An Archaeology of Sympathy: The Sentimental Mode in Literature and Cinema by James Chandler (review)

James Chandler’s new book unearths the long history of the “sentimental disposition” as it took shape in the literary work of Laurence Sterne, Charles Dickens, Mary Shelley, William Blake, William Wordsworth, Joseph Conrad, and James Joyce, and the cinematic work of D.W. Griffiths and Frank Capra. At the heart of the book is a wide-ranging and subtly crafted argument for the continuity of the sentimental disposition as it recurs across the different eras, genres, and media in which these artists worked. If Chandler’s argument surprises—Laurence Sterne helped to invent classical Hollywood cinema!—it does so with such impeccable scholarship and refined analysis that the surprise is both welcome and salutary. By tracing the sentimental mode across this broad terrain, Chandler is able, first, to recast key aspects of our received narratives of literary history, showing in particular how Romantic and modernist authors not usually associated with the sentimental incorporated and amended the mode within their texts, and, second, to challenge what he describes as the “programmatic institutional animosity towards cinema” that was a feature of literary studies for much of the twentieth century (330).

Chandler’s favoured term for his object of study—the sentimental “disposition”—foregrounds the rhetorical processes of ordering, arrangement, and presentation that are central to the works he analyzes. The sentimental is not, for Chandler, simply a debased form of affect—the pejorative sense of uncritical self-absorption that clings to the term today—but instead a repertoire of formal devices for producing, managing, circulating, and reflecting on affect within the virtual space of the text. Chandler defines sentiment as “distributed feeling” or “emotion that results from social circulation, passion that has been mediated by passage through a virtual point of view” (12). He describes his own method as a form of “media archaeology” and compares his mode of analysis to “stratigraphy,” or the geological study of rock strata (xvi). This method is consistent with Chandler’s conception of the sentimental as both a “horizontal field” of historical relationships and a “vertical structure of reflexive levels” (xviii). This self-reflexive, non-linear structure is evident in the construction of the book itself, which begins with Capra and the formation of the classical Hollywood narrative system, then “circles back” in a “large loop” to Sterne and the eighteenth century, then works towards the present through key sentimental moments in Romanticism and modernism (xix).

According to Chandler, the history of the sentimental begins with seventeenth-century Latitudinarian theology and the “vehicular hypothesis,” which identified the human sensorium as the repository of the soul in an age defined by the scientific materialism of Hobbes, Descartes, and Spinoza. The Latitudinarian conception of the soul would later influence the way in which Sterne and other authors working in the genre of the “sentimental journey” described the mobile attachments of the human heart. Indeed, when Parson Yorick writes his preface while riding in the “Desobligeant” in the opening chapters of Sterne’s novel, he deploys many features that will come to define the sentimental mode in the subsequent centuries: inversion of sequences of cause and effect, sympathetic projection into the “case” of another character, mercurial shifts in mood and affect, and the programmatic revelation of the text’s own mechanisms for ordering and displaying its contents. This last and crucial feature is signalled in Yorick’s oft-interrupted opening gambit, “—They order, said I, this matter differently in France—.”

The central focus of the book is on the continuities between literary and cinematic sentiment in the work of Sterne and Dickens on the one hand, and Griffith and Capra on the other. At numerous points in the argument, Chandler deems certain features of literary texts to be “protocinematic” (12). His rationale for doing so is derived both from the comments made by Sergei Eisenstein, Viktor Schlovsky, Griffith, and Capra on the literary sources for...