene set in Dayton, Ohio near the end of the war. Hoping to spy on the North, she adopts the guise of a servant. But faced with her mistress's “insolence” and “vile temper,” Velazquez declares herself a Cuban.Footnote 44 Revealing her foreign identity does not relegate her to minority status. Rather, Velazquez removes herself from a subservient role and situates herself as a spectator to the Civil War. She then finds a new position with a “Copperhead family,” who respond to her identity as a Cuban and “true Southern sympathizer” by insisting she be their guest.Footnote 45 Her willingness to identify with the South as an outsider reestablishes her authority so that her host declares her a “genuine Southerner,” which implies that sympathy collapses her difference from the objects of her affinity.Footnote 46 Whether her feelings are genuine, strategic, or both, revealing her sympathies affords her material comforts, social recognition, and reprieve from labor.
This Ohio scene offers a miniature version of the memoir itself, likewise a confession of her southern sympathy, wherein the Copperhead family serves as a stand-in for readers that lets her suggest how the audience might respond to her memoir. Readers who morally oppose white supremacy are unlikely to identify with the Copperheads or share their sympathy for Velazquez. Yet we may locate in this scene a rather different lesson: we can see how writers deploy ostensibly self-subordinating confessions to appeal to readers and claim power.
Indeed, by rewriting her Cuban identity as an elite, white US southerner, Velazquez defines herself not only against the lower-class white Americans whom she briefly poses as, but also against the era's negative, racialized images of Cubans that circulate in work such as Julia Ward Howe's A Trip to Cuba (1860). Howe's travel narrative contrasts white Americans to Cuba's Spaniards and Creole Cubans. While Howe portrays Spaniards as tyrannical “plunderers,” she characterizes creoles as “indolen[t],” “mechanically [inept],” and possessing “bad taste,” perhaps because she presumes they intermingle Spanish and African heritage.Footnote 47 Velazquez's role as sympathizer, by contrast, distances her from inhumanity and tastelessness. She emphasizes her sensibility and ability to identify with Confederates, both of which also affirm her whiteness. By confessing herself a sympathizer, Velazquez draws on an antebellum belief that sensibility indexes racial superiority and national belonging. The racial stakes of her sympathy become all the clearer when she purchases an enslaved African American, Bob, to serve her while she fights. As Caroline Levander argues, Velazquez's memoir speaks to contemporaneous interest in US annexation of Cuba and hopes that “the Confederacy and Cuba would jointly maintain a colonial fantasy of white privilege through black slave labor.”Footnote 48 Sympathizing here entails collapsing the distance between Confederates and Cubans to claim the exploitative power of whiteness.
The confessional mode that Velazquez deploys to affirm her whiteness arguably draws its potential appeal from a desire for legibility entangled with early American ideologies of race and sympathy. For instance, Thomas Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia asserts that Africans cannot mingle “sentiment and sensation,” as they lack a capacity for “imagination” and “reflection”; he thereby emphasizes white Americans’ claim to moral and aesthetic refinement and valorizes visible feeling and identification as evidence of white supremacy.Footnote 49 Antebellum celebrations of sympathy likewise assume that the morally virtuous can read and share in one another's pleasure and pain. In turn, a number of antebellum African American writers disrupt such uses of sentiment to justify white supremacy and refuse black humanity. Harriet Wilson, for instance, offers an incisive critique of “white skin” that belies a “black heart”; she thereby implies that sensibility masks racial violence.Footnote 50 The trope of the sympathizer similarly threatens to undermine claims of white moral sensibility. Velazquez models how “whiteness” can hide criminal attachments. By confessing these sentiments, her memoir promises a return to legible, genuine sentiment associated with the whiteness she claims.
Even while promising legibility, though, the sympathizer's narrative complicates the idea that disclosure enables regulation. Confessing can afford the sympathizer authority to define what she feels and what this means. This is particularly evident in Velazquez's memoir: her unabashed admission of southern sympathy and spying suggests that confessing does not subject her to government sanctions, but rather establishes her cultural authority. Her editor, C. J. Worthington, prefaces the text by admitting that “under ordinary circumstances” some of Velazquez's actions “would admit of no extenuation.”Footnote 51 However, he insists that she “was acting as the agent of the only government to which she acknowledged allegiance” and was driven by her “enthusiasm for the cause of Southern independence.”Footnote 52 Thus he implies that her feeling is not simply a cause for her ostensible crimes, but also a means of legitimating them. Further, Worthington asserts that reading about her motives will help northerners understand southerners and foster a “cordial and fraternal, as well as a political union.”Footnote 53 Worthington justifies Velazquez's aid to the South via her sympathy, which he imagines helps advance the familiar vision of the nation as family. This justification is noteworthy given Ahmed's observation that affect aliens are treated as problems because they disrupt shared feeling – as in texts that criticize the “melancholic migrant” for failing to move past histories of racism and embrace the promise of a happy, multicultural nation.Footnote 54 Here Worthington promises that the sympathizer's very history of alienation can become a means of advancing national unity.
