Borges on long novels

[Anonymous No.16724121]

/lit/ has an obsession with long novels. Yet here is what Borges had to say about them: https://webs.ucm.es/info/especulo/numero25/borveres.html

I translate (Spanish is not my first language, so forgive me if I make a mistake):

>In the course of a life dedicated mainly to books I have read very few novels, and in many cases only a sense of duty has made me find my way towards their last pages. I have always being a reader, and a rereader, of short-stories."

>And I have the impression that a long novel is not only excessive for the reader, who cannot read it at once, but also to the author himself. All of this is a repetition of what was said by Poe: that "There is no such thing as a long poem"; that a long poem is nothing but a succession of short poems; and that aesthetic emotion demands a single reading. I believe that the short-story is able to give us this aesthetic emotion. The novel, on the other hand, gives us a series of emotions, and leaves us only with its memory. I believe, furthermore, that in the short story [novella?]*, as practiced by Henry James, Kipling, Conrad and others, there is space for everything that fits inside a novel. That is to say: it can be as dense, as charged with complexities and intensities as a novel with a lot of enthusiasm. And there comes a moment in which one feel that this reading is, perhaps, less a pleasure than a duty. On the other hand, with the short story this does not happen. The short-story, like the short poem, can give us a sensation of plenitude continuously.

>The length of the novelistic genre does not conform either to the darkness of my eyes, nor to the brevity of human life. I can count the books - the Arabian Nights, let's say, or the Orlando Furioso - in which the essence itself is inseparable from the length, because they give us the certainty that we can lose ourselves in their pages as in a dream or a song; in general, however, abundance of pages is a promise of boredom or mere routine.

This is from a Brazilian interview: http://filosofia.fflch.usp.br/sites/filosofia.fflch.usp.br/files/publicacoes/Gaia/gaia1.pdf

>Question: Are you an frequent reader of novels?
>Answer: I am not a reader of novels, except for Stevenson, Conrad, Dickens, the Russian novelists. I don't read novels. Novels demand too much effort from me. Now a short story, a short story by Kipling, can be essential. Every word is usually essential. On the contrary, a novel has to justify itself with scenarios, with opinions, with dialogues that are not substantial.
>I begun my life by reading the tales of Grimm - one of the masters of humankind - and books from the Arabian Nights, in diverse translations, diverse idioms. Novels, I've read few. I don't know the novels of Cortázar; I know the short-stories, and hold them in the highest regard.
*The context and the authors mentioned make me think he's talking about a novella ("novela corta"), but the original says "cuento corto".

[Anonymous No.16724128]

BASED as always.

[Anonymous No.16724142]

>The length of the novelistic genre does not conform either to the darkness of my eyes, nor to the brevity of human life. I can count the books - the Arabian Nights, let's say, or the Orlando Furioso - in which the essence itself is inseparable from the length, because they give us the certainty that we can lose ourselves in their pages as in a dream or a song; in general, however, abundance of pages is a promise of boredom or mere routine.
HOLY MOTHER OF BASED

[Anonymous No.16724149]

>>16724121
Confirmed hack and brainlet. I have seen one interview with him where he was speaking English and i had to turn on the subtitles, he was painful to listen to.

[Anonymous No.16724152]

reddit fabulist has reddit opinions on literature, big surprise

[Anonymous No.16724159]

>>16724152
there's nothing more reddit than a novel. check out their top 100 books. all are novels.

[Anonymous No.16724162]

>>16724121
>I have always being an rereader

[Anonymous No.16724167]

>>16724121
>books from the Arabian Nights, in diverse translations, diverse idioms.
"idomas" is languages, OP, not idioms.

[Anonymous No.16724172]

>>16724149
t. feminine novel reader

[Anonymous No.16724187]

>>16724162
Sorry, I translated it fast. If you pay me I can revise it for typos.

>>16724152
Wrong.

>>16724159
Correct.

>>16724167
True. My bad.

[Anonymous No.16724190]

>>16724121
That's literally in the preface to Ficciones. Are you a newfag?
And, is this really surprising for a blind guy?
Jokes aside, what do you guys think of Borges' poetry?

[Anonymous No.16724208]

>>16724190
>Jokes aside, what do you guys think of Borges' poetry?
I like it. He has his moments of excellence.

