It’s often said (or implied without saying it explicitly) that the works recognized as “Great Literature” are praised mainly for historical reasons only, that contemporary fiction is superior in most ways that matter, in particular because it’s better suited to modern values and the way of life, and that it’s primarily literary snobbery that stands in the way of a widespread adoption of these attitudes.
This, however, is wrong. Great Literature works survive as such because they prove relevant to every new generation. When they don’t, they very quickly become forgotten or relegated to “famous back then, known mostly to scholars nowadays”. Great Literature works that retain their high status over many hundreds of years usually have done that by having something relevant to say to every generation in those centuries; sometimes there’re gaps of obscurity and then rediscovery, but those are the exception, not the rule.
The reason that the wrong attitude is popular is that people tend not to know or think of once-Great works that fell from the top. They see Shakespeares, but not Ben Jonsons. Ben Jonson was much higher regarded than Shakespeare for about 100 years after both died. His were much Greater works, until in the 18th century people decided they didn’t care much for his style anymore and he didn’t have much to tell them. There have been many more Ben Jonsons than Shakespeares.
I am sure we could take some great works of the past and turn them into awesome works of the present.
I bet you’d end up with silly-looking, embarrassing pastiches of no lasting value, maybe good for a chuckle or two because of contemporary allusions the readers would recognize.
Pretty much: something is good if it works out of its context. The work of a savannah poet who understands human nature. People do in fact read Dickens, Austen and Shakespeare in the present day for pleasure and not just because it was forced on them at school.
That said, literary canons tend to be retconned from contemporary works of great resonance, as if history were a story that built to a climax rather than shit happening.
I mean that when you see a literary canon listed, or a writeup of an artistic progression, it looks very like history writing a story, but has actually been constructed at all because of interest in the work at the end. So the progression may be true, but its selection is heavily biased and makes history look like a bunch of stories. In practice, everyone is just trying to write a good one this time out, and artists steal furiously from every possible source they can, whether it fits a marketable story or not; real life is messy and doesn’t have to make sense as a story.
This, however, is wrong. Great Literature works survive as such because they prove relevant to every new generation. When they don’t, they very quickly become forgotten or relegated to “famous back then, known mostly to scholars nowadays”. Great Literature works that retain their high status over many hundreds of years usually have done that by having something relevant to say to every generation in those centuries; sometimes there’re gaps of obscurity and then rediscovery, but those are the exception, not the rule.
this was true until Public Schooling became a standardized system. Consider how long it took for Latin to go from being mandatory to being something almost completely forgotten.
Depends on the country, but, generally speaking, it went from widespread to rare in one generation, and never was mandatory in the age of compulsory schooling.
Not sure what your point is—teaching of (non-classical) fiction in schools is itself very new, only a little more than a century old, and if you look at the mandatory fiction reading list in 1910s, 1930s, 1970s or 2010s, you’ll see a lot of changes. So clearly teaching of literature in school doesn’t stop Great Works from being reappraised.
My impression was that “great literature” is mostly read to signal intelligence/culturedness to people who don’t realize that reading them doesn’t require much intelligence, and that fiction doesn’t “teach lessons” as much/well as people claim, and that people only claim that it does because they need some justification (to themselves and others) for spending long periods of time in fake worlds. I’ve only read like 3 or 4 classics though, and I could be convinced to read more if I found one that actually seemed to teach something, but that hasn’t happened yet.
The impression I’ve had from reading supposed Great Works is that they often (but not always) fail to tell you much that’s new about life or love or the human condition or what have you, but they do often tell you a lot about the evolution of fiction as an art form. That doesn’t generalize all that well, but it does make you a better reader and a better writer.
Another point: if you’re reading works that’re central to your native literary traditions, you’re likely to have already picked up most of their major themes through cultural osmosis. That doesn’t mean they weren’t insightful at the time, but it does mean you’ve been spoiled for that aspect of the books. If you’re looking for new insights in your fiction, reading Great Novels from a culture you don’t belong to is probably a better idea than digging into your native canon.
Depends what’s changing about it. Sometimes I’d say the evolution of media points to genuine improvement, especially when you see it in relatively new branches like rock and roll or comic books or film; we’ve been doing some literary forms for a very long time. Often, though, it reflects external changes in technology or education, changes in language, or just differing tastes and preoccupations. And even that might be assigning too much rationale: sometimes it’s just a random walk based on recombinations of whatever’s been popular in the last thirty years or so.
