The almighty and powerful

[Adagio]

What pieces of literature, would you say, have packed the hardest punch? I'm talking about the pieces which have a general powerful effect on their audience. Which writers are the almighty when it comes to our emotions? who do we consider the elite when it comes to making us breakdown into tears, or filling us with warm euphoria, or completely changing our lives etc.?

Obviously I expect there to be many mentions of writers such as: Shakespeare, Dostoevsky and Keats etc. but tell us what specific area of their work affected you and why. What I hope this topic will present is various shades and ways in which literary works have personally affected us and also to bring awareness to some new texts (so no major spoilers).

[DanielBenoit]

As for me, it was James Joyce's Ulysses. I just started getting into serious literature, and I discovered this and it just had a primary effect on me. Here's what I said about it in another thread:

I remember starting it in the early morning as I watched the sun rise on the beach. I remember reading Stephen Dedulas's thoughts while walking along the shore in chapter three, realizing that I was doing the same thing.

And after finishing Molly's epic soliloquy that I had went outside, and after being infiltrated by those words, my mind was racing and I just felt ultra-sensitive. It was like no other feeling in the world.

Dostoyevsky too, always stirs up strong emotions in me. Just read anything by him and by the end you will be effected in some way or another.

[LitNetIsGreat]

Wilde, Shakespeare, Milton, Guy de Maupassant, Keats, Wordsworth, Baudelaire.

These authors (not in any particular order) have really got under the skin and strongly affected me in different ways, at different stages in my life, though all have a strong pull on me still.

Wilde in Dorian Gray and the rest of his life and works, has affected me in a way that it is hard to explain, it is just a strange sense of connection and understanding to him and his works. It probably helps that Wilde was really one of the main figures who influenced my earlier reading and “finding” him as a voice at random really switched me on to the pursuit of literature and art as a lifetime passion and study. I’m certainly not blind to his faults as a writer (or person) and there are other writers who I would prefer to study in greater detail, but even so he has been, and still is, a very influential figure in my life.

Shakespeare speaks for himself and I fail to see how he can’t pull anyone who is even remotely interested in literature. I’ve said before that when I read Shakespeare I wonder why I bother reading anything else, and I still feel that way.

John Milton, particularly for Paradise Lost, which I have read about three times this year alone. I always thought that Milton was going to be sort of stuffy or dry but he is far from those things. The delight for me in Milton is feeling the power and the rhythm in the verse, and the fiery nature of whole fabric of the text in Paradise Lost, especially the earlier books. From there I love the earthly beauty of the pastoral scenes of Eden and the intrigue of the political and religious connotations of the whole thing. It’s sublime stuff. Milton shows touches of his greatest and connection in me in other works, in Samson, in “Lycidas” in particular, but not on the scale of PL. I was going to write my dissertation on Paradise Lost, but I am being pulled more and more towards Dorian Gray, which is the most sensible option for me in reality.

Maupassant and Baudelaire translate to me a dark undercurrent of brooding, of melancholy, which is really affecting. It is a feeling at times which can be quite pessimistic of life and of human society, though it is not only a negative emotion, it more of a sense of realisation or acceptance of life and death. Keats sometimes connects with these elements in many respects, but it is not these elements which attract me to Keats. Some of his more polished works strike me as capturing the beauty of life and nature, and art I suppose, and they have had a strong influence on me too. Wordsworth comes across in similar ways to this, but he gives me more of an “earthy” connection, unsurprisingly, and for me his “Tintern Abbey” in particular is a very special piece.

Some works just seem to connect, almost instantly, boom, like listening to Bach, it just hits you and takes over. Proust once said something along the lines that, when works connect in this way, it is because they articulate our inner thoughts and feelings better than we could ever hope to express ourselves. I don’t know if this is true or not, or wholly true, and there is obviously more to it than that, but it is an interesting thought I suppose.

There are others that have had a strong pull on me such as Euripides, Shelley, Hardy, Checkov, Marx (for theory), Epicurus, Homer (though I need to read more translations, as with Dante at present I only feel like I have scratched the surface of these works), Barthes in some way, amongst others, but those listed are probably the main ones.

[Barbarous]

Joyce's work really had/has that supreme reckoning with me. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man was really the first 'European' novel I had ever experienced, and at the time, it enlightened me on the boyhood to manhood I was heading into. Ulysses and Finnegans Wake have a similar effect, the continuation, metempsychosis, if you will.

Of course, as you said Shakespeare will always be the essence of humanity to me, along with the works of Dostoevsky, like The Idiot (the face motif), The Brothers Karamazov.

As for American novels, Moby-Dick by Melville reigns over all. The idea of the limitations to reason, a German philosophy (Kant) placed in an American novel is incredible, never mind the actual philosophy, which is equally astounding. Ralph Ellison' Invisible Man also deserves a mention, for me it is one of the defining 'American' novels. Oh, and As I Lay Dying by Faulkner is certainly a novel to be reckoned with.

[mal4mac]

The hardest punch? Shakespeare. When you hit one of his major soliloquies, he says things that are so important, so central to lived life, and in such a wonderful way, that you just get bowled over. I could mention 20+ plays. The Tempest may be the one to try first. But why not just get the complete RSC Shakespeare and start reading! It starts with the Tempest. (And follows with some minor comedies, so expect a slight let down until the knock out punches start raining down again.)

[The Comedian]

Prose: Walden -- I read it annually, and have done so for quite some years now, and each time I read it I feel my spirit and my mind being cleansed as with a wire brush. Now that's powerful!

Poetry: Wordsworth's "Intimations of Immortality" -- I can think of no pleasure more sublime than reading this poem aloud to myself, as I sit on the hearth, a warm fire warming the wool of my sweater, and feeling lifted by the language in that work.

Comics: Watchmen -- I find more and more to like both on a literary level and on an entertainment level in that book than in any other work of fiction. The art, the story, the reality, the absurdity -- the perfect grotesque reflection of modern life.

[kelby_lake]

Kafka. I get totally baffled by him. And isn't life rather baffling?