But he deliberately defied the basic literary rule that no author who wishes respect as a man may publish his own follies without suggesting compensatory strengths of character.
The story makes extensive use of the literary rule of three, featuring three chairs, three bowls of porridge, three beds, and the three title characters who live in the house.
Crowning Moment: The satire whistles and foghorns of beautifully controlled insanity go off as these two break all the rules of literary convention long into the night.
But these characters resist in myriad ways, dreaming of real love, or good sex, or intelligent conversation – just as Lispector's remarkable prose breaks with literary convention (and even grammatical rules).
In Italy (see article), police fiction of a literary kind rules the list.
The reverence that a new generation of novelists show to one literary ground rule – write what you know – can make it tricky for us as readers to observe another basic principle: don't confuse a novel's narrator with its author.
Mostly, Mr. Voznesensky complied with the literary bureaucracy's rules even while denouncing its tight grip on writers.
Alongside Grimmelshausen, other Baroque writers who deserve mention are the poet and poetic theorist Martin Opitz, who introduced foreign literary models and rules into German poetry, and the lyric poet and dramatist Andreas Gryphius, who wrote sonnets and tragedies imbued with a deep Christian faith.
In a letter of 1948, Cassady set out the ideas that would alter Kerouac's practice (until then shaped by early-20th-century realists): "I have always held that when one writes, one should forget all rules, literary styles, and other such pretensions.... Rather, I think one should write, as nearly as possible, as if he were the first person on earth".
But with literary non-fiction these rules are far less clear.
