/lit/ - Literature

I'm the wordy fag obsessed with meaninglessness from the last thread. You guys gave me some of the best, most actionable criticism I've received and I want to say that I hear you and I am adjusting. I still feel strongly about the piece I shared (or an idealized, future version of it) but I can see that there's just not enough foreplay. My idea right now is to insert the madness as a more gradual development, or even a kind of nested story. If the narrator receives a letter (for example) containing what appears to be nonsense, maybe another layer of separation will make it more palatable, in that a reader can empathize with the narrator rather than being forced to rationalize it themselves. The narrator can himself do some of the work of interpreting, and in him the reader can find reassurance that their confused is reasonable and anticipated. I'm still really attached to the concept of manipulating and playing with meaning, but in review it seems like it makes more sense (yeah yeah) to have the plot follow a traditional Heart of Darkness plot structure. I like the idea of the journey being paralleled by the writing style rather than being tied strictly to the events of the story, but nothing is set in stone.

I wait to give this somewhere close to the minimum amount of work so I don't get too caught up in it to actually write, but I'm still fuzzy. Am I barking up the right tree?

>Nabokov's emphasis on literary detail was not merely a pedagogical approach.
In a letter to Wilson from 1946, Nabokov harshly criticizes Andre Malraux's La
condition humaine on the grounds that he found it unlikely that mosquitoes in
the "imaginal stage" were to be found in early spring in Shanghai—an oversight
that leads him to class Malraux as a "third-rate writer"
Was any writer more querulous than Nabokov? I've been reading some of his essays and he spared nobody, except maybe Kafka and Joyce. The running antagonism between Faulkner and Hemingway is will documented, but I don't believe either was particularly prone to the stuff without the other to play foil.