Why wait till now to look for clarity?
Quoting Shakespeare poorly does nothing to make up for however many hundreds of blameless keystrokes 'signifying nothing,' save your strength of wish to impute your own unsettled emotions via the text unto its author.
Two hours ago you implied that simple possession of the text may be a major crime: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44167140 Why strive so now for the pretense of evenhandedness?
It couldn't be much more obvious how the work interests you. The problem is mistaking that for a commentary on it. Your effort at literary criticism is no more belated than radically ungrounded, as I have already detailed in a prior comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44167578 No one who gives the work an honest reading will find therein what you describe.
The quote is first attributed to Shakespeare but his usage is not the one I’m referencing.
I tried to show that it’s possible to engage with the violence of the book and the incest of the book as two separate concerns, by engaging with one but not the other. In response, you’re challenging my motivations rather than challenging the separation I described as possible. That ends my engagement with your thread; be well.
It is good form to cite or at least indicate, with quotation marks, when quoting. If you meant not to reference the famous usage, to name the work is best, not least to establish relevance and avoid appearing pretentious.
You say you find the incest and the torture equally upsetting, then you justify one and indict the other. If you can't be consistent even in the scope of a single comment, or for that matter distinguish fiction from reality better than this, wise indeed you seek balm for your dismay over the book elsewhere than with me; I have only so much patience for patent nonsense these days.
> You say you find the incest and the torture equally upsetting
I presented no information whatsoever regarding my personal views on the violence. Perhaps you tried to infer my position from the verb “excuse” in the first sentence.
I inferred your position from your constant use of the first-person singular to describe it, across what must now be at least a dozen paragraphs. Also by the fact you have found this position worth strenuous and irate effort to defend. If you had meant something else or had some relevant interest to disclose, I assume you would have said so.
What you did say was
> I hope this helps offer some clarity into how one might evaluate two equally upsetting things
which I took, by the way you called the two things - namely, the incest and the torture, as introduced at the top of your comment - "equally upsetting," to mean you consider them equally upsetting. If you wish now to claim you intended something by the phrase "equally upsetting" other than its literal meaning, you need to clarify.
You have by now after all impugned, whether openly or by implication, both the motivations and the intellectual competence of the author, the audience, and I myself. None of this is convincing. It is time to try something else. Ideally, that might involve discussing the text, but I agree it isn't for everyone.
Oh, good grief, I wish I'd caught this while I still could delete my prior comment. You opened with
> The incest doesn't excuse the torture.
But that is not what I said. I said, in the comment of mine to which you first replied, that people excuse the torture, but not the incest, just as you have done.
I still can't figure out what you meant by "equally upsetting," but the basic issue is that we're talking past each other because you failed to apprehend my thesis and I was too busy to notice and call you on it right away. I hope this clears things up!