I think about this book a lot. if an author can say what he wants with only the necessary sentences and nothing more, why don't they just do that? Tolstoy proved here that his older books were too long. if he can fit something profound into a short story with everything required to make a great book, what was the excuse to write anything longer?
Some stories are brief and may be told in a few minutes, others are long and require a half hour.
Why not exclusively read poetry then?
>>25370850>what was the excuse to write anything longer?people won't like this, but i think novels are much more like videogames than we suppose. they're not primarily means to 'say' something, to communicate a message. they're about experience and becoming conscious of the production of experience. you're travelling through a structure and doing things in that structure and seeing what the structure can do. communicating a message is just one thing a novel-structure can do.what determines the length of a novel is simply its powers of production, how much text its machinery can produce while keeping things interesting and interconnected and alive. it's an incredible experience to read a hefty 19thC novel and see how the disparate materials of that society have been intricately grouped in ways that form all kinds of resonances and connections and surprising moments of kinship. it's like seeing a whole city raised from the ground.a 'message' makes all the material in a book resonate with its unifying force, but in a strict top-down way that makes that material feel thin, generic, a means to an end. whereas in something like hardy's mayor of casterbridge or james's ambassadors, which have no clear message or moral, what makes all the material resonate is something much more mysterious: the blundering life of henchard, the dubious sacrifice of strether. at the end you look back over the whole book and think, 'what kind of man would live a life like that? why did he act so? what did he see in these people, these places?' it's a question with no determinate answer, it simply makes you aware of the specificity, the feel, the 'thisness' of everything you've read. perhaps you could say that in those novels the material is not a means to communicate the story - the story is a means to charge the material with its mystery.moral messages about life would only matter if our lives mattered, and our lives are made up not of moral messages but of activity, duration, material, experience. in other words they're much closer to playing a videogame than attending a sermon. the role of art isn't to judge life but to produce life and make it intense.
>>25370898in retrospect i could've probably cut down this post to just the final paragraph. its length is.... inexcusable..
>>25370898you need to explore art disourse more. you look to vidya because its what you know, but really you are on the edge of the philosophy around formalism.good luck.
>>25370906No, I enjoyed it as is. It's quite thoughtful and you have successfully communicated many subtle ideas. Based on this post I think you're brilliant.
>>25370898>>25370898gotta bump this 10/10 post
wait until you read his non-overrated novellas like hadji murat or father sergius
Ever heard of fallibility OP?
>>25370850wasn't Tolstoy paid for his early books by the number of pages he wrote?
>>25370898>moral messages about life would only matter if our lives mattered, and our lives are made up not of moral messages but of activity, duration, material, experiencewise
>>25371107
>>25370898life is filled with moments of moral messages, reallyotherwise, true
>>25372286Weren't they all?
>>25370883A poet aims to not be understood, to leave the reader wondering "What did he mean by this?" A novelist aims to be understood, to leave the reader thinking "Ah, I see, so it's like this..." It should be obvious to all which is the inherently superior medium.
