Sometime i have thought about what I say before I say it, and sometimes I know I'm not sure but I want to say something, anything...please, god, please, let them listen to me once! Please oh lord please have them stop yelling at each other and look at me and listen. Just everybody, you're all valid and right and lets just get back to me, please? Please? Please?
Merit suggests a content, a transferable thing which one can pass like a stone from one's cock. The assumption here presupposes that novels are philosophy, though the speaker comes at this from the inverse. He believes that truth may only lay in central metaphors. This is akin to saying that a man's life is worth only what his accomplishments mean to us, what his deeds produce in value for us - such that a machine could one day take all creative jobs by simply plugging in a randomiser with a plot generator and a scriptomatic 3000.
Yet the measure of a man can simply be in his style, and that in itself may affect the world more than a simple truth, because it is the raw content of our social environmental biological existence tempered by language and mythic structures.
To reject the long-winded dandy is to reject the value that is only apparent in appearance, and one does so unwisely. Take for example Les Chants de Maldoror. Seriously, take him! Take him and be done with it. I mean this! I have no one want of him in hear and you shall not hear the end of this you fool if you do not take him soon away from this place! He tears at the ships bottom, listlessly. I desire him to be gone from inside me, and I do not want this, or this, or this.
Otherwise, the marvel is un-miraculous because it cannot actually contain terror and wonder, the object never awesome. A story long and longer still only but an interest and ever a doom that suggests you are in despair.
Or, I like to read long-works when they entrap me, make me anew, cut my body open and tear at my guts. It's very hard to sustain this though, which is why I read mostly actual philosophy and truly awesome poetry - when I'm not reading newspapers.
If you like Chekhov, try Alistair Macleod and Alice Munro.