From: fi@grebyn.com (Fiona Webster)
Subject: Re: Literature Students/Small World
Organization: Grebyn Timesharing
Date: Thu, 15 Oct 1992 15:32:00 GMT

Huh.... Ron and I don't seem to have the same style of thinking about
this topic here, so I'm not sure how to proceed with the discussion.  He
says he agrees with my description of the reading experience as
consisting in a continuous field of interaction between reader and book,
but he wants to make a distinction between two different types of
intellectual valuation of a book:

>And so this gets back to my question of the
>benedictions placed on works only AFTER some intellectualizing, instead
>of WITH some additional intellectual reflection.

This is what I don't understand: how is the process of continuing to
think about, and interact with, one's own internal "map" of a book,
different in the two time frames of *during* the reading, vs. *after*
the reading?  Like a relationship with a human being, a relationship
with a book starts when you first meet, and never ceases, then, for the
rest of your life, to undergo some sort of change--if only the change of
attrition of memory.  So this temporal dividing line doesn't make sense
to me.

He also says:
>And from here I go on to my question of the motives behind the
>overvaluation of the intellectual content above all else, the tendency
>to denegrate a work UNLESS it has intellectual content, or praise a
>work we otherwise wouldn't like solely because of the intellectual
>content.
[...]
>We are somehow not free to enjoy them unless there is
>some intellectual reason d'etre to justify our indulgence.

Again, I am puzzled by the either-or dichotomies you set up.  How can
you differentiate the intellectual pleasures of a book--which arise in
the reader's mind within that free-flowing field of interaction between
"self" and "text"--from other pleasures?  I understand what your point
is, about how there's what I might call a puritanical part of ourselves
(the analogy to sex is telling indeed) that overvalues intellectual vs.
other forms of enjoyment, but I don't see how that dichotomy works.
Maybe it's one of those things that some people see, others don't.

But if I try your hat on for size here, and lean way out here into what
I perceive of as your way of thinking, Ron, I sense that you're thinking
of books as falling into not two, but three, categories:
     
     --those which have little intellectual content but are enjoyable
       in some other way;

     --those in which we invest an effort of intellectual valuation,
       and thus can enjoy the "intellectual trophies" gained thereby
       (what a bizarre concept, I must say--"trophy" having the
        connotation of a prize gained in conquest!);

     --those which we may or may not like, but for which we clearly
       acknowledge an intellectual content that didn't require all that
       much effort on our part.

This sounds like more of the same along the lines of "I liked it, but it
wasn't any good," "I didn't like it, but it was good," and so on--the
set of typologies from Auden.  In a casual conversation, I can play
around with those categories for the heck of it, but in a serious
discussion of my reading experience, I could not slice things up that
way.  I see a Stephen King novel into which I invest a lot of "mutually
congratulatory" (I think was Ron's phrase) intellectual effort, as no
different in *kind* than a Nabokov novel that challenges me to think
harder while I'm reading it.  Both are intellectual satisfying
experiences, and both can be capital-G "Great Novels," for *me*.  In
both cases, were I asked to defend my (subjective! always subjective!)
conception of the novel as "Great," I would have to describe the content
of the mental map I made of the book--*and* the process by which I arrived at
that map.  The process would be different for King vs. Nabokov: that's
obvious.  But it would be different for Nabokov vs. Turgenev, too.

Maybe this is as far as we can go, because of how differently we
approach the discussion of mental contents.  For what it's worth in the
way of additional comment, I know I am *utterly* incapable of making the
physical vs. intellectual pleasure distinction Ron adduces, for love
relationships.  I can't imagine the activity of sex, without its accom-
panying intellectual, emotional, cultural, spiritual, etc., parameters.
  
Can anyone else help us out here?

                                                       --Fiona

Newsgroups: rec.arts.books