Eliot in Reverse: Postmodern Sentimentality in Graham Swift’s Ever After

1We need to remind ourselves these days that ‘sentimentality’ was originally a neutral or even positive term, popularly used to signify something that was valued highly, namely something characterized by sentiment. The chief sense of ‘sentiment’ was ‘a thought or reflection coloured by or proceeding from emotion,’ but, significant to our purposes, it also had the sense of ‘an emotional thought expressed in literature or art.’1 However, the positive value attached to these terms was part and parcel of that culture of feeling which pretty quickly also became the object of debate and of critiques, in books such as MacKenzie’s The Man of Feeling.2 Consequently, the term ‘sentimentality,’ or at least its cognate ‘sentimentalism,’ was gradually put to pejorative use, signifying excessive indulgence in feeling or insincere display of feeling. So, for instance, to Thomas Carlyle, sensibility was the positive term, whereas sentimentality signified sensibility put in the service of falsehood. In fact, the views that T. S. Eliot would later express in his essay on Hamlet were already in place in Carlyle, as Carlyle identified the sentimental work of literature as one which displays ‘feeling in excess of what the dramatic situation supports.’3 Thus, Carlyle also reversed the earlier use of the terms that we find in Friedrich Schiller: to Schiller, writing at the time of Carlyle’s birth, sensibility signified excess of feeling, whereas sentimentality meant self-consciousness in relation to one’s feelings, and sentimental poetry had elements of reflexivity and disinterestedness, in contrast to what Schiller called naïve poetry.4 I will have reason to get back to Schiller in a while, but for the moment I will note that, by the early twentieth century, the pejorative use of ‘sentimentality’ and its cognates had come to reign supreme and Schiller’s model had sunk into relative oblivion.

2Thus, the stage was set for the modernist attack on sentimentality, or even on sentiment as such. And this attack took the form of a discourse on impersonality, a discourse that followed a path of radicalisation, from Eliot and Joyce through Brecht, via Ortega y Gasset, and on to Foucault and Barthes. But this path of radicalisation is also a path of consistency. Although Eliot remains to a large extent within the humanist tradition that Barthes would seem to leave behind, there is a clear correspondence, I think, between Eliot’s more prescriptive stance and Barthes’s ostensibly more descriptive stance: to Eliot, poetry is an escape from both personality and emotion;5 to Barthes, similarly, ‘[w]riting is... where all identity is lost’6 and ‘writing is a science, no longer of the human heart, but of human discourse.’7 However, there is also a difference between the two, and it is as follows: despite his quip about escaping emotion, to Eliot the real crux was how to successfully express emotion in art (and, what is more, the right kind of emotion)—whereas, to Barthes, emotion does not seem to enter the equation at all. And so the eclipse of sentimentality would seem to be complete.

3Indeed, according to Fredric Jameson, we may have witnessed the eclipse of all modes of affect: in Jameson’s analysis, one of the chief characteristics of postmodernism is, not simply the waning of sentimentality, but the waning of affect as such, and what is more, postmodernism is coterminous with, not just the death of the author, but the death of the subject. Thus, Jameson remains faithful to the discursive tradition that links depersonalisation to the subduement of emotion. In postmodernism, Jameson suggests, there is ‘a liberation from every kind of feeling... , since there is no longer a self present to do the feeling.’8

4Yet, I would like to side with Suzanne Clark’s contention, in her book Sentimental Modernism, that ‘in retrospect, no discourse is without emotional appeal and pathos, and so, in retrospect, the sentimentality becomes evident.’9 As Clark shows, there is a persistence of the sentimental in a number of female modernist, and even postmodernist, writers. Even in the great, canonized male theorist-practitioners of literary modernism that I mentioned before, the practice may be found to belie the theory: as Victor Strandberg has persuasively argued, sentimentality emerges according to the logic of the return of the repressed in the poetry of T. S. Eliot, and as Michael Bell has recently illustrated, there are elements of sentimentality not only in Joyce but even in Brecht.10 I would contend that postmodernist literature is ripe for this kind of reevaluative retrospection as well, and that such retrospection will reveal the persistence of, not just affect, but sentimentality, in postmodernist literature— contrary to what Jameson has proposed. I would like to note that we may find this persistence in the writings of some postmodern theorists as well: indeed, Barthes’s disimpassioned post-humanism yielded eventually to a sentimental turn, as he sought to reaffirm the sentimental discourse of the lover,11 and as he conceded in Camera Lucida that he ‘was interested in Photography... for “sentimental” reasons.’12 But sentimentality also pervades Derrida’s The Postcard13—in fact, following John D. Caputo’s book, The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida, we may read Derrida generally as, not just homo religiosis, but also homo sentimentalis.14

