/lit/ - Literature

>>5839294

>>5839302
kekkkkkkk

he is known by russians to be shite

inserting your philosophical discourses into the mouths of random tavern drinkers aint good writing

>>5839310

This

>>5839310
>>5839371
>gay man fantasy book about dicks

lol, no.

Nabokov

>>5839294
>help me form an opinion
Go read some stuff and make your own choice, and then come back and ask a proper question.

>>5839294
Op

>>5839377
this is the worst mem of all tyme

Tacitus

Me.

>>5839634
No anon, the "Nabokov writes bad prose" meme is the worst meme if all time

>>5839683
He wrote adequate prose.

St. Paul

Delillo is a strong contender.

Pic related. #Selfie

>>5839376

Is that what YOU got out of it? Pretty gay of you, dude.

Joyce

Joyce, you fokken mongs, he stutter'd.

Depends on language.

>>5839310
This is up there. Joyce is also a possibility, but complexity doesn't necessarily equate beauty. Milton is the other obvious suggestion.

There are some dark horses scattered throughout history, though. Pick between Abelard, Heloise, and the love letters poet. Hesiod should get a nod. Someone could get away with saying Nabokov and I wouldn't slap them.

Hemingway. Fuck the wordy fucks.

For English? Melville.

"He turns and turns him to it,—how slowly, but how steadfastly, his homage-rendering and invoking brow, with his last dying motions. He too worships fire; most faithful, broad, baronial vassal of the sun!—Oh that these too-favouring eyes should see these too-favouring sights. Look! here, far water-locked; beyond all hum of human weal or woe; in these most candid and impartial seas; where to traditions no rocks furnish tablets; where for long Chinese ages, the billows have still rolled on speechless and unspoken to, as stars that shine upon the Niger's unknown source; here, too, life dies sunwards full of faith; but see! no sooner dead, than death whirls round the corpse, and it heads some other way.
"Oh, thou dark Hindoo half of nature, who of drowned bones hast builded thy separate throne somewhere in the heart of these unverdured seas; thou art an infidel, thou queen, and too truly speakest to me in the wide-slaughtering Typhoon, and the hushed burial of its after calm. Nor has this thy whale sunwards turned his dying head, and then gone round again, without a lesson to me.
"Oh, trebly hooped and welded hip of power! Oh, high aspiring, rainbowed jet!—that one strivest, this one jettest all in vain! In vain, oh whale, dost thou seek intercedings with yon all-quickening sun, that only calls forth life, but gives it not again. Yet dost thou, darker half, rock me with a prouder, if a darker faith. All thy unnamable imminglings float beneath me here; I am buoyed by breaths of once living things, exhaled as air, but water now.
"Then hail, for ever hail, O sea, in whose eternal tossings the wild fowl finds his only rest. Born of earth, yet suckled by the sea; though hill and valley mothered me, ye billows are my foster-brothers!"

>>5839825
Joyce is beautiful regardless of complexity.

Milton's poetry was immensely superior to his prose.

in English probably Nabokov, though I think Joyce, Woolf, and Pynchon are all serious contenders

>>5839310
lol...? textbook writing about whale puke doesn't qualify.

The OP was right with its pic related.

>>5840029
You're even stupider than kitty and paradise, holy fuck

>>5839376

how could you be gay if you have a wife

>>5840040
Go rage more that your purple romantic plagiarized from Poe drivel is taken for what it is, --- shit.

>>5839310
Probably this.

>>5840046
You can be gay and married to a woman, but he probably wasn't.

>>5840055
You're shit, even niggers have better taste than you do.

>>5840029
Definitely had lots of whale sperm, but never any puke.

Also, the sperm sections are famously gorgeous.

>>5840055
This pleb.

>>5840065
>never any puke
There's at least 50 pages about ambergris in there.

>>5840065
He's too much of a fucking imbecile to realize that Melville wrote a lot more than Moby Dick, all of it with high quality prose, and that the point of the whale info is philosophical, not scientific.

>>5840055
>TROLL SO HARD
>MOTHERFUCKERS WANNA RAPE ME IN MY QUASI FRENCH FILTHY BUTTHOLE

Best prose in English.

