All this talk about books I haven't read reminds me another book I haven't read, and want to read. High upon my list it is, though little knowledge about it, have I. (god i'm bored).
The book is Thirteen Moons by Charles Frazier, author of the wonderful Cold Mountain.
Does anyone know anything about this? Is it supposed to be any good? I thought, all this Cormac McCarthy talk, we shouldn't forget other people.
Like Charles Frazier, or Herman from Herman's Head. Remember that show? Whatever happened to Herman?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
19 comments:
i think we need to start a cultural revolution and convince publishers to put books out in paperback from the get-go. i would LOVE to be reading this book.
Hmmm...I started reading "Thirteen Moons" but before I did, I made the mistake of reading reviews on the book. Washington Post just ripped it to shreds, claiming it was "long winded, sentimental and soporific." This made me gulp. The word "sentimental" has always left me in horror since a certain early college class in which it was very pointedly told to all of us, that sentimentality was something to beware of and that all lower grade writing contained it. beware, beware. So after the Washington Post review, I just sat back and blinked. Was Cold Mountain sentimental as well? Maybe...I really don't know. I hardly even know where I stand in the "sentimental" case. I'm not totally sure what it is. I loved Cold Mountain but this review made me flinch. It touched on the raw- sentimentally.
I started reading "Thirteen Moons" and even though I really wanted to, I couldn't keep reading. Washington Post had left such a muddy taste in my mouth that I couldn't continue forward. It's sad and it's a shame but there it is. Maybe in a couple months I can pick up that book again. I hate reviews that pull the rug right out from under me.
i understand completely, and ask you to join my campaign against the anti-sentimentality factions.
i think it's a bullshit way to cast something off wihtout putting any effort in. don't get me wrong, there is bad sentimental pap.
but there is great art, too, that is sentimental.
No way, dudes. Hip ironic detachment forever!
I will join your campaign whole-heartedly. Sentiment is just one of those things. I even might dare to say, it can be a very good thing at times and necessary too. Chris- tell me some great works that have sentiment in them. I have my own ideas but I'd like to hear yours.
I'm tired of hip ironic detatchment. It has its place alright but its been feeling increasingly like a "has-been". Seen it. Done it. Yadda yadda. I'm joining the campaign.
How about anything written by Jane Austen. She's so fab in that wonderfully sentimental way.
Excessive emotion is the sentimental; its over indulgence, like too much sugar or too many adjectives. Good literature, i think, should typically have Pathos not the sentimental. there are moments of johnathan safron foer that border on the sentimental. He may get away with it only because of the holocaust or 9.11, but it's easy none the less and the sentimental (or at least the cultural pejorative definition) is always easy.
alyosha karamozov may be a sentimental character but we are not neccessarily asked to love and weep with him. In fact we might dislike him completely in lieu of some one less melodramatic such as Ivan who is not sentimental at all.
But hold on!
Certainly when Sam and Frodo have just tossed the ring and believe it's the end of all things the emotional impetus of all the books has reached its apex so to say and is really quite sentimental,(i am sure i cried.) However, isn't this abundence of emotions deserved? Also compare that emotional content to say a picture of a smiling baby with puppies. These examples may both be sentimental but one is far more complex and i suppose true than the other, in which case we have two defintions and some one better make up another bloody word.
Pathos
There's nothing wrong with sentiment...it's natural. But when it exists as sentiment for sentiment's sake it becomes manipulative and cheap.
here is a list of things that i think are sentimental and wonderful.
jane austen (as has been mentioned)
little miss sunshine
extremely loud and incredibly close (sorry forest, but it can't be rescued as you would have it)
walt whitman
louisa may alcott
nathaniel hawthorne
i could go on. but this is a small list of people and things that do not value reason over the senses and emotion. i know that many people prefer to exclude things they love ipso facto from sentimentality because they love it and must not love sentimentalism, but i still hold that this is ridiculous.
