Painting, sculpting, disappearing?

[Angrboda]

I think in some sense that's short-selling literature. Literary analysis deals primarily with structure rather than execution. There is a reason why reading remains a popular medium for artististic expression in that aspects of narratives can have edifying and beautiful qualities all in themselves. I think of writers like Faulkner and Stephen R. Donaldson (Chronicles of Thomas Covenant), whose literary style in lesser hands would simply be numbing to read. Their sentences are long and complicated, and reading them is more of an effort than the simpler prose of a Steinbeck or Clifford Simak but the effort is rewarded by the immediacy, intimacy, and beauty of the evoked images and ideas. Yes, they also had great stories to tell and were excellent in their construction of plot and so forth, but there is a beauty in reading the written word used well which also is immediate and not mediated by the intellect. It's just not something tangible you can point at as the cause of said experiential aspect like a painting or sculpture because the effect is created by the activity of the mind and is by its nature temporally limited, whereas a painting or sculpture is not.