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Pif Magazine
Pif Magazine |
On Sentimentality : Page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 Yes, to the first question; no, to the second. It's true that the aim is to talk readers through the antechambers of skepticism and to get them to step without their noticing through the portal that leads from their real world into the writer's invented one. However, suspending disbelief does not mean surrendering the wish or the need to reason. It's instead a matter of readers leaving one universe, their actual lives, where thought and analysis and rumination are required, for an alternate one where they are needed just as much. For isn't it the case that your dreams, while you're in them, propel you through narratives you're continuously challenged to make sense — not merely sensation — of? In the title essay of her collection, The End of the Novel of Love, Vivian Gornick writes that, after finishing Jane Smiley's novella, "The Age of Grief," and feeling real but finally modest admiration for it, she asked herself, "Why [is this story] only a small, good thing? Why am I not stirred to a sense of larger things here? Almost immediately I answered myself with, Love is the problem here. It's the wrong catalyst. It doesn't complicate the issue. It reduces it." I cite this passage not to argue that love is, per force, sentimental. I don't believe it is and that's not what Gornick is saying. But reading it, I was struck by the applicability of her last two sentences — It doesn't complicate the issue. It reduces it — to the behavior of sentimental writing. It's worth repeating: Sentimentality never complicates the issue. It always reduces it. Hence, sentimental prose has no power to pervade and hence no possibility, in Gornick's words, to stir us "to a sense of larger things."
If it's clear that sentimentality is to be avoided, how can writers hope to suffuse their work with a quality of sentiment that does not become exaggerated? In answer, remembering again the list fashioned from Joy Williams' definition of good writing, I would emphasize two requirements — rigorous descriptive precision and, equally, a relentless restraint — which result in writing that has the chance to enchant readers and explode in their faces. Both precision and restraint contribute to a kind of leavening of the sentiment, a tempering that's necessary in order to keep it from becoming extreme. John Cheever's story, "The Cure," beautifully illustrates the characteristics of narrative precision and restraint. It is one of Cheever's classic portraits of life in exurban New York, that country of rueful courtesies and decorous longing which he made entirely his own. The story begins with the narrator telling us that —
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