With this in mind, I’d say modern writers are likely to get more out of responding to technological and social changes than trying to improve basic technique. Reading techno-thrillers or near-future SF, for example, is vastly different when you’ve got a Wikipedia tab open, and yet I can only think of a couple of writers that seem to have realized this potential.
I’m not sure what the point of your reply is—my comment wasn’t about why people read “great literature”, it was about how the canonical list of great works changes over time and the implications of that. Perhaps you’re eager to signal that you think reading classics is all about signalling?..
Your list of what you think people’s motivations are w.r.t. “great literature” has middle-school rebel written all over it. It’s not even wrong, and hence difficult to discuss. The fact that you seem to be using “great literature”, “fiction” and “classics” interchangeably doesn’t help either (e.g. the “fake worlds” clause applies to genre fiction just as well as to literary fiction, but people don’t normally claim that romance novels or detective novels teach important lessons).
I’m not sure what the point of your reply is—my comment wasn’t about why people read “great literature”, it was about how the canonical list of great works changes over time and the implications of that.
Yeah, sorry, this was probably the wrong place to put it. I’m just trying to figure out why people read “great literature”, because it seems weird to me and I suspect I might be wrong that it’s not worthwhile, especially because some aspiring rationalists seem to think it’s worthwhile.
Perhaps you’re eager to signal that you think reading classics is all about signalling?
Ha, I missed that :) I’m writing under a pseudonym though, and I’ve never told the stuff in the grandparent to anyone in person, because it:
has middle-school rebel written all over it
Maybe my ape-brain wants to metacontrarianly signal that it’s so smart it can afford to signal middle-schooler-level stupidity? Still, I think middle-schoolers are largely right about “great literature”.
It’s not even wrong
Do you think it’s wrong to say that “great literature” (by which I mean things like Shakespeare or The Great Gatsby) is read mainly to signal intelligence/culturedness? I really think it is, because for instance it impresses people, and it’s difficult, and it’s not as fun as most things you could read, and I don’t think reading (a small amount of) “great literature” has taught me anything useful for anything other than signalling. By saying I think it’s about signalling I’m not trying to imply that it’s wrong or that you shouldn’t do it, but if you know you’re signalling then you can optimize for signalling (by e.g. reading summaries rather than the original).
Do you think it’s wrong to say that “great literature” (by which I mean things like Shakespeare or The Great Gatsby) is read mainly to signal intelligence/culturedness?
It doesn’t have to be one or the other. It is possible for something to both genuinely posses literary merit, and for people who don’t actually appreciate that merit to say that they do in order to signal culturedness.
On an unrelated note, The Great Gasby is unrepentantly an Idea story, and that Idea is “Fuck The Jazz Age”; if you don’t give a shit about the Jazz age, then Gatsby probably isn’t going to appeal to you at all.
That’s strange, I also thought Gatsby was an idea story, but with a different idea: “don’t get too hung up on your dream”. But then again, I saw the same idea in “Moby-Dick” and “Tender Is the Night”, so maybe I’m imagining things...
You might be using ‘fuck the jazz age’ in a slightly broader sense than referring to the literal, but I don’t care much about the jazz age, and Gatsby appealed to me. Though I’ve only seen the film and so probably lose all signalling rights.
I have not seen the film; what about it appealed to you?
For my part, when I said that Gatsby’s Idea was “Fuck the Jazz Age”, what I meant was something along the lines of: “The period in American history from the end of the first World War until the onset of the Great Depression was a decadent, morally bankrupt time and furthermore the so-called ‘American Dream’ that it was said to embody is a hollow lie; fuck it, and fuck any similarities that our current time period has to it”. It’s been years since I read the book, though; so it’s possible that I’m misremembering details. Elsewhere in this thread, Moridinamael says: “The value of The Great Gatsby is (some would say) in how it perfectly expressed the zeitgeist of a time and place.” This comment leads me to believe that my assesment of Gatsby as an Idea story may be incorrect; perhaps it works better as a Milieu story. Perhaps I would have enjoyed it better if I had understood it as such when I initially read it.
You sound like you don’t know that Gatsby was written during the period it chronicles. I don’t expect that this will have a large effect on your reading, but some of the details in the long version of your slogan are definitely off.
I’m not sure what I liked about the film so much: I’m a sucker for Lurhmann in general. But there’s something more general about privilege and carelessness, and the dismissal of those outside an enchanted circle, going on in it for me: these might be particularly well-shown in the jazz age, but they aren’t limited to it. There’s clearly something about the American Dream going on—apparently Fitzgerald tried to change the title to ‘Under the Red, White and Blue’, but I think being British I don’t fully get the American Dream either intellectually or emotionally.
