Open Thread: Emotional vs. Intellectual Novelists?
George Eliot vs. Charles Dickens? Victor Hugo vs. Alessandro Manzoni? Henry James vs. Dostoevsky?
I dislike Monet but love Cézanne. Why? I couldn’t say. But it’s true: Show me a Monet and I shrug; show me a Cézanne and I sing.
Curious about my subterranean rationale, I asked ChatGPT. Here’s what it told me, more or less: Where Monet concerns himself with surfaces, Cézanne obsesses over architecture. Monet dissolves, while Cézanne builds. Monet is light, feeling, and sensation, moving the heart. Cézanne is structure, form, and thought, challenging the mind.
I have no idea if that’s right, but I might buy it as an explanation for my Cézanne bias. I do find his work more visually stimulating, which might well involve the headier conceptual dimensions of his work. But I don’t bring this up to talk about my uninformed opinions about painters. I bring it up to discuss my uniformed opinions about writers.
This supposed emotional-intellectual divide got me thinking: Can we see a similar split among novelists? Can we map temperaments and styles along a similar emotional-intellectual dimension?
Intellectual vs. Emotional
I had a few starter ideas for my Cézanne column, novelists who tend to be more structured, philosophical, and analytical—people like Henry Fielding (Tom Jones), George Eliot (Middlemarch), and Alessandro Manzoni (The Betrothed). I asked ChatGPT for some additional suggestions. Here are eight who lean intellectual.
Henry Fielding: Satirical insight, moral structure, formal control.
Jane Austen: Rational clarity, social precision, elegant structure.
Nathaniel Hawthorne: Allegory, moral tension, psychological depth.
George Eliot: Ethical realism, intellectual voice, recursive character analysis.
Alessandro Manzoni: Providential order, religious vision, social scope.
Leo Tolstoy: Epic vision, spiritual weight, structured narrative.
Henry James: Psychological nuance, moral ambiguity, refined form.
Edith Wharton: Social critique, emotional restraint, narrative balance.
What about the Monet side of the ledger, authors who are passionate, intuitive, and whose stories are driven by the feelings of their characters? I thought about the Brontë sisters (Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights) and Dostoevsky (Crime and Punishment). ChatGPT provided several other suggestions.
Laurence Sterne: Emotional eccentricity, playful narration.
Victor Hugo: Grand emotion, moral drama, humanistic sweep.
Elizabeth Gaskell: Social empathy, domestic warmth, class focus.
Charlotte Brontë: Romantic struggle, emotional intensity, moral passion.
Emily Brontë: Mythic force, wild emotion, gothic mood.
Charles Dickens: Sentiment, theatricality, social energy.
Fyodor Dostoevsky: Inner torment, spiritual chaos, existential feeling.
Thomas Hardy: Melancholy, fatalism, lyrical pain.
From what I’ve read of these authors, this seems roughly accurate. Laurence Sterne is insane! ChatGPT allowed that a few—say, for instance, Tolstoy and Wharton—span both columns but slotted them where they landed to reflect the traits that tended to predominate in their work. But that’s not all.
Restrained vs. Explosive
After providing these names along the emotional-intellectual dimension, ChatGPT asked if I’d like to see these authors plotted along an additional dimension: restrained vs. explosive.
Sure! You can get a sense of that when you read, right? Pride and Prejudice takes care of its appearance, while The Brothers Karamazov leaves shrapnel in your hands. What might that look on a graph? I’m glad you asked. ChatGPT provided one.
Lonely Mrs. Gaskell. . .
But now I have several questions, starting with:
Is this sort of analysis useful? If so, how?
Does it emerge, or do we impose it?
Do you agree with these author categorizations? How would you improve them?
What other dimensions might you plot: individualism vs. society, philosophy vs. psychology, economics vs. aesthetics, material vs. soul? What else?
Who else? These authors are all of a time: What of today’s novelists?
That’s my pitch. The ball is yours.
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Strikes me as a false dichotomy.
And I see far too many graphs of things that probably shouldn't be graphed.
Dostoevsky, at least in the Brothers Karamazov, has many religious and philosophical discourses, and at the the same time much of the dialogue is of a high emotional (batshit crazy?) pitch.
Same with Melville and Moby Dick.
It was once said about the brothers William James and Henry James, that William was a psychologist who wrote like a novelist and Henry was a novelist with the insights of a psychologist. Now, that's interesting.
oh, I don't know. It depends on the subject of the painting. Monet was very good when he was painting boats. I deeply dislike Cezanne's dancers, but the colour in his still lifes and landscapes is gorgeous. Then there is Renoir, whose domestic scenes are charming. It is Manet who leaves me entirely cold.
I think the ChatGPT analysis is too shallow, too easy, too 'safe', as it were.
For example, most people are probably thinking of Charlotte Bronte's 'Jane Eyre' when evaluating her work. Those of us who have read 'Villette' know 'Jane Eyre' only shows Bronte at the beginning of her powers. The 'intellectual' novelist George Eliot wrote after reading 'Villette': "Villette! Villette! There is something almost preternatural about its power." The balance between emotion and intellect in 'Villette' is almost perfect.
Charles Dickens' 'Hard Times' is an example of how classifying him as an emotional novelist doesn't cover his breadth. 'Hard Times' is on an entirely different emotional plane than most of his novels. The eccentric casts of characters is there, the blistering commentary on social ills is there, the message is read loud and clear as always, yet the story triggers analysis more than emotional response. There are multiple instances in his other novels where his description is vivid as ever, yet he quite deliberately pulls the reader back from emotional entanglement with the scene, encouraging analysis instead. 'Our Mutual Friend' does that frequently, but so does 'Dombey and Son', 'Little Dorrit', and 'Bleak House'.
George Eliot is not that easy to classify. What of the emotionally satisfying 'Silas Marner', what of the emotionally turbulent 'Mill on the Floss', what of the clash between head and heart in 'Adam Bede'?
In short, it is like ChatGPT has taken high school or first year college papers on these auhhors to give a facile response for an easy grade.