Not really, as if you've read my earlier posts too, you should have seen that in my view there's a clear distinction between popular literature in general and "great literature" and that I find it stupid to apply the same critical grid to both. I happen to enjoy many kinds of popular literature too, and to be very impressed by the skills of many popular writers at keeping me entertained... I watch many TV series and enjoy many blockbusters, but I don't expect from them what I expect from auteur cinema (which I also enjoy a lot). Art is art, and quality entertainment is quality entertainment.


All I ask from the prose of a popular writer is that it's grammatically correct, devoided of too many irritating writing habits/tricks, and otherwise don't get in the way of the story. If it's beyond that so much the better, but I don't need that to be entertained by a writer. Popular literature is a great deal more about story and characters than about language, great literature is more about pushing the language and writing it to the point it becomes art. Pop Lit. shouldn't be judged as Art (unless it's incidentally both - Hugo is considered both as a great writer and a great popular writer, for instance), because it isn't. There are a lot great popular writers than there are true great writers, and few great writers have left many masterpieces in their canon.

You seem to have taken my list as something it isn't. I was simply asked to list a few of the writers I have read which I consider great writers - Art - and I wrote my own list reacting to Tom's in large part. I've left out many I've read too few novels from (eg: Jane Austen), didn't really have a set opinion about, forgot others and so on, and I've pointed out I can't be a great judge of American (and even anglo-saxon) literature as I made it a low priority by choice (call it a downside of the imperialism of the US entertainment industry... it so aggressively invaded the field of pop culture and entertainment that if I spent much time on American higher culture too (and yes, it exists), there'd be no time left for anyone else.).



That's more the exception than the norm with most of the writers I've listed, but you also have to consider my culture is not yours, and the French literary tradition is (and even more, was) quite different from the anglo-saxon one. French and English for all their similarities remain very different languages, and have different aesthetics.
Most of the writers I've listed are hardly florid and in fact some like Zola, Camus are recognized for the very opposite!

As for "poetic", this has a slightly different value in the French language (and it's not exclusive to French... Japanese, Russian, Chinese... many languages values the poetic aspect of prose a great deal more than it's done in English (except of course in poetry in its various forms), that values "efficiency" over beauty in prose. By "poetic" the French don't necessarily mean the language is close to the aesthetics of classic poetry. It's more the combination of how interesting it sounds aloud (the musicality, the rhythm), and how evocative it is.

As an aside, that's hardly the sole standards by which French culture has traditionally judged what is and isn't "great literature", especially foreign ones, for which the French just don't expect French aesthetics and are far more interested in substance, vision, perspective for foreign books (they value that a lot in French literature too, of course - it's not all or necessarily primarly about "beautiful prose". The French don't like beautiful prose without substance (but do say that writing great ideas with average prose is a shame!).

Not much of the beauty of Austen's english survives in translation (translation levels the prose a lot), and her prose and style don't fit the canons of the French novel. She's much admired in France for her tone, her insights and her delightful portraits, not much is ever said about her prose, except by those who've read her in English. Novelists like Hemingway have been much admired (some more there than in America, as it happens), and the American novel in general has been very influential on modern French writers since WWII. Again, it's hardly for the linguistic aspect of their writing (though they've influenced the modern French), it's about the ideas/perspectives and also the form of the novel, quite different from the classic French tradition. When the French discuss much the prose of foreign works (which they do.. it's still today a very literary culture) it's usually because they've read them in the original language.



Verne is considered one of the great storytellers and one of the best writers of French popular literature, but even more so than Dumas he isn't considered one of the "grands écrivains" (and he didn't want to be, that's not why he wrote for!).

Verne's writing style is far too simple and conventional for that. His genius was storytelling and his keen imagination to use recent discoveries and extrapolate from them. Verne was never of much interest to the French literary circles. Dumas more so, but it's in part because he fuelled himself so many literary debates in his time (and shared his opinion the competition...) rivals) and one day would claim he ought to be considered a great writer, the greatest alive, but when mocked or attacked he tended to reply he wrote popular literature, that he wrote to be read by the most people, not for the elite.

Why Dumas isn't considered among the great writers (and rather called a great popular writer) is largely due to his "style brouillon" (his "messy"/botched style). Dumas was a feuilleton writer more than a genuine novelist. He wrote fast, he rarely re read himself, published the chapters as soon as written. He had a classical education and he could write grammatically flawless sentences in first draft. But his style isn't researched, carefully crafted like those of the other great 19th century writers. Make no mistake, Dumas was a master of the feuilleton genre, there are countless others in the genre, and novelists, that were mediocre and are long forgotten. Dumas was an excellent craftsman, a writing machine and a born storyteller.

Of course, it never helped Dumas's reputation as a writer that it's well established (even in his days) that it's very hard to determine what Dumas created and wrote himself and what Auguste Macquet planned and drafted and that Dumas just revised. It's established that Monte Cristo is mostly Dumas, but it's believed by many scholars that Dumas's personal contribution to the planning and actual writing of Les Trois Mousquetaires isn't terribly large. It's not easy to judge Dumas a great writer when it can't even be determined beyond doubt what his real contribution to some of his best novels actually is... but then, would Macquet have been able to write the novels without Dumas revising his style and prose? Hard to tell...