[Anonymous No.16724230]

>>16724121
He is just literally mad he can't carry an idea past a rough sketch. It's just a cope from Borges because he could never actually flesh out any of his idea. Borges is the equivalent of an ad-pitch man in the literary world.

[Anonymous No.16724255]

>>16724190
>That's literally in the preface to Ficciones. Are you a newfag?

No, it's been more than six years since I last read the preface of Ficciones.

>Jokes aside, what do you guys think of Borges' poetry?

Very good, specially his later poetry. His early poetry is still somewhat infused with the literary fashions of his day, though he seems to have never fallen totally into them.
Of course, even his later poetry is still written in a manneristic style, and does not rise to the level of originality that we find in his prose, but even then his mastery of the Spanish language, which enables him to remain very clear while writing verses which attain the highest formal ideals, is striking.

[Anonymous No.16724289]

>>16724230
How come?
He could definitely had developed many of his stories into novels if he wanted. But he didn't. And guess what? No one misses the "Borges novel". Why? Because novels are unnecessary.
If Anna Karenina were 300 pages long, nobody would miss the remaining 500 pages, in the same way that nobody misses the remaining 500 pages of Heart of Darkness.
And it wasn't laziness, as Borges wrote, or at any rate spoke, many series of lectures which in text would have the size of a short novel.

The novel is, as Borges said, a non-essential form. It does not condense enough. There is something very artificial in it, much like opera. This doesn't mean that there cannot be masterpieces: we all love Wagner, or at least Verdi. But even then we recognize their works as artificial to a larger extant than a symphony, or a series of fugues is.

Here is Faulkner:

>Faulkner answered the question of why he gave up poetry and turned to prose in “The Paris Review” interview in 1956: “Maybe every novelist wants to write poetry first, finds he can’t, and then tries the short story, which is the most demanding form after poetry,” he said. “And, failing at that, only then does he take up novel writing.”

[Anonymous No.16724292]

>>16724172
Borges is for low IQ frauds.

[Anonymous No.16724304]

>>16724121
absolutely retarded opinions.

[Anonymous No.16724308]

>>16724289
Interesting. Borges also liked Faulkner btw. Particularly The Sound and The Fury, Absalom, Absalom!, and The Unvanquished.

[Anonymous No.16724320]

ITT: Angl*ds SEETHING because they wasted hundreds of hours reading worthless novels

[Anonymous No.16724324]

Grimm's tales and Arabian nights are just the genreshit of antiquity. They are tales of women and children.

[Anonymous No.16724326]

>>16724292
Reading long novels doesn't make you smarter, faggot. You're just coping because you wasted your time reading them.

[Anonymous No.16724333]

>>16724324
Fundamentally anachronistic view. There wasn't any elitist distinction between muh literary fiction and muh genre fiction the way we have now. That was the beauty and purity of it.

[Anonymous No.16724337]

>>16724121
BASED BASED BASED BASED BASED
>>16724149
>>16724152
>>16724230
>>16724292
>>16724304
>>16724324
Cope

[Anonymous No.16724350]

>>16724121
The fact that novels take commitment and effort when both of those things are lacking in the uncompromising and increasingly irrelevant literary world is a sign, for me, that Borges was wrong here, specially as he did not took into account the contigency of the decaying attention spam in the newer generations of readers.

[Anonymous No.16724362]

>>16724324
Yeah dude. This is a kid's story. I'd show this to my 5 yr. old.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2mOGD5tGEoE

[Anonymous No.16724374]

>>16724326
You wasted your time reading short fables for kids, so what?
>>16724337
Coping retard.

[Anonymous No.16724381]

>>16724362
Aladdin is your favourite movie isn't it?

[Anonymous No.16724384]

The last very long novel I read was The Count of Monte Cristo and there was honestly no need for it to be so long.

[Anonymous No.16724390]

>>16724381
Did you actually watch the clip or the Pasolini movie itself? Aladdin is a French story that was added in. The actual original Arabic and African stories are all sexual and adult, just like what's in Chaucer or Boccaccio. If you think it is for children then Aladdin is all you know about it.

[Anonymous No.16724391]

>>16724292
In his book 'The History of Reading', Alberto Manguel writes that Borges knew the poems of Heinrich Heine by memory in the original German. He hired Manguel to read for him (Borges was blind), and as soon as Manguel started reading the book, Borges "read along". I suppose it must have been like following a song that you know really well.

