If modernist and postmodernist paintings are about the act of painting or the artist’s own engagement with painting – ironic, circumspect, intellectual – as Elkin’s remarks, they are not subjects calculated to draw tears.
In contrast, Elkins comments upon the eighteenth century fashion for crying; a mode of being in the world that seems to have had its day.
An ‘epidemic’ of crying spread through Europe, he suggests, in parallel with the development of the novel:
readers cried because Rousseau’s characters were simple, because they were pure, and because they were happy. They wept delighted tears, jubilant tears, gentle tears, and rapturous tears … Soon the weeping spread from novels to theater and from theater to daily life … Tears were just part of the full response that any sensitive person should feel. (p 121)
Tears were wept with judgement and tempered passions. This was a regulated economy of emotions – and texts, performances and artworks were expected to yield a measurable quotient of weeping, neither too much nor too little, requiring careful staging on the part of the author or playwright.
‘It is no accident’, Elkins writes:
that the eighteenth century is also the beginning of the theory of acting. Diderot and Voltaire both speculated on whether actresses should cry outright, or feign their emotions. Some might elicit pity, or even disgust. Crying had to be projected, sent out to the audience and not just released. (p 123)
The rhetoric of tears, the codes of emotional communication, have altered drastically since then. Although it’s not hard to find their trace in contemporary film genres, or in the sets of rules given to authors of contemporary mass-produced romance novels, Elkins suggests we are wary of being manipulated and resent trickery. Dry-eyed and well-controlled, ‘stoked with irony’ and ‘banked with lucidity’, we no longer know how to cry moderate tears, permitting ourselves only ‘slim rations of pleasure’ and forbidding‘genuine transport’ or feeling. (p129)
