Interrogations

By Kassandra

An eclectic, literary challenge to everyday thinking.

Number Eight: Sense and Sentimentality

There are many obstacles to clarity, realism, seeing things as they really are, and one of the greatest of these is sentimentality. Sentimentality got a foothold in the Eighteenth Century, with Rousseau and Werther and The Man of Feeling, Ossian and Chatterton and the Vicar of Wakefield, and it has been with us ever since. The Victorians, notoriously, were awash in the stuff (not so across the Channel--they do these things better in cool, dry, eyebrow-raising France), what with Little Nell and Tiny Tim and Victoria underlining every other word. Even earnest, determinedly grown-up George Eliot, author of the wicked essay 'Silly Novels by Lady Novelists,' couldn't seem to help making her incidental child characters revoltingly cute. Small wonder that Lytton Strachey, longing for Gibbon, felt compelled to set off a bomb under all that lachrymosity with his rudely ironic Eminent Victorians. But sadly he, and all who have continued his work, all the Menckens and Waughs and Vidals and Hitchenses, have only been able to tease the dragon, not put a stop to it. Sentimentality is still with us, not only robust but fostered and nearly required in many circles. To offend against the canons of sentimentality is nearly as rash as expressing reservations about Mullahs in office in Iran: cries of blasphemy are the result of both.

We are sentimental about a lot of things, not all of them obvious. It's not just puppies and children and Christmas. We're sentimental about some ideas, myths, stories we tell about ourselves and the world, we're sentimental about our own way of doing things, about our habits and beliefs, our misconceptions and hatreds. We're sentimental about ourselves, both as individuals and as a species. We're sentimental about the self. We're firmly convinced that there's something terribly special about each and every Self, and that we should all spend a great deal of our time cherishing and cultivating and nursing and asserting and expressing it. We drone about fulfillment and creativity, we take our psychic pulse every few minutes, we look with suspicion on people who are more interested in the outside world than they are in their darling selves. We are unconcerned at how narrow and parochial and impoverished this self-obsession is, because at least it's honest and authentic and we're in touch with our Feelings.

And of course if there's anything we're more sentimental about than our selves, it's Feelings. Naturally. Sentimentality is all about Feelings, so of course sentimentality is going to put Feelings in the center of the shrine. One of those feelings--so we're always being told, anyway--is the 'hunger' for religion. We all long to believe, to fill in the god-shaped hole, to rest in the bosom of the Lord. In fact many people want no such thing, but never mind. We think we have this yearning, and furthermore that the yearning makes us better people, that those who have it are more profound and insightful and wise than shallow secular skeptics who don't. This is a very sentimental notion, and leads to another--that there is some connection between our longings and hungers, and how the world is. The belief (or unexamined assumption, is more like it) seems to be that because humans have always wanted and postulated one or more deities, that somehow shows there is a deity. The non sequitur seems blindingly obvious, but one hears this 'argument' all the time, usually offered with an air of triumph.

This notion is so sentimental it's downright perverse. As if the universe were arranged in such a way as to meet every desire and need and lack of humans. As if one species out of millions on one smallish planet in one solar system in one galaxy could shape all the rest of the cosmos by the mere force of its wishes. And as if our wishes were always met anyway! What could be more sentimental than to believe that? You might as well believe that Anne Frank went on thinking "people are basically good at heart" right up to the moment she died of starvation and typhoid at Auschwitz. Cynthia Ozick furiously points out the sentimentality and falsity of this idea in her essay 'Who Owns Anne Frank?'

But of course, as Jake Barnes says in the last line of The Sun Also Rises, isn't it pretty to think so. That's the essence of sentimentality, thinking what's pretty rather than what's true--and congratulating ourselves for doing it, too. Sentimentality in all directions. We're sentimental about our sentimentality. We confuse sentimentality with virtue and kindness and generosity, but the two are by no means identical. A sentimental person may be kinder and more generous to people who are cute and appealing than to people who are ugly and unattractive...as ill or impoverished or miserable people often are. Or they may simply be kinder and more generous to themselves than anyone else, like Rousseau, the fons et origo of the cult of sensibility, who took great trouble to punish Hume for being kind and generous to him. Small wonder that Hume had this to say in a letter: 'For the purposes of life and conduct, and society, a little good sense is surely better than all this genius, and a little good humour than this extreme sensibility.'

Kassandra is the pen name of Ophelia Benson. She is editor of Butterflies and Wheels - http://www.butterfliesandwheels.com.

She can be emailed here.

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Interrogations will next be updated early January 2003

Previous Interrogations

1. Self and Internet
2. Perfection Isn't
3. Homo Quaerens
4. Showtime
5. Thinking Makes It So
6. Who's In There?
7. Gustave and Dawn

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