| >what you speak of is difference between literature and mere communication. So a novel is not literature unless it uses your preferred writing style? >But mud fog BLEAKNESS gestures here maybe to social decay, anomie, listlessness, an eternal stupor, impotence of characters and so on. That passage doesn't introduce any "characters". Perhaps Lord Chancellor will turn out to be one of the novel's characters, but that remains to be seen. > The painting has a point for the plot AND your pleasure. There's no need to be so confrontational. Isaac Asimov is nowhere close to being my favorite writer but I offer this for your amusement. In his autobiography "I, Asimov" he talks about his simple writing style: >Before Pebble in the Sky was published, Walter Bradbury asked me to do another novel. I did and sent in two sample chapters. The trouble was that now that I was a published writer, I tried to be literary, as I had in that never-to-be- forgotten writing class in high school. Not nearly as badly, of course, but badly enough. Brad gently sent those two chapters back and put me on the right track. >"Do you know," he said, "how Hemingway would say, 'The sun rose the next morning'?" >"No," I said, anxiously (I had never read Hemingway) "How would he say it, Brad?" >Brad said, "He would say, 'The sun rose the next morning.' >That was enough. It was the best literary lesson I ever had and it took just ten seconds. I did my second novel, which was The Stars, Like Dust-, writing it plainly, and Brad took it. |
Géricault, Mondrian (early and late), and Standard Highway Signs [0] are all art, but with different goals and paths to getting there.
That an author chooses florid prose doesn't make them superior or inferior to others, aside from the skill with which they wield language.
Some people prefer stop signs. Some like The Raft of the Medusa. Plenty of room for everyone.
[0] https://mutcd.fhwa.dot.gov/kno-shs_2024-release-status/index...