In my fiction workshop last year, the issue of sentimentality came up again and again. ‘Don’t be sentimental’ was like the credo us fiction writers were supposed to live by. But this was problematic to me. Sentimental didn’t sound like such a bad thing. How could it be? When I thought of sentimental, I thought of emotion and reflective emotion after an event – both things I drew on heavily in my own work. After all, what would McEwan be without the heart-pulling threads of Atonement, and Rhys without her stumbling, loving female protagonists? It didn’t seem possible or easy to avoid sentimentality in the way my fiction class was preaching. So mostly I ignored this and went about my way, writing how I pleased and what I pleased. I never got complaints about sentimentality during workshop, so I figured it wasn’t an issue and it went out of my mind.
However, this morning I was reading an interview between Tom Stoppard and Adam Thirlwell in McSweeney’s lovely lovely Book of Writers Talking to Writers, and they began talking about this issue. Stoppard said: “I’m always doubting myself when I think I’ve brought off a moment of sentiment–and I think, ‘Oh, God, this is actually TV.” The conversation went on, and they ended here:
TS: If you think of love letters, other people’s or your own, there’s a tendency for them to veer off into the most embarrassing pathos and sentimentality which is all too evident in retrospect but which at the time of writing seems to be an accurate expression of feeling. So it makes one wonder whether there’s something which is relative to the observer which is not the same thing which is relative to the writer. And I think when I said they always seem a hair’s breadth apart, it’s that difference between how it is being felt by the writer and how it is being received by the audience.
Reading this was like a breath of fresh air. Not only did it make clear for the the distinction (and the incredible blurriness in that definition), but it also raised some interesting questions. I am ashamed – should I be ashamed? – to admit I’ve written said love letters. At the time, they felt eloquent, loving, carefully rendered, but looking back it all seems in shambles. Why did I write that? I doesn’t reveal anything about my inner self, just simply a moment in time that so quickly disappeared. And also – how can one be sure the feelings you writer are the feelings felt by the reader?
Then there is the distinction never made in my fiction workshop, that between sentiment and sentimentality. Nabokov called on this distinction when defending Dicken’s Bleak House against the terrible charge of being sentimental: “I want to submit that people who denounce the sentimental are generally unaware of what sentiment is.”
These are the first three definitions for Sentiment given by dictionary.com:
- an attitude toward something; regard; opinion.
- a mental feeling; emotion: a sentiment of pity.
- refined or tender emotion; manifestation of the higher or more refined feelings.
So what is literature without sentiment? I think the thing so many writers are afraid of is overdoing it, drawing too much on feeling and pathos, to the extent that it alienated the reader from the characters and removes them from experiencing the writing as much as the reader would have done otherwise.
I don’t want to become boring with my general rambling, so I’ll add just one more quote from an essay by John Irving publishing in NYTimes Book Review, called “In Defense of Sentimentality“:
The other name is sentimentality–and, to the modern reader, too often when a writer risks being sentimental, the writer is already guilty. But as a writer it is cowardly to so fear sentimentality that one avoids it altogether. It is typical–and forgivable–among student writers to avoid being mush- minded by simply refusing to write about people, or by refusing to subject characters to emotional extremes. A short story about a four-course meal from the point of view of a fork will never be sentimental; it may never matter very much to us, either. A fear of contamination by soap opera haunts the educated writer–and reader–though we both forget that in the hands of a clod, “Madame Bovary” would have been perfect material for daytime television and a contemporary treatment of “The Brothers Karamazov” could be stuck with a campus setting.
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And when we writers–in our own work–escape the slur of sentimentality, we should ask ourselves if what we are doing matters.
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On a separate and unequal note, according to Wikipedia, ‘Sentience’ is the “ability to feel or perceive subjectively.” Originally, I stuck the word up there because I thought it sounded cool with the other words, but I think it fits in nicely.
flower cannon 