>>5840071
There's nothing philosophical about it. It's one more of his travel novels which were popular at the time, and which he did for money. Americans needed a real author, and for some reason didn't like Poe, perhaps because he was too good for their mediocre taste, so they took Melville, which in fact was just whales and fury, signifying nothing.

>>5840070
No there isn't, you dimwit. You're like a six-year-old who had to wait for five minutes and thinks it took hours.

>>5840086
Just admit you don't know what you're talking about, bro.

>>5840082
This could be right. His prose is absolutely magnificient.

>>5840071
By the way, Gordon Pym's prose is far superior to that of Moby Dick, while containing a far more interesting story. You are plebs who buy the mainstream shit you got shoved down your throat and who would rather fight and claw your way out of common sense than question your understanding of a mediocre travel novel that mankind almost forgot as the author was alive, which would have spared a lot of trouble and dignity to the literary world, had it perdured.

>>5839873
>reading books about bells and bulls
Kek.

>>5840086

>There's nothing philosophical about it.

it further establishes the monomania that ahab felt throughout the book by covering the subject of the whale from every possible angle

>which in fact was just whales and fury, signifying nothing

this post of yours was noticeably bad i want you to know this

>>5839873

>I'm new to reading but I want to play too can I please play too?

>>5839294

god i hate flaubert. best example of missing the woods for the trees.

>muh perfect word!

anal retentive scrupulousness to prose made his stories fucking suck and drained the characters of any real life.

>>5840070

No, there's not.

He makes an active point to beautify the technical -- calling it "textbook" says more about your attention span than his prose.

>>5840110

>>muh

Opinion hilariously discarded.

Already you could see through the dust on the ponies' hides the painted chevrons and the hands and rising suns and birds and fish of every device like the shade of old work through sizing on a canvas and now too you could hear above the pounding of the unshod hooves the piping of the quena, flutes made from human bones, and some among the company had begun to saw back on their mounts and some to mill in confusion when up from the offside of those ponies there rose a fabled horde of mounted lancers and archers bearing shields bedight with bits of broken mirrorglass that cast a thousand unpieced suns against the eyes of their enemies. A legion of horribles, hundreds in number, half naked or clad in costumes attic or biblical or wardrobed out of a fevered dream with the skins of animals and silk finery and pieces of uniform still tracked with the blood of prior owners, coats of slain dragoons, frogged and braided cavalry jackets, one in a stovepipe hat and one with an umbrella and one in white stockings and a bloodstained wedding-veil and some in headgear of cranefeathers or rawhide helmets that bore the horns of bull or buffalo and one in a pigeontailed coat worn backwards and otherwise naked and one in the armor of a spanish conquistador, the breastplate and pauldrons deeply dented with the old blows of mace or sabre done in another country by men whose very bones were dust and many with their braids spliced up with the hair of other beasts until they trailed upon the ground and their horses' ears and tails worked with bits of brightly colored cloth and one whose horse's whole head was painted crimson red and all the horsemen's faces gaudy and grotesque with daubings like a company of mounted clowns, death hillarious, all howling in a barbarous tongue and riding down upon them like a horde from a hell more horrible yet that the brimstone land of christian reckoning, screeching and yammering and clothed in smoke like those vaporous beings in regions beyond right knowing where the eye wanders and the lip jerks and drools.
Plebs.

>>5840117

>muh ad hominem

>>5840105
I don't know what it has to do with Ahab other than to contrast Ishmael's ability to interpret the whale in multitude of ways (just like the painting in the beginning), something Ahab couldn't do. Ahab interpreted the world too plainly as good or evil just as he does with the whale, yatta yatta.

>>5840110
>anal retentive scrupulousness to prose made his stories fucking suck

hahahaha you sound like a grade 10 student who had madame bovary on his required reading list

>>5840086
>There's nothing philosophical about it
Holy fuck, you are a goddamn nigger with downs. Apart from the Bible, makes more allusions to philosophers than he does literature.

You're too fucking simple to understand the depth of the this shit.

