/lit/ - Literature

>>3596792
You know I always see these threads and I never say anything, but I think many people here don't understand this, so damn it, here goes.
I'm not going to claim that I'm a great writer or a scholar with a phd, but here is the way I see it: a novel, short story, poem, whatever, is a work of art. The purpose of art is not necessarily to be beautiful, rather to communicate an aesthetic feeling. This can be done in diverse ways, and that's how you can have seemingly nonsensical ramblings of Burroughs in Naked Lunch alongside beautiful prose like in Nabokov's Lolita. Which of them is the better is subjective and up to the reader to decide, but there is no doubt about it that they each communicate their own aesthetic idea in their works.
For example, consider the following: why is the first-person prose in Lolita so damn good? Is he doing it just because he is a great writer and he can, or is there a higher reason? The narrator is a pedophile who is explicitly aware that he is (literally) telling you his story. He does it in such a good way that the reader is irresistibly inclined to his favor. And in the end, he takes it all away from us by affirming that he is a monster, that he took a young girl's childhood away, making us question the power of persuasive speech.
I'm doing it too. Right now. At the very moment that you're reading this. I haven't even read Lolita aside from some snippets here and there, and some browsing on wikipedia. Naked Lunch too, for that matter, but I digress. The point is that language is only a means of communication through symbols. When I write the phrase 'OP is a faggot', the reader doesn't read it and say, 'gee, this consists of 11 characters and three spaces, therefore OP must be a faggot'. He reads the idea communicated through them: OP sucking on a 12 inch black cock; perhaps being pounded in the ass by a 200 lb black man named Jerome while crying like a bitch. In the same way we have to read and pierce through to the idea within