Then again, this is
just the film
probably heavily influenced by half-hearing about it and expecting an entirely different story (I thought Gatsby was the dangerously careless one and that the narrator would be drawn into his glitzy world but wouldn’t have the money and power to escape the bad sides and would be discarded)
I saw the film with people who’d read (and possibly briefly studied) it, and I suspect my view isn’t typical. For instance, I saw a clear and direct read-across between Gatsby and Steerpike (from Gormenghast), and everyone thought I was just being weird...
Do you think it’s wrong to say that “great literature” (by which I mean things like Shakespeare or The Great Gatsby) is read mainly to signal intelligence/culturedness? I really think it is, because for instance it impresses people, and it’s difficult, and it’s not as fun as most things you could read, and I don’t think reading (a small amount of) “great literature” has taught me anything useful for anything other than signalling. By saying I think it’s about signalling I’m not trying to imply that it’s wrong or that you shouldn’t do it, but if you know you’re signalling then you can optimize for signalling (by e.g. reading summaries rather than the original).
I’ve read a lot of “great literature”, and I will admit that signalling is a big motivation. Many of my friends are academics in the humanities and I’m often involved in conversations where references to Dostoevsky, Henry James, etc. are frequent (again, probably to signal intelligence and culture). Not being familiar with literature would incur a significant social cost in that context.
That said, I do also legitimately enjoy much great literature. Not so much because I learn a lot from it (although I wouldn’t say I don’t), but because a lot of it is actually brilliantly written and involves deep and interesting ideas. As a contrast, I also have friends who are really into anime, and they often talk about it. I’ve tried getting into it, but I’ve found even the most acclaimed animes (Cowboy Bebop and Death Note are ones I’ve tried watching) to be dull and somewhat silly. I just can’t get into the aesthetic. I pay a social cost for this—I often feel left out of the conversation when I’m hanging out with my anime-loving friends—but that isn’t enough to force me to watch these series.
So signalling is definitely a big part of why I read literature, but it’s not a sufficient reason. If I didn’t enjoy it I doubt I would force myself to do it.
Those can be some of the factors, depending on the people. Another reason for reading “focus point” works of fiction is that they give you a common topic to talk about. This is true for Cult Classics as well as for Great Classics.
One can thus read fiction for two social reasons; their value as a simulator of interesting and dangerous situations, and their value as a conversation piece.
Ambiguous works that invite a lot of alternate character interpretation or a lot of symbolism are especially appropriate, whether it be Hamlet or Neon Genesis Evangelion; you make the audiences care about what happens, and then you leave them homework (an exercise to the reader).
I bet you’d end up with silly-looking, embarrassing pastiches of no lasting value, maybe good for a chuckle or two because of contemporary allusions the readers would recognize.
Like Kick-Ass, huh? Its authors certainly don’t seem to treat it (or its audience) with much respect. Or like, for that matter, Don Quixote itself (it was supposed to be a silly comedy and a lampoon of chivalry books, not the Best Novel Ever it’s become… well, Part I was; part II takes itself more seriously).
The goal is to use modern, more sophisticated tools to make something better than the original. If your result is a “silly-looking, embarrassing pastiche of no lasting value”, you’ve failed in your task as a writer, and need to try harder. And, of course, “silly-looking” is a subjective qualifier, but it’s the job of a good writer to properly anticipate audience reactions; I’d even say it’s their main job. If by “embarassing” you mean “will lower your status in the eyes of a certain demographic, whose cooperation you need in order to achieve your goals”, then, yes, this is a crucial factor that should be accounted for, and pre-empted.
To sum it up, if the result is a “silly-looking, embarrassing pastiche of no lasting value”, you need to try harder, because you weren’t doing your job properly.
Don Quixote itself (it was supposed to be a silly comedy and a lampoon of chivalry books, not the Best Novel Ever it’s become… well, Part I was; part II takes itself more seriously).
But that’s just as I was saying: Don Quixote remains on the list of Great Works (there is no “best novel ever”) because new generations find it relevant even as their tastes and understanding shift. To the contemporary audience Part I was LOL-grade funny and to modern readers it’s much more tragic; this is probably because we’ve taught ourselves to empathize much more strongly with someone being ridiculed than people in the 17th century (note: this and not the novel’s age! Gargantua and Pantagruel is 100 years older and reads today exactly as the satire it was then, w/o accumulating gravitas). But the novel always supported both points of view; if it didn’t, we’d have stopped reading it. There’s any number of satirical texts from the same era that are no longer widely read because to us they would just seem stupidly cruel, with no high tragedy involved.
