Thread 24845838

All great novels must try to say something significant about the following five topics:

God
Death
Sex
Art
Money

These are the essential questions of existence. You may make minor adjustments if you wish, like saying "love" instead of sex, or "politics" instead of money.

You will find that all the truly great novels manage to do this for four or all five subjects. You'll also find that minor, superficial, or amateur novels, whatever their apparent scope or topic, address only one or two.

Keep this in the back of your mind and you will sift out what is serious from what isn't in fiction.

>>24845838 (OP)
>saying "love" instead of sex
Those aren't interchangeable

>>24845838 (OP)
Counterpoint: The Old Man and the Sea only addresses Death and MAYBE God or Money if you want to be extremely charitable in your interpretation. Art and Sex/Love certainly do not factor in at all.

>>24845859
Your observation refutes nothing OP said

>>24845883
The Old Man and the Sea is in all honesty a pretty middling effort by a waning talent. His earlier novels, The Sun Also Rises and Farewell to Arms, were superior and they also fare better on the big five, no?

>>24845889
I honestly can't disagree and I'm struggling to think of other unambiguous counterexamples. You might be on to something.

>>24845892
That said, I'd also say that addressing 4 or 5 of these themes does not guarantee that a novel will be good or even great. I've read much trashy genre fiction that arguably addresses all 5, though I suppose it depends on your definition of "say something significant", since bad fiction by definition doesn't say much of significance about anything.

>>24845900
Yeah that's the more ambiguous part, significance. But clearly, books that have characters who die don't necessarily say anything about death.

For example, Moby-Dick:
It obviously tackles God and death head-on in the hunt for the White Whale, and money in the business of whaling in general.
Arguably, Melville does something unprecedented in his consideration of the meaning of tattoos, scrimshaw, and tall tales as forms of folk art.
The only debatable one is sex. The Pequod is an all-male world, but we do see the brotherly love of Ishmael and Queeuqueg and Ahab's mad abandonment of his young wife. If you accept that the book is homoerotic, then it's checkmate.

>>24845889
>when my theory fails that book didn’t count
Once you learn to recognize god of the gaps reasoning it’s everywhere.

>>24846036
Yeah tip that fedora buddy, that's what your >muh fallacy post amounts to

>>24845838 (OP)
My novel deals with all of those topics. I hope you will enjoy it.

>>24845885
It exposes anon's worldview as extremely limited

>>24845838 (OP)
Lolita’s a great novel and I don’t see much of money or God in there.

>>24846200
Not really, OP never said those were the same.

>>24845838 (OP)
What about Don Quixote?

>>24846262
I was gonna say maybe either loneliness or absurdity/idealism deserves to take the place of money on OP’s list. Either way Don Quixote would still elude pretty much everything. If we change sex to love we can add that in there for 2/5.

>>24845838 (OP)
What books tackle money directly? I can only think of Confidence-Man and JR. Maybe Middlemarch. Politics is much more universal of a theme.

>>24846337
Money is far more universal because it is the embodiment of politics, labor, achievement, struggle, privilege, etc in people's actual lives. Everyone has to make money, spend money, and think about it for their entire lives: politics, for the vast majority of people, is an abstraction.

>>24846087
pathetic impotent seething

>>24846036
That's not God-of-the-gaps reasoning, that's a no-true-Scotsman fallacy.

for me it's all about geology

>>24846262
Don Quixote speaks directly to all of the 5 items OP mentioned alongside being unironically the great epic of the spanish people and Spain as a nation, that's what makes it so grand. Though in my opinion madness should be on OP's list too
OP is right because I have been trying to think up a great novel that doesn't at least indirectly adress any of these and it's straight up impossible, but again these happen to be quite general themes im sure even Spongebob speaks to at least half of this list

>>24845883
I do think a book about an old man, past his prime, throwing himself at a seemingly impossible feat out of sheer stubbornness and determination, ultimately to no monetary gain, has something meaningful to say about Art.

>>24847166
Post geology novels

>>24847183
>madness
No. It's literally not a thing in real life and is a crutch for writers to force scenarios that couldn't happen otherwise.

It's so easy to bait people with vapid pseudo intellectual bullshit like this. People walking around with a checklist to see what qualifies as great literature. Trying to pretend your metric is less arbitrary than all others.

>>24847217
>wh-what do you mean there are aesthetic standards and criteria
Go back to /grrm/

>>24846249
But he did imply it

>>24847257
As much as he implied that money and politics are the same

>>24847227
Hit and a miss. You need the veneer of intellectual weight to consider a text worthwhile. Why, beauty has nothing to do with that. It's so easy to love what presents itself as meaningful. It's so easy to be a tortured poet.

>>24846337
Ulysses is one example. In Nestor, Stephen must sacrifice his time and betray his values to work as a school teacher for wages. The final sentence of the chapter reads: "On his wise shoulders through the checkerwork of leaves the sun flung spangles, dancing coins." Which in my opinion alludes to Judas and the betrayal of God, morality, for money. >>24846679 makes a very good point in that money relates to modernity's material conditions that shape a person's life. Ulysses has many things to say about how those material conditions shape how its characters live.

>>24847217
>>24847267
NTA. You're not wrong that this criteria is simplistic and formulaic but the easiest thing you can do is call it as such. Instead, you could share your thoughts about what makes a novel great. Maybe then we'd be closer to having a conversation near your high standard

>>24847316
I'm quick to attack this way of understanding literature because I also see myself in it. I'm drawn towards novels that tackle such themes, but I genuinely think approaching it from this angle is ass-backwards. Maybe it's the idea that deep topics automatically invite deep thought, which can be disproven with a single glance at popular culture. I keep seeing writers I like, say, Dostoevsky or Kafka, ground up into shallow memepulp online. Everyone laps up profundity. I believe a skilled writer can create beautiful work based on just about anything. I appreciate language and the complexity of information structures.

>>24847264
Exactly

>>24847425
>>24847264
Whether you say love or sex, money or politics, God or religion, they are different approaches to a shared domain but they are not equivalent anymore than the front and back of a coin are.

>>24847378
People being fake deep about a book which has become popular doesn't mean the book isn't genuinely deep and resonant. Stop being such a misanthrope, it's unbecoming

>>24847473
I think I'm just opposed to how nicely thoughtful literature seems to fit into the current market, despite the latter's general condition. People have this idea of "investing" in books to gain knowledge, seeing it as a passive thing to acquire. When I read the OP, I cringed a little, because I saw a part of myself in this attempt at identity-building. But what else can one do.

>>24847378
Yep I get where you are coming from and I was a bit of a dick. Online discourse naturally skews to the simplistic and superficial. It's certainly a problem in discussing lit and it results in what you mentioned. For people interested in talking about lit online, all one can really do is take whatever opportunity there is to share one's authentic thoughts about a work and hope that it will either inspire or return equal sincerity. Explaining how we really feel about art is more difficult than most seem to acknowledge, so it is hard to open oneself to criticism and much easier to either deflect or stick with superficiality. But that's not worth anyone's time.

>>24847194
Blood Meridian has a lot of that, innit

>>24847668
Oh? Name the 5 most important rocks in Blood Meridian and explain why they are important.

>>24847890
not doing your homework for you, bud. but you can search the excerpt in warosu because we discussed it to death once already