I've yet to hear anyone explain what the word really means, other than the ever popular 'Anything just a bit less respectable than MY favorite novel.' Could the problem lie in the reader *feeling manipulated*? Good ol' Jane doesn't seem to fit the definition, though. She tackles subject matter that's often treated with sentimentality (romance, peril, rescue...) but she seems to be rather icily illusion-free in her discussion of the topics. If her work is sentimental, what isn't?
I'm reminded of the transformation in the comic industry following the Gold and Silver age booms in superhero/war hero/etc stories. After decades of noble, patriotic heros fighting the nazis and rescuing orphans and waving the flag, writers and artists started pushing the boundaries and putting less virtuous, more conflicted characters in important roles. Antiheros and so on. Moore's The Watchmen was the crown jewel, a thought-provoking deconstruction of the entire superhero genre.
But... just like the aforementioned 'hip ironic detatchment' it turned into its own self-promoting cliche, a parodied over-reaction to what came before it. As the guys from Penny Arcade said, "Eventually Captain America's shield drank human blood and everything turned stupid..." It just turned into a fresh set of cliches.
Hip, ironic detachment has eaten itself! Future generations will look back at us and chuckle at our hip literature the way we chuckle at overwrought gothic novels! You heard it here!
These are the muddy waters of semantics. Certainly we may all agree that socially culturally the sentimental has a negative meaning. What are the sources of this negativity? Fashionable irony? Or are there actual movies and books that resort to cheap excessive emotions, perhaps merely rhetorically? And thus our criticizing them by saying they are sentimental is in some sense accurate? Or course there are works of literature that defy reason on emotional grounds, such as for instance, most poetry, but does that make most poetry sentimental? The dictionary’s definition of sentimental makes a quantitative difference between the sentimental and plain emotions, by which it means, the sentimental is too emotional. The question then is, given the various works with emotional content, is it yes, irrationally emotional? But also abundantly emotional? And is this surplus of emotions desereved?
Compare two photographs involving 9/11.
First a photo of a child holding a candle and an American flag at a 9/11 vigil. Am I imprecise to say this photo is sentimental? I dont think I am.
Then consider the photo of the man falling from one of the towers. This of course evokes an abundant emotional response, such as horror and sorrow. However one would be reluctant to define this photo as sentimental.
In any case, there is a cultural definition of sentimental with a largely pejorative meaning, and it's not found in the dictionary. That has to be acknowledged.
And I agree that manipulation has to do with it.
Manipulation, definitely. As I was puzzling over what I learned in college (OK! OK! This was before bethel. I learned a lot of rot at bethel but this wasn’t one of them), I finally found the story that was such a great case in point for sentimentality. That story is “Editha” by William Dean Howells. Howells was an advocate for realistic writing and one article put it tried to “wean american literature away from sentimentality”. His story is about a young woman who pretty much manipulates her fiance to join a war he doesn’t agree or believe in. She uses such great lines as:
"But don't you see, dearest," she said, "that it wouldn't have come to this if it hadn't been in the order of Providence? And I call any war glorious that is for the liberation of people who have been struggling for years against the cruelest oppression. Don't you think so, too?"
"I suppose so," he returned, languidly. "But war! Is it glorious to break the peace of the world?"
"That ignoble peace! It was no peace at all, with that crime and shame at our very gates." She was conscious of parroting the current phrases of the newspapers, but it was no time to pick and choose her words. She must sacrifice anything to the high ideal she had for him, and after a good deal of rapid argument she ended with the climax: "But now it doesn't matter about the how or why. Since the war has come, all that is gone. There are no two sides any more. There is nothing now but our country."
He sat with his eyes closed and his head leant back against the veranda, and he remarked, with a vague smile, as if musing aloud, "Our country--right or wrong."
"Yes, right or wrong!" she returned, fervidly. "I'll go and get you some lemonade.."
And then after she returns, there’s another great line of hers waiting:
“But there is no question of wrong in this case. I call it a sacred war. A war for liberty and humanity, if ever there was one. And I know you will see it just as I do, yet."
