“Sentimentality,” declared James Baldwin in 1949, “the ostentatious parading of excessive and spurious emotion, is the work of dishonesty, the inability to feel.” The “wet eyes of the sentimentalist,” continues Baldwin, “betray his aversion to experience, his fear of life, his arid heart.” Far from being evidence of genuine compassion or solidarity, such exhibitions of sentiment are “always,” in Baldwin’s view, “the signal of secret and violent humanity, the mask of cruelty.” This generalization springs, we recall, from a palpably impatient appraisal of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which paves the way for his iconic clash with Richard Wright. Baldwin singles out Stowe’s “self-righteous, virtuous sentimentality” as the trademark of an “impassioned pamphleteer” far removed from the “vast reality” of social experience. Elevating opposition over artistry, such activist fiction is “badly written and wildly improbable,” leaving itself incapable of cultivating the “power of revelation” that ought to be, Baldwin advises, the true “business of the novelist” (15, 13).

Baldwin’s takedown raises questions that continue to haunt critical treatments of the sentimental mode. To what extent does the prosecution of sentimentalism’s supposed exaggeration of feeling into a condition of decontextualized, superficial generality rely in itself upon a distinctly generalized, contextually hazy conception of how real-world readers confront depictions of pain or injustice? Why should the response to sentimental strategies in fiction translate into what Lauren Berlant calls a “desire for amelioration at any cost”? And how can we assume that readers are so unself-conscious as to end up “witnessing and identifying with pain,” as Berlant supposes, while “consuming and deriving pleasure and moral self-satisfaction” from doing so? In short, what might such assumptions – about the affective dynamics of fiction that allegedly manipulates readers prone to pathos – say about criticism’s own attitudes in deeming what is and isn’t emotionally appropriate to the “business of the novelist”?

By raising these questions out of genuine curiosity, rather than out of some polemical desire to defend sentimental aesthetics, I want to examine in this paper how contemporary fiction is reassessing the sentimental mode when confronting some of the political needs of our contemporary moment. To do so, I consider the way Valeria Luiselli has been adjusting her own formal relationship with sentimentalism’s traction, in all its ethical contestability, as an occasion for deliberating the efficacy of fiction in reimagining the relation between sympathy and solidarity. Lost Children’s Archive (2019) both solicits and repurposes sentimental engagement to stage a deeply self-conscious examination of the politics of compassion, while also inviting readers who are vigilant toward sympathetic involvement to acknowledge how self-gratifying it can be to turn the rejection of such involvement into a critical virtue.