Like Kick-Ass, huh?
Well, no. I don’t like Kick-Ass personally, but it’s a very successful graphics novel that also resulted in a successful movie. This is incredibly rare and difficult to achieve. If you aim to start with a “great work” of the past and change some stuff around to make it modern, it’s highly unlikely that you’ll replicate the success of Kick-Ass.
If by “embarassing” you mean “will lower your status in the eyes of a certain demographic, whose cooperation you need in order to achieve your goals”,
By “embarrassing” I mean that it’ll be embarrassingly badly written.
If you aim to start with a “great work” of the past and change some stuff around to make it modern, it’s highly unlikely that you’ll replicate the success of Kick-Ass.
Yes, but that shouldn’t stop one from doing everything in one’s power, as a writer, to achieve it.
By “embarrassing” I mean that it’ll be embarrassingly badly written.
The whole point of the exercise is to write better than the original. Again, if it’s badly written, it’s a failure, no matter how otherwise “modernized” it is. Whether the failure feels embarassing or not to the writer is utterly irrelevant; what matters is that they failed, when rationalists should win.
You: “Let’s work together and, as an exercise, take a famous classic work and rewrite it as a better one”
I: “This is a naive and ill-founded proposal that has near-zero chance of success. You don’t seem to understand what made past great works great, or what it takes to make a successful work of literature today. Most likely you’ll end up with an embarrasingly badly written piece of pastiche”.
You: “The whole point is to be better than the original! Rationalists should win! Try harder! If what you say happens, that just means I haven’t achieved my goal.”
… yes, it does? What does this pronouncement have to do with anything I’ve said? Why are you just repeating empty slogans?
I think Anatoly’s point is just that this project is will involve an absolutely massive expenditure of time and effort, while being overwhelmingly likely to fail. In general, the combination of these two situations is very good reason not to do something, especially when there’s no clear payoff.
For my part, I also don’t think it’s true that LWers are well equipped to handle this sort of project. LW tends to attract comp-sci, math, physics, bio, engineering type people. It also tends to specifically drive away history, literature, art history, english type people. The reaction to philosophy is mixed at best. If GRE scores represent anything to do with writing ability, this means that LW is a community that generally selects against writing talent. And writing talent is just a minimum condition on writing good literature. It’s not close to sufficient. Almost everyone who spends their entire lives perfecting their writing and trying to write great literature fails completely.
It also tends to specifically drive away history, literature, art history, english type people.
The causes of that, and how to counteract them, would be a topic very much worth investigating. We cannot get by on matter-oriented skills alone.
will involve an absolutely massive expenditure of time and effort
Well, yes. I´m just beginning to set the foundations and attempting to gather interested, like-minded people. The easy part is to look at an old book and go
where is there here room for improvement?
what techniques and methods in this book wouldn’t a modern writer be able to get away with? unless already high-status or explicitly homaging older works?
A typical example would be to switch from an Omniscient Narrator who judges characters for the reader, to a narrator that doesn’t spell things out so much, while also avoiding the alienating extremes of a Cameraman Narrator who only shows the externalities of actions. Third Person POV narration seems to be the modern standard, with character thoughts referenced to obliquely (instead of “‘She´ll kill me!’ she thought”, use “She would kill her!”) so as to get past the subconscious separation between reader and character, and make the story more immersive.
Another would be to take old stories that used to follow Random Event Plots and Nested Stories and shave off anything extraneous to whatever the tale´s “about”. Part One of Don Quixote had lots of little stories and backstories in it that had nothing to do with the plot, the themes, or the message (heck, sometimes they sort of undermined it; a pastoral fantasy in a chivalry lampoon?), and which didn’t even serve the purpose of being allegories or reflections of it, and which might have been better off as separate stuff. Many nineteenth century Doorstoppers were compilations of serialized works where the author was paid by the word, encouraging them to verbosity and filler.
when there’s no clear payoff
There is; fun, and improvement of writing and critical skills, and all the secondary skills that go with that. There is also focus; an interesting, challenging goal, with clearly-set parameters, and with all the usual facilities of fanfiction.
There’s already a bit of a tradition of writing fanfiction of classics (from the Aeneid, to Avellaneda’s Quixote, to Pride and Prejudice and Zombies), and there’s a bit of a tradition in the fanfiction community of writing fics that change something about the original that audiences found unsatisfactory, and “Better Than Cannon” is not all that uncommon a praise.
