ITT Famous writers with nothing insightful to say

I have and I find it a bit vapid, I don’t think he had any metaphysical interests whatsoever, just pretty words and shit

I tend to agree. All style, no substance. An utterly specious thinker despite his unquestionable literary talents.
Dostoevsky, in contrast, whom he criticized, was both a great thinker and writer.

>judging art on the basis of what ideas can be extracted from it

not how this works

I’ll go further and say that his talents were not as great as Yea Forums seems to estimate of him. I enjoyed Lolita immensely and to a lesser degree still liked Pale Fire, as well as The Gift.

Tolstoy and Melville were far and away better novelists from a purely aesthetic standpoint. Sterne was more inventive and (and funnier). I’d say even the best parts of Dickens are better than Nabokov. And of course Koyce, who makes Nabokov look like a YA writer. As a poet, Eliot is leagues better, as are more than a few 20th century poets.

Nabokov is mostly exemplary for his stylistics. Nobody can quite turn out an English sentence like he did. The subject and substance of his novels, their human reach, are throughly mediocre. He was too much of an elitist softy to get at what really matters.

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Style IS substance.

I think what "really matters" varies from artist to artist. Why should every artist have the same preoccupations or priorities?

>As a poet, Eliot is leagues better, as are more than a few 20th century poets.
Nabokov isn't known for his poetry, though.

>

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Objectively wrong. None of you understood Pale Fire, the Gift, on Pnin; they are all immense in their substance and philosophy of human nature

Based

I read Pnin too early in my reading career. What makes the book especially special to you?

Thomas Carlyle, nothing but vague bullshit.

exactly

haahahhahahahah this fucking guy

>pale fire
>vapid
bet you this guy read just the poem and half the commentaries before giving up.

this picture is only for good anons. good user.

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How does it work? Genuinely curious to read what you have to say

it's art. aesthetics. form and beauty. hemingway was an artist. it wasn't his job to have ideas. brave new world: one of the worst novels ever written, full of ideas. it's not the artist's job to make predictions, contribute to knowledge, or philosophize. it's to make great art. knocking hemingway because he didn't "say" anything is missing the point.

b a s e d

Wondering if anybody here even read Hemmingway. There is a lot he has to say about things as heroism, masculinity and suffering. Are these things original? Of course not, they have been written about since the epic of Gilgamesh. Hemminway, however, is able to contrast them with a modern way of thinking where many ideas(masculinity, sacrifice, suffering) have lost a large part of their significance. The tension between the modern world and the ancient idea of being a man is the great idea of Hemminway.

Trying to present an idea is not a prerequisite for calling something art.
Art is aesthetics also, some art exists simply to sublimity, like some poetry one can read, and not extract any "meaningful idea" but rather find themselves elevated and moved, just by the words stringing themselves together forming an intricate web of emotion.
Surely the same with paintings, look at Goya´s black paintings for example, lauded and held in extremely high regard by most of the world,
yet critics have not found an overarching theme or narrative for the paintings.

thank you, I thought nobody knew how to read here

Dino Buzzati

His real name was Ernestion Hemingwowska and he worked for the KGB.

>Dostoevsky, in contrast, whom he criticized, was both a great thinker and writer.
This.

Dostoevsky had his love of platitudes but he had some very original and well articulated ideas too. And he's not that bad aesthetically as Nabokov says he is.

OK I'll try it.

yeah? like what?
has Nabokov written anything that stands up against the grand inquisitor?

Please try reading Dostodrivel in it's original Russian before making any claims about aesthetics. He's a very sharp guy but a complete failed artist.

If you want "substance" read philosophy. Fiction exists to provide you with aesthetic beauty and a good story

Evola

>Nabakov had some interesting things to say. Read Pale Fire
What interesting things does it say, in your opinion?

Good bait

>it disagrees with my notions therefore it's bait

That Moloch poem of his is super creepy. That's something?

This is generally correct except when you say that Hemingway produced anything of aesthetic value. He didn’t.

Imagine reading for insight

Style is substance, clown

Nothing your mind could detect anyway

I find Hemingway's writing to be crude and ugly. There are some writers who also wrote in concise English and had better prose and word selection, like Salinger or Carver.

>completely original take on humanity
>failed artist
>drivel

what are you? a Ukrainian or something?

I’ve read Pale Fire twice. The whole novel is in the commentaries so how could I skip that? As I said before, Tolstoy and Melville are both equally or more aesthetically gifted and at the same time more interesting. I will probably read Lolita again someday soon, but in comparison to the true greats, Nabokov feels like an imitator.