Velazquez's narrative, though, persistently subverts the assertion that her illicit sympathy constitutes a national good that fosters reunion. Near the close of the war she flees the nation for Europe. On her return during Reconstruction, Velazquez deploys sympathy to distance herself from northerners and southerners alike. She writes, “although the war was over, I was still anxious to do something, so far as my power extended, for the Southern people. I accordingly announced my intention of making a tour through the late Confederacy, for the purposes of seeing for myself what the situation really was.”Footnote 55 Her expression of sympathy hints that she need not share their suffering: she is an outsider who lacks firsthand knowledge of the region. Notably, she claims to “fully sympathiz[e]” with southerners who want to depart, “rather than to remain and be victimized.”Footnote 56 Instead of fostering reunion, she evinces pity that both elevates her above southerners and validates their grievances at Reconstruction. Though her confession may reveal her illicit feelings, the sympathizer remains an unstable outsider.
Velazquez further complicates the idea that confession fosters cohesion when she leaves the South to journey west. Along the way, she criticizes the US nation, for example by commenting on Native Americans’ dispossession. Her pity for Native peoples affirms her elite, white sensibility at their expense:
The red men smiled on me in a rather disdainful sort of way, and evidently regarded me as an enemy. I wished … [to explain] my friendly feelings towards them. I had much more respect for these savages than I had for the ruffianly white men who were dispossessing them of their country.Footnote 57
She claims authority to define Native American suffering, even as their perception of her as enemy affirms her whiteness. Throughout her westward journey, Velazquez deploys her sensibility to assert her moral authority, critique the government, and define her racial identity against both exploitative whites and racial minorities.
Not all sympathizers cast off their sentiments in the midst of confessing to them. Nonetheless, Velazquez models how confessions promise legibility, while demonstrating the sympathizer's instability. This pattern emerges when we read The Woman in Battle alongside another confessional expression of Civil War sympathy: Walt Whitman's “The Wound-Dresser.” The poem offers a useful point of comparison given its difference from Velazquez's memoir. Unlike Velazquez, the poem's unnamed narrator, a Civil War nurse, identifies with the US North and South. Whitman frames the poem as the nurse's simultaneously confessional and didactic response to the next generation's question: “What stays with you latest and deepest?”Footnote 58 Notably, while the speaker provides stoic descriptions of the war, he supplements this narrative with parenthetical asides on his feeling for wounded soldiers. For instance: “These [wounds] and more I dress with impassive hand, (yet deep in my / breast a fire, a burning flame.)” Secreted away behind parenthesis, such asides foster intimacy between audience and speaker as he reveals that, despite his initial anger at and desire to fight in the war, he became a nurse who feels for both armies: “(was one side so brave? the other was equally brave).” Given the virtue of each, both deserve his compassion. Ironically, his lack of partisan sentiments signals he is a sympathizer, as his ability to feel for both sides becomes both his confession and his lesson.
By refusing to define his primary affiliation, i.e. which side he took when he “thought to … urge relentless war,” Whitman's speaker reminds us that the sympathizer's confession can create ambiguity. Even as “The Wound-Dresser” evinces faith that sympathy serves the nation, this narrative does not provide the transparent view onto his sentiments that the confessional mode ostensibly promises. Rather, the poem balances revelation and occlusion. The sympathizer confides in the reader, purporting to share the most significant sensations of the war, but withholding knowledge from us. As recent scholarship notes, narratives of postbellum reunion often overlook “the various constituencies, North and South, white and black, that challenged the conciliatory mood.”Footnote 59 This criticism calls our attention to how Whitman's poem refuses to distinguish any of the soldiers and so leaves us wondering, for instance, whether the speaker's capacious sympathy includes African Americans.
Through the sympathizer's confession, Whitman and Velazquez address a desire to make sentiment legible, to insist that Americans can read and even reform one another's feelings to advance the nation. Yet such perfect knowledge and regulation remain illusory. The trope would play on both the promise of affective transparency and resistance to regulation long after the US Civil War and Reconstruction. Americans responded to events ranging from the Spanish–American War to the Cold War, in part, by imagining how transgressive feeling influences the country's identity.Footnote 60 Tracing the range of repetitions of and revisions to the sympathizer across American literary history is, of course, beyond the scope of my argument. Yet by briefly returning to the text that prompted this essay, Nguyen's The Sympathizer, we can see how the figure still speaks to anxieties over illicit sympathy and its effect on the state.