>With a wild whimsiness, he now used his coffin for a sea-chest; and emptying into it his canvas bag of clothes, set them in order there. Many spare hours he spent, in carving the lid with all manner of grotesque figures and drawings; and it seemed that hereby he was striving, in his rude way, to copy parts of the twisted tattooing on his body. And this tattooing had been the work of a departed prophet and seer of his island, who, by those hieroglyphic marks, had written out on his body a complete theory of the heavens and the earth, and a mystical treatise on the art of attaining truth; so that Queequeg in his own proper person was a riddle to unfold; a wondrous work in one volume; but whose mysteries not even himself could read, though his own live heart beat against them; and these mysteries were therefore destined in the end to moulder away with the living parchment whereon they were inscribed, and so be unsolved to the last. And this thought it must have been which suggested to Ahab that wild exclamation of his, when one morning turning away from surveying poor Queequeg—"Oh, devilish tantalization of the gods!"

or

>Then gazing at his quadrant, and handling, one after the other, its numerous cabalistical contrivances, he pondered again, and muttered: "Foolish toy! babies' plaything of haughty Admirals, and Commodores, and Captains; the world brags of thee, of thy cunning and might; but what after all canst thou do, but tell the poor, pitiful point, where thou thyself happenest to be on this wide planet, and the hand that holds thee: no! not one jot more! Thou canst not tell where one drop of water or one grain of sand will be to-morrow noon; and yet with thy impotence thou insultest the sun! Science! Curse thee, thou vain toy; and cursed be all the things that cast man's eyes aloft to that heaven, whose live vividness but scorches him, as these old eyes are even now scorched with thy light, O sun! Level by nature to this earth's horizon are the glances of man's eyes; not shot from the crown of his head, as if God had meant him to gaze on his firmament. Curse thee, thou quadrant!" dashing it to the deck, "no longer will I guide my earthly way by thee; the level ship's compass, and the level deadreckoning, by log and by line; these shall conduct me, and show me my place on the sea. Aye," lighting from the boat to the deck, "thus I trample on thee, thou paltry thing that feebly pointest on high; thus I split and destroy thee!"

>>5840118
word

>>5840086
> The American reading public couldn't handle Poe's magnificent prose

Twenty years later Henry James was a bestselling author. Moreover, Melville didn't make any money from his masterpiece, nor (according to his letter) did he think he was going to.

Your taste is questionable, argument misguided, and ahistorical statements demonstrate that it might be best if you stopped posting and read more

>>5840086
Your ignorance of both the contents of the book and its real life history are astounding. Why the fuck are you on a literature board?

>>5840082
I've been trying to get my hands on this guy for a while now. Is he as singular as everyone (including Melville, actually) reports?

>>5840129
All pompous purple prose, ripped off of Poe, but without keeping what made Poe a genius, instead turning it into aimless muddling onanism.

>>5840121

of course it's an ad hominem i'm openly mocking you you loser dweeblord lol

m-muh noticeably fedora ways
m-muh

>>5840132
It's funny because there actually is a concept album based entirely on Blood Meridian

>>5840101
>. You are plebs who buy the mainstream shit
Are you fucking hipster? Saying a great literary work is very widely recognized to be great is not a mark against it, but a mark for it.

>>5840150
link?

>>5840132
>>5840150
Suttree is money, Cities of the Plains moreso, and Outer Dark is breathtaking. Gets too much hate on this board.

That said, can he be compared with the greatest in history?

not yet

>>5840136

>I've been trying to get my hands on this guy for a while now. Is he as singular as everyone (including Melville, actually) reports?

He's the greatest prose stylist in English. Possibly the greatest prose stylist of all time.

I find it amusing that people are still arguing over Melville when I've already trumped them.

>>5840159
It's called The Last Pale Light in the West by Ben Nichols

>>5840169
ty bby

>>5840144
Yeah, you probably think Thus Spoke Zarathustra is purple prose too, it think philosophical dialogue or description qualifies.

>>5840040
>>5840144

Poe was a horrible writer. He was literal about everything. The way he made a sad, or horrifying scene was by literally saying it was sad or horrifying.

>>5840198

>Poe was a horrible writer.

Do you even read?

>>5840207
I actually don't think he's that great either. Just curious, what do you like about him?

>>5840207

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1984/oct/11/inescapable-poe/

>>5840207
>Poe is a bad poet, a poor critic, and a dreadful prose stylist in his celebrated tales...In translation, Poe inproves greatly, as French and German versions demonstrate [hence Tallis's praise]...Almost anyone can retell The fall of the house of usher more effectively than Poe does, because Poe's diction is uniquely abominable.

