Should Writers Avoid Sentimentality?
Each
week in Bookends, two writers take on questions about the world of
books. Roland Barthes said, “It is no longer the sexual which is
indecent, it is the sentimental.” This week, Zoë Heller and Leslie
Jamison debate whether sentimentailty is a cardinal sin for writers.
By Zoë Heller
Sentimental
fiction is a kind of pablum: Excessive amounts can spoil the appetite
for reality, or at least for more fibrous forms of art.
From
time to time, a writer rises up to chastise our modern squeamishness
about sentimentality. In “A Lover’s Discourse,” Barthes claims we have
grown so chilly and clever that we can no longer speak of love without
putting the word in mocking quotation marks. Nabokov makes a similar
point in his lecture on “Bleak House,” when he warns his students
against sneering at Dickens’s descriptions of orphaned children: “I want
to submit that people who denounce the sentimental are generally
unaware of what sentiment is. . . . Dickens’s great art should not be
mistaken for a cockney version of the seat of emotion — it is the real
thing.”
Neither
Barthes nor Nabokov is really defending sentimentality in the
contemporary, pejorative sense of the word, however. Both men are
invoking an earlier, 18th-century definition — the quality of having or
appealing to tender feelings — and urging us not to let our contempt for
soppy or cheap appeals to sentiment spill over onto the sentiments
themselves. They are surely right: We ought not to become so preening
and protective of our rational, modern selves that we end up snickering
indiscriminately at any nonironic appeal to human emotion. But this is
not to say we should cease to criticize the soppy, cheap stuff — the
“cockney version” of sentiment — when we come across it.
As it happens, I think Nabokov is wrong about Dickens’s depictions of orphans in “Bleak House”: They are
sentimental — not because they set out to inspire our pity, but because
they insist on idealizing and prettifying what is to be pitied. The
distinctive characteristic of sentimental art is not, as is sometimes
claimed, that it “manipulates” (all art does this in some measure) but
that it manipulates by knowingly simplifying, Photoshopping or otherwise
distorting the human experience it purports to represent. It isn’t
sentimental for Dickens to want us to feel compassion for Jo, the
homeless street sweeper; it is sentimental for Dickens to try to secure
that compassion by making Jo more virtuous, humble and forbearing than
any boy who ever lived.
This
sort of pandering to, or babying of, one’s audience may not be sinful,
exactly. But it isn’t entirely without moral hazard either. Sentimental
fiction is a kind of pablum: Excessive amounts can spoil the appetite
for reality, or at least for more fibrous forms of art. One reason,
surely, why readers throw down books when they don’t contain
sufficiently “likable” characters is that their tolerance for any sort
of moral challenge — for being asked, say, to sympathize with homeless
little boys who are godless and truculent and a bit smelly — has been
eroded by too many fairy tales masquerading as adult literature.
Fairy
tales can be immensely pleasurable and affecting, of course. But the
fact that they often succeed in making us cry or smile or sigh ought not
to inhibit our criticism of their falsehoods. I always weep at the
scene in “Bleak House” in which Jo the street sweeper dies, reciting the
Lord’s Prayer. (I am also inclined to blub at “The Notebook,” “Steel
Magnolias,” “Beaches” and most of the Carpenters’ songbook.) And in
spite — or perhaps precisely because of — my lachrymal responses, I
reserve the right to be conscious and critical of the ways in which
these works achieve their effects. If I point out that their portrayals
of love, friendship, marriage, sex and death traduce or euphemize
everything I understand to be the truth about those phenomena, I am not
being a hypocrite. I am merely confessing, with a certain sense of
wonder, to having been sold a bill of goods.
Zoë Heller is
the author of three novels: “Everything You Know”; “Notes on a
Scandal,” which was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and adapted for
film; and “The Believers.” She has written feature articles and
criticism for a wide range of publications, including The New Yorker,
The New Republic and The New York Review of Books.
