Re: Discuss: Yea-Sayers and Nay-Sayers
Posted by:
Kipling (IP Logged)
Date: 9 August, 2023 08:50AM
Dale Nelson Wrote:
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>
> We could list authors whose works suggest that
> they are primarily yea-sayers or primarily
> nay-sayers. (It will be seen that these
> temperaments, if that’s the word, may both be
> found among the religious, the irreligious, and
> the anti-religious.) It’s not necessarily
> accurate to say that yea-sayers are optimists and
> nay-sayers are pessimists.
>
> A nay-sayer writes works that might be
> “depressing” or might not be, but that suggest
> a final absence of grace or goodness from the
> order of things. A nay-sayer may “enjoy life”
> but you get the sense that he or she thinks it
> might have been better if nothing had come to be.
> A nay-sayer’s implied narrator might affect a
> stance of detachment, and a nay-sayer is likely to
> write works pervaded by irony. A nay-sayer might,
> as a rule, convey scorn or disdain for human
> beings, or might convey pity or compassion for
> them.
>
> A yea-sayer may suspect that nay-sayers often
> haven’t really earned their angst.
>
> Works by a yea-sayer gravitate towards affirmation
> of things even if passion, crime, foolishness,
> etc. are in the foreground. A yea-sayer may have
> been disillusioned at some point, but if so, has
> passed through the experience to affirmation. A
> yea-sayer’s works probably suggest that the
> order of things justifies love.
>
> A nay-sayer may feel that the yea-sayer “just
> doesn’t get it.”
>
> In short: some authors suggest that the answer is
> No, other that it is Yes.
>
> Yea-Sayers
>
> Richard Adams
>
> Asimov
>
> Algernon Blackwood
>
> Ray Bradbury
>
> John Buchan
>
> Edgar Rice Burroughs
>
> Chesterton
>
> Arthur C. Clarke
>
> Coleridge
>
> Dickens
>
> Dostoevsky
>
> Arthur Conan Doyle
>
> E. R. Eddison
>
> Ursula Le Guin
>
> Machen
>
> Patrick O’Brian
>
> Sir Walter Scott
>
> Simak
>
> Stevenson
>
> Tolkien
>
> H. G. Wells earlier in life?
>
> Colin Wilson
>
> Wordsworth
>
> Nay-Sayers
>
> Borges
>
> Cabell
>
> Conrad
>
> Dunsany
>
> Harlan Ellison
>
> Graham Greene
>
> Hardy
>
> Hemingway
>
> Robert E. Howard
>
> Shirley Jackson
>
> Stephen King
>
> Fritz Leiber
>
> David Lindsay
>
> Lovecraft
>
> Melville
>
> Clark Ashton Smith
>
> Swift
>
> Tolstoy
>
> Vonnegut
>
> H. G. Wells later in life
I'm curious if you would consider L.P. Hartley a nay-Sayer, based upon the stories in The Travelling Grave, or not?? How about, let's see-- John Metcalfe? It seems to me that I would have to read their novels before regarding Metcalfe as more affirming or less pessimistic than Hartley. I would just guess that Ramsey Campbell was influenced by Hartley, and Campbell seems more of a nay-Sayer,,? Hartley in turn may have been influenced by Henry James, a yea-sayer even if reading his work has been decribed as like watching a man in another room through a keyhole who is looking through another keyhole in that room (or something like that). Anyway, "Washington Square" if not "The Turn of the Screw" establishes James as a yea-sayer, so if Hartley admired James strongly, he would almost have to be a yea-sayer too. The Lovecrat-Dunsany connection, Smith's influence from Baudelaire and Edgar Saltus would be further examples.Your thoughts?