The only thing about this project that is novel and dangerous and exciting is that, instead of starting from works that come under heavy fire for their flows, one starts from works that are so sanctified and canonized as to be nigh-untouchable. Setting out to “improve” them is a twofold task:
Determining what, precisely is great about them, why we would want to keep them around, why they would be worth the effort of reading by new readers.
Getting rid of whatever gets in the way of that greatness, of conveying whatever the work is meant to convey.
This optimization process, and its defiance of blind faith, bias, and halo effects, is gratifying in itself, and very much in the spirit of Less Wrong. Failure, at first, is, of course, inevitable, as part of the process called deliberate practice.
Almost everyone who spends their entire lives perfecting their writing and trying to write great literature fails completely.
Irrelevant; we’re not trying to write new great literature; we’re just updating stuff that’s allegedly (allegedly) great.
LW is a community that generally selects against writing talent.
I have a wonderful answer for this that my margins of time are too narrow to contain right now. I’ll get back to you on this in July, when I’m done with finals.
It’s often said (or implied without saying it explicitly) that the works recognized as “Great Literature” are praised mainly for historical reasons only, that contemporary fiction is superior in most ways that matter, in particular because it’s better suited to modern values and the way of life, and that it’s primarily literary snobbery that stands in the way of a widespread adoption of these attitudes.
This, however, is wrong. Great Literature works survive as such because they prove relevant to every new generation. When they don’t, they very quickly become forgotten or relegated to “famous back then, known mostly to scholars nowadays”. Great Literature works that retain their high status over many hundreds of years usually have done that by having something relevant to say to every generation in those centuries; sometimes there’re gaps of obscurity and then rediscovery, but those are the exception, not the rule.
The reason that the wrong attitude is popular is that people tend not to know or think of once-Great works that fell from the top. They see Shakespeares, but not Ben Jonsons. Ben Jonson was much higher regarded than Shakespeare for about 100 years after both died. His were much Greater works, until in the 18th century people decided they didn’t care much for his style anymore and he didn’t have much to tell them. There have been many more Ben Jonsons than Shakespeares.
I bet you’d end up with silly-looking, embarrassing pastiches of no lasting value, maybe good for a chuckle or two because of contemporary allusions the readers would recognize.
Pretty much: something is good if it works out of its context. The work of a savannah poet who understands human nature. People do in fact read Dickens, Austen and Shakespeare in the present day for pleasure and not just because it was forced on them at school.
That said, literary canons tend to be retconned from contemporary works of great resonance, as if history were a story that built to a climax rather than shit happening.
Er, I don’t get what you mean here...
I mean that when you see a literary canon listed, or a writeup of an artistic progression, it looks very like history writing a story, but has actually been constructed at all because of interest in the work at the end. So the progression may be true, but its selection is heavily biased and makes history look like a bunch of stories. In practice, everyone is just trying to write a good one this time out, and artists steal furiously from every possible source they can, whether it fits a marketable story or not; real life is messy and doesn’t have to make sense as a story.
this was true until Public Schooling became a standardized system. Consider how long it took for Latin to go from being mandatory to being something almost completely forgotten.
Depends on the country, but, generally speaking, it went from widespread to rare in one generation, and never was mandatory in the age of compulsory schooling.
Not sure what your point is—teaching of (non-classical) fiction in schools is itself very new, only a little more than a century old, and if you look at the mandatory fiction reading list in 1910s, 1930s, 1970s or 2010s, you’ll see a lot of changes. So clearly teaching of literature in school doesn’t stop Great Works from being reappraised.
My impression was that “great literature” is mostly read to signal intelligence/culturedness to people who don’t realize that reading them doesn’t require much intelligence, and that fiction doesn’t “teach lessons” as much/well as people claim, and that people only claim that it does because they need some justification (to themselves and others) for spending long periods of time in fake worlds. I’ve only read like 3 or 4 classics though, and I could be convinced to read more if I found one that actually seemed to teach something, but that hasn’t happened yet.
The impression I’ve had from reading supposed Great Works is that they often (but not always) fail to tell you much that’s new about life or love or the human condition or what have you, but they do often tell you a lot about the evolution of fiction as an art form. That doesn’t generalize all that well, but it does make you a better reader and a better writer.
Another point: if you’re reading works that’re central to your native literary traditions, you’re likely to have already picked up most of their major themes through cultural osmosis. That doesn’t mean they weren’t insightful at the time, but it does mean you’ve been spoiled for that aspect of the books. If you’re looking for new insights in your fiction, reading Great Novels from a culture you don’t belong to is probably a better idea than digging into your native canon.