5But neither in Barthes nor in Derrida is it a case of a simple return of a classical mode of sentimentality. Rather, they approach what I call postmodern sentimentality, as their writings are intertextual webs with elements of self-reflexivity and self-irony, thus effecting a certain level of impersonality. Whereas irony and self-consciousness may be thought of as foreign to the classical sentimental text as it has come to be defined, postmodern sentimentality depends on irony, on metadiscursive devices and on relativizations; the discarding of irony and of markers of self-consciousness may take place locally in the text, but not in the text as a whole. However, sentimentality is not swallowed up by irony, but lodged in it—much like in Umberto Eco’s famous illustration of the postmodern attitude, where a man discloses his romantic feelings to a woman by saying, ‘As Barbara Cartland would put it, I love you madly.’15 In other words, an aesthetics of impersonality, even of ‘ludic overkill,’ need not necessarily preclude the expression of unabashed sentimentality—but it may be a necessary prerequisite for the successful representation of such sentimentality in our cultural clime. One may say, then, that if Barthes is correct that literature is a science of human discourse, it may still be a science of the human discourse on or of the human heart. And so one may also say that postmodern sentimentality rehabilitates sentimentality in Schiller’s sense: a self-conscious, reflexive, at times even disinterested, way of relating to one’s emotions and of representing them.

6Having thus made a brief theoretical case for postmodern sentimentality, it remains for me to point to an actual case of it, in a more elaborate fashion. It is lucky that our focus here is contemporary British literature, for I think it is there one may most easily find not one, but several, such cases.

7And chief among them is probably Graham Swift, whose novels have been acknowledged as prominent examples of British postmodernism, but have also met with the criticism, in both reviews and scholarly articles, that they are overly sentimental and melodramatic. Indeed, Swift has voiced a poetics that seems the very opposite of the poetics championed by Eliot and other modernists, and in Swift’s novel Ever After, which I will focus on here, the narrator espouses views on literature that stand in sharp contrast to those of the earlier Barthes. As for Swift’s own poetics, it has been outlined with quite some consistency in a number of interviews; for instance, he says:

I think there is an awful lot of writing which in its cleverness, in its insistence on formal virtuosity is only defensive and hiding the writer.... There is a lot of attention given to form and style, a lot of heavy self-consciousness about style... which again I think is defensive and protective. It’s like somebody putting on a suit of armour to keep in the things that matter rather than to show them. And then there is the kind of writer who tends not to do that, and how you don’t do that, I don’t really know, but I hope I am one of those people who doesn’t defend. Vulnerability— that’s the thing.... I am desperate to avoid a sense of the power derived from form. I don’t want to say ‘Look at me being clever!’ instead of ‘Look at me as someone like you!’16

8In a discussion of the issue of truth in his novels, Swift explains that ‘much more important for me is the emotional side of fiction. Whether or not they can say they’ve discovered some truth by reading my book, I want my readers to have had an experience, I want them to be emotionally involved. If it’s not about truth, then fiction is about compassion.’17 Yet, significantly, Swift is wary of being seen as sentimental, as one can tell from the following remark: ‘With the risk of sounding sentimental, I have to say that I’m on the side of love against truth. Heart and feeling are important—though that is a point of view that probably won’t strike a chord with today’s literary critics. I write as a vulnerable human being for other vulnerable human beings.’18 Still, I do think that Swift’s emphasis on emotional involvement, on compassion and vulnerability points in the direction of sentimentality, taken in a neutral, or positive, rather than a pejorative sense.

9The question is to what extent Swift, being a postmodernist novelist, can put his professed poetics of vulnerability into practice. For, as a postmodernist, he heeds protocols of impersonality that compromise his goal of not being ‘defensive’ or ‘clever,’ as will become clear as I turn now to his novel, Ever After.

