Imagine

[Anonymous No.6533732]

Imagine there is a 2D graph. On one axis is obscurity on the other is greatness both increasing to infinity. Who is in the top right for you?

[OP No.6533741]

Cesar Vallejo for me

[Anonymous No.6533757]

dubs

[Anonymous No.6533768]

Me

[Anonymous No.6533769]

>>6533732
Antonio Lobo Antunes

[Anonymous No.6533772]

Yogi ramacharaka

[Anonymous No.6535557]

>>6533732
Jean Motherfucking Toomer

The best black prose stylist in America's history.

[Anonymous No.6535563]

>>6533732

Sexton Ming

[Anonymous No.6535571]

>>6535557

He could pass, couldn't he? Looks like Bryan Brown with a tan.

[Anonymous No.6535601]

>>6533769
holy fucking shit, I can't agree more

[Anonymous No.6535616]

>>6535557
he looks white

[Anonymous No.6535618]

>>6535571
Looks more Pakistani than anything to me.
But he was still very outspoken about his heritage. That being said, Langston Hughes made huge waves only ten years later, so I suppose I don't know.

Excerpt from Cane (1923):

Face flowed into her eyes. Flowed in soft cream foam and plaintive ripples, in such a way that wherever your glance may momentarily have rested, it immediately thereafter wavered in the direction of her eyes. The soft suggestion of down slightly, like the shadow of a bird’s wing might, the creamy brown color of her upper lip. Why, after noticing it, you sought her eyes, I cannot tell you. Her nose was aquiline, Semitic. If you have heard a Jewish Cantor sing, if he has touched you and made your own sorrow seem trivial when compared with his, you will know my feeling when I follow the curves of her profile, like mobile rivers, to their common delta. They were strange eyes. In this, that they sought nothing—That is, nothing that was obvious and tangible and that one could see, and they gave the impression that nothing was to be denied. When a woman seeks, you will have observed, her eyes deny. Fern’s eyes desired nothing that you could give her; there was no reason why they should withhold. Men saw her eyes and fooled themselves. Fern’s eyes said to them that she was easy. When she was young, a few men took her, but got no joy from it. And then, once done, they felt bound to her (quite unlike their hit and run with other girls), felt as though it would take them a lifetime to fulfill an obligation which they could find no name for. They became attached to her, and hungered after finding the barest trace of what she might desire. As she grew up, new men who came to town felt as almost everyone did who ever saw her: that they would not be denied. Men were everlastingly bringing her their bodies. Something inside of her got tired of them, I guess, for I am certain that for the life of her she could not tell why or how she began to turn them off. A man in fever is no trifling thing to send away.

[Anonymous No.6535621]

>>6535557
>black

[Anonymous No.6535626]

>>6535618
They began to leave her, baffled and ashamed, yet vowing to themselves that some day they would do some fine thing for her: send her candy every week and not let her know whom it came from, watch out for her wedding-day and give her a magnificent something with no name on it, buy a house and deed it to her, rescue her from some unworthy fellow who had tricked her into marrying him. As you know, men are apt to idolize or fear that which they cannot understand, especially if it be a woman. She did not deny them, yet the fact was that they were denied. A sort of superstition crept into their consciousness of her being somehow above them. Being above them meant that she was not to be approached by anyone. She became a virgin. Now a virgin in a small southern town is by no means the usual thing, if you will believe me. That the sexes were made to mate is the practice of the South. Particularly, black folks were made to mate. And it is black folks whom I have been talking about thus far. What white men thought of Fern I can arrive at only by analogy. They let her alone.

Anyone, of course, could see her, could see her eyes. If you waked up the Dixie Pike most any time of day, you’d be most likely to see her resting listless-like on the railing of the porch, back propped against a post, head tilted a little forward because there was a nail in the porch post just where her head came which for some reason or other she never took the trouble to pull out. Her eyes, if it were sunset, rested idly where the sun, molten and glorious, was pouring down between the fringe of pines. Or maybe they gazed at the gray cabin on the knoll from which an evening folk-song was coming. Perhaps they followed a cow that had been turned loose to roam and feed on cotton-stalks and corn leaves. Like as not they’d settle on some vague spot above the horizon, though hardly a trace of wistfulness would come to them. If it were dusk, then they’d wait for the search-light of the evening training which you could see miles up the track before it flared across the Dixie Pike, close to her home. Whereever they looked, you’d follow them and then waver back. Like her face, the whole countryside seemed to flow into her eyes. Flowed into them with the soft listless cadence of Georgia’s South.