Hence why I thought it might be easy to see where there was room for improvement using more modern techniques.
Depends what’s changing about it. Sometimes I’d say the evolution of media points to genuine improvement, especially when you see it in relatively new branches like rock and roll or comic books or film; we’ve been doing some literary forms for a very long time. Often, though, it reflects external changes in technology or education, changes in language, or just differing tastes and preoccupations. And even that might be assigning too much rationale: sometimes it’s just a random walk based on recombinations of whatever’s been popular in the last thirty years or so.
With this in mind, I’d say modern writers are likely to get more out of responding to technological and social changes than trying to improve basic technique. Reading techno-thrillers or near-future SF, for example, is vastly different when you’ve got a Wikipedia tab open, and yet I can only think of a couple of writers that seem to have realized this potential.
I’m not sure what the point of your reply is—my comment wasn’t about why people read “great literature”, it was about how the canonical list of great works changes over time and the implications of that. Perhaps you’re eager to signal that you think reading classics is all about signalling?..
Your list of what you think people’s motivations are w.r.t. “great literature” has middle-school rebel written all over it. It’s not even wrong, and hence difficult to discuss. The fact that you seem to be using “great literature”, “fiction” and “classics” interchangeably doesn’t help either (e.g. the “fake worlds” clause applies to genre fiction just as well as to literary fiction, but people don’t normally claim that romance novels or detective novels teach important lessons).
Yeah, sorry, this was probably the wrong place to put it. I’m just trying to figure out why people read “great literature”, because it seems weird to me and I suspect I might be wrong that it’s not worthwhile, especially because some aspiring rationalists seem to think it’s worthwhile.
Ha, I missed that :) I’m writing under a pseudonym though, and I’ve never told the stuff in the grandparent to anyone in person, because it:
Maybe my ape-brain wants to metacontrarianly signal that it’s so smart it can afford to signal middle-schooler-level stupidity? Still, I think middle-schoolers are largely right about “great literature”.
Do you think it’s wrong to say that “great literature” (by which I mean things like Shakespeare or The Great Gatsby) is read mainly to signal intelligence/culturedness? I really think it is, because for instance it impresses people, and it’s difficult, and it’s not as fun as most things you could read, and I don’t think reading (a small amount of) “great literature” has taught me anything useful for anything other than signalling. By saying I think it’s about signalling I’m not trying to imply that it’s wrong or that you shouldn’t do it, but if you know you’re signalling then you can optimize for signalling (by e.g. reading summaries rather than the original).
It doesn’t have to be one or the other. It is possible for something to both genuinely posses literary merit, and for people who don’t actually appreciate that merit to say that they do in order to signal culturedness.
On an unrelated note, The Great Gasby is unrepentantly an Idea story, and that Idea is “Fuck The Jazz Age”; if you don’t give a shit about the Jazz age, then Gatsby probably isn’t going to appeal to you at all.
That’s strange, I also thought Gatsby was an idea story, but with a different idea: “don’t get too hung up on your dream”. But then again, I saw the same idea in “Moby-Dick” and “Tender Is the Night”, so maybe I’m imagining things...
You might be using ‘fuck the jazz age’ in a slightly broader sense than referring to the literal, but I don’t care much about the jazz age, and Gatsby appealed to me. Though I’ve only seen the film and so probably lose all signalling rights.
I have not seen the film; what about it appealed to you?
For my part, when I said that Gatsby’s Idea was “Fuck the Jazz Age”, what I meant was something along the lines of: “The period in American history from the end of the first World War until the onset of the Great Depression was a decadent, morally bankrupt time and furthermore the so-called ‘American Dream’ that it was said to embody is a hollow lie; fuck it, and fuck any similarities that our current time period has to it”. It’s been years since I read the book, though; so it’s possible that I’m misremembering details. Elsewhere in this thread, Moridinamael says: “The value of The Great Gatsby is (some would say) in how it perfectly expressed the zeitgeist of a time and place.” This comment leads me to believe that my assesment of Gatsby as an Idea story may be incorrect; perhaps it works better as a Milieu story. Perhaps I would have enjoyed it better if I had understood it as such when I initially read it.
You sound like you don’t know that Gatsby was written during the period it chronicles. I don’t expect that this will have a large effect on your reading, but some of the details in the long version of your slogan are definitely off.
I’m not sure what I liked about the film so much: I’m a sucker for Lurhmann in general. But there’s something more general about privilege and carelessness, and the dismissal of those outside an enchanted circle, going on in it for me: these might be particularly well-shown in the jazz age, but they aren’t limited to it. There’s clearly something about the American Dream going on—apparently Fitzgerald tried to change the title to ‘Under the Red, White and Blue’, but I think being British I don’t fully get the American Dream either intellectually or emotionally.