10Ever After has as its epigraph a few words from the Aeneid: ‘... et mentem mortalia tangunt’—which translates as ‘mortal sorrows touch the heart.’ This sentimental dictum thus stands as a motto for the narrative that follows it. And that narrative is indeed full of mortal sorrows: the narrator, a literary scholar named Bill Unwin, sits in the Fellows’ Garden of his college taking stock of his life following the suicide of his terminally ill wife, Ruth, and his own subsequent failed suicide attempt. As if his wife’s death was not enough, he has also recently lost both his mother and his stepfather. (His father, for that matter, committed suicide when Unwin was nine.) On the death of his mother, he has come into the possession of the notebooks of one of his maternal ancestors, a troubled Victorian by the name of Matthew Pearce. The notebooks offer little comfort, as they are the record of Matthew’s falling under the spell of Darwinism, renouncing Christianity and consequently being forced to leave his wife, the daughter of a Rector. As Unwin struggles to make sense of this history, his main objective becomes a sentimental one, as he tries to salvage as much happiness and romance as possible from his own life and from Matthew’s.

11However, Unwin also confesses to melodramatic feelings of anger and suspicion, as he discloses that he has conceived of his life and its conflicts in terms of Hamlet, viewing his father’s suicide as caused by his stepfather-to-be’s affair with his mother. Thus, Unwin casts himself in the role of the troubled prince, with his mother in the role of Gertrude, his stepfather in the role of Claudius and his father in the role of the dead king, with his wife Ruth lurking in the role of Ophelia. He does this, though, with quite an amount of irony and self-consciousness—which is not surprising, given that he is a professor of literature and has thus doubtlessly read what Eliot had to say on the matter of Hamlet and his problems. Indeed, Eliot would seem to have precluded the affectation of tragic heroism in literature as he let Prufrock exclaim, ‘No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be.’ Yet, while Unwin does come across as rather Prufrockian, he is also able to reverse Eliot’s disillusion by flippantly declaring: ‘I am Hamlet the Dane.’19

12But such flippancy aside, the novel charts Unwin’s struggle to be himself, to be his sentimental self. It is in this struggle that Unwin espouses views that contrast with those of the earlier Barthes. The very opening of the novel may be read as a metafictional comment that puts the death of the author into question. The first sentence of the novel would seem to affirm Barthes’s position: ‘These are, I should warn you, the words of a dead man.’ (1) But the next sentence constitutes an important qualification: ‘Or they are at least... nothing more than the ramblings of a prematurely aged one.’ In other words, while the ambition of being personal in writing may be compromised, it is perhaps not wholly untenable. Unwin also contests Barthes’s notion that literature is no longer a science of the human heart, as he declares that ‘despite its failure to save lives, including, I suppose I must say, my own... I still believe it is the speech, the voice of the heart’—to which he notably adds the parenthetical remark: ‘Say things like that round here and see what happens.’ (5) Later on, he admits that in his tutorials, he has been ‘doing little more than urging [his] students to acknowledge that literature is beautiful... and other such crude, sentimental and unschooled tosh.’ (70; my emphasis) And while Unwin may wax somewhat cynical and parrot the fashionable notion that ‘romantic love’ is ‘a made-up thing,’ ‘a concoction of the poets,’ (111) in the end he maintains that poetry tells us ‘what is in our hearts’ and is a mirror ‘for our lost, discredited souls.’ (249) Thus, Unwin expresses the same view as Swift has done on the subject: that heart and feeling are important in literature, and that literature may give voice to the vulnerable self, but that these are not very fashionable notions.

13But we may of course ask how full of feeling, and how personal, Unwin actually is, notwithstanding his expressed opinions. In other words, is Ever After itself evidence that literature may be the speech of the heart? In a manner, yes. If the novel contests the notions of the earlier Barthes, it also follows the later Barthes in giving voice to the unwarranted discourse of sentimental love. Unwin stresses repeatedly that in Ruth he found ‘the real thing,’ ‘happiness ever after,’ and the phrase ‘Amor Vincit Omnia,’ inscribed on the family clock inherited from his mother, becomes something of a mantra throughout the novel. But the lover’s discourse here is of course primarily one of longing for an impossible (re) union, an expression of a deep sense of loss, as in the following passage: ‘The monstrosity, the iniquity of love—that another person should be the world. What does it matter if the world... is lost, doomed... so long as— But when she is gone, you indict the universe.’ (256) However, this passage also offers an example of Unwin’s inability to speak his heart, his keeping in the things that matter, to use the words of Swift. The affective charge of the novel often comes through in this manner, in what is not said: the frequent instances of aposiopesis in Unwin’s narrative are indicative of his suffering in the face of what he is about to say, a suffering that leaves words unspoken, sentences unfinished, as in the passage just quoted: ‘What does it matter... as long as—.’ Thus, while these silences may be intimations of the heart, they also approach the impersonal, the protective, the shying away from the vulnerable self.

