[Reader-list] Riotous Sentimentalism

[pratap pandey]

Dear All,

Sentimentalism is an ethic, a posture, a mode of representation, a narrative style, a gargoylic closure that emerged in the foment leading to the French Revolution. (I am regurgitating, with tears forming in my eyes, my inability to possess or even read Peter Brooks' classic text on this. I place a bucket under each eye.)

Every human being is equal. Why? Because they cry.

This is a re-statement of: Every human being is equal because they eat, piss, and crap. 

[Sentimentalism's relation to Menippean satire is extremely interesting. In Menippean satire, everyone is equal because everyone gorges, and pisses and craps by the litre and the tonne. In medieval, and even early modern Europe, till the time the peasantry possesses the ability to pamphleteer, Menippean satire is the mode in which the excesses of the rich are represented. With the supersession of mercantilism into primitive accumulation of capital, came a new regime of representation that excluded such expressivities. In an enlightened universe and emergent burgher culture, it was difficult to tell such enteric truths. Refinement was everything.

In a time of the transformation of the peasantry into labour, refinement relegated Menippean satire, and peasant celebration, to the sphere of obscenity. Fathers had banned Rabelais; sons were told to read the later Dryden, or Racine; grandsons, Shaftesbury's moral philosophy. Of course, you could read "well-written" satire. It was witty and intellectual; it never crossed boundaries, Voltaire notwithstanding.

The appropriation of Menippean satire is then filled in in the form of the emergence of sentimentalism. Repression, or the excess of it, finds a new outlet.

There is a change here, in how "excess" is defined. There is an attempt to shift from a fantasy of control to a fantasy of agency.

The latter fantasy, too, is appropriated.

And how. It is turned into a regime of absolute victimisation, an invitation to recognise the absolute overtaking of the subject by external forces not under control. This eminently suited the 19th century European bourgeosie, which drew its strengths from a belief in permanent victimisation. It suited, even more, the ever-in-flux petty bourgeosie, which based its lifestyle on an ethic of humiliation]