And you? What do you know from the novels that you read?
Because when I read a 900 pages novel it is very entertaining, much like watching a television series, although with an incomparably superior content; yet even then, one year later, I barely remember anything that I read. All that the novel has left in my mind is a succession of memories, a blurry selection of images, characters, and perhaps a sentence here and there, though often not even that.

Meanwhile, a poetry book, or a short story, can be memorized. And one year later you will remember the short story or the poem better than you remember the 1000 pages novel.
Even if you memorize a section of a novel, it is only a section. It does not stand on itself as a complete aesthetic object.

[Anonymous No.16724400]

>>16724381
In fact, to expand upon that, it's even thought Chaucer's the Merchant's Tale was stolen from the Arabian Nights.

[Anonymous No.16724414]

>>16724391
You don't need to memorize poems and short stories, autist.

[Anonymous No.16724416]

>>16724121
/lit/ definitely has a thing thinking long novels are usually the best. With this I disagree. Some of the best novels are quite short; and why not, just because there is less of it? It's not about quantifying anyway, but I have taken quite a liking for novels/novellas (to demarcate a form by word/pagecount only is a br**nlet take, and quite an anglo one at that) 80-150 pages in length. This does not make me a supporter of Borges either, however; something called a novel, or even just a book, is what I like; I am not a reader of short stories. . .

[Anonymous No.16724425]

>>16724350
He read the GOAT novels, though. But there's no need to read 800 page long pomo garbage like Gass or Vollmann. That'd be a waste of time. Especially for a blind man.

[Anonymous No.16724426]

>>16724350
>The fact that novels take commitment and effort

J.K. Rowling's novels do too. This is no aesthetic measure, but purely one of willpower, and has nothing to do with literature.

[Anonymous No.16724433]

>>16724414
True, but if they truly moved you or changed you or you found beauty in them you would know the words by heart.

[Anonymous No.16724438]

>>16724391
Have you tried interpreting the novels you read?
I can perfectly see the comparison between literature and television, specially in the long running fantasy or crime series but saying that the novel doesn't stand as a complete aesthetic object by itself is absurd.

[Anonymous No.16724448]

>>16724414
You need to if you wish to write well. Maybe not short stories, because it is prose; but you certainly need to memorize poetry.
Why? Do you have a problem? Does it sound harder than just passively reading a 500 page novel as if it were a Disney movie, something that even a 10 y.o. Harry Potter fan can do?
Yeah, you ought to force your neurons to work if you wish to memorize large amounts of poetry.

[Anonymous No.16724449]

>>16724426
Really? Wanna use that as an exmple? Because i rather not banalize the discussion going into particulars.

[Anonymous No.16724462]

>The essential advantage I see in it is that the short story can be taken in at a single glance. On the other hand, in the novel the consecutive is more noticeable. And then there’s the fact that a work of three hundred pages depends on padding, on pages which are mere nexuses between one part and another. On the other hand, it’s possible for everything to be essential, or more or less essential, or — shall we say — appear to be essential, in a short story. I think there are stories of Kipling’s that are as dense as a novel, or of Conrad’s too. It’s true they’re not too short.

[Anonymous No.16724467]

>>16724438
>Have you tried interpreting the novels you read?
>saying that the novel doesn't stand as a complete aesthetic object by itself is absurd

Have you tried interpreting the post that you read?

>Even if you memorize a section of a novel, it is only a section. It does not stand on itself as a complete aesthetic object.

The "it" on the second sentence refers to the section, not to the novel. Maybe I should have preceded it with two points to make it clearer:

>>Even if you memorize a section of a novel, it is only a section: it does not stand on itself as a complete aesthetic object.

[Anonymous No.16724473]

>>16724333
Muslim scholars have always had a very low opinion of Arabian nights. They consider them to be childish fairy tales that pale in comparisson to poetry.

[Anonymous No.16724478]

>>16724190
>is this really surprising for a blind guy?
He became blind later in his life.

[Anonymous No.16724509]

>>16724462
You can make short stories with just glimpses of an idea, a situation or just a feeling without ever having to develop a concisive story to be told in a coherent manner. That's why there is little experimentation in the short story as a form.

