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I made no such universal statement. Some people enjoy hard things simply because they are hard. My claim is that this can also result in people thinking some li
by gizmo 2y ago
I made no such universal statement. Some people enjoy hard things simply because they are hard. My claim is that this can also result in people thinking some literature is better than it is, because people draw satisfaction from the effort itself.
- mykowebhn 2y agoOkay, I got that. The point you might be missing is that some people might enjoy hard things not only because they are hard, but because only through their laborious efforts is the true brilliance of the work revealed.
- gizmo 2y agoSince that is the entirely conventional take on literature I couldn’t possibly be missing that. (Edit: re-reading what I wrote earlier I can see how it can be read that way. My bad. )
- CydeWeys 2y agoFor me it's not even that, it's simply that The Brothers Karamazov and other novels like it have historicity and depth to them in a way that modern-style light popcorn novels never do. The hardness therefore is more incidental than the means to an end in itself. And for what it's worth, there's plenty of modern-style "hard" novels that I've enjoyed immensely as well, including House of Leaves, Infinite Jest, Shogun, The Pillars of the Earth, and [pick any Neal Stephenson novel published this millennium].