(all together now:) Awwwwww...
Hmm, I've got embroiled in a discussion about sentimentality, on a messageboard elsewhere.
Here are some thoughts on the subject: i.e., my post, cruelly transplanted.
I'd say sentimentality is where something is freighted with more than its proper load of sentiment, or feeling - where the emotion expressed is out of proportion to the thing it pertains to. It's giving a thing more tenderness than it has earned.
It's a risk of earnestness, also of whimsy (on which side it overlaps with - but is not quite the same as - camp, or kitsch).
Sentimentality tells the viewer or reader how to feel about its subject. It is dangerous because it takes a specific person or thing and makes it general, applying this false emotion to all instances of that thing: kittens, old people, young lovers, the countryside. It idealises, & thus falsifies.
Then again, it can take something common and make it out to be almost unique, exaggerating the amount of feeling due to it as a type: the cult of motherhood (with its emphasis on this thing called mother-love, which is supposed to be the best kind of love in the world) is a case in point.
Fascist art is sentimental: Mussolini & Stalin loved all that stuff because it's so easy to manipulate and potentially so powerful. It's like sugar - it's absorbed quickly, all in one go, but it palls quickly too, because there is nothing left to be got from it. There's nothing left over from it.
In terms of art, sentimentality can never be successful, because in order to engage with it the viewer or reader (or listener) has to shut down his or her critical faculties, ask no questions, and just become a passive recipient of whatever feeling the artist decides to throw at them.
Some film examples. Both Forrest Gump and It's a Wonderful Life (much as I love Jimmy Stewart) are grossly sentimental, in that they both make emotional points which are false, and do so by distorting the truth. Forrest Gump, though I hate it more, can arguably be more easily redeemed, because it at least has a satirical element. ET, however, will burn forever in the hell of gross sentimentality. God I hate that film! Chaplin, eg, is shockingly sentimental where Buster Keaton is not at all. Because he understates.)
The saying (I think from Oscar Wilde, himself a great sentimentalist) is that idealism is born of cynicism - and I think sentimentality (the close relative of idealism, which is the condition of valuing things not as they are, but how you wish they were - this is the type of sentimentalism that so mars the final section of The Colour Purple) is also born of cynicism, because if a person is in touch with his or her feelings, there's no need to distort them to make a point. In my experience of life, the people who are the most sentimental - who assign most emotional weight to things that haven't earned it - often don't assign enough to those things that have. It's a corruption of real feeling, or anyway of the accurate expression of feeling.
This element of distortion is the thing that makes sentimentality potentially creepy (a useful device for the purposes of portraying something as sinister), and makes clowns so frightening.
3 comments:
I couldn't have put it better myself.
One day yer nearly blind saving domestic animals; the next yer a bleeding space face genius; out-facing reality for a laugh, and beyond the giggle, to show off wiv yer bleeding intellectuality.
A goog manifesto. The register affirmational, but with a certitudeness of overstatementness, yet nea quite.
You aul moo'er, you've been nickingt off me, nicking off you in the first place, with my bleeding tu-whitt tu-woo; mine alone now the H's have been removed.
No longer the aul shaymus wan's. moi fievin', you robbin' back wot i stole first!!
You owe me baroque. This is war!!
Call and return colonial girl. Forgive me if the tenor is too au fait wiv yer bleeding cleveralities Ms B, but me and yous got histories to be pretending to have; away from the purer source of Chaucey and that.
Stop pretending baroque. Cease your dream forf-wiv and never wield the biro oragain. Junk yer laptop, you are a threat to my windiness baroque. The making it-up'ness is a personal assault on me as a delusional hack and borderline alkie.
If i imbibe teb cans tommorow and get arrested for indecent exposure; i'm blaming you, bush.
Good mooing ms b, fink yer great now do yer?
Seriously though, my last blog-post that i first depisted here, the Plath hoof tap wan; i felt a bit - not guilty - .but knew that you were what made it happen, in the sense of buzzing in the return when i read here.
Coz it's obvious, honesty, when you see it in print, and you, even though i do not treat you with any special favour, can't help but warming to you.
Humanity is in these posts; random, like everyones, hit and miss.
But the most major fing i reckon that just is, is that you have outed yerself; in the sense of you just being honest in print, yerself.
And i know after 6 years of talking rubbish and reading, that this is a fundamental of writing not everyone finds or is lead to. You were, and it was this blog that brought it on, and that is all we need baroque, simple honesty - or rather - humanity and truth.
You are a near invalid, recovering on instinct, wiv yer pen, words of recovery. Like stephen king wrote on writing after getting hit and intesive cared by the truck as he took his afternoon walk.
It doesn't matter what we write, in the grander scheme of eternity, as long as we do it. Talent quality blah blah is irrellevant, as long as the person in mimesis is happy. So better to affirm a joke who is rubbish and buzz off them thinking they are great, than be a negative git always finding fault, and trolling the crap poets.
oz as this piece proves your critical self is coming through, and i think we both sense this is important, and the only thing you did that i didn't with this, is frame it by - not apologising - but feeling the need to talk of its origin, on another board.
I faced the same dillema with the plath piece, but decided to not mention this, and realised after that i am getting handy.
Did you see the joseph ridgwell Brutalist manifesto on the grandy rag friday?
Mr Bomber he is, who literally bombed in two munth back baroqué, and submitted an article - Brutalist manifesto - and got 270 quid for 500 words.
Four months i'm there full on and after doing all three of them after one told me to shut the f**k up, anointed there movement with a few lines from the proclamation and o'connell, loadsa words 5000 this weekend, but realising that they are sniffing for - not me - but more or less and when i submit, it is nailed on, and if not and i am just an alco delusional, it matters nought, coz we are bleeding honest.
And not in some wanky way of "luv yooo" but experience of knowing that, hey if yer wanna write - write - simple as, and who gives a toss who says wot. coz at the end of the day when yer windy yer know, the competition - wrong word - is actually, not in awae, but you are in their head far fart more than they you, coz talk is talk and as long as we do it in print, we get better.
So be shit, yer have to be to be good, coz the times are changing and professionally, as amaatuer windbags, we will be doing 1000 words a wekk in the grandy in two years max, i predict. Coz Mr Bomber proved it, online writing has different forces. Young eds out to make a name for themselves with a bitta shake up and me and you, we are nailed on..
Generally speaking, "sentimental" isn't a very useful word in criticism, is it? Most of the time, all it means is, "I didn't care for this." Schiller and L.C. Knights called Shakespeare's poetry sentimental (though they probably meant it in some special senses inaccessible to you and me). Critics of Tennyson called him sentimental. Critics of Wordsworth called him sentimental. Critics of Frost called him sentimental. There are critics who called Auden, in his camp-est mode, sentimental. I read one critic who managed to find Hardy sentimental. I suppose that by any conventional measure, Housman is sentimental, but that scarcely seems a qualitative judgment--merely a description.
I'm semi-convinced that calling a poem sentimental is the equivalent of calling someone in the 50s a communist. It's a generalized expression of distaste and little more.
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