READING THE SYMPATHIZER THROUGH THE NINETEENTH CENTURY
Twenty-first century texts, from novels to news articles, explore tensions over how Americans’ attachments destabilize the nation. For instance, headlines speculate about the destructive potential of and need to reform purported ISIS sympathizers.Footnote 61 Contemporary writing thereby reiterates long-standing fears that Americans’ affective ties may radicalize them to support an alternative political formation (whether a foreign government or a new state within the country) instead of the US nation. Writers continue to explore how the government addresses these anxieties by regulating illicit sentiment and imagine how feeling exceeds control.
Nguyen's The Sympathizer offers an extended meditation on how, in the Cold War era, the state treats feeling as a threat that military and political officials strive to regulate. The novel thus speaks to political writing of the era, which suggests that the Cold War reanimated anxieties that Americans might confuse loyal citizen and traitor, ally and enemy. For instance, J. Edgar Hoover asserted that sympathizers play a significant role in “thought control” because they are susceptible to Communist influence, while their position outside the party allows them to spread its influence more covertly.Footnote 62 Further, Hoover's depiction of sympathizers implies that their threat lies in their unstable identities: they may remain passive or act on their sympathies; they both identify with the enemy and yet are not readily identified as one of them.
While tapping into general Cold War fears that Americans possess illicit affinities and Communist enemies lurk within the nation, Nguyen conveys the sympathizer's particular significance to Vietnam War stories. In part, his narrator's Vietnamese identity shapes how we read his role as a sympathizer because he speaks to stereotypes of Asians that recur in US crime fiction. Maureen Reddy notes that the genre's emphasis on “whiteness – its boundaries, its values, its meanings, and perceived threats to its dominance” – manifests in the portrayal of Asians as a “threat to whiteness both through their supposedly ruthless intelligence and through a type of undecidability.”Footnote 63 When such writers as Chang-Rae Lee revise pernicious stereotypes of Asians and Asian Americans as cyphers, spies, and traitors, Crystal Parikh argues, they “make visible heterogeneous objects of loyalty, motives for violating such loyalties, and modes of violation.”Footnote 64 Nguyen likewise intervenes in the US cultural tradition of imagining Asians as inherently duplicitous, in this case by highlighting how the Vietnam War fostered vexed feelings and forms of identification, which became motives for and modes of betrayal. Daniel Y. Kim and Viet Thanh Nguyen contend that US intervention engendered Vietnamese refugees’ and immigrants’ “sentiment[s] of gratitude and loyalty,” “shot through … with varying levels of ambivalence.”Footnote 65 At the same time, “Vietnamese American war survivors [carried grievances] … at the fratricidal atrocities, so endemic to revolutions and civil wars, perpetrated by their communist enemies.”Footnote 66 The sympathizer, perennial insider and outsider, embodies the vexed bonds that foreign intervention and civil war in Vietnam produced.
Nguyen's narrator exemplifies the sympathizer's disruptive power as he frustrates efforts by the United States, along with North and South Vietnam, to claim his loyalty. The captain emphasizes that his sensibility equips him for espionage while undermining any stable sense of national identity. Near the opening, he explains, “I am simply able to see any issue from both sides. Sometimes I flatter myself that this is a talent.”Footnote 67 But as the captain learns to conflate himself with everyone, he struggles with feeling that exceeds his control: “The talent you cannot not use, the talent that possesses you – that is a hazard, I must confess.”Footnote 68 Still, his very lack of agency evokes the power of sentiment as it moves him to disobey his governments.
Though the captain evades detection by the South Vietnamese as a Communist sympathizer, compatriots on both sides of the war criticize his feeling. His South Vietnamese commanding general asks, “Do you know what your problem is?” and diagnoses him as “too sympathetic.”Footnote 69 Moreover, the general models how to avoid this identification. For instance, when he becomes suspicious that one of his Chinese officers is spying for the National Liberation Front, the general renames this suspect “the crapulent major” and orders his murder.Footnote 70 The nickname further others the major (already an outsider in terms of nationality) by implying he is too gluttonous and successful to be properly sympathetic to the South Vietnamese or to merit their compassion. Ordered to help murder this alleged spy, the captain deploys the derisive nickname to distance himself from his victim. Despite this attempt at detachment, the narrator is then haunted by the crapulent major's ghost. This twist turns the crass joke on the captain as his remorse takes an absurd spectral form that underscores his inability to refuse sympathy. Yet the haunting also suggests that the captain's sensibility exceeds his commanders’ control; the state cannot foreclose his feeling for the enemy.