>>5840207

His stories were ingenious, but his prose is not the best. Let's be honest. Plus he was a terribly corny poet.

I'mma throw a curveball and say Conrad.

>>5840249
Maaaaaan... maybe.

I love him to death, but he's more of a honorable mention

>inb4 sjw

>>5840268

I agree.
Slightly above Conrad on that "honorable mention" list.
Maaaaaybe top-20 tier.

>>5840262

He's the only writer I've seen who can write a proper oxymoron that really makes you think about something, rather than scrambling your brain with an obvious paradox.

>>5840213
>>5840228
>>5840238
>>5840249

Getting reservations I think I need to revisit Poe soon. His poetry was pretty rough I do have to agree there.

>>5840249

Conrad's pretty good when it comes to narratives, but when speaking of pure prose I think one pretty much has to acknowledge that modernists managed to exhaust the limits of linguistic expression while still largely playing by the rules. After that we get to postmodernism and all that, and pretty much anything goes.

>>5839294
no such thing imo. different authors accomplish different things with their prose. couple of examples. joyce's reverence of language and the 'literary tradition' produced incredibly dense, complex, and dynamic writing. you name any sort of literary device, tradition, skill, and you'll find it in his bibliography elevated to an awe-inspiring level.

however, no one rivals garcia marquez when it comes to scaling time and space in my view. he can span thousands of years in a single sentence, or spend an entire chapter on a single evening, and the work still flows seamlessly. he can zoom in on a character's face, or he can zoom out to track the progress of a continental/colonial war like a military historian. and when i talk to readers of him the fact they usually don't notice this going on is a testament to his skill/grace.

this isn't as rigorous an analysis as the previous two, but i haven't found many authors who are as musical, colorful, or have the same rhythm as nabakov. as a counter example, i enjoyed as much camus for how stark and spare his prose is. even in translation, when i read murakami his writing evokes an ethereal or dream-like quality that is beyond the ordinary surreal writing.

to some degree i think the question of 'best' is about what you are looking for or enjoy in prose, as much as it can be about who makes the most classical allusions, who writes the longest sentences, who writes the shortest sentences, etc. to a considerable degree i believe writers cant be compared with one another or ranked as people here are trying to argue

>>5840268
No doubt. Shame that "LOL WOMEN" is the hip /lit/ response, her prose is up there with Joyce's

>>5840029
prose is about the writing itself as much as it is about what is being written about. thats like an ENG 101 lesson. joyce might write about a topic even more dry than whale vomit and the prose would still be great.

George R.R. Martin

>>5840335

>Shame that "LOL WOMEN" is the hip /lit/ response

Other way around. It's the battle cry of unhip fedora losers who haven't got a single clue.

>>5839302
nobody could actually think this

dosto is a great writer but a thoroughly average stylist

>>5840335

Joyce wrote glorious prose, but Finnegan's Wake is not prose. It's music. It's like the Terrence Malick of literature: going against the grain of the medium too much.

>>5840101
> Gordon Pym's prose is far superior to that of Moby Dick
tallis this is the most pleb thing said on /lit/ today and im a fan of you generally

poe is a trash stylist

This a good comedy movie !
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-dkIsa8sylE&list=UUW02DPhvop-GfW7KU2gXjVQ

>>5840364

UPPS

>>5840364

>It's like the Terrence Malick of literature: going against the grain of the medium too much.

let's be honest here if i were to ask you what you meant by this you wouldn't even be able to give me a cogent answer

in english, probably joyce if i'm being honest.

>tallis thinks poe was a great stylist
lol now we know he can't read

anyone who reads a poe story and can stand the style needs to get their inner ear checked. poe has the unique ability of attempting to be mathematical and exact in all his language (see especially: the pit and the pendulum) while still giving the reader a completely muddled and useless picture of things. pair that with the fact that he encases all his narratives inside frankly obnoxious first person perspectives riddled with melodramatic asides and absolutely terrible diction and you have possibly the worst stylist to ever be a great writer.

