/lit/ - Literature

>>21500451
imagine if they linked up

>>21500507
need it

>>21500517
Sneed it.

John Milton and Tolkien.

>>21500451
why on earth would i want kafka to be tainted with dostoevsky's shitty melodrama though? like pouring vimto into a glass of cool spring water

>>21500451
Just for the pure fiesta, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. They will probably try to bash each other's heads at any given moment, but will write a fantastic text on women.

>>21500601
Nigga Metamorphosis was nothing but melodrama.

>>21500451
H. P. Lovecraft & Cormac McCarthy

NOONE, BECAUSE COLLABORATIONS NEVER PRODUCE ANYTHING OF WORTH.

>>21500676
Wasn't the Bible a collaboration?

>>21500708


?

NO, AND THE HOLY BIBLE IS SACRED SCRIPTURE, NOT LITERATURE.

>>21500451
Mikhail Bulgakov and Aldous Huxley

>>21500719
Interesting choice.

Gogol and Chesterton
Mikhail Bulgakov and Hunter Thompson
Nabokov and Clarice Lispector
Nabokov and Henry Miller
Gustave Flaubert and Yukio Mishima
Thomas Mann and Thomas Pynchon

>>21500601
Dostoevsky was a major influence on Kafka, the most blatant was Crime and Punishment’s influence on The Trial. There is one scene in C&P where Raskolnikov is summoned to the police station and he gets there and they say you’re late you were supposed to be here three hours ago, but he just got the summon fifteen minutes ago. Dostoevsky’s melodrama was like Lynch’s technique in Twin Peaks, it’s intended to feel uncanny, bizarre and alienating my making things *too* dramatic and emotional at inappropriate moments. Here is Lynch using a light tough and achieving a Dostoevskyian effect
https://youtu.be/FcsNhIozEPo

Twin Peaks uses scenes and acting vaguely reminiscent of melodrama but does them “off” on purpose just like Dostoevsky did with with novelistic melodrama using tropes from western novels but doing them bizarre and off to achieve an effect. Kafka took this technique even further just like Lynch does with with many of his films. Here is a stronger touch achieving a Kafkaesque effect
https://youtu.be/JamnCWXNsPs

Nabokov was filtered by this, despite being a good aesthete. It just looked like tacky artistry him because he didn’t grasp the point

>>21500451

— Bertrand Russell & Edward Gibbon

Gibbon is praised as a master stylist but the ugly truth is he's terrible. Good writing should make things as easy as possible for the reader, and he does the opposite. Russell's History of Western Philosophy, on the other hand, is a model of clarity and economy. They should collaborate on a re-write of Decline & Fall of the Roman Empire. Gibbon assembles the facts & Russell puts them on paper.


— J. R. R. Tolkien & William Shakespeare

A match made in heaven. Tolkien would supply the world; Shakespeare would bring it to life with magical wordsmithery and then fill it with sex, drugs and rock'n'roll. The epic speeches would be great. The songs would be great. Everything would be great. Someone invent a time machine already.


— Ludwig Wittgenstein & Lewis Carroll

They would have a surprising amount in common. (LC actually invented a game to teach basic logic to children.) What we want from them is a third Alice book, presenting LW's thoughts in a lighthearted way.


— Patrick Leigh Fermour & Jack London

Simply introduce them and bet them fifty cases of Laphroaig they can't make it round the world together in a year. When (if) they return, glue their diaries together and publish them as a single volume. Impromptu slam poetry sessions in Harvard. Bar fights in Singapore. Hair-raising mercenary escapades in Mozambique. An instant classic of travel writing.


— Ted Kaczinski & Cormac McCarthy

Like Ludwig & Lewis, they would have a lot in common. Both have a jaundiced view of the direction the modern technological world is taking. (CM & Edward Abbey discussed a plan in the 1980s to reintroduce the wolf into Arizona, IIRC.) Cormac would respect Ted's mathematical chops. Ted would respect Cormac's sympathetic portrayals of loners living in abandoned shacks and eating roadkill. What we would get from them is a novelized version of Industrial Society And Its Future. An sort of eco-primitivist Turner Diaries written by someone who can actually write, if you will. It could still happen.

(Perhaps it already has. Perhaps the result is so explosive it's only going to be published post-mortem. Even if this is not true, /lit/ could make it true. And we should.)

>>21501058
>Russell's History of Western Philosophy, on the other hand, is a model of clarity and economy.

