Read ‘em and Weep

What is it exactly that earns a work the epithet “sentimental”? If we take it as a neutral term, as in Flaubert’s “sentimental education,” we simply mean “having to do with the emotions, and with the growth of a sensibility, particularly through what used to be called ‘affairs of the heart’”—as opposed to an intellectual education or a professional education, for instance. But the notion that an education could be “sentimental,” in the way we use the term today, would indicate that it’s a way of predisposing someone to cry easily, to indulge in emotional displays, to wallow unduly in feelings of attachment, to behave as if each greeting or leave-taking is a wrenching moment, possibly shot in slow motion, accompanied by stirring music.

Clearly, the latter notion has been inflected by cinema and TV, and one could argue that what constitutes a “sentimental education” in our time is learning to respond on cue to the dictates of popular forms of identification. For every kid who cried when Bambi’s mom died, and so forth. But if that’s even a little bit true, it says something about the way we have come to understand what “sentiment” is. The wise-guy sarcasm, the clear-eyed skepticism, the wink-wink irony that our culture is so rife with could be seen as a reaction to the “disneyfication” of emotional responses. We find such emotion cloying because we know it was used to manipulate us when we were young, and so we have to show we’ve outgrown it through our deadpan expressions. Life can’t touch us because movies have been way too touchy-feely.

But what does that mean for literature? To read is to enter into something that is potentially much more intellectual than watching something, which is why movies have to use such an array of tricks to keep our attention. Books must rely on the reader’s imagination, must stir the reader’s imagination, but they should also stir certain kinds of critical reflection as well. Or, they can. When I look at stuff on the best-seller lists I have to concede that critical reflection doesn’t seem to be part of the reading experience for millions, that they must read much like they watch. And if that’s so, then maybe some of them are looking for literature to provide a “sentimental rush” the way their favorite tear-jerking entertainments do. So be it.

But if there is a critical reflection at work, not simply a naïve engagement in emotion or an arch detachment from whatever is portrayed, then how does one affect such a reader emotionally? The question, from of old, has always concerned pathos, which, since the Greeks, we’ve understood as an expression of the gravitas of life—each individual life as implied in the individuality of the hero, his predicament mirroring (but also masking) to some degree that of the populace, or humanity writ large. Much sentimental and cloying prose can be summoned up to speak of “common humanity,” but if there is something to that idea then what one of us suffers we all suffer, at least imaginatively.

But what makes for pathos rather than “the pathetic?” The latter term might be used to designate heroes who suffer to the point that we have to disengage from their sorrows because they have allowed themselves to be defined by them. In other words, they have ceased to be “heroes” and have become “victims.” Much of what cinema celebrates now, at its most sentimental, is allowing the audience to root for an underdog—a character who is “us” in not being wildly successful or universally loved—who somehow gets the upper hand. If that doesn’t happen, then the sentimental uplift can’t occur and we feel cheated, our attention directed to a loser who wallows in loserdom. But pathos, a sense of shared suffering derived from the fact that life is cruel, unfair and random, could still rescue such a hero, but only if we are truly open to pathos rather than sentimentality. Because sentimentality trades on ersatz emotion. It serves up “suffering” simply to alleviate it to our edification, when, in fact, life is what we all suffer from and it doesn’t stop until it ends. This is the truth of pathos—best evidenced to my mind by the sense of time passing in works of literature (which one can apprehend in one’s life, if one is detached enough, but it’s easier to see it in literature)—and its power is what true works of art are not afraid to confront. Otherwise, we simply are looking for a “good cry,” a way to assuage a vague sense of dread by seeing a miraculous change of fortune.

We used to say a change of fortune for the worse was “tragedy,” a change of fortune for the better was “comedy.” That’s still true, but Aristotle gave us grounds for seeing “tragedy” as tied to the individual and to the interplay of fate and volition that changes a hero’s life contrary to the way he intended, while comedy is entertaining because we see the hero get the better of the situation, usually “getting the girl.” But somewhere along the way the “popular” became a way of shielding us from true pathos in the name of a sentimental uplift, a happy sense that life goes on and not at the expense of the hero (or of us).

Fiction, of course, is partly to blame. There are any number of sentimental entertainments in the novel. In fact, one could argue that a novel can never really be tragic, that the fact of its narration means that some consciousness has grasped the suffering depicted and can recount it. Nothing truly earth-shattering can be contained in a novel. And so we can see how much our visual entertainments derive more from novels than from theater, in their shared invitation to the collective viewer/reader as a participant who needs a distraction rather than a lesson. But that leaves open the question of how true pathos can make itself felt in fiction.

I believe it can, in the sense that one doesn’t simply “feel sorry” for Anna Karenina or Emma Bovary despite their tragic ends. Pathos in these cases is to some extent like it was in ancient theater, a view of a unique individuality at its end, though with a certain irony, especially in Flaubert, at the circumstances that brought about that particular end (because, unlike in ancient theater, they could have been otherwise, fate not having an implacable guise in the modern world).

Here is Conrad’s formulation of the principle, in Nostromo (1904): “In the most sceptical heart there lurks at such moments, when the chances of existence are involved, a desire to leave a correct impression of the feelings, like a light by which the action may be seen when personality is gone, gone where no light of investigation can ever reach the truth which every death takes out of the world.”

Note the terms: “sceptical heart,” “chances of existence.” Here we have the modern attitude, the notion that nothing one feels is necessarily true or valid or original, when faced with the random chance that has made a person one thing and not another, and yet a humble, democratic statement gets registered, perfectly conformable to a world made available by journalism: “a desire to leave a correct impression of the feelings.” To go on the record, as it were, with one’s innermost thoughts and emotions. Why? Because (and here pathos flits in) “every death” removes from the world a “personality,” yet another unique instance of “humanity.” The effort of our novelists, then, in the collective, would be the task of registering as many different instances of personality as possible, to, as Neil Young sings, “tell your story, boy, before it’s time to go.”–Donald Brown, Jan. 15, 2011