>>5840364
>tfw you realize The Waves is Malick in book form

>>5840062
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4NW3RLnXmTY

>>5840482
My reference to nigger's had to do with poll conducted asking Americans what their favorite book way, minus the Bible. Among whites, the most popular book was Gone With the Wind. Among Hispanics, it was The Great Gatsby. Among blacks, it was Moby Dick.

Let's be real, OP may be right with Flaubert. People picking Joyce and Melville over him are out of their fucking depths (as far as pure prose goes).

>>5840496
blacks most patrish

>>5840499

>People picking Joyce and Melville over him are out of their fucking depths (as far as pure prose goes).

I would bet serious cash that you've only ever read him in translation.

>>5840509
lol look at this muh translation fag
you must be new

>>5840501
book features an articulate pagan harpooner from Africa, and rather pointed critique of slavery.

>>5840496
Yo I want a source

Not because I don't believe, but because that's fucking hilarious

>>5840509
>I would bet serious cash that you've only ever read him in translation.
You're wrong, bel essai. Anything else ?

>>5840517
http://www.harrisinteractive.com/NewsRoom/HarrisPolls/tabid/447/ctl/ReadCustom%20Default/mid/1508/ArticleId/1422/Default.aspx

>>5840521
post a paragraph you wrote in french faggot

>>5840514

This thread is about the greatest prose writer ever, of course considerations of translation and native language matter lol why are you even on this board you errant prole.

>>5840527
>errant prole
Holy shit you're retarded.

>>5840525
Paragaphe ? Calme toi. Je n'ai rien à te prouver donc cette phrase est la seule démonstration que tu auras de ma part. Je suis canadien, btw.

>>5840530

If you're having trouble understanding certain words try looking them up first before you vomit out a response. This is how you learn, anon. This is how you learn.

>>5840543
holy shit you're retarded.

>>5840546

You're honestly too stupid to be on this board. Even by /lit/ standards.

>>5840556
holy shit you're retarded.

Nabby or McCarthy.

>>5839294
W.H. Auden

outta my way, english speaking fucking shits

>>5839294
Joyce.
if you don't believe me try listening to some of his works on audiobook, utterly spellbinding.

>>5839294
Demosthenes

>>5839294

Probably Shakespeare. It was not enough for him to write the best verse: his prose is also the best one.

>>5840110
Emma Bovary is one of the greatest characters of 19th century literature

>>5840335
Hmmmm except it's like no one actually did that but you decided to bitch preemptively for no reason

>>5840353
The fedora meme is infinitely less funny than the women can't write meme

btfo

>>5842960
not in this thread but it happens

>>/lit/thread/5302693#p5305518
>>/lit/thread/5186416#p5186438
>>/lit/thread/3802981#p3803245
>>/lit/thread/1400454#p1408754

why are so called "prose" readers the most worthless and idiotic readers?

>>5839908
I agree. For Japanese, Mishima.

>>5840409
To be fair, he sometimes has great tone, but not much else.

>>5840354
lol

>>5839294
Paul, also known as Saul of Tarsis.

>>5843181

Go back to /r/books plotpleb no one wants to listen to a newreader.

>no one saying John fucking Milton

Sometimes I wonder why I even come to this pleb board

>>5843337
>Prose
>Verse

Feel free to leave

>>5840029
>>5840040

listen. I don't know you guys but I'm sick of you already. I don't understand why you would want to be a trip on an anonymous literature imageboard.

Honestly, are you unable to find an identity elsewhere? Tripfags fucked this place.

>>5843331
typical retarded /lit/izen. got any more maymays?

>>5840531
get outta here quebec scum

>>5843342
>Milton only wrote verse

Feel free to go fuck yourself

>>5843585
dont even pretend

Tolstoy
Fitzgerald (during his Prime)

>>5840393

The prose of Dubliners is some of the best in the language, but music is one of the only media whereby an artist can throw signification out the window, which Joyce arguably did. I mean signification for a real audience, not an ideal reader who appears once a century. And as you should well know, fw is meant to be read aloud. Joyce himself said his writing prioritized sonorousness over significance, and honestly he loses points from me for this.

My Terrence Malick reference is entirely cogent. The man relies heavily on interior monologues, which film as a medium of light and its many reflections off surfaces, is uniquely ill-eqipped to render. I think he has a powerful artistic vision, but I think he fundamentally misunderstands the nature of his medium.