Why do people act like purple prose

[Anonymous No.19750450]

= good writing? I read such a good book that had reviews that state that the story has tons of twists, it’s very intriguing and the prose was simple as hell. Why do you have to describe a lamp for a whole two paragraphs for someone to think that it’s good writing?

[Anonyman No.19750456]

You take it easy OP, purple prose got me through high school.

[Anonymous No.19750537]

>>19750450
Have you ever considered that he isn't telling you about a lamp?

[Anonymous No.19750554]

>>19750450
>Why do you have to describe a lamp for a whole two paragraphs
Idk, why does a painter have to use a thousand brush strokes to paint a lamp? Because it's aesthetic as fuck. Plotfags are so annoying, just read what you like and what draws you into the world of the novel.

[Anonymous No.19750564]

>>19750554
>aesthetic as fuck
>posts a Bob Ross tier disgusting painting of a lamp
Eloquently making the opposite of what you think is your point here, little buddy

[Anonymous No.19750604]

>>19750564
The painting is not the point. You're retarded.

[Anonymous No.19750617]

>>19750604
No little buddy, you not getting how you self sabotage in your stupidity is what is indeed the sign of mental retardation here. You fuck.

[Anonymous No.19750646]

>>19750537
No, it’s describing a lamp. They’re being pretentious and overly verbose. The lamp has no meaning

[Anonymous No.19750858]

>>19750646
>>19750450
You unironically don't have the IQ to appreciate it and I mean that with no disrespect. The great prose stylists spend a long time talking about something but do so in a manner that's aesthetically pleasing. That what it comes down to - aesthetic appreciation, in much the same way you might enjoy poetry - rather than the wholly utilitarian view that prose exists solely to advance plot and cannot be appreciated in its own right.

So I can take, say, Portrait of the Artist, and Lolita, or To the Lighthouse, and read those novels for reasons other than that of plot. In the first and second of these novels plot is almost incidental to the impressions, moods, and feelings that the authors seek to describe. Joyce and Woolf are certainly more concerned with beauty than with plot in these works (which does not mean, by the way, that they are also unconcerned with characterisation). The plot in Lolita has a bit more to it, but I can assure you it would not be held in such esteem if it was stripped to the bones and told in a minimalistic style - people read it for the joy of the language.

Either you take pleasure in language for its own sake, or you don't. I'm not denigrating your lack of aesthetic appreciation. I am an ecumenical reader. Take what you like and leave what you don't. But there is a sizeable subset of readers who pick up a novel for reasons other than following the usual train of exposition, rising tension, climax, resolution. After fifty or a hundred novels the beats turn stale, and you look instead to the brilliant turns of phrase that scratch an itch you didn't even know you had, and stay with you.

I leave you with the opening of Brideshead Revisited, by one of the greatest English language prose stylists of the nineteenth century, as an example of this. See if you can take anything from it other than the progression of plot alone.

[Anonymous No.19751015]

if its good, "purple prose" can have subtle story implications, layered meanings, narrativized descriptions, enjoyable details, food for imagining imagery, tasteful uses of unique words, fun unconventional syntax, phonetic rhythm...

at its worse, purple prose is repetitive, excessive, pretentious, pompous, melodramatic, icky, gay, awful, bad

[Anonymous No.19751032]

>>19750450
no one does. purple prose is a negatively loaded term

[Anonymous No.19751056]

>>19750450
No one acts like purple prose is good. When people say a book's prose is purple they're criticizing it. That said, a skilled writer can write long, descriptive sentences that aren't purple. Nabokov, for example, does not have purple prose. For examples of purple prose look at popular Victorian novels.

[Anonymous No.19751147]

>>19750450
I don't think it is inherently, but when a novel uses very compelling or unusual language in its description, the effect becomes very transcendental.

One example I like is the description of the baseball game between the New York Giants and Brooklyn Dodgers at the beginning of Don Delillo's novel "Underworld". The language, pacing and rapid POV and narrative changes made reading it an almost rapturous experience, despite myself not having any knowledge of baseball nor even being American.

