Intellect vs Emotion

[Matthew P Wiener]

>Is it just me, or does the intellectual content of a great work
>diminish its emotional impact for you? Sure there's a tug here and
>there, and a cumulative emotional effect in, for example, Pynchon's
>work, but never nearly as much (for me) as even a bad movie or song
>with simple loss (and perhaps resolution), [...]

Pynchon isn't going for emotional impact in most of his work in the first
place.  He goes for something else, is all, and along the way has a very
heavy duty intellectual content.  You could say the same about John Barth,
Joseph McElroy or George Bernard Shaw.

But the two are not incompatible.  You've simply not read enough.  Richard
Powers and Kim Stanley Robinson are two examples of fine writers who include
and interweave both emotional impact and intellectual content very strongly.

More difficult is the matter of having intellectual content that *induces*
emotional impact.  Tom Stoppard often succeeds at this.  Samuel Beckett may
have done this--with rather cryptic intellectual content to boot--but it's
perhaps impossible to gauge: Beckett was also a superlative poet and artist.
--
-Matthew P Wiener (weemba at sagi.wistar.upenn.edu)    If Apple owned
 NBC, they would sue Nike for comedy-interface copyright violation.