Intellect vs Emotion

[Vaska]

At 01:40 PM 6/15/97 -0400, you wrote:

>>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.

I think the distinction itself is laregely a spurious one: Barth's and
McElroy's novels, to take that example, do produce very specific emotional
effects [with a subtle range of difference for differently situated readers,
naturally], effects that constitute an emotional stance as well.  It's
simply that we are not used to naming these types of attitudes and effects
as emotional.  

Fear, unease, disgust, sense of indignation or even confusion [which I guess
most of us tend to categorize in some other way] are both very specific
feelings and also ethical stances -- and the world of Pynchon's novels
provides innumerable occasions for all of these.  To say that Pynchon
doesn't strive for emtional impact makes no sense to me.

Vaska