[Anonymous No.19751319]

There is a difference from a very nice, beautiful style, and try-hard purple prose. One expresses the beauty of the written word outside of poetry while the other is a very soulless mimicry of that. You can enjoy works that are well-written and focus on plot which aren’t exactly beautiful and you can also appreciate a work that’s style is beautiful and the plot is otherwise uninteresting without the aesthetic style of writing. You don’t have to pegionhole yourself into only liking simply written books. One thing all good books have in common is that the author was a good writer, whether they express this through their prose style or their ability to write a compelling story or explore themes deeply.

[Anonymous No.19751328]

>>19750858
I disagree. I read and write poetry but in novels, I just cannot appreciate such excessive wording. I am here to enjoy a story, not to read about the lamp in the corner for two paragraphs.
I'm also not low IQ. Never had it tested but I study something difficult so I know I'm not dumb.

[Anonymous No.19751656]

>>19750450
t. seething brainlet

[Anonymous No.19751665]

>>19750564
I think the chain is more interesting than the lamp. They did a really good job on it.

[Anonymous No.19751667]

>why did the painter have to use so many strokes and put so much unneeded detail into it, all this shit obscures the breasts and bagina i'm trying to masturbate to
>just draw a manga picture in black and white that shows all the gentials so i can coom faster and get back to consooming
>paintingfags are pseuds, dont' they know the only reason to look at a painting is to pull your dick to it and get back to playing video games and eating cheetos faster

[Anonymous No.19751694]

>>19750564
>disgusting painting
>disgusting
Don't be so dramatic

[Anonymous No.19751775]

>>19751667
nicely put

[Anonymous No.19752204]

>>19750858
>you need a high IQ to be able to...
jesus christ its uncanny how much you faggots write the same

[Anonymous No.19752353]

>>19751667
Paintings are not books

[Anonymous No.19752386]

>>19751328
the sounds like a "get to the point" it's obvious you haven't read something maximalist or even 500 pages with this attitude.

You are sitting down and reading a book that will take you a few days to a week, its all about getting comfortable with it you don't have to constantly advance the plot in a novel there are points where tone, mood, and setting has to have a place.

[Anonymous No.19752408]

>>19750450
They don't, it's one of the most commonly critiqued aspects in literature

[Anonymous No.19752437]

>>19752353
source?

[Anonymous No.19752441]

>>19750450
Depends on the writer. I don't read novels anymore generally aside from Pulp Fiction or garbage like Kerouac.
When I hear purple prose = bad though, then I immediately get offended as I think of Melville's 'Purple Prose' in Pierre which is because he's just writing philosophy with a narrative, but hardly anyone praises that book aside me, so I think that's an exception. Same with de Quincey, Lamb's Essays on Elia, Matthew Arnold, Coleridge's Aids on Reflection, Thomas Browne, and other more philosophical essayists that I have enjoyed recently.
Someone like Nabokov or Joyce or Gaddis or even Hawthorne is more tedious and not worth the effort, I rarely find novels beautiful. I guess you could call Conrad 'purple prose,' but his work (which I don't particularly enjoy reading) is necessarily like that as he smothers the reader. Purple Prose I suppose often feels like it's pandering or showing off the writer's intellect and is hardly ever earnest or profound, thus unnecessary and frivolous, like most literary novelists.

[Anonymous No.19752456]

>>19752437
Hold on a minute while I find a peer reviewed study

[Anonymous No.19752541]

>>19750858
This argument is retarded. Why even bother having a semblance of plot then? You could just spew out some stream-of-consciousness horseshit or poetry with no aim or connectivity and you'd be achieving the same effect with less effort.

The very attempt itself of an author to establish some coherency in terms of narrative and characterization implies care on their part for more than just "the beauty of prose" or whatever the fuck you're talking about, so any value you might incidentally find in their work from how prettily it reads is almost certainly incidental to their original intent in writing it. You, personally, are free to enjoy media in whatever manner you want, but I don't think it makes sense to extend that enjoyment to praise for the author if it's clear your deviant brain is enjoying something beyond the creation's clear overall intent.

I'm sure there are a number of artfag authors who do actually use plot as a device for guiding clever/artsy prose, but don't even pretend it's on the mind of the overwhelming majority of them, much less their primary concern when writing.

