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Originally Posted by shalym
Can you give an example of a book or story that you consider a "true literary work"? I'm trying to imagine how words themselves could cause feelings that would be distinct from the meaning of the words.
Shari
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I've picked a couple of quotes that happen to come from one of my least favourite books:
Moby Dick by Herman Melville.
From the opening of the book we get this:
Quote:
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November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people's hats off—then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can.
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The words would seem express anger and depression, and yet there is a sense of fun or amusement in the way they are expressed that gives the reader quite different feeling. (Or is that just me?)
The following isn't quite the same thing but it's a favourite quote and shows that what the words say and what we are to understand in the context of the story may be quite different things.
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He piled upon the whale's white hump the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by his whole race from Adam down; and then, as if his chest had been a mortar, he burst his hot heart's shell upon it.
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Most fiction uses metaphor and simile to some extent, but literary fiction (as I define it) tends to stray further from literal interpretations than would be acceptable in non-literary works. And this is one of the reasons why I chose
Moby Dick as an example - there are lots of less obvious, and less easy to quote, examples of (possible) meanings layered into this book. Take a look a the
Themes section of the Wikipedia article for some brief discussion. Yes, much non-literary fiction has themes, but these are typically less deliberate, or more obviously an element of the story, as opposed to something layered into the way the story is constructed and told.