Interested in Everything

According to Thomas de Quincey, all readers secretly want fiction ‘to realise an ideal; and to reproduce the actual world under more harmonious arrangements’. If so, it’s no wonder that Edmund Burke described the experience of reading Laurence Sterne as ‘a perpetual series of disappointments’. A Sentimental Journey (1768) begins with a remark about order that is itself a disruption to the usual way of doing things. Books don’t tend to start like this:

• – They order, said I, this matter better in France –

Where are we? Who is speaking to whom, and about what ‘matter’? Rather than address such trifles, the speaker drops the argument – although he continues to fret about ‘order’ as often as he affronts it. Within the next ten lines, we have moved from Dover to Calais, a transition effected so seamlessly that it sounds like the eighteenth-century equivalent of a puff for Eurostar: ‘the packet sailing at nine the next morning – by three I had got sat down to my dinner upon a fricasee’d chicken … incontestably in France’. Our guide on the mournful, bawdy caper that ensues is Parson Yorick, a character resurrected from Sterne’s Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1759–67) as well as from Shakespeare.

Sterne’s gleeful inconclusiveness – displayed syntactically and through a plague of dashes, as well as via episodes that are truncated or wilfully misplaced – is a flirtatious, sometimes maddening, game. In his Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1759), Burke attempted to define the ‘disappointment’ which a reader might feel in such circumstances. It is the moment when pleasure is ‘abruptly broken off ‘. Such an experience need not only be frustrating, chastening, or regrettable. It is, Burke says, ‘an uneasy sense’, poised between indifference and grief. Our desires may not have been satisfied, but the promise of future enjoyment remains. We look backwards and forwards, uncertain quite where we stand.

James Chandler’s ambitious, original, and astute new book construes ‘the practice of sympathy’ in twentieth-century cinema, as in eighteenth-century fiction, in terms of ‘imaginative mobility’. His zigzag approach to film and literature begins with Frank Capra, leaps back to Dickens, Adam Smith, and Sterne (a touchstone of the argument), then races on to Mary Shelley, Conrad, Woolf, and Joyce. Chandler gives a novel slant to what we mean when we talk about moving pictures, or sentimental vehicles of any kind. Transport – the capacity to go beyond one’sself – is the basic condition of sentiment. It is therefore also a structuring principle of Chandler’s voracious critical study, licensing his tour across centuries, media, and genres. Motion is bound up with emotion, in Capra and Dickens as in Sterne, because the sentimental onlooker is capable of passing sympathetically into the point of view of those he meets in everyday life. Feeling is thus distributed in a form of social circulation. It involves an element of vicariousness, since the sentimental spectator is drawn to conjecture the meaning of another person’s gestures and expressions, and what they might reveal or conceal.

Sentimental art is often queasily uncomfortable, as well as hard to pin down. Chandler notes the curious fact that it is easier to date the emergence of the ‘sentimental’ (he has traced the adjective back to 1743) than it is to say what the phenomenon itself might be. Indeed, as he brilliantly demonstrates via a wealth of sources, a self-inspecting instability is part of the fundamental character of such a genre, mood, or style: ‘Mixed feelings elicit reflection, but reflection also seems to elicit mixed feelings.’ Taking his cue from Schiller, who argued in 1795 that ‘conflicting images’ are the stock in trade of sentimental poets, Chandler reveals time and again that this literary and cinematic mode – widely assumed to be mere schmaltz – is defined by its complexity and impurity. Yorick may insist that he is writing a simple account...