Then again, this is
just the film
probably heavily influenced by half-hearing about it and expecting an entirely different story (I thought Gatsby was the dangerously careless one and that the narrator would be drawn into his glitzy world but wouldn’t have the money and power to escape the bad sides and would be discarded)
I saw the film with people who’d read (and possibly briefly studied) it, and I suspect my view isn’t typical. For instance, I saw a clear and direct read-across between Gatsby and Steerpike (from Gormenghast), and everyone thought I was just being weird...
I’ve read a lot of “great literature”, and I will admit that signalling is a big motivation. Many of my friends are academics in the humanities and I’m often involved in conversations where references to Dostoevsky, Henry James, etc. are frequent (again, probably to signal intelligence and culture). Not being familiar with literature would incur a significant social cost in that context.
That said, I do also legitimately enjoy much great literature. Not so much because I learn a lot from it (although I wouldn’t say I don’t), but because a lot of it is actually brilliantly written and involves deep and interesting ideas. As a contrast, I also have friends who are really into anime, and they often talk about it. I’ve tried getting into it, but I’ve found even the most acclaimed animes (Cowboy Bebop and Death Note are ones I’ve tried watching) to be dull and somewhat silly. I just can’t get into the aesthetic. I pay a social cost for this—I often feel left out of the conversation when I’m hanging out with my anime-loving friends—but that isn’t enough to force me to watch these series.
So signalling is definitely a big part of why I read literature, but it’s not a sufficient reason. If I didn’t enjoy it I doubt I would force myself to do it.
Those can be some of the factors, depending on the people. Another reason for reading “focus point” works of fiction is that they give you a common topic to talk about. This is true for Cult Classics as well as for Great Classics.
One can thus read fiction for two social reasons; their value as a simulator of interesting and dangerous situations, and their value as a conversation piece.
Ambiguous works that invite a lot of alternate character interpretation or a lot of symbolism are especially appropriate, whether it be Hamlet or Neon Genesis Evangelion; you make the audiences care about what happens, and then you leave them homework (an exercise to the reader).
Like Kick-Ass, huh? Its authors certainly don’t seem to treat it (or its audience) with much respect. Or like, for that matter, Don Quixote itself (it was supposed to be a silly comedy and a lampoon of chivalry books, not the Best Novel Ever it’s become… well, Part I was; part II takes itself more seriously).
The goal is to use modern, more sophisticated tools to make something better than the original. If your result is a “silly-looking, embarrassing pastiche of no lasting value”, you’ve failed in your task as a writer, and need to try harder. And, of course, “silly-looking” is a subjective qualifier, but it’s the job of a good writer to properly anticipate audience reactions; I’d even say it’s their main job. If by “embarassing” you mean “will lower your status in the eyes of a certain demographic, whose cooperation you need in order to achieve your goals”, then, yes, this is a crucial factor that should be accounted for, and pre-empted.
To sum it up, if the result is a “silly-looking, embarrassing pastiche of no lasting value”, you need to try harder, because you weren’t doing your job properly.
But that’s just as I was saying: Don Quixote remains on the list of Great Works (there is no “best novel ever”) because new generations find it relevant even as their tastes and understanding shift. To the contemporary audience Part I was LOL-grade funny and to modern readers it’s much more tragic; this is probably because we’ve taught ourselves to empathize much more strongly with someone being ridiculed than people in the 17th century (note: this and not the novel’s age! Gargantua and Pantagruel is 100 years older and reads today exactly as the satire it was then, w/o accumulating gravitas). But the novel always supported both points of view; if it didn’t, we’d have stopped reading it. There’s any number of satirical texts from the same era that are no longer widely read because to us they would just seem stupidly cruel, with no high tragedy involved.
Well, no. I don’t like Kick-Ass personally, but it’s a very successful graphics novel that also resulted in a successful movie. This is incredibly rare and difficult to achieve. If you aim to start with a “great work” of the past and change some stuff around to make it modern, it’s highly unlikely that you’ll replicate the success of Kick-Ass.
By “embarrassing” I mean that it’ll be embarrassingly badly written.
Yes, but that shouldn’t stop one from doing everything in one’s power, as a writer, to achieve it.
The whole point of the exercise is to write better than the original. Again, if it’s badly written, it’s a failure, no matter how otherwise “modernized” it is. Whether the failure feels embarassing or not to the writer is utterly irrelevant; what matters is that they failed, when rationalists should win.
