“There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book [...]"

Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.”

Was he right? Why not?

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of course he would say that he was an immoral degenerate

Comes rich from a man who literally spend all his life writing on morals.

That isn't a refutation of the quote though

what if the book is telling you to torture newborn babies and it's written well?

Ultimately, yes. Not that a book on human behavior cannot be well written.

Wilde was never wrong.

Degenerate who died alone, broken, and in misery. The only sympathetic thing about Oscar Wilde is that he was forced into homosexuality by a sexless marriage to a shrew wife.

Why he couldn't keep a series of mistresses like every contemporary French fin de siecle author is his own fault though. Artistic movements create hordes of female groupies to circle them, and he chose to fuck men. Amoral degenerate who got the ending he deserved.

>Degenerate
stopped reading there. you have nothing to say.

/pol/ has ruined this board

lol when you're reading King Lear and it says "you degenerate!" do you go "wow I gonna stop reading this right here, mind your cis white male privlege Shakespeare you have nothing to say"

>lol
stopped reading there

I believe he's referring to fiction, not torture manuals.

I'm not sure I agree. Aesthetics, and morality are intimately linked. Truth, Beauty, and Goodness. If you compromise morality, you compromise truth and beauty to some extent because evil is repugnant.

The truth hurts. The tragedy of Oscar Wilde is his desperate attempt to reconcile with the Church while dying and alone is France, and failing. While Huysman returned to live the comfy life as an oblate amongst the church bells and cathedral architecture he loved. Wilde was consumed and destroyed by his degeneracy, Huysman overcame decadence to return to the Sublime.

What about Lolita? Beautifully written, but about a pedophile.

>he was forced into homosexuality

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Well an author can write about evil very beautifully and that is a different affair from an evil book. It has been a long time since I read Lolita. But it isn't child pornography. There is a definite morality that is congruent with beauty and truth

one of those overly simplistic statements that can't be refuted because you could argue ad nauseum about how a particular book isn't immoral in your intepretation
"Justine isn't immoral bro, if you view it from an outsider's perspective it's merely a look into a mad genius MQdS! That's what the book is about, the author bro! Try to see the metaphysics of it!"

John Gardner "On Moral Fiction" presents the counter-argument to Wilde.

If you read that, I won't have to type it all out here.

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This
Don't listen to buttsniffers

>Truth, Beauty, and Goodness
utterly useless terms

>useless terms ! I can't increase my profit margins with those terms!
Utility is useless in the long run

This is such a narrow, awful view. I'll have to read more of him to get a real understanding but that quote alone is a minefield of pointless terms. "Scoffing at good" - what does this even really mean in the context of fiction? Either you find a novel's representations convincing and thought-provoking or you don't - why is Gardner so concerned about mockery?

I couldn't care less about profits.

I wish people like you were holocausted tbqhdf.

>Degenerate who died alone, broken, and in misery.
based.

keking at the petit-bourgeoise cucks on this board

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>If you compromise morality, you compromise truth and beauty to some extent because evil is repugnant.

If evil is repugnant and good is beautiful, then this perhaps is all the morality that you need? The "moral" criticism of art stems at conventional and traditional values which are supposed to be upheld, while l'art pour l'art is essentially beauty for beauties sake and as such all what matters is the beauty of the artwork itself and not any alligning to conventional moral values and imperatives like compassion, decency and what not

>I AM SO BEAUTIFUR RIKU SABASTIAN-SAN PREASE RUV ME BEAUTIFUR ARYAN MANU

Why not?

>Was he right
He was right about everything

It's either stupid relativism or a meaningless distinction between the morality of a book and how well it was written.

Or perhaps the salient point that books (and inanimate purveyors of information in general) are not agents in the world, and therefore have no moral status regardless of their contents.

Stop killing yourself

this is the gayest thing i’ve ever read

He never read Atlas Shrugged, or Battlefield Earth. Oh wait, he's both wrong and right.

I think he’s referring to the modernist and postmodernist tendencies to deconstruct the idea of objective good, clarity of morals, or progress. I don’t know that I’d say they scoff necessarily, but many such writers to sorry of impute a tone of “why bother? It’s all pointless.”

*sort of

He probably didn't write it with a strong conviction he wrote it to make the censors and moralfags fuck off he probably delighted in the "immorality" of his book........................

>there's no such thing as well written or badly written books, they are only written books. That is all.
two can play at this game

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Good thing to know is that people like you tend to holocaust themselves.

this thread is spooked hard. we need a ghostbuster asap.

What do you mean spooked?

is this goodness?

It's always up to the person reading it to interpret and act on what they read, the book isn't forcing you to.

Like the bible?

THe reason this is true is that all fiction is ultimately a manual on how not to behave

The only thing worse than having a spooked thread is not having a spooked thread.