Great novels -- Wonderful poetry

[rayheinrich]

Are you indifferent to your own emotions as well? Or just about manipulation from the outside?
Ray

I'm really interested in this question, Ray. Here's an excerpt from a book I'm reading by Matthew Sweeney and John Hartley Williams:

"WS Graham says 'Do not be sentimental in your art.' Why does he say this, and what does he mean?
Don't a lot of people find great pleasure in sentimental songs and books? Another Scot, the poet and
critic GS Fraser, describes in his autobiography what happened when, as children, he and his sister
went to see a particularly sentimental film. His sister, embarrassed by the tear-jerking nature of what
they were watching, would start to suck the fingers of her gloves and they gave the name 'glove-sucky'
to any film that made a too obvious play on their emotions. This shows that some people resist
sentimentality. The embarrassment it makes them feel is caused by an awareness that they're being
manipulated, and they don't like being manipulated, whether by films, politicians or poems. For writing to
reach the level of art it needs to persuade the reader that the emotion in it is founded in the truth of
the situation depicted. It has to be properly motivated. When it's not, it's sentimental -- it's imitation
emotion, not the real thing."

"persuade the reader that the emotion in it is founded in the truth of the situation depicted"

Or maybe hypnotize the reader into thinking it IS real.  Which, I guess, is why some
people try to disguise their fiction as non-fiction: it saves them a lot of work.

That reminds me of this quote: "A good writer is thin air, all you see is the subject."

I think good readers can do the same thing: make themselves disappear.   
And if that reader is good enough, she/he can make up for a so-so writer.  
That reader can fill in the bits left out, can turn mediocre attempts to convey
emotions into her/his real emotions.  

Because, really, the emotion isn't in the writing, it's in the reader. It's created
by the story she/he is constructing in their head while they are reading the story
on the page.

Movies, because they contain music, are particularly easy to do this with; or,
depending on your view, have this done to you.  I remember crying during a movie
and feeling later that I'd been tricked.  Movies like that are said to have "picked
your sentimental pocket".

But all this depends so much on your personality.  I'm someone who really loves/needs to
feel emotion, it's a high for me.  I don't think of attempts to evoke emotion as manipulation;
I think of them as encouragement.  I'm willing to make allowances, willing to follow the
writer's good intentions rather than his actual writing. But no, I'm not THAT easy! There
are definitely humongous piles of writing out there that I don't find encouraging.