Sentimentality

[poliphilo]

So what's the problem? Why is that word still used as a put-down? We all like a good cry, don't we?  Speaking for myself I love it when Dickens emotes over a dead kiddy or Richard Curtis makes amends to Van Gogh. I don't find such moments embarrassing. I don't find them cheap. Life is sad and tears are the proper response to a lot of what goes on in it.  Is making people weep any less respectable than making them laugh?

We've all been intimidated by Oscar Wilde- and his bon mot about Little Nell. He's made it uncool to be moved by fiction. And yet Wilde was the most sentimental writer going. Have you read the Selfish Giant or the Happy Prince? He makes Dickens look stoical.

Wilde- and the twentieth century opinion makers that followed him- had daddy issues with the Victorians.  Their mockery isn't thought through. It's instinctive and defensive. The Victorians were sentimental, therefore sentimentality is bad.  But it's the Twenty First century now,  the Victorians are our great-great-great grandparents- and it's time we dropped our great-great grandparents feud with them.

Comments

[haikujaguar.livejournal.com]

The attitude that it's uncool to be genuine and vulnerable in response to life is tiresome and frankly adolescent. World-weariness does not make you mature.

Yesterday I was watching a DVD issued by my daughter's nursery school of footage taken of her classmates throughout the year. There was a slideshow with photos at the end set to about six country songs, which is a style of music I don't listen to much (not because I dislike it particularly, but because I'm not exposed to it). Six songs... and all of them about children. Two of them were men singing about how their little girls growing up make them want to cry.

Six songs about children and how we should let them be innocent. I think that's more tearjerkers about kids than rock music has produced in sixty years. It made me wonder: why doesn't rock and roll talk about being parents? Is it because rock is the province of teens and anger and a sort of permanent adolescence? Why do you have to switch musical genres to address an experience common to grown-ups?

It was just a powerful moment of 'wait, what'?

Jethro Tull, "No Lullaby"

[jorrocks-j.livejournal.com]

That's off "Heavy Horses."

But then, the process of Ian Anderson growing up is the process of him leaving the Neverland of Rock-and-Rule, though he continued to make good music.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I think rock music is dead and gone- or should be. It had a great, few decades in the middle of the last century, but it's a limited form and it's got nothing new to say- and it's really time to move on. "Screw you, daddy!" makes sense coming from an angsty teen with a 1950s paterfamilias but not a lot when the paterfamilias used to be a rocker himself- or the singer is a grandfather (like Mick Jagger).

One reason the Beatles have lasted so well is because they transcended the genre.

[haikujaguar.livejournal.com]

I'd be hard-pressed to call a lot of (or even most of) the Beatles's oeuvre "rock and roll." Things like Norwegian Wood and Across the Universe are some genre, but they're not rock. Or maybe they're no genre at all... maybe they're just music.

I do find it astonishing to come back to bands decades later and hear them singing the same kind of music they did when they were 18 and angry. It sounds rather ridiculous coming out of married men with children and sometimes grandchildren.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

You're right about the Beatles. There are rock 'n' roll numbers in the mix- but a lot of what they did was something else entirely. Mind you, I think they thought of themselves as rockers.

[ibid.livejournal.com]

i think by the standards of the time they were. We forget how tame the sixites were in some regsrds

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

It was, after all, the decade that made Englebert Humperdinck (sp) a huge star.

[mokie]

It may have nothing new to say, but each generation brings it someone new to say it to.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I suppose. I have to admit I'm terribly out of touch, these days.

[mokie]

Same here. I don't know that what's playing right now can rightly be called rock'n'roll, but we seem to wobble reliably between happy dance tunes and grumpy rebellious music. I'm guessing once Gaga wears off, the angry kids will pipe up and someone will dub it rock.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I'm waiting for the watershed- the Elvis Presley moment- when the music scene will be purged- and something completely new will take over. I reckon it's overdue.

