I’ve always considered myself to be somewhat sentimental, but I’ve come to the realization that I really don’t like sentimental novels or movies. Don’t get me wrong, I cry very easily when watching or reading something sentimental, but it’s usually through laughter (for falling victim to it) or through disgust (that the writer went so low to endeavor to make me cry). Henry Mackenzie’s novel, however, did not affect me too much. I think that has a lot to do with the structure of the novel, which at times made me quite confused. I’m not really sure why Mackenzie chose to style the book in that way, I know it was for a purpose, but all it did was distance me from Harley, and so I never really felt too much for him. His death scene was not very sad to me, I know the intention of the death scene was to make me cry, but it didn’t work. I didn’t read the book with an ironic eye, and I was all prepared to feel for him, but I didn’t. I think if the novel took on a less fragmented shape, and I got to know Harley better I would have been more able to sympathize with him. So it brings me back to my original question, why did Mackenzie create such a fragmented book; wouldn’t the book have had a more sentimental effect if it was more cohesive? Perhaps not, I really not sure what the purpose of sentimental fiction is, so I don’t understand Mackenzie’s motivations. I read a little bit of the introduction and it attempts to explain the fragmentation a bit. There’s a specific part (if I understand correctly what it’s saying), that makes the distancing of Harley from the reader more interesting. It implies (to me) that in a sentimental novel there is a “marked sense of distance between the sentimental hero and the society in which he finds himself” (viii). If that is the case, perhaps Mackenzie was not only trying to create a distance between the hero and his society, but a distance between the hero and the reader. In this way, the novel does not only follow the sentimental form, but is in essence sentimental?
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Very interesting post--you get at some of the conflicts that I experience. In some ways these novels are the victims of history--there was an intense vogue for them that died out within about 15 years. Like many transitory fashions, it can be hard to discern their appeal. But Mackenzie was not a mindless follower of fashion. Although he was part of a trend, he was familiar with complex debates about the nature of experience and perception, and the relationship between emotion and morality. Your comment makes me think that he does not seek to write a tear-jerker--which as you say would more effectively take the form of a coherent narrative the culminated in some sort of tragedy. The form is often distancing--almost as if the subject were being offered more for our contemplation than for our uninhibited immersion. It is worth noting that most writers of the time (deliberately or not) write for two audiences or types of readers, sophisticated and skeptical (usually assumed to be male) and young, naive, uninformed (usually assumed to be teenage girls). Certainly, many readers were or pretended (perhaps unconsciously)to be extremely moved by books like this. There was something liberating about it--these were young people throwing off the cultural authorities who were for their part extremely threatened by novels--sort of like jazz in the 1920s or rock 'n roll during the 1950s.
Professor Nadell beat me to the punch. Those were almost my exact sentiments after reading the book. The novel isn't meant to tell you the answers, it's there to ask the questions.
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