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An Archeology of Sympathy: The Sentimental Mode in Literature and Cinema by James Chandler

James Chandler. An Archeology of Sympathy: The Sentimental Mode in Literature and Cinema. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013. Pp. xxii+430. $45. While we already have some fine pieces of scholarship on how Shaftesburian "sympathy" and "the sentimental mode" arose in the literature and philosophy of eighteenth-century England and flowed into writing of the Romantic era, James Chandler's highly eloquent and absorbing new study surpasses nearly all of them in precision of description and in historical and aesthetic scope. On the one hand, it provides undergraduates and advanced scholars with unusually clear connections and distinctions between "sensibility," "the sentimental," and "sympathy" (as well as their watered-down derivative, "sentimentality"). It defines sympathy quite sharply as an attitude, stance, or aesthetic scheme (this last of which is "the sentimental mode"), best dramatized by the face-to-face encounter, in which one mentality "adopts" or identifies with "another" and thereby "modifies passion into [widely humane] sentiment" by way of a "virtual circulation" of outward feeling across other minds and eventually many minds (xvii). Chandler thereby establishes this process as one "deep principle of intelligibility in" what has become the modern "aesthetic and ethical structuring of experience" (330), finding it most thoroughly articulated before the 1780s by Laurence Sterne, albeit in a way that is shown to build powerfully on Adam Smith, Samuel Richardson, and Latitudinarian religiosity. On the other hand, this book argues better than any other that the "scheme of features and practices" essential to this mode (13) has ultimately had a long and widely-disseminated life. It has extended itself and its principal elements, Chandler reveals, in Western cinema from the 1910s to the 1990s, indeed at the very center of "classic Hollywood" filmmaking--especially in the pictures of Frank Capra in the 1920--40s, analyzed here across his whole career--and also in the fiction of Charles Dickens, a long-acknowledged influence on Capra, as well as in Romantic and Modernist authors from Blake and Wordsworth to Conrad, Joyce, and Woolf, most of whom have been dissociated from "the sentimental" by prominent critics until now. All of these exemplars are layered archeologically for us so that extensions of the sentimental in the twentieth century become rooted more conclusively than ever in "intersubjective visual fields" established by eighteenth-century writers (12). This book even dares, after defining its key notions and briefly referencing eighteenth-century examples, to move early into the films of Capra and Capra's debt to D. W. Griffith, alongside their agreements and disagreements with the theories of Sergei Eisenstein, to establish how the essentials of face-to-face sympathy are achieved in "shot/ reverse-shot" filmmaking and the "themes and practices" brought together with it (42-43). It then turns backwards to analyze anticipations of these techniques in Sterne and Dickens before forwarding us to their reappearance in Romanticism and Modernism. This succession, from the visually verbal to the verbally visual, proves remarkably effective in showing how recursive a quite particular set of procedures and attitudes has proven to be. The overall result is a major study immensely valuable not just for the analysis of literature and film but for the cross-disciplinary effort now well under way, particularly since Charles Taylor's A Secular Age (2007), to renew our understanding of some primary cultural ingredients of modernity as they carry over from century to century and from one medium to another. The benefits of this Archeology for students and their professors are many indeed. Chandler's close readings of scenes, for example, from Sterne's Sentimental Journey, Capra's It's a Wonderful Life, and Griffith's 1909 film of Dickens's "The Cricket on the Hearth" (compared, of course, to Dickens's text), are unparalleled in their clarity and their exemplification of key sentimental-mode techniques such as "visual mutuality," "triangulated spectatorship," "dispersed subjectivity," as well as rhetorical tropes such as "hypallage" (exchange of cause for effect or vice-versa) and "syllepsis" (ambiguous slippage between the literal and the figurative). …