This conversation is bizarre.
You: “Let’s work together and, as an exercise, take a famous classic work and rewrite it as a better one”
I: “This is a naive and ill-founded proposal that has near-zero chance of success. You don’t seem to understand what made past great works great, or what it takes to make a successful work of literature today. Most likely you’ll end up with an embarrasingly badly written piece of pastiche”.
You: “The whole point is to be better than the original! Rationalists should win! Try harder! If what you say happens, that just means I haven’t achieved my goal.”
… yes, it does? What does this pronouncement have to do with anything I’ve said? Why are you just repeating empty slogans?
That part is new. Very well, let us assume, for the sake of argument, that I don’t. Enlighten us.
Woe! “Rationalists should win” is an empty slogan now?
I think Anatoly’s point is just that this project is will involve an absolutely massive expenditure of time and effort, while being overwhelmingly likely to fail. In general, the combination of these two situations is very good reason not to do something, especially when there’s no clear payoff.
For my part, I also don’t think it’s true that LWers are well equipped to handle this sort of project. LW tends to attract comp-sci, math, physics, bio, engineering type people. It also tends to specifically drive away history, literature, art history, english type people. The reaction to philosophy is mixed at best. If GRE scores represent anything to do with writing ability, this means that LW is a community that generally selects against writing talent. And writing talent is just a minimum condition on writing good literature. It’s not close to sufficient. Almost everyone who spends their entire lives perfecting their writing and trying to write great literature fails completely.
The causes of that, and how to counteract them, would be a topic very much worth investigating. We cannot get by on matter-oriented skills alone.
Well, yes. I´m just beginning to set the foundations and attempting to gather interested, like-minded people. The easy part is to look at an old book and go
where is there here room for improvement?
what techniques and methods in this book wouldn’t a modern writer be able to get away with? unless already high-status or explicitly homaging older works?
A typical example would be to switch from an Omniscient Narrator who judges characters for the reader, to a narrator that doesn’t spell things out so much, while also avoiding the alienating extremes of a Cameraman Narrator who only shows the externalities of actions. Third Person POV narration seems to be the modern standard, with character thoughts referenced to obliquely (instead of “‘She´ll kill me!’ she thought”, use “She would kill her!”) so as to get past the subconscious separation between reader and character, and make the story more immersive.
Another would be to take old stories that used to follow Random Event Plots and Nested Stories and shave off anything extraneous to whatever the tale´s “about”. Part One of Don Quixote had lots of little stories and backstories in it that had nothing to do with the plot, the themes, or the message (heck, sometimes they sort of undermined it; a pastoral fantasy in a chivalry lampoon?), and which didn’t even serve the purpose of being allegories or reflections of it, and which might have been better off as separate stuff. Many nineteenth century Doorstoppers were compilations of serialized works where the author was paid by the word, encouraging them to verbosity and filler.
There is; fun, and improvement of writing and critical skills, and all the secondary skills that go with that. There is also focus; an interesting, challenging goal, with clearly-set parameters, and with all the usual facilities of fanfiction.
There’s already a bit of a tradition of writing fanfiction of classics (from the Aeneid, to Avellaneda’s Quixote, to Pride and Prejudice and Zombies), and there’s a bit of a tradition in the fanfiction community of writing fics that change something about the original that audiences found unsatisfactory, and “Better Than Cannon” is not all that uncommon a praise.
The only thing about this project that is novel and dangerous and exciting is that, instead of starting from works that come under heavy fire for their flows, one starts from works that are so sanctified and canonized as to be nigh-untouchable. Setting out to “improve” them is a twofold task:
Determining what, precisely is great about them, why we would want to keep them around, why they would be worth the effort of reading by new readers.
Getting rid of whatever gets in the way of that greatness, of conveying whatever the work is meant to convey.
This optimization process, and its defiance of blind faith, bias, and halo effects, is gratifying in itself, and very much in the spirit of Less Wrong. Failure, at first, is, of course, inevitable, as part of the process called deliberate practice.
Irrelevant; we’re not trying to write new great literature; we’re just updating stuff that’s allegedly (allegedly) great.
Are you conflating academic interest in the history of the arts with proficiency of creative writing skills? More importantly, what is this “talent” you are talking about?
What are the ‘modern, more sophisticated tools’? I think that’s one of the things I don’t see from your post.
I have a wonderful answer for this that my margins of time are too narrow to contain right now. I’ll get back to you on this in July, when I’m done with finals.