He took half the lemonade at a gulp, and he answered as he set the glass down: "I know you always have the highest ideal. When I differ from you I ought to doubt myself."
Okay so obviously, Editha has got some shit going on. I think what strikes me most about sentimentality in these few little bits is the incredible act it puts on. It’s posturing or what could be called “deep acting.” I mean, Editha believes this but underneath, you wonder how much its really affecting her. It’s a great act! She could be speaking lines out of a heroic play. She’s reveling in her part. She seems to be speaking her heart…but its so manipulative. It’s scary. Just like the picture of the child, candle, and vigil- okay this picture could be authentic but it’s just scary instead. There’s an odd hollowness to these sentimental things. They seem so sincere, they seem to be telling us a truth but they ring very hollow.
I also ended up reading a little bit about the cult of sensibility, which used sentimental literature and sentimental reading as its instruments and came up with this great quote: “As literary critic Janet Todd points out, sensibility taught its devotees not so much "what it felt like to be another person or object, but what it felt like to be looking at a person or object and how such looking affirmed their own sensibility." And that’s a truly great point and what fr’s photo child truly does.
There’s this ring of falsity in sentimentality, I think. It’s hard to pinpoint, hard to define in the dictionary but it is a sort of deceit. Looking at a picture of a man falling out of window from the Towers isn’t deceitful. It’s brutal, it’s hard but it happened. There’s no posturing or deception.
Also, I think it’s humorous that Jane Austen was picked as an example of sentimentality because she despised so much of it in her own age and era. Wasn’t that what Northanger Abby was, after all? A girl looking for lurid sentimentality gets in trouble with every time she tries to find it. That’s what enraged me so much about this new movie of Pride and Prejudice. It turned into a sentimental love song and made me think of the Brontes (who were sentimental) when Austen was really too biting and brutal to be condoned as such. Austen never had Darcy coming of the fog at dawn in a sort of trench coat (good God!), nor do I ever think she treated Lizzie as a girl who would stare into a mirror for the course of a day because of a heartbreak (that is sentimental and yuck). She was the woman who laughed down her sleeve at everyone, including her own heroines. So I can’t agree that Austen was sentimental. She told love stories, this is true, but that doesn’t necessarily make her sentimental. The only posturing and manipulation I see in JA’s works are her own characters and these are drawn without pity or excuses.
P.S.: that was just me looking at the negative side of sentimentality. I know that this word has a lot of facets to it.
cat. you are talking about dissembling, and you are right to see it as in part an act that is being carried out.
but this does not mean it has to be manipulating. this is a problem i have. what's with this horrible fear of being manipulated by emotions in art? since when has art not done this? why would we watch a film or read a book that left us completely unmanipulated by the content?
that sounds hideously boring to me.
and i know there is a difference between the manipulation of great novel and the manipulation of a roland emerich film. but its the same task.
finally, i do think that Austen is in the sentimental camp. and i love her.
(We all know I was joking about my love for ironic detachment, right?)
I think with Austen there is the mislabeling of nostalgia as sentimentality. Austen was not sentimental in her time (as Cat points out). However, we consider her sentimental because modern readers (in my experience, mostly young girl readers) tend to romanticize and nostalgically long for the period in which Austen is writing when romance was an epic adventure... rather than the messy jr. high affairs we feel we experience.
CZF, we agree and you've helped me hone my feelings on this subject. One major source of discussion could be Life Aquatic. I originally (and still am somewhat) was frustrated by this movie because it spent so much of its time in the ironically detached world of Wes Anderson's mind only to, in the end, embrace an ending full of sentiment (I think sentimental). The sudden shift could be a shift to tear down the movie's previous facade of ironic detachment... or it could be simply putting it on pause to give us a sentimental wink.
I still don't know how I feel about it.
(errrr...sorry about that, whb, didn't know. heh!)
Post a Comment