David Foster Wallace wrote on a number of occasions, both in fiction and in essays, about his feeling that irony was a negative force in our society and that American culture would do well to embrace (re-embrace, I suppose) sentimentality—or at least something that risks being mistaken for sentimentality.
"The next real literary 'rebels' in this country might well emerge as some weird bunch of anti-rebels, born oglers who dare somehow to back away from ironic watching, who have the childish gall actually to endorse and instantiate single-entendre principles. Who treat of plain old untrendy human troubles and emotions in U.S. life with reverence and conviction. Who eschew self-consciousness and hip fatigue. These anti-rebels would be outdated, of course, before they even started. Dead on the page. Too sincere. Clearly repressed. Backward, quaint, naïve, anachronistic. Maybe that'll be the point. Maybe that's why they'll be the next real rebels. Real rebels, as far as I can see, risk disapproval. The old postmodern insurgents risked the gasp and squeal: shock, disgust, outrage, censorship, accusations of socialism, anarchism, nihilism. Today's risks are different. The new rebels might be artists willing to risk the yawn, the rolled eyes, the cool smile, the nudged ribs, the parody of gifted ironists, the 'Oh how banal.' To risk accusations of sentimentality, melodrama. Of overcredulity. Of softness." ("E Unibus Pluram," A Supposedly Fun Thing..., 81)
It's a bold claim, and one that DFW's uninformed detractors might be surprised to hear him making. I've always identified, too, because certainly irony is often a defensive posture and a way to avoid engaging with reality. I have a friend who claims she can't watch Family Guy because the evil, adult-sounding, ambiguously gay baby with the football head is too disturbing: my first reaction to this is incredulity and amusement, but then—well, yeah, isn't that sort of disturbing? and isn't there something a little...let's say unlikely about the fact that seemingly no one seems to have that reaction?
I myself recall that as a boy I used to be very disturbed by scenes in movies where the bad guys would finally eat it—I remember a scene in I think it was Outrageous Fortune, maybe Risky Business, in which [SPOILER ALERT*] this guy is hanging by his fingertips from the edge of a cliff and I think ultimately falls to his death, and I was watching this and thinking, "Holy shit, that's terrible, how would it feel to be that guy?"—which of course is the wrong reaction and not at all what the audience is supposed to think...but actually rather a lot what Huckleberry Finn thinks, as it happens:
"Now was the first time that I begun to worry about the men—I reckon I hadn't had time to, before. I begun to think how dreadful it was, even for murderers, to be in such a fix. I says to myself, there ain't no telling but I might come to be a murderer myself, yet, and then how would I like it?" (87) [Amazing.]
But now so isn't it actually sort of fucked up that we usually don't have anything like that reaction?—that we've become deadened, numbed, and no longer feel inconvenient emotions like that?
Sure. But here's the counterargument:
(1) Why are we afraid of sentimentality? Yes, the fear may be bad for us, but does it have any rational basis? As I've blathered on about in my posts about advertising and also about politics,** we actually do live in a society in which people are trying to manipulate us. This is a democracy (close enough), and it's a capitalist society, so we've got people on all sides trying not to speak to us, but to control us (say influence if control sounds too extreme) in one way or another. So in fact skepticism (which, yes, has a tendency to blur into cynicism) is an extremely important characteristic to have in the United States of America.
(2) What is sentimentality?
"The part that got me was, there was a lady sitting next to me that cried all through the goddam picture. The phonier it got, the more she cried. You'd have thought she did it because she was kindhearted as hell, but I was sitting right next to her, and she wasn't. She had this little kid with her that was bored as hell and had to go to the bathroom, but she wouldn't take him. She kept telling him to be still and behave himself. She was about as kindhearted as a goddam wolf. You take somebody that cries their goddam eyes out over phony stuff in the movies, and nine times out of ten they're mean bastards at heart. I'm not kidding." (The Catcher in the Rye, 181)
"He is feeling little, but he is sentimental; sentimental being used here in the sense of 'feelingless feelings,' the thought of or the daydreams of feelings, rather than felt feelings. It is a well-known fact that many possessive, cold, and even cruel people—and the three belong together—who are not moved by human suffering that is real, can shed tears when a movie presents one of those constellations that they remember from their own childhood or that they think of in daydreams." (The Art of Being, 112)
(3) I've talked a number of times here about "junk religion," and I may have mentioned "junk feminism" once or twice as well. If the term junk makes little sense to you in this context, you might substitute in fake or bullshit. I submit that the real problem here is not irony, but junk irony, and that what we need is real sentiment, not junk sentiment, which I agree with Fromm*** we might just identify with sentimentality. I think that my feelings when I saw the bad guy about to fall off the cliff were real, if misplaced, empathy; on the other hand, the way my eyes got teary when Eve saw the recording of all the good stuff Wall-E had done for her, I can't help but think that that's not empathy but a kind of narcissistic fantasy—that or the result of some very successful narrative manipulation—sentimentality, either way...
[I'm not going to proofread this too carefully because, come on, who's going to read something this long on a blog? I remember what that well-dressed hobo told me. You can throw in some pictures, but you can't...make them...drink...?]
* Yeah, right.
** Many of these you can find by clicking on "The Man" under "subjects" on your right.
*** Oh, surprise, surprise! –ed.
0 comments:
Post a Comment