Are difficult books deeper than easy ones?
yes.
>>24833385What about the classics? Matthew Arnold, in On Translating Homer, agrees with Pope's stance on Homer's verse being simple as is the prose of Scripture.
>>24833384maybe it would help to have an idea of what we mean by 'deep'. one definition i saw was that a work of art is deep if you feel like you can come back to it over and over and never 'exhaust it', never get to the bottom of it everything it might mean to you. you could read a long, complex fantasy epic and at the end think, 'very cool, but i'm done with that now, i know all the plot twists and i've learned all the details of the world.' but a simple short story might draw you back to it again and again, because there's something in it that feels true but can't be 'figured out', it can only be experienced: a sort of core which the story revolves around but which doesn't itself come to the fore, so you too walk around and around it just feeling its presence.
>>24833384Believe it or not complicated works are usually introduction to easier ones
>>248333846/9
>>24833410>long, complex fantasy epicDo you mean complex, as in Aristotle's definition of a complex plot, the number of reversals, which we could translate to twists? I was interpreting difficulty as in being more interpretive, but it's interesting to see how other people view it differently.
>>24833384the greatest works of literature were written with a dominant entertainment motive.
>>24833416What's the 3?
>>24833384Generally yes. If you want the reader to experience richer emotions, you add poetic prose, which is harder to parse. Do you want your book to be more than a sum of its parts? You create a complex overarching structure and copious symbolism, which is harder to understand. Do you want to add some ambiguity to your narrative, multiplying its possible interpretations? You make it unclear whether you're being ironic or sincere, or perhaps even straight up add unreliable narrators.
>>24833384how the fuck is Satoshi Kon missing? yikes
>>24833778Satoshi Kon is pretty logical, actually. I'm putting those that are more interpretive
>>24833775Many writers through history have forgotten the necessarily spontaneous nature of the art, and have tried (for lack of any compelling utterance) to beat the sophisticated critics of their day by piling an immense number of technical devices on their prose, killing what little passion there was, by the tyranny of self-imposed rules.
>>24833384No not always.A lot of times difficult to read writing is just someone trying really hard to look right even though they're completely wrong or just total nonsense.Smart people usually try as hard as possible to make their work as easy to understand as possible because obviously whatever you say is useless if nobody understands you.
>>24833843Hyper-focusing on the technical part of the craft can lead to Schoenberg and co., a soulless intellectual exercise, I agree. But it also gave us Bach https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KYouXtuk0T8A truly great writer needs to be capable of utilising all kinds of different literary techniques, and he needs to do so with mastery.
>>24833384In its ”meaning”? Not necessarily, but in a linguistic sense, yes (most of the time, anyways). Finnegans Wake being a perfect example of this.
>>24833859Terry Davis' quote is one of the most misunderstood quotes out there. In engineering you want to simplify; complex code is inefficient and hard to maintain, complex parts break down more often and are costlier to manufacture, complex interfaces are prone to failure. Making things simple also takes skill: it's easy to cobble together something that sorta works, but simplifying it later takes a lot of thought.This does not apply to art. What is more admirable, an intricate gothic cathedral, or brutalist architecture? Bernini's Apollo and Daphne, or Henry Moore's Double Oval? Great art attracts virtuosity and complexity.
>>24833901A truly great writer would do well to remember what the word actually means, rather than confusing things with acrostic-making and Alexandrianisms. The general rule is people won’t enjoy reading something the writer didn’t enjoy writing. If something’s difficult to read, the author was probably straining himself writing it. And W. S. said:Fall to them as you find your stomach serves you.No profit grows where is no pleasure ta'en.
>>24833464Not a fan of madoka and penguindrum i consider to be the weakest ikuhara. I don't even remember what top right is called but I remember stopping following it 3 episodes in
>>24833977Woah bud madoka kicks ass
>>24833384It depends. I would say most of Kafka's short stories are more "deep" than most big complex fantasy epics than span over thousands of pages.>>24833795Sure, his movies are but Paranoia Agent is pretty out there. Certainly more open to interpretation than Madoka.
>>24833945>This does not apply to art. What is more admirable, an intricate gothic cathedral, or brutalist architecture?neither
>>24833390the prose of scripture is not remotely uniform
>>24833384all slop