14And so we come to my point that Unwin’s more unabashed sentimentality is lodged in, or surrounded by, a discourse that effects quite a level of impersonality and urbanity. Significantly, it does so by following Eliot’s basic stratagems for accomplishing depersonalisation and controlling emotion: namely, the adoption of masks and personae; the pervasive use of irony; and the abundant use of allusion. We have already seen Hamlet become a mask for Unwin, albeit a mask of melodrama. But one of the first things Unwin points out is that he is also wearing a mask of cynicism and flippancy that is strange to him; in other words, he is putting on that suit of armour that Swift claims he strives to discard. ‘I have never begun to write anything as—personal—as this,’ Unwin says; ‘Yet this way in which I write is surely not me.’ (4) Unwin worriedly asks us whether there is, ‘[u]nderneath it all, something careless, heartless? Is this how I am?’ (4) As these quotes indicate, Unwin is also an exceedingly self-conscious narrator, questioning his own style and tone and his own reliability as a narrator. Thus, his struggle to salvage happiness and romance from his own and Matthew’s lives becomes a struggle against uncertainty. As Unwin concedes, ‘I invent. I imagine. I want them to have been happy. How do I know they were ever happy?’ (212) Moreover, Unwin uses an exceedingly sophisticated vocabulary, which is however wittily balanced by colloquialisms—all of which signals a highly ironic aloofness. Ever After is also Swift’s most elaborately intertextual novel to date. It contains allusions to, as well as direct quotes from, Shakespeare, Virgil, Dryden, Sidney, Donne, Raleigh, Dante, the Bible, a number of Psalms, but also Mozart and Puccini. The question is where Unwin’s own, ostensibly original discourse and his personal feelings are to be located in this intertextual web. For instance, when Unwin recollects Ruth’s and his first night together, at one point he exaltedly exclaims, ‘O Mayflower Road! O garrets under the stars! O vie Bohème! O Mimi! O Rodolfo!’ (250) We must ask whose emotions are expressed here: is it Unwin’s own, but by means of ironic quotation, as in Eco—or is it just a case of a somewhat mechanical reproduction, the detritus of culture ventriloquising itself through a dead man?

15Either way, we can see that for all the novel’s attempts to exorcise the ghosts of Eliot and the earlier Barthes, it remains caught in the stronghold of the aesthetics of impersonality. While Swift’s professed poetics constitutes a reversal of Eliot’s poetics, Ever After comes across as a reversal of the outcome of Eliot’s project: whereas Eliot could not ultimately suppress superfluous emotion by means of formal devices, Swift cannot keep formal devices from controlling and disciplining emotion. The one Eliotean stratagem that Swift, or Unwin, rather, possibly fails to follow is the objective correlative—but Eliot too failed to do so occasionally. In that case, what was Eliot’s failure is Swift’s success—a success, at least, in terms of Swift’s own poetics.

16Eliot, of course, would quite probably have faulted Swift for making Unwin a direct mouthpiece for his own personal views and sentiments without sufficiently reconciling these with the more properly impersonal parts of the work—in an Eliotean reading, Ever After contains material that has not been properly thought through. But such a reading rests on modern notions of selfhood and artistic consistency that were Eliot’s but that are not necessarily our own. Indeed, Eliot conceded in his essay on Hamlet that we are at times excessively emotional—his point was that such experiences should not, could not, be the subject of accomplished art.20 In my view, Swift shows that, through the postmodernist aesthetics of plurality and openendedness, they most definitely can. And so we may conclude that, rather than entailing the waning of affect, the aesthetic practices of postmodernism may actually enable again the expression of that sentimentality which modernism seemed to have done away with forever.