[Anonymous No.19752579]

Purple prose is not verbose/wordy prose, it is prose which is overly ornate and removing that ornamentation has no effect on the underlying structure or the meaning, it remains a complete thought and properly formed sentence. It serves no purpose beyond itself.

[Anonymous No.19752651]

>>19752353
And you're not a human, soulless bugman

[Anonymous No.19752668]

>>19752353
you're looking for >>>/tv/
get the fuck out

[Anonymous No.19752705]

>>19752651
Being me I'll have to disagree

[Anonymous No.19752718]

>>19752668
Not really an outrageous claim I made. Why the anger?

[Anonymous No.19752735]

>>19752718
>lmao hey /lit/ i hate books haha i made a trolll

[Anonymous No.19752749]

>>19752735
That's not what I wrote or implied

[Anonymous No.19752826]

>>19752353
Scripts aren’t books, either, and that’s what you prefer reading—if not manga.

[Anonymous No.19752830]

>>19752456
Like button hit

[Anonymous No.19752834]

>>19752705
>IRobot.jpg

[Anonymous No.19752853]

>>19750604
No, no, he's right. It is pretty funny though.

[Anonymous No.19752862]

>>19752826
No

[Anonymous No.19752907]

>>19752541
That's like saying life isn't meaningful unless it's got a good plot. Life can be mundane yet beautiful. Reflecting on that mundane beauty is perfectly valid, even without an exciting plot. There's no one way to do something well. .

[Anonymous No.19752923]

>>19752353
You'd think someone in a forum about literature would understand the concept of metaphor.

[Anonymous No.19752947]

>>19752907
You're dodging the point. On the topic of whether writing is "good" or "bad", you have to have some measure of objectivity lest any discussion be totally meaningless. There's nothing wrong with you enjoying pretentious shit writing for its floweriness, I just want you to admit that pretentious shit writing coincidentally having some aesthetic value doesn't make it any less pretentious or shit, because in almost every circumstance, the author didn't set out to make his literary work just so you could ogle at a particular paragraph sandwiched between a bunch of narrative.

[Anonymous No.19752968]

>plot
>pic of hollywood whore
Lol! (laughing out loud)

[Anonymous No.19752970]

>>19752947
Why isn't every single TV show and movie shot like a TV soap opera, and why isn't every single game a gacha shooter (yet)? Why aren't you eating Onions, the most nutritionally balanced meal money could buy?

[Anonymous No.19752986]

>>19752947
Please just go back to watching marvel movies and jerking off. *yawns*

[Anonymous No.19753912]

>>19750450
Because those are failed writers. At least from what I've seen. They love jerking each other off with ideas like "prose" or fancy descriptions instead of communicating concrete details or an overarching message

[Anonymous No.19753920]

>>19751667
>I'm happy the author wrote two pages about the character's rhinestone eyes rather than the plot

[Anonymous No.19753949]

>>19753912
I don't discourse with retards. Here's your (you)

[Anonymous No.19754852]

>>19753912
The most valid post in this shit thread. Why can’t these writers admit that they can’t actually deliver a story and compelling characters and go?

[Anonymous No.19754864]

>>19751328
You have a limited view of what constitutes a novel as an art form. A novel is not a scenario. It has *writing* in it, not just a collection of chronological facts.

[Anonymous No.19754886]

>>19752947
(1) Your "objective" measure of literary value would seem to be incapable of distinguishing between a novel and its summary.
(2) Your appeal to authorial intention makes no fucking sense—the author did not write a plot, he wrote a text.

[Anonymous No.19754887]

>>19750450
Sometimes it's good.
The first time I played Warhammer 2 I asked why the hell high elf archers (arguably one of the best in the game) are just called Archers and the spearmanii are called Spearmen, while Dark Elves get Dreadspears, Darkshards, and Bleakswords.
But I assume whatever shitty ye olde quote Angelina is about to rattle off in your OP pic is what you're talking about, and it is annoying.

[Anonymous No.19754901]

>>19751667
This is literally just getting some instathot to pose next to your car, isn't it?
That's what that is. Some pretty young woman on his fine horse. And she's naked for no other reason than pretty pale redheads are pretty naked.