[Anonymous No.16724518]

/lit can't handle the fact that the novels they were memed into reading were a waste of time.

[Anonymous No.16724526]

>>16724289
And yet Faulkner's worst novel is worth magnitudes more than the entirety of Borges body of work.

[Anonymous No.16724528]

>>16724473
If we're talking about Arabian Nights the we're talking about translations and all of Europe was crazy for these tales when they were published. Writers who liked the book include Coleridge, Thomas de Quincey, Stendhal, Tennyson, Edgar Allan Poe, Newman, all read the Galland translation or a version of that. It's similar to how Americans have a low opinion of Poe but Europeans like him.

[Anonymous No.16724532]

>>16724449
>Really? Wanna use that as an exmple?

Yes, I do wish to use that as an example.

[Anonymous No.16724540]

>>16724518
A thing you do for passion can hardly be a waste of time.

[Anonymous No.16724541]

>>16724121
The longer short story (10K - 20K words) is the ideal length

[Anonymous No.16724548]

>>16724526
No one in their right mind would think so. Certainly not any thinking reader. You're just salty because you wasted money and time in worthless long novels. Faulkner himself would probably laugh at the idea.

[Anonymous No.16724549]

>>16724320
Borges is half Anglo though

[Anonymous No.16724552]

>>16724416
>/lit/ definitely has a thing thinking long novels are usually the best.
Of course, the original meme trilogy are doorstoppers. Novel is the lit genre. No shit they got pissed itt. Borges criticized their main criteria.

[Anonymous No.16724562]

>>16724549
Not really half. Like a 1/8, probably.

[Anonymous No.16724598]

>>16724548
Borges seems to think academic puzzles have higher literary merit than aesthetic experience. Every single one of Borges gay little story is some queer academic puzzle he has crafted. None of them have that much aesthetic value since the purpose is to solve the puzzle. Novels however have aesthetic value and give the reader an aesthetic experience. The aesthetic experience I get from a novel is magintudes larger than the aesthetic experience I get from one of Borges "DUDE INFINITE RECURSIONS" puzzle stories.

[Anonymous No.16724625]

>>16724552
>>16724548
Is this your brain on flash fiction?

[Anonymous No.16724638]

>>16724625
It's your brain on a redpill. Read the GOAT novels and forget about unnecessarily long garbage. Much more forgettable if they're long AND pomo.

[Anonymous No.16724643]

>>16724121
I may disagree with some of Borges' opinions but I can't deny that he was the most based writer to ever live

[Anonymous No.16724655]

>>16724643
he makes faggots here SEETHE that's for sure.

[Anonymous No.16724659]

>>16724643
He was pretty cringe desu. I feel fascinated and shameful after reading him.

[Anonymous No.16724660]

>>16724643
Borges no existe

[Anonymous No.16724668]

>>16724655
Aren't you too old to use memespeak?

[Anonymous No.16724688]

>>16724598
>academic puzzles have higher literary merit than aesthetic experience

Do you read Spanish?

>the purpose is to solve the puzzle

Are you joking?

[Anonymous No.16724693]

>>16724598
>Novels however have aesthetic value and give the reader an aesthetic experience.
HAHAHA jesus christ guys. Now you're just regurgitating meaningless buzzwords. You have no clue what you're talking about. Explain what an "aesthetic experience" is. I'm all ears. Yes, I'm sure Ready Player One is a better "aesthetic experience" than The Metamorphosis.

[Anonymous No.16724749]

>>16724693
You are like a monkey, pure noise and by being childish you killed the chance of any meaningful discussion.

[Anonymous No.16724761]

>>16724433
No. You need to feel it, not memorize it.
>>16724448
Who said anything about writing? I'm not a writer, i don't give a fuck.

[Anonymous No.16724772]

>>16724643
Lol, not even close. That would be Céline.

[Anonymous No.16724790]

>>16724749
>ONLY NOVELS PROVIDE AN AESTHETIC EXPERIENCE BROS"
>what is an 'aesthetic experience'?
>REEEEE YOU'RE A MONKEY AND I'M SMART
Just admit you can't define what it is, faggot.

Also
>being childish
>reduces Borges' work to "puzzles" and "DUDE INFINITE RECURSIONS"
Really big brained and mature.