[Anonymous No.6535644]

>>6535618
>But he was still very outspoken about his heritage.
According to wikipedia he "resisted efforts to classify him as a black writer."

[Anonymous No.6535645]

>>6535626
A young Negro, once, was looking at her, spellbound, from the road. A white man passing in a buggy had to flick him with his whip if he was to get by without running him over. I first saw her on the porch. I was passing with a fellow whose crusty numbness (I was from the North and suspected of being prejudiced and stuck-up) was melting as he found me warm. I asked him who she was. “That’s Fern,” was all that I could get from him. Some folks already thought that I was given to nosing around; I let it go at that, so far as questions were concerned. But at first sight of her I felt as if I had heard a Jewish cantor sing. As if his singing rose above the unheard chorus of a folk-song. And I felt bound to her. I too had my dreams: something I would do for her. I have knocked about from town to town too much not to know the futility of mere change of place. Besides, picture if you can, this cream-colored solitary girl sitting at a tenement window looking down on the indifferent throngs of Harlem. Better that she listen to folk-songs by dusk in Georgia, you would say, and so would I. Or, suppose she came up North and married. Even a doctor or lawyer, say, one who would be sure to get along—that is make money. You and I know, who have had experience in such things, that love is not a thing like prejudice which can be altered by changes of town. Could men in Washington, Chicago, or New York, more than the men of Georgia, bring her something left vacant by the bestowal of their bodies? You and I who know men in these cities will have to say, they could not. See her out and out a prostitute along State Street in Chicago. See her move into a southern town where white men are more aggressive. See her become a white man’s concubine…. Something I must do for her. There was myself. What could I do for her? Talk, of course. Push back the fringes of pines upon new horizons. To what purpose? And what for? Her? Myself? Men in her case seem to lose their selfishness. I lost mine before I touched her. I ask you, friend (it makes no difference if you sit in the Pullman or the Jim Crow as the train crosses her road), what thoughts would come to you—that is, after you’d finished with the thoughts that leap into men’s minds at the sight of a pretty woman who will not deny them; what thoughts would come to you, had you seen her in a quick flash, keen and intuitively, as she sat there on her porch when your train thundered by? Would you have got off at the next station and come back for her to take her where? Would you have completely forgotten her as soon as you reached Macon, Atlanta, Augusta, Pasadena, Madison, Chicago, Boston, or New Orleans? Would you tell your wife or sweetheart about a girl you saw? Your thoughts can help me, and I would like to know. Something I would do for her….

[Anonymous No.6535650]

>>6535644
Yet look at his subject matter

[Anonymous No.6535654]

>>6535645
One evening I walked up the Pike on purpose, and stopped to say hello. Some of her family were about, but they moved away to make room for me. Damn if I knew how to begin. Would you? Mr. and Miss So-and-So, people, the weather, the crops, the new preacher, the frolic, the church benefit, rabbit and possum hunting, the new soft drink they had at old Pap’s store, the schedule of the trains, what kind of town Macon was, Negro’s migration north, bollweevils, syrup, the Bible—to all these things she gave a yassur or nassur, without further comment. I began to wonder if perhaps my own emotional sensibility had played one of its tricks on me. “Lets take a walk,” I at last ventured. The suggestion, coming after so long an isolation, was novel enough, I guess, to surprise. But it wasn’t that. Something told me that men before had said just that as a prelude to the offering of their bodies. I tried to tell her with my eyes. I think she understood. The thing from her that made my throat catch, vanished. Its passing left her visible in a way I’d thought, but never seen. We walked down the Pike with people on all the porches gaping at us. “Doesn’t it make you mad?” She meant the row of petty gossiping people. She meant the world. Through a canebrake that was ripe for cutting, the branch was reached. Under a sweet-gum tree, and where reddish leaves had dammed the creek a little, we sat down. Dusk, suggesting the almost imperceptible procession of giant tress, settled with a purple haze about the cane. I felt strange, as I always do in Georgia, particularly at dusk. I felt that things unseen to men were tangibly immediate. It would not have surprised me had I had vision. People have them in Georgia more often than you would suppose. A black woman once saw the mother of Christ and drew her in charcoal on the courthouse wall…. When one is on the soil of one’s ancestors, most anything can come to one….From force of habit I suppose, I held Fern in my arms—that is, without at first noticing it. Then my mind came back to her. Her eyes, unusually weird and open, held me. Held God. He flowed in as I’ve seen the countryside flow in. Seen men. I must have don something—what, I don’t know, in the confusion of my emotion. She sprang up. Rushed some distance from me. Fell to her knees, and began swaying, swaying. Her body was tortured with something it could not let out. Like boiling sap it flooded arms and fingers till she shook them as if they burned her. It found her throat, and spattered inarticulately in plaintive, convulsive sounds, mingled with calls to Christ Jesus. And then she sang, brokenly. A Jewish cantor singing with a broken voice. A child’s voice, uncertain, or an old man’s. Dusk hid her; I could hear only her song. It seemed to me as though she were pounding her head in anguish upon the ground. I rushed to her. She fainted in my arms.

