The Stuff of Fiction: Advice on Craft

Sentiment versus Sentimentality

Sentiment versus Sentimentality The First, Always; the Second, Never I take it for granted that every serious writer recognizes the reprehensibility of sentimental prose. I am making this assumption primarily because I have never heard a student voice anything other than concern or dismay or even more extreme despair when I have pointed out to him some aspect of his work that was sentimental. Never has one reacted in a way that would suggest he believes there is an argument to be made for sentimentality. But just in case, let’s be clear that, by dictionary de‹nition, “sentimentality” is the “affectation of sensibility, exaggerated insistence upon the claims of sentiment.” And I particularly want to underscore the latter phrase—the exaggerated insistence upon the claims of sentiment—as we distinguish between sentimentality, on one hand, and sentiment on the other, and examine ways in which writers can “insist” on the infusion of sentiment in their stories while making certain that insistence does not become “exaggerated.” Some of the dif‹culty in separating sentiment from sentimentality , of embracing the former and rejecting the latter, has to do with the fact that they are not opposites. Rather, as the de‹nition says, sentiment is contained in sentimentality. Sentimentality is sentiment run amok. It’s as if a tree, the sentiment tree, were in one case kept artfully trimmed and shaped, and in another allowed to grow untended until its branches overwhelmed all the others in the orchard, killing the grass because no sun could penetrate the canopy of leaves and producing lousy fruit because the limbs were never pruned. John Gardner’s thoughts are of help in making the necessary distinction. “Sentimentality,” he wrote, in The Art of Fiction, “is the attempt to get some effect without providing due cause . . . [it is] emotion or feeling that rings false, usually because achieved by some form of cheating or”—again the word—“exaggeration.” So there is not only a fundamental aesthetic objection to sentimentality , but an equally unwelcome ethical one. It is a matter of either cheating, as Gardner says, in order to draw the desired emotional response from a reader; or, in the case of sentiment, of employing the tools and devices of narrative with a touch of deft legitimacy. (Which is not to say that sentiment does not involve a certain manipulation of the reader. I think manipulation, per se, is neither unethical nor inartistic. A central ambition of storytelling is to inspire the response in readers that you, the writer, are aiming for. But what is at issue is the means by which we achieve that response. The manner in which we manipulate the reader. Fairly, so that the response resonates? Or “by some form of cheating”?) In her contributory essay to the anthology Why I Write, the story writer Joy Williams says, “Good writing never soothes or comforts. It is no prescription, neither is it diversionary, although it can and should enchant while it explodes in the reader’s face.” It may seem on ‹rst reading that Williams is describing an especially uncharitable art, detailing as she does all the things that good writing is not inclined to do. A sort of aesthetic tough love, should we as readers agree to its conditions. But actually that is not what Williams is saying at all. As she makes implicitly clear, she is speaking of the gratuitous gestures of commercial pap as opposed to serious writing’s more intricate charity and echoing generosity. She is de‹ning the kind of writing that requires the engagement of both our emotions and our intellect and, asking for this double commitment, rewards us doubly or, at the top of its form, exponentially . The qualities that Williams identi‹es are at the same time exact and encompassing in suggesting the duties of worthy ‹ction. And even more fortuitous, she provides us with an invaluable 146 / The Stuff of Fiction checklist that we can use to make sure our work stays free of sentimentality . It seems, then, an especially good idea to isolate her terms, indeed to make a literal list of them to keep close at hand as we proceed. Good writing, writing that is free of sentimentality but infused with sentiment: Does not soothe or comfort Does not prescribe Does not simply divert Should enchant Should explode in the reader’s face (I salute her distinction between diversion and enchantment. The latter...