[Anonymous No.16724797]

>>16724772
Céline doesn't make /lit/fags seethe and cry just with a few sentences. People are about to commit suicide here.

[Anonymous No.16724808]

>>16724790
18+ to post here

[Anonymous No.16724813]

>>16724473
The Arabian Nights is LITERALLY half poetry of poets such as Abu Nuwass and Aatiyah. WHY DO YOU COMMENT WHEN YOU DON'T KNOW ANYTHING ABOUT IT? I KNOW ABOUT IT AND IT ANGERS ME THAT YOU COMMENT BUT YOU DON'T!!!!

[Anonymous No.16724817]

Faggots who read DFW and Pynchon and other stupid ass burger literature will never understand.

[Anonymous No.16724819]

>>16724808
t. can't define aesthetic experience

[Anonymous No.16724829]

>>16724817
>t.

[Anonymous No.16724836]

This thread is so fucking stupid and its just bait meant to rile up anyone who hasn't read Borges. Borges himself was, like any other author, keen to make the same pithy statements and one-offs that sound good as sound-bites but don't really represent the whole of their aesthetic and worldview. Thus, in one of his nonfiction reviews you have him making the off-handed statement that perhaps the greatest of all fantastic fiction are the systems built by philosophers like Plato, Spinoza, or Leibiniz, and "how can the wonders of Wells or Edgar Allen Poe compare?" This doesn't stop him from gushing over fantastic fiction in other reviews though such as Arabian Nights and Wu Cheng'en's Monkey and his beloved Commedia. But the statement itself has rhetorical effect. Borges himself was a writer of such grand superlative gestures. It is silly to think he really had anything against monumental novels when he has an entire essay on Ulysses where he admits he has not read the novel in full but "I will always esteem and adore the divine genius of this Gentleman, taking from him what I understand with humility and admiring with veneration what I am unable to understand". In another review, for Faulkner's Absalom Absalom, he ends it by saying that it "is comparable to The Sound and the Fury. I know no higher praise". Borges was a great writer, but like any other writer prone to say things more for effect than veracity or consistency. Yet the motherfucker loved mystery novels out of all things. He praises Dostoyevsky and Murasaki's Genji. He writes an entire essay about the influences of Kafka. He loved the hell out of the novel. He devoured everything. Why do you think his ideal was a goddamn infinite book? And this statement about concision goes against the fact that Borges is a massive lover of philosophy, whose tomes are the epitome of excessiveness and lack of concision. Borges was erudite and brilliant but also a fucking blowhard. He fellated books of all sorts and was carried away by his own ideas on them. Use his quote as a jumping pad for discussions about concision if you must, but don't use the Borges name as a sign of authority, just as Nabokov could write brilliantly but also have the dumbest fucking opinions on literature in the world.

[Anonymous No.16724841]

>>16724473
I do not hate you but you REALLY should not be commenting if you have not read the book. Abu Nuwass, Aatiyah and all sorts of other classical Arabian poets make up a good portion of the book.

[Anonymous No.16724847]

Borges is being a brainlet here, and if you reflect on what he's claiming it should be fairly obvious.

Surely one could, at their leisure, read a collection of different short stories that are together of equivalent length as a novel. And such collections could easily be related in theme, or setting, or even character. Take, for instance, all of Hemingway's Nick Adams stories. You can buy a single volume that contains only these stories, and together they form a collection of stories about a single person. Or take Winesburg, Ohio, which takes a single setting and cast of characters, and tells different self-contained stories about them. In both of these cases, the stories show clear interconnections, even though they do not share enough "plot" to constitute novels.

But then what exactly is the criterion that makes the novel superfluous, any more than writing multiple short stories? Why can't one appreciate the opening scene of War and Peace, where Pierre defends Bonaparte from the criticisms of the Russian aristocrats, as an artistic piece in itself? The scene where Prince Andrew leaves his family for war--why can't I appreciate this in the same way I appreciate the short story? What exactly is stopping me from having a succession of aesthetic experiences equivalent to the short story collection while reading this book?

The answer, of course, is that Borges has a short attention span and gets bored.