◆ ◆ ◆
By Leslie Jamison
I would argue that one of the deep unspoken fears beneath the sentimentality taboo is really the fear of commonality.
My
first negative review came from my college counselor, who wasn’t sure
about the essay I’d planned on submitting with my applications. It was
an account of my relationship with the little girl I’d spent four years
babysitting; she’d gotten cancer when she was 5 years old, while her
mother was undergoing chemotherapy for a tumor of her own. The essay
came across as a little melodramatic, my counselor warned, and I can’t
remember if she used the word “sentimental” but that’s the word that
comes to mind now — the best name for an admonition that would become,
for me, a kind of running commentary from the peanut gallery, a constant
specter of judgment.
I
wrote about my relationship with that little girl for simple reasons:
She was important to me and her illness had made me feel powerless.
These weren’t unusual thoughts and feelings — the world isn’t fair; I
can’t do anything about it — but they were powerful ones. Also, I
couldn’t shake certain memories: the antiseptic tang of her hospital
ward, the pale powder-white of her small bald head, the wrongness of an
IV disappearing into the crook of her tiny arm.
But,
my counselor told me, Harvard didn’t want sob stories that were too —
too what? I was made to feel there was something unseemly and even
opportunistic about what I’d done. This shame took root as an abiding
paranoia that I would mishandle emotions in my writing by inflating or
exploiting them — that I’d conscript them in service of my own authorial
ego, my desire to produce writing that moved people.
The
fear of being too sentimental — writing or even liking sentimental work
— shadowed the next decade of my life. The fear was so ingrained in me
it became difficult to tell where outside voices ended and internal ones
began. But the whole time I wasn’t entirely sure what I was afraid of:
What was the difference between a sentimental story and a courageously
emotive one? We dismiss sentimentality so fully — so instinctively —
that we no longer bother justifying the dismissal, or mapping its edges.
But it’s a useful question: What kind of failure does sentimentality
represent? How can it be judged?
Resisting
sentimentality means resisting exaggeration and oversimplification; it
means resisting flat tragedy and crude emotional manipulation — the
cheapening of feeling, the pulling of heartstrings. But I would argue
that one of the deep unspoken fears beneath the sentimentality taboo is
really the fear of commonality: the fear of being just like everyone
else or telling a story just like everyone else’s. Nabokov’s definition
of philistinism gets at something similar: “Philistinism implies not
only a collection of stock ideas but also the use of set phrases,
clichés, banalities expressed in faded words.”
It’s
worth remembering, of course, that we all have the same stories to
tell, and that refusing our commonality is as dangerous as conforming to
it too much. It’s a fitting irony that Madame Bovary, whose tragic
selfishness offers a kind of cautionary tale about the dangers of
excessive sentimentality, is also motivated by a fear of commonality.
Her attachment to sentimental narratives is fueled by an obsessive
desire to separate herself from her surroundings; and our resistance to
sentimentality is also fueled by an obsessive attachment to distinction —
to the notion that narratives must distinguish themselves through
particularity and complication. It’s a way of adhering to Pound’s old
modernist saw: Make it new. Sentimentality is taboo, in part, because it
keeps it old. Keeps it trite. Keeps it banal.
But
many sentimental narratives have been deeply moving to many people, and
it’s worth thinking about the things that make them compelling: their
emotional intensity, their sense of stakes and values and feeling and
friction, their investment in primal truths and predicaments — yes,
common; yes, shared. Sentimentality is simply emotion shying away from
its own full implications. Behind every sentimental narrative there’s
the possibility of another one — more richly realized, more faithful to
the fine grain and contradictions of human experience.
Leslie Jamison
is the author of an essay collection, “The Empathy Exams,” winner of
the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize. Her first novel, “The Gin Closet,”
was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First
Fiction; and her essays and stories have been published in numerous
publications, including Harper’s, The Oxford American, A Public Space
and The Believer.
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