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

Ha - I was just listening to Chris Wood's "Hard" (from The Lark Descending), which is exactly about his little girl growing up and his wanting to cry. Actually it made me cry too, as does anything about one's children not growing up, such as Ben Jonson's Epitaph on his son. Or indeed about their being children, such as Coventry Patmore's "The Toys". Sentimental all, but none the worse for that.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I'm a sucker for mother and child reunions.

The conclusion of Home Alone had me in tears

[haikujaguar.livejournal.com]

The only thing that upsets me about sentimental music is that crying gives me a headache. -_-

BINGO:

[jorrocks-j.livejournal.com]

"Wilde- and the twentieth century opinion makers that followed him- had daddy issues with the Victorians. Their mockery isn't thought through. It's instinctive and defensive. The Victorians were sentimental, therefore sentimentality is bad. But it's the Twenty First century now, the Victorians are our great-great-great grandparents- and it's time we dropped our great-great grandparents feud with them."

Stealing this.

Re: BINGO:

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Please do. I'd be honoured.

[solar-diablo.livejournal.com]

I am not overly moved by most fiction, esp. in comparison to my wife. It's seldom that I'll laugh out loud or tear up while reading. I suspect that's less about my wanting to keep my cool than it is lacking a certain imaginative sophistication, or else being predominately visually oriented. Movies can and often do choke me up, but books? Almost never.

As to the Victorians, I suspect their issues were neither greater in number or complexity than our own. It certainly seems like they get put on the retroactive therapy couch more than any other historical group, however.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I can tear up at anything- books, movies, TV programmes.

I tear up at Shakespeare all the time, but, interestingly, no-one ever accuses him of sentimentality. Is the death of Little Nell any trashier than the death of Cordelia? I don't think so.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

Despising sentimentality is far more a UK thing than American. I tend to put it down to the differences in education system, though obviously that's just a guess. While school-age bullying and vicious mockery are by no means unknown in US schools, in the UK they appear to be a sort of revered institution, particularly in the Public schools. If you're subjected to that sort of crap on a regular basis, you pretty quickly learn to project a neutral affect under emotional stress, and will probably regard tears and sentiment as babyish.

It's the same reason I think the piss take is such a basic building block of Brit humor.

[veronica-milvus.livejournal.com]

Agreed except only about 0.01% of the population goes to that type of school these days. But there must be a cultural overhang.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I think it's got a lot to do with the emotionally numbing effect of the First World War- which hit Britain hard but was only a brief adventure for the USA. The mocking of the Victorians and their values really took off in the 1920s- with Lytton Strachey and Virginia Woolf and all that set.

[(Anonymous)]

That may certainly factor in -- one can hardly blame the few survivors of that horrific massacre for rejecting whole cloth the values of the generation that sent them off to slaughter with a pat on the head and a white feather at the ready. But the rejection I've seen in Britons of even honest sentiment, without gilding or bathos, has at times been so vicious and frantic that it's hard to believe it isn't on some level personal.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

Sorry, that was me, just having been logged out of LJ.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

It's certainly a national characteristic, but one that's changing, I think. Look at the outpouring of grief over the death of Diana Princess of Wales- or, again, consider the oeuvre of Richard Curtis.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

Er, the Richard Curtis I know is an American literary agent. Um, is this the screenwriter you mean?

Diana was, I think, almost a singularity, but if the tendency to feel personally threatened by anything that triggers empathic sorrow is on the decline in the UK, then I'm glad to hear it.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Richard Curtis is the writer of Blackadder, Four Weddings and a Funeral, Notting Hill- and much else. He's as famous- over here- as any screenwriter is ever likely to be. Getting him to write the latest episode of Dr Who- the one featuring Van Gogh- was a real coup.

There's a continuing debate in the British media over the significance of the public reaction to Diana's death. Some think it shows we're lightening up emotionally- and that's a good thing, others deplore it as unBritish.

[petercampbell.livejournal.com]

The argument against sentimentality if that it's false preception. You look at something like a polar bear and it looks cuddly and adorable, but the truth is that it'd dismember you in a couple of seconds.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

If that's the definition, I'd suggest that Dickens- for one- is exonerated. He makes us cry at the suffering of the innocent- which is- indeed- a terrible thing.