What do you think of this paragraph? Hemingway sometimes feels flat for me too, but other times, like the first few chapters of A Farewell to Arms, much of The Sun Also Rises, and For Whom the Bell Tolls, his simplicity and careful detail
is mesmerizing.
>I had gone to no place where the roads were frozen and hard as iron, where it was clear cold and dry and the snow was dry and powdery and hare-tracks in the snow and the peasants took off their hats and called you Lord and there was good hunting. I had gone to no such place but to the smoke of cafés and nights when the room whirled and you needed to look at the wall to make it stop, nights in bed, drunk, when you knew that that was all there was, and the strange excitement of waking and not knowing who it was with you, and the world all unreal in the dark and so exciting that you must resume again unknowing and not caring in the night, sure that this was all and all and all and not caring. Suddenly to care very much and to sleep to wake with it sometimes morning and all that had been there gone and everything sharp and hard and clear and sometimes a dispute about the cost. Sometimes still pleasant and fond and warm and breakfast and lunch. Sometimes all niceness gone and glad to get out on the street but always another day starting and then another night. I tried to tell about the night and the difference between the night and the day and how the night was better unless the day was very clean and cold and I could not tell it; as I cannot tell it now.

Yeah he definitely has his moments like that Christ moment in The Old Man and the Sea.

>The whole novel is in the commentaries so how could I skip that?
My point exactly. It really isn't.

>but in comparison to the true greats, Nabokov feels like an imitator.
HIS point exactly - user how could you miss the point this much?

Damn dawg you are 100% correct on that. Coming from a 10/10 fanboy whose read even the shittier late works.

Nothing insightful, and no pretty way of saying it

Nabokov clearly had interesting aesthetic insights. You’re just a pleb who read for the plot. DFW is back and forth. I think in large he had less insightful things to say than he had ways of saying things, period. But I go back and forth on the real implications to his communicate spiel. Like a late Tolstoy or Forester. Disliking Camus is a sign of a disenginuine thinker, this coming from someone who once loved, hated, disavowed, discarded, and now recently reformed a deep appreciation for his thought. Give it time. It’s more pleb/less fashionable to hate him again. After all, it’s not 2012.

Again, like DFW, I go back and forth. Try to tale seriously his spiel about work and he comes off as closer to Diogenes than, say, Jack Kerouac or whoever.

Dont kid yourself.

Thats an idea as old as the ancient world itself, found in Aesop’s Fables. The issue with Hemingway is that it is exactely what people are claiming about Nabokov: it’s all style, no substance. Take a clean, well-lighted place for example. Why should I give a fuck about the suicide if an old man? I have zero reason to. The focus of the story is the containment of the story itself, which really says more about what Hem thinks of the potential of his other medium, journalism via mass media, than it does contribute to literary fiction. He’s just an American Chekhov as far as I’m concerned. Big emotions, sure. But not much insight.

Interesting points of view ITT.

>Jewish
>Homosexual
>Communist
>NAMBLA supporter
He's like some sort of /pol/ caricature.

what an utter cope.

No, it isn't. That style is substance is no different than masturbation. It feels good but overall is worthless. It produces nothing but an ephemeral high. The seed needs soil to grow in. Style for its own sake is hedonistic and unworthy for even consideration, reminiscent of paintings of a single, solid color. Similarly, substance over style reduces things to mechanistic synopsis and inert and insipid meaning.

This guy
>People experience things and then base their actions on what they experience
Thanks for that, Dave

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>interesting aesthetic insights
what the fuck does this even mean? do you have any examples? I like his aesthetics but in a way i like my beautiful Mercedes. That's not art.

>You’re just a pleb who read for the plot.
ideas and plot are intermixed; they can never be separate...stop giving bullshit arguments

Camus is a decent writer but his ideas are nothing but commonsense. Kierkegaard is the real absurdist. Read a fucking book, m8... instead of reading what the plebs are reading.

Ideas are not aesthetics.

Dostoevsky's aesthetics is dumb without his ideas. That, is his aesthetics. Your "definitions" are worthless to me, or to any serious student of literature.

underrated post

Read three of his works. All were awful trash.

>Dostoevsky's aesthetics is dumb without his ideas

you almost have it

James Baldwin was a mewling sentimentalist with nothin of substance to offer. How anyone can believe his work is genuinely radical is beyond me.

Cause hes a nigger
that's it

Y'know, i didn't became an antisemite overnight

...and how!