Unruly sentiments continue to defy state control well after the US Civil War, Nguyen suggests, because of ongoing state violence, Western colonialism, and racial oppression. The captain's identity offers a metonym of colonial history: born from French exploitation of Vietnam, he is educated in capitalism, democracy, and American exceptionalism. This background and his childhood split between North and South Vietnam lead him to identify with his countrymen's attraction to and abhorrence of the West. His origins likewise ensure that he struggles to reconcile his North and South Vietnamese brothers’ competing claims to his loyalties. We might read The Sympathizer as an inverse of Velazquez's memoir: where she deploys affect to redefine her national and racial identity, the captain's sensibility reflects how shifting geopolitics preclude him from claiming a stable national or racial identity.
Rather than simply affirming government power to shape his feeling, though, the captain also plays on cultural narratives about whom he should feel for and how his race will shape his sensibility. Racial and political ideologies lead other characters (American and Vietnamese) to misread his identity and sympathies. For instance, Americans assume his father was a white GI. While Nguyen acknowledges that the war increased interracial sex and powered a prostitution industry, the misreading of the captain's origins signals the US ethnocentrism of “forgetting” French imperial history. Because other characters presume that they know the captain, he can act as a “mole,” who “hide[s] where everyone can see him and where he can see everything.”Footnote 71 Nguyen thus reworks stereotypes of Asian cyphers to contest assumptions that the captain is illegible because inherently other. Rather, US ignorance, coupled with belief that his illegitimate birth and interracial heritage render him “inferior,” obscures his sentiments.
This rewriting of Asian American stereotypes may seem a far cry from Velazquez's assertions of her “white” sympathies. Yet Nguyen hints that his characters’ experiences of race and sensibility speak to nineteenth-century politics of feeling through a provocative allusion to Harriet Beecher Stowe. The captain's lover, Ms. Mori, mocks his tendency to ingratiate himself with white Americans by mirroring their sentiments and notes that on first meeting him she marked him an “Uncle Tom-a-san.”Footnote 72 Her epithet updates Stowe's infamous protagonist to suggest that the captain, like Tom, fulfills white Americans’ need for his sympathy; his feeling seemingly attests to their humanity and moral virtue. The analogy suggests that white Americans retain their ancestors’ desire for a submissive racial other who affirms their value through his difference and deference. Crucially, Ms. Mori hints that his expressions of feeling may be strategic: “You've mastered the inscrutable Oriental smile, sitting there nodding and wrinkling your brow sympathetically and letting people go on, thinking you're perfectly in agreement with everything they say, all without saying a word yourself.”Footnote 73 By playing the role of a model minority who affirms US virtue, the captain evades detection as Communist sympathizer.Footnote 74
Yet the captain cannot mask his unruly feelings from the North Vietnamese forever. When he violates orders from Man to continue his work as a spy in the United States and instead returns to Vietnam in hopes of protecting Bon on a South Vietnamese reconnaissance mission, he lands in a “re-education camp.” The narrator is forced to account for his oblique sympathies by writing his confession: the novel itself. His conflicted affinities make his confession an appealing means to understand him. This may explain why some reviewers have praised the novel by suggesting that they forgot they were reading fiction: we may want to imagine that his elusive narrator provides unmediated access to himself, though the novel insists that this confession is coerced.Footnote 75 Moreover, reviews often emphasize the novel's potential to shape how “American readers” (i.e. non-Vietnamese Americans) view and feel for Vietnamese Americans.Footnote 76 Reviewers’ treatment of the captain as a conduit to real people's interiority likens the novel to Velazquez's memoir and Whitman's lyric poem; despite their generic differences, all three evoke expectations of intimacy through their confessional mode.
In The Sympathizer, confession is alluring not only to readers, but also to the government that compels it. And we discover why: after the captain details his affinity for the “wrong” people over much of the narrative, the climax centers on two moments when his feeling fails him. His sentiment is not all-powerful after all. Near the conclusion, the captain describes how technologies of war disrupt his connection to Man. Until this scene, feeling unites the characters as fellow Communists and blood brothers. They forged their elective bond as boys: when schoolmates beat the narrator for his “impure” heritage, Man and Bon fought with him. In adulthood, Man and the narrator sympathize ideologically as they serve the People's Liberation Front in Vietnam and America respectively. When they meet again, Man reveals that napalm has burned off his face, and the narrator sees “the hairless, earless skull” as “one massive keloid scar, leaving the head to resemble one of those dried, decapitated trophies swung on a string by an ebullient headhunter.”Footnote 77 Man becomes a hyperbolic other.