[Anonymous No.16724882]

>>16724847
>Borges is being a brainlet here, and if you reflect on what he's claiming it should be fairly obvious.
The big mistake here is thinking Borges had every reader in mind as opposed to just his own taste and necessities. No, Kyle, he doesn't want you to stop reading novels. He's talking about himself, not imposing his ideas on anyone.
>But then what exactly is the criterion that makes the novel superfluous, any more than writing multiple short stories? Why can't one appreciate the opening scene of War and Peace, where Pierre defends Bonaparte from the criticisms of the Russian aristocrats, as an artistic piece in itself? The scene where Prince Andrew leaves his family for war--why can't I appreciate this in the same way I appreciate the short story? What exactly is stopping me from having a succession of aesthetic experiences equivalent to the short story collection while reading this book?
That's what he's saying. There's lots of filler and 'glue' in novels but you can of course appreciate sections of them.

[Anonymous No.16724916]

>>16724882
>That's what he's saying. There's lots of filler and 'glue' in novels but you can of course appreciate sections of them.

I understand what he's saying, but he's wrong. The fact that bad novels have filler is irrelevant to the fact that good novels have virtually none. Pointing out that one could skip a scene in a novel is like pointing out that one could skip a story in the Nick Adams collection--does that prove that the story you skipped had no aesthetic merit? Of course not. It's a brainlet take.

[Anonymous No.16724950]

>>16724916
All novels have filler. It’s just that some filler is well written and entertaining

[Anonymous No.16724960]

>>16724950
No, they don't, and there's no justification for believing they do.

[Anonymous No.16724965]

>>16724916
>The fact that bad novels have filler is irrelevant to the fact that good novels have virtually none.
Many novels have irrelevant disgressions in between the narrative so this is false. Even many of the good ones. Novellas are the ones who tend to be concise.
>Pointing out that one could skip a scene in a novel is like pointing out that one could skip a story in the Nick Adams collection--does that prove that the story you skipped had no aesthetic merit?
Not sure why you autists are obsessed with muh aesthetic value (yet can't define it). Some people read for pure joy, for pleasure, and somehow this makes pseuds get all angry and salty.

[Anonymous No.16724976]

>>16724965
>Not sure why you autists are obsessed with muh aesthetic value (yet can't define it). Some people read for pure joy, for pleasure, and somehow this makes pseuds get all angry and salty.

What exactly are you claiming? Whether you read for aesthetic value or joy or pleasure, a novel can surely supply those things without filler. The point you need to address, if you really want to defend Borges claim, is that there is no principle that separates a collection of short stories from a novel.

[Anonymous No.16724993]

>>16724882
>>16724916
>>16724950
>>16724960
>>16724965
>>16724976
This discussion is useless without specific examples and both of you should get the fuck out

[Anonymous No.16724996]

>>16724993
I literally gave specific examples to defend my point--the Nick Adams collection and Winesburg, Ohio are collections of short stories that function similarly to novels. I then gave specific examples of how War and Peace is enjoyable scene-by-scene, in the same way that a collection of stories is enjoyable story-by-story.

[Anonymous No.16725001]

>>16724976
See: >>16724462

[Anonymous No.16725028]

>>16725001
See >>16724996

The "padding" argument is difficult to defend if you think collections like Nick Adams and Winesburg, Ohio don't have padding, but novels inevitably do.

[Anonymous No.16725060]

>>16724996
>>16725028
>Nick Adams collection and Winesburg, Ohio are collections of short stories that function similarly to novels
Those are the so-called hybrid books like Faulkner's The Unvanquished, which are more novel-like via references to other stories in the same book or use the same setting/era/characters to form a consistent unity, as apposed to actual short story collections with unconnected stories and varied subjects/themes. Hybrid books use interrelation to get rid of the of the filler in a novel yet give a novel-like consistency and unity.

[Anonymous No.16725077]

>>16725060
I think this is an attempt to see how long one can sustain an argument without knowing shit about the books one mentions.

[Anonymous No.16725094]

>>16725077
Do you have a real countergument or do we call it a day?

[Anonymous No.16725113]

>>16724847
>The answer, of course, is that Borges has a short attention span and gets bored.
Sure, the guy who taught himself German to read Schopenhauer with nothing but a German dictionary and Heine's poems is easily bored.
The same guy who read The Divine Comedy in Italian without speaking Italian has a short attention span. Nice one.