[Anonymous No.6535658]

>>6535650
White people have written books about slavery too.

[Anonymous No.6535663]

>>6535654
There was much talk about her fainting with me in the canefield. And I got one or two ugly looks from town men who’d set themselves up to protect her. In fact, there was talk of making me leave town. But they never did. They kept a watch-out for me, though. Shortly after I came back North. From the train window I saw her as I crossed the road. Saw her on her porch, head tilted a little forward where the nail was, eyes vaguely focused on the sunset. Saw her face flow into them, the countryside and something that I call God, flowing into them … Nothing ever really happened. Nothing ever came to Fern, not even I. Something I would do for her. Some fine unnamed thing….And, friend, you? She is still living, I have reason to know. Her name, against the chance that you might happened down that way, is Fernie May Rosen.

End.

[Anonymous No.6535670]

>>6535557

This guy is so white i thought you meant "black humor prose stylist"

[Anonymous No.6535673]

>>6535658
True
But it is still true that he was black, and wrote the majority of his work on the experience of blacks in America.

[Anonymous No.6535687]

>>6535557

he was mixed father and white mother.

he was "black" during a time when polish people were called white niggers, and Irish were considered none-whites Irish still aren't white

[Anonymous No.6535715]

For philosophy Johann Gottlieb Fichte. his book the vocation of man is amazing.

[Anonymous No.6535733]

>>6533732
djuna barnes

not terribly obscure but i talk with well-read friends and acquaintances, english majors, who don't know her name let alone read anything by her. high modernism comparable to joyce, faulkner, woolf, and ts eliot (who wrote an introduction to the novella 'nightwood')

[Anonymous No.6535748]

Lewis Hyde, Primo Levi, WG Sebald, David Graeber

None are totally obscure, but looking at the stuff in my Goodreads account with criminally low readership, that's the stuff that sticks out.

[Anonymous No.6535765]

Nabokov. because if you the random pleb on the street they still don't know who he is. There are barely any authors who aren't obscure to the general population.

[Anonymous No.6535793]

>>6535765

'didn't he write that pedo book?' don't underestimate the plebarchy

[Anonymous No.6535894]

>>6535557
>he's so black he absorbs literally all the colours

[Anonymous No.6535956]

>2D graph

You mean a Cartesian plane you calculus noob?

[Anonymous No.6535978]

>>6533741
Hay golpes en la vida, tan fuertes... ¡Yo no sé!
Golpes como del odio de Dios; como si ante ellos,
la resaca de todo lo sufrido
se empozara en el alma... ¡Yo no sé!

Son pocos; pero son... Abren zanjas oscuras
en el rostro más fiero y en el lomo más fuerte.
Serán tal vez los potros de bárbaros Atilas;
o los heraldos negros que nos manda la Muerte.

Son las caídas hondas de los Cristos del alma
de alguna fe adorable que el Destino blasfema.
Esos golpes sangrientos son las crepitaciones
de algún pan que en la puerta del horno se nos quema.

Y el hombre... Pobre... ¡pobre! Vuelve los ojos, como
cuando por sobre el hombro nos llama una palmada;
vuelve los ojos locos, y todo lo vivido
se empoza, como charco de culpa, en la mirada.

