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Monday, October 27, 2008

Sentiment and irony

Posted by Adam Roberts on 10/27/08 at 01:17 PM

In his poem ‘The Definition of Love’, Bernard O’Donoghue suggests love is not what has previously been suggested (not sex, not wishing someone else’s welfare, notcetera), but is rather fingers touching fingers across a linen tablecloth. The last nine lines of the poem are given over to this little narrative:

A young curate of a parish in West Cork
Was told his mother was seriously ill
And he must come home to Boherbue
(In fact she was dead already; they had meant
To soften the blow). He drove recklessly
Through mid-Kerry and crashed to his death
In the beautiful valley of Glenflesk.
This was because he fantasised in vain
About touching her fingers one last time.

Nicely handled, this, I’d say: the use of plain language and the plain measure of blank verse, the vocabulary titivated by the expressive use of Irish place names; the way the syllabic count contracts (11, 10, 9; and then again 11, 10, 9) until the punctus is reached at ‘death’, whereafter the lines are all regularly decasyllabic. It is properly touching poetry. More, its the kind of dramatic irony (as in Greene’s Heart of the Matter) that is both surprisingly resonant and surprisingly rare in contemporary literature. Why should this be? I’ve been thinking about it, and I wonder if my first reaction—that it is too sentimental for modern tastes (although ‘sensibility’ is not a criterion of aesthetic dispraise, in my book)—hasn’t got it the wrong way about. What I mean is I wonder now whether the definition of sentimentality isn’t, as it is often taken to be, grounded in affective response; whether sentimentality isn’t more radically the iteration of a certain sort of dramatic irony.

I’m not sure about this. I think the idea would be something like: affect is affect; babies are cute; young love is young and lovely, kitties are ‘aww!’, but none of these things (or the representations thereof) are sentimental exactly. That articulation of sensibility in the fullest sense needs irony.

Comments

Reuben Bright

Because he was a butcher and thereby
Did earn an honest living (and did right)
I would not have you think that Reuben Bright
Was any more a brute than you or I;
For when they told him that his wife must die,
He stared at them and shook with grief and fright,
And cried like a great baby half that night,
And made the women cry to see him cry.
And after she was dead, and he had paid
The singers and the sexton and the rest,
He packed a lot of things that she had made
Most mournfully away in an old chest
Of hers, and put some chopped-up cedar boughs
In with them, and tore down the slaughter-house.

Edward Arlington Robinson

By on 11/01/08 at 07:08 PM | Permanent link to this comment

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Monday, October 27, 2008

Sentiment and irony

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