>>21501047
Here is a good example of the technique

>RASKOLNIKOV raised himself and sat up on the sofa. He waved weakly at Razumikhin to stop the whole stream of incoherent and ardent consolations he was addressing to his mother and sister, took both of them by the hand, and for about two minutes peered silently now at the one, now at the other. His mother was frightened by his look. A strong feeling, to the point of suffering, shone in his eyes, but at the same time there was in them something fixed, even as if mad. Pulcheria Alexandrovna began to cry.

This definitely reflects Dostoevsky more than other translators, especially Garnett who tries to translate the passage realistic rather than uncanny and consequently butchers it

>Raskolnikov got up, and sat down on the sofa. He waved his hand weakly to Razumihin to cut short the flow of warm and incoherent consolations he was addressing to his mother and sister, took them both by the hand and for a minute or two gazed from one to the other without speaking. His mother was alarmed by his expression. It revealed an emotion agonisingly poignant, and at the same time something immovable, almost insane. Pulcheria Alexandrovna began to cry.

The P&V captures the weird description of using “suffering” to describe Raskolnikov’s gaze while contrasting it with “mad”, this unsettled us because melodramatic literary convention makes us think of a look full of suffering as a pitiable puppy dog, and madness as something ferocious and dangerous. Garnett was acutely aware of this bizarre impression hence she renders suffering as agonizing poignancy, and fixed as immovable, though being obsessively crazy conveys being fixed wildeyed, but to her that is totally at odds with the pathetic look of suffering, so it becomes a look of being grimly determined. But the expression on his face is supposed to be distorted by suffering and having wide and mad eyes, and this in a realistic reader’s mind is not just melodramatic but almost bizarre, which is the intention. That’s uncanny, it makes you feel uncomfortable and alienated, it makes so you can understand and empathize with the characters but there is a barrier making you feel like you are an alien world

P&V gets a lot of flak for their translations of Gogol and Dostoevsky (both influential to Kafka) sounding weird and inappropriate sometimes (but their other translations aren’t criticized), however both authors often intentionally wrote weird and inappropriate

>>21501047
My favourite scene from Twin Peaks. Honestly I think it depends person-to-person whether those scenes have the intended effect you write of. For me those scenes could be normalcy manifest or they may appear uncanny and planeshifted. The interpretation is fluid to the point of removing any stable meaning.

>>21501070
Yes certainly however there is no doubt Lynch aimed for exaggerated and sometimes inappropriate drama and emotions all over the work, what affect this achieved depended on context and interpretation but it is not tacky writing or acting as it might seem to a superficial viewer

>>21500451
Late Tolstoy after he became holy and excruciatingly boring and prime high modernism "arse-full-of-farts-let-no-end-of-them-off-on-my-face" Joyce.

>>21501047
Jesus fucking Christ an actual interesting effortpost that's not only not-retarded, but good, thanks anon.

>>21501110
No problem, if you want to look into the philosophy of what they were getting at, see Heidegger on the Unheimlich (uncanny), which is the sense of not being at home of modernity caused by the loss of kosmos or world. This shock is a little like when a catastrophe happens and everything feels unreal, uncanny. You are numb and simply unsettled by the emotions around you and the sensation you feel is a kind of anxiety (angst)

>>21501131
So you recommend P&V for dosto. What works would you recommend/translations for Kafka?

>>21501232
The new Schocken translations since they use is mostly unedited manuscripts and try to replicate his idiosyncratic style of sentences that go on and on and are almost stream of consciousness sometimes. His friend edited his works to make them more publicly digestible and get attention but now we can appreciate his weirdness

>>21500451
Elio vittorini and yukio mishima or
Vittorini and Calvino, albeit i think that there's already something

Crichton and yukio mishima, for the memes

>>21500451
Oswald Spengler and Francis Parker Yockey

>>21501047
So, you're saying Nabokov is the first documented case of someone being LYNCHED?

>>21501918
Normies get lynched. Nabokov was a normie par excellence, this is why his commentary on Eugene Onegin is of the highest caliber available in English whereas while enjoying The Metamorphosis by Kafka, his commentary on it shows he was totally filtered

>After all, awakening as an insect is not much different from awakening as Napoleon or George Washington. (I knew a man who awoke as the Emperor of Brazil.) On the other hand, the isolation, and the strangeness, of so-called reality—this is, after all, something which constantly characterizes the artist, the genius, the discoverer. The Samsa family around the fantastic insect is nothing else than mediocrity surrounding genius.