Hay golpes en la vida, tan fuertes... ¡Yo no sé!

[Anonymous No.6535982]

McCarthy and London.
Jared Diamond deserves also a mention. Loved his work on the fates of human societes.

[Anonymous No.6536037]

>>6535748
I think graeber's star is rising

[Anonymous No.6536042]

>>6535715
Fichte is well-known in philosophy, and I can't see how someone not under the influence of 19th century German nationalism could genuinely enjoy his work

[Anonymous No.6536048]

>>6535982
Am I being coaxed into a snafu? Those are wildly popular authors. McCarthy definitely in the lower quadrant for obscurity, nowhere near the top.

McCarthy:
>718,516 ratings goodreads
>3,751 reviews for The Road on Amazon

Jack London:
>403,039 ratings on goodreads
>1,632 reviews for Call of the Wild on Amazon

Just for comparison, a few other authors mentioned ITT:

Cesar Vallejo:
>2,323 ratings goodreads
>7 reviews for his most popular book on Amazon

Antonio Lobo Antunes:
>4,711 ratings goodreads
>10 reviews Amazon

London and McCarthy are orders of magnitude less obscure. It's like saying I'm hearing you say that Radiohead is obscure. Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel is also #1 on Amazon for Anthropology, #1 for Geography, #3 for Human Geography, #27 for history, and it was published in 1999. It's one of THE most popular history book ever published. Plenty of higher quality authors who are more obscure.

[Anonymous No.6536151]

The greatest writer of our generation only a relatively small message board knows about

[Anonymous No.6536191]

>>6535956
nigga we are in /lit/ not /sci/

[Anonymous No.6536216]

>>6535956
a 2d graph doesn't have to use cartesian coordinates bitch

[Anonymous No.6536236]

david lynch

[Anonymous No.6536492]

>>6536236
hes like the Pynchon of cinema

[Anonymous No.6536509]

>>6536492
yes friend, yes he is.

[Anonymous No.6536529]

>>6536492
>>6536509
No, he absolutely is not. Pynchon is authentic. Lynch, however, is a hack, and wouldn't be able to explain Inland Empire even with a gun pointed to his head.

[Anonymous No.6536537]

>>6536529
>explaining art

[Anonymous No.6536550]

>>6535557
looks indian

[Anonymous No.6536555]

>>6536529
>he thinks inland empire is difficult to explain

full pleb

also, eraserhead is his best work and one of the best expressionist films of all time, comparable to anything by lang.

pynchon on the other hand is a genuine turd. nothing he wrote was ever comparable to joyce. pynchon owes practically everything to joyce and could never reach his level. not even fucking close.

[Anonymous No.6536556]

Hermann Broch

[Anonymous No.6536568]

>>6536529
go back to /mu/ or something man.

[Anonymous No.6536591]

>>6535673
Which may be more indicative as him trying to get out of the way of his work?

Perhaps he wanted people to see him pieces for what they were and have no prejudgment based on who he was. Polar opposite of the Steven King type.

I don't know, I've never read him, just a theory.

[Anonymous No.6536618]

>>6533732
Eva Figes (her fiction, not her godawful feminist essays)

[Anonymous No.6537130]

>>6536555
Pynchon is nothing like Joyce. Congrats on falling for the retarded meme

[Anonymous No.6537223]

>>6533772
Good ol' Walker. Got a recommendation?

[Anonymous No.6537236]

>>6536555

>pynchon owes practically everything to joyce

found the non-reader

[Anonymous No.6537266]

>>6533732
Patrick White.

He's won the Nobel prize, but no-one has read him. About 5000 total ratings on goodreads, and the only person I know in real life who has actually read one of his books is the head of the literature department at my university.

Has some of the best prose I've ever read, though. The Vivisector is the most nihilistic, sentimental, and artistic kunstelroman's I've ever read.

[Anonymous No.6537287]

>>6537266
>The Vivisector is the most nihilistic, sentimental, and artistic kunstelroman's I've ever read.

Sounds like just the book I've been looking for. I've known of White for years but never wanted to read him because I have a bias against Australians. I'll give him a shot, though.

[Anonymous No.6537291]

[Anonymous No.6537412]

Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky and Georges Perec