[Anonymous No.16725116]

>>16725060
>>16725094

There's no such thing as "hybrid books". Your own example Faulkner himself called a novel, which simply speaks to the arbitrariness of the term. The Nick Adams stories were written and published separately, and later collected. Winesburg Ohio was written and conceived as a whole. What are the actual criteria by which such books are determined to be "novels" or not? The answer is just an impression of unity, whatever that entails. There's literally nothing about the novel that necessitates padding beyond what these other books have.

[Anonymous No.16725178]

>>16724324
Long novels were seen as the feminine genre until the first world war because only adolescent girls and housewives read more than a small handful of them.
The two cited were certainly not for children.

[Anonymous No.16725220]

>>16725178
Back then only women had the time to read such long entertainments but the modern era has feminized men so much that they also have engaged into feminine novel-reading. Think about the way a woman tells and enjoy a story and it's pretty much like a novel: long-winded, unnecessary details, many irrelevant disgressions, etc. As opposed to a man telling a story: concise, to the point, make an impact, only the essential yet important parts, etc. Therefore we could conclude that novels are the feminine literary genre while short stories are the masculine one.

[Anonymous No.16725223]

>>16725116
I've seen some critics refer to these types of books as 'hybrid books', a cross between a shorty story collection and a novel. They're interconnected so as to become a consistent unity like a novel. The sections have something in common (charactetersand in this way they achieve their unity. Also, hybrid books are not really the norm when it comes to novels and that's why people can tell the nuance. Either way, Borges liked The Unvanquished so clearly this isn't the type of novel he was talking about.

[Anonymous No.16725801]

>>16724289
Based and poetry-pilled.
Rise up, condensing-bros

[Anonymous No.16725817]

>>16724473
>They consider them to be childish fairy tales that pale in comparisson to poetry.
Recommend me some God-tier arabian poetry.

[Anonymous No.16725831]

>>16724425
>He read the GOAT novels, though.
Which ones?
I'm curious about what where Borges' classics.

[Anonymous No.16726030]

>>16724797
>People are about to commit suicide here.
Keked so hard.
Fuck the eternal anglo!

[Anonymous No.16726108]

>>16724526
"Everynovelistwants to write poetry first, finds he can't, and then tries theshort story, which is the most demanding form after poetry. And,failingat that, only then does he take upnovelwriting." - Faulkner

[Anonymous No.16726116]

>>16725113
>The same guy who read The Divine Comedy in Italian without speaking Italian
How does it work? Now I wanna try.

[Anonymous No.16726201]

>>16724121
Lol my mans would love twitter

[Anonymous No.16726319]

>>16725220
That's the way to do an Apology.

[Anonymous No.16726358]

>>16726116
He knew Spanish, Latin, French. He made sense of it by reading it aloud and checking dictionaries and the thousands of annotations and footnotes.

[Anonymous No.16726544]

cope

[Anonymous No.16726838]

>>16724121
Wow, your spanish sucks.

[Anonymous No.16726940]

>>16726838
Meanie

[Anonymous No.16726950]

>>16726838
nice google translate

[Anonymous No.16726975]

>>16726838
I bet you don't know how to write in proper english beyond 2 or 3 sentences.

[Anonymous No.16727113]

>>16724121
>Borges
>Poe
Don't give a shit.

[Anonymous No.16727249]

>>16724562
Borges is more argentinian than inflation

[Anonymous No.16727295]

>>16724836
>And this statement about concision goes against the fact that Borges is a massive lover of philosophy, whose tomes are the epitome of excessiveness and lack of concision

No, they are not. Concision has nothing to do with size, it has everything to do with condensation.
Gibbon does not lack concision: his subject matter is too large. Kant does not lack concision: his subject matter is too profound.

A novelist invents his own subject matter, and here lies the difference. You mention Ulysses. Well, Ulysses has many pages which are frankly useless and unnecessary, even though it also contains some of the best prose ever invented.
Now point me to one page of Kant which is unnecessary to his arguments. He actually went to great pains to make his arguments as clear as possible, even writing shorter volumes exposing his ideas in a more accessible manner.

[Anonymous No.16727339]

>>16724121
Has anyone have some chart on good short stories?

[Anonymous No.16728376]

>>16724562
1/4