This arguably hackneyed trope of the headhunter's trophy ironically underscores the new monstrosities of warfare. Faced with Man's suffering, the narrator admits he “cannot imagine” this pain.Footnote 78 The sympathizer, who often laments his excessive compassion, proves unable to feel for the allegorically named Man. Whereas the earlier scenes of childhood bonding affirm Adam Smith's theory that when “our brother is upon the rack,” we imagine ourselves in his place and share his suffering, here modern warfare's sensations exceed his imagination.Footnote 79 This barrier to shared feeling is profoundly unsettling to the captain and potentially to readers, if we have been drawn in by a desire to know the captain through his sympathies.
Yet the captain's most disturbing confession centers on a moment when he felt sympathy but failed to act. The captain proves unable or unwilling to provide this confession in his written narrative, and so his captors engineer a violent display of affective regulation. Following his psychological and physical torture, he recounts witnessing another member of the National Liberation Front being raped by the South Vietnamese police (his purported allies). The captain realizes his captors have retrieved this memory so that he will confess to his failure: “hav[ing] done nothing.”Footnote 80 He is punished not only because he feels for the wrong people, i.e. the Americans, but also because his Communist sympathies may not prompt sufficient self-sacrifice. He implies that he suffered vicariously through her torture, and so must have remained passive only because he could do nothing. Yet his rationalization undermines this claim as it signals that his sympathy serves to justify his failings and mask self-interest.
Both confessions of failure – to intervene in a compatriot's rape and to feel for Man – mark the limits of sympathy. Even as he admits that his feeling may not be all-powerful, the novel does not suggest that confession reforms the sympathizer. Rather, the novel emphasizes ongoing tension between moments when his confession reveals his failures of feeling and moments when, in the midst of debilitating torture, it allows the captain to control his narrative. The narrator hints that he may exert agency through his confession when he interrupts his story to address his captors. Thanking them for their editorial comments on his work, he acknowledges that his writing is unlikely to satisfy their expectations.Footnote 81 His remarks remind us that though confessions promise transparency, they take shape through conventions. When he violates formal rules, he fails to satisfy (fictive) readers who strive to regulate his feeling through such rules.
Indeed, the government views his unconventional expression – which fails to cite proper Communist texts and to confess to key crimes – as “recalcitrant.”Footnote 82 He even claims authority to define his torture, which is designed to reform his sentiments, by depicting his out-of-body experience. Narrating how he seems to float above himself, he conveys his trauma and distances himself from both his own body and his captors at the moment when he purportedly reveals himself to them. Finally, when Man secures the captain's release and promises safe passage out of Vietnam, we see that the sympathizer remains too vulnerable and threatening to live under the government he supported. This ending resonates with nineteenth-century portraits of sympathizers, who haunt illusions of national unity even as they confess.
Situating Nguyen's narrative in a broader literary tradition thus highlights a pattern that runs from The Woman in Battle to The Sympathizer. He reminds us that the sympathizer is a provocative figure who claims power by resisting government efforts to curtail illicit sentiments and so fosters instability. Parikh theorizes, “Acts of betrayal expose particular bonds – and they expose these bonds as particular and partial, not total – as they do damage to them.”Footnote 83 So, too, can sympathizers’ confessions highlight both the partiality and the multiplicity of an affect alien's bonds, in promising to reveal subjects’ relations to the state. Indeed, these figures suggest that national cohesion depends as much on efforts to forbid feeling for particular peoples or causes as to engender sympathy. Debates about whether this figure can be reformed persist and resist neat resolution, as the sympathizer remains “simultaneously subjugated and elevated.”Footnote 84
Even while American depictions of the sympathizer share an interest in how sentiment disrupts national stability, though, they also present sharply divergent political perspectives: from Velazquez's embrace of a white, southern identity to Nguyen's satire of US racism and attempts to forget the political history that shapes the captain's affiliations. The trope's flexibility enables its prevalence: writers adapt this figure to explore conflicting political perspectives and craft narratives of national identity. Attending to such variation can help nuance critical narratives about sympathy's cultural importance. Nineteenth- and twenty-first-century writers alike insist that if sentiment could unify the nation, so too might it link citizens to foreign peoples and unsettle national loyalty. Their portraits of the sympathizer invite us to consider such questions as: whom does the state deem proper objects of sympathy? When does feeling signal virtue and when is it a crime? What are the political stakes of choosing sympathy over loyalty? Though Nguyen cannot provide all of the answers, he incites us to examine the sympathizer's potency and array of cultural uses throughout American literary history.
