[ 3 / biz / cgl / ck / diy / fa / ic / jp / lit / sci / vr / vt ] [ index / top / reports ] [ become a patron ] [ status ]
2023-11: Warosu is now out of extended maintenance.

/lit/ - Literature

View post   
File: 69 KB, 562x530, 1489318709774.jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google]
9307034 No.9307034 [Reply] [Original]

If you somehow published a novel and it became a renowned masterpiece, would you rather it be praised for its beautiful and masterful prose or for its thought-provoking themes?

>> No.9307058

>>9307034
ideally, my masterpiece would be reviled and hated for it's inhuman obscenity. Not merely dismissed, but actively suppressed and destroyed by all people of good will.

>> No.9307071

>>9307034
don't care as long as it makes me rich

>> No.9307075

>>9307058
Got to your dungeon De Sade

>> No.9307289

>>9307034
I don't care as long as someone reads it.
Even if they read it even after my death.

>> No.9307423

Definitely themes. People may enjoy your prose when they are reading your book, but themes will stay with them long after if it's truly thought-provoking.

>> No.9308437

>>9307071
This. Fuck everything else.

>> No.9308622
File: 242 KB, 2700x1800, 1370432117220.jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google]
9308622

i'd rather it was praised for the foresight of having one of the main characters a large-breasted redhead so that when they make a film of it they'll cast Christina Hendricks as Russ.

>> No.9308629

>>9307034
masterful prose, hands down.
You could write the dumbest shlock, but if it's fun and pleasing to read, then there you go.

Prose is also the most important thing for me. I'd read about a pig rolling in shit if the prose was good enough.

>> No.9308867

themes last; we still read the odyssey and the divine comedy in translation

I'd like to last, ergo I'd like themes.

For all of you who are precious of prose, btw, I have a quote from Borges for you:

"The perfect page, the page in which no word can be altered without harm, is the most precarious of all. Changes in language erase shades of meaning, and the "perfect" page is precisely the one that consists of those delicate fringes that are so easily worn away. On the contrary, the page that becomes immortal can traverse the fire of typographical errors, approximate translations, and inattentive or erroneous readings without losing its soul in the process. One cannot with impunity alter any line fabricated by Gongora (according to those who restore his texts), but Don Quixote wins posthumous battles against his translators and survives each and every careless version. Heine, who never heard it read in Spanish, acclaimed it for eternity. The German, Scandinavian, or Hindu ghost of the Quixote is more alive than the stylist's anxious verbal artifices.

I would not wish that the moral of this assertion be understood as desperation or nihilism. Nor do I wish to foment negligence, nor do I believe in a mystical virtue of the awkward locution and the shoddy epithet. I am stating that the voluntary emission of those two or three minor pleasures-the ocular distraction of metaphor, the auditory distraction of rhythm, and the surprises of an interjection or a hyperbaton-usually proves that the writer's overriding passion is his subject, and that is all. Genuine literature is as indifferent to a rough-hewn phrase as it is to a smooth sentence."

>> No.9308968

Both, otherway it would not be a masterpiece tbqh