133 years ago...

[Nikosandros]

But yeah, he's not Hemmingway.

That's for sure, even if I rather liked A Farewell to Sanity and For Whom the Flute Pipes.

 

[Snarf Zagyg]

That's for sure, even if I rather liked A Farewell to Sanity and For Whom the Flute Pipes.

It is absolutely necessary, for the peace and safety of mankind, that some of earth’s dark, dead corners and unplumbed depths be let alone; lest sleeping abnormalities wake to resurgent life, and blasphemously surviving nightmares squirm and splash out of their black lairs to newer and wider conquests. But then I was like, naw, and totally pwned that Yog-Sothoth, like a Real Man.

 

[Umbran]

But yeah, he's not Hemmingway.

Hm.

If I want an author whose very prose is art, Hemmingway doesn't come to mind - his writing is clear, I grant you. It gets you the narrative and meaning with the least adornment possible, rather like his journalism from earlier in his career. But it is so simplified as to come off... blunt or clipped.

For example, this from The Sun Also Rises:
“In the morning I walked down the Boulevard to the rue Soufflot for coffee and brioche. It was a fine morning. The horse-chestnut trees in the Luxembourg gardens were in bloom. There was the pleasant early-morning feeling of a hot day. I read the papers with the coffee and then smoked a cigarette. The flower-women were coming up from the market and arranging their daily stock. Students went by going up to the law school, or down to the Sorbonne. The Boulevard was busy with trams and people going to work.”

It is almost more a list of facts than anything else, and might be well-represented as a bulleted list rather than a paragraph. The reader is told what is happening, but little about what those happenings are like. Heck, not even a lot of variation of sentence cadence, structure or length.

To find an author (in or near genre) for whom the prose itself is art, we might look to Ray Bradbury, in Something Wicked this Way Comes, or Harlan Ellison in Deathbird Stories. These are wordsmiths.

 

[Snarf Zagyg]

Hm.

If I want an author whose very prose is art, Hemmingway doesn't come to mind - his writing is clear, I grant you. It gets you the narrative and meaning with the least adornment possible, rather like his journalism from earlier in his career. But it is so simplified as to come off... blunt or clipped.

If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about, he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water.

Some might say that to write with fewer words is an art in and of itself; the use of the negative space is not a thoughtless or careless act, but a knowing inclusion that requires deliberation and careful choice.

Of course, this is not something that I am overly familiar with.

 

[Umbran]

If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about, he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water.

Yes, but in so doing, the author is relying on a shared human knowledge and experience. The author depends on the reader knowing what the, "pleasant early-morning feeling of a hot day," is like. And for Hemmingway this works, because his writings are ultimately about mundane, perhaps even pedestrian, things, invoking feelings common in human experience.

And, indeed, the dullness of the writing happens to serve his more common themes of disillusionment and fatalism. The muted tones of his prose mirror the dampened emotional responses of his characters, who must seek solace in drink, and validation in ideals of masculinity when they get insufficient validation from society.

Some might say that to write with fewer words is an art in and of itself; the use of the negative space is not a thoughtless or careless act, but a knowing inclusion that requires deliberation and careful choice.

It is not thoughtless, nor carless, no. It is limited, however, to those areas of common experience.

The cosmic, eldritch horrors of Lovecraft are not areas of common experience. Or, at least I hope not. Writers of speculative fiction don't have that economy as an option. They have to invoke ideas and feelings the characters have that the reader hasn't had, except maybe in dreams...

 

[Jd Smith1]

He was a man of his times, and for me, not a great writer as such, but his concepts changed horror forever, and he gave a hobby as yet unborn a perfectly vague, RL-free enemy pantheon that fits literally any setting.

Like bacon, it goes with literally anything.

 

[ruemere]

By the way, I have asked ChatGpt to rewrite the text as if they were several different writers.

Here's Stephen King:
----
The freakiest damn thing in the world, I guess, is how our brains just can't seem to connect all the freaky dots. We're like living on this little boring island of cluelessness, smack in the middle of this never-ending sea of dark unknowns, and guess what? It ain't in the cards for us to sail too far out. The sciences, they're all doing their crazy dance in their own damn corners, haven't screwed us over too bad yet; but mark my words, one of these days, when all those messed-up puzzle pieces of knowledge get slapped together, we're gonna be staring at some seriously messed-up truths. Truths about our messed-up reality and our messed-up place in it, that'll either drive us screaming nuts or send us scurrying away from that brain-frying light into the cozy arms of a brand new freakin' dark age.

And Hemingway:
----
The kindest act, methinks, is the mind's lack of power to weave its threads into coherence. We exist on a calm isle of unknowing, surrounded by vast oceans of the unknown, and it was never destiny's intent for us to venture too far. The sciences, each in pursuit of its own path, have thus far caused us little harm; yet a time may come when the uniting of disjoined wisdom shall unveil daunting panoramas of reality, and of our grisly stance therein, pushing us to madness upon revelation or compelling our flight from the lethal illumination into the solace and security of a fresh era of darkness.

Pretty scary. I have also tried Stanisław Lem, Roger Żelazny, Marcel Proust. Made for an interesting reading.