Is Literature Dead?
theparisreview.org
theparisreview.org
That is a pool of 120 million readers to produce the tiny fraction that would produce works worth being broadly read. Its even entirely likely that many lacked the resources to become prolific skilled writers read by others even if they had the talent there being a significant barrier to entry in those days.
Now we have a population of 7.6 billion of which 85% can read. This is a population of almost 6.5 billion readers.
If people are 1/10th as likely to produce good works then we are apt to have 5 times the number of good writers.
For there to be half as many good writers we have to believe that multimedia has extinguished 99% of the inclination to write.
In 1800, say in England, there were probably some thousands of people whose opinion an author really cared about. Now authors measure success in much higher numbers. If, and it is a big If, the cultural significance of fiction erodes then it won't matter how many people can read words off a page. Most writers want the greatest audience that they can reach and they want to give them a meaningful experience.
Everybody is able to, and not more people want to.
More and more I think we need space, differences, voids to create attraction poles so that those who really deeply wants to be musician, moviemaker, writer, will get there and it will be meaningful.
Could you imagine, for example, a door constantly bleeping "Fire Exit, Do Not Open" for illiterates?
There are standard pictographs for "fire exit" and "do not open door" that are used where not everyone reads the same language.
Even it it were feasible to get by without reading it would take 50 years for this change to happen and in between a and b the groups that allowed this would be out competed for resources by those less stupid.
I'd say that literature isn't dead; it's just changing its narrative medium.
Else, we can just say that "fiction is not dead".
And I personally agree with his sentiment, that they would obviously not do that, it's just a form of romanticism and cultural pessimism.
Most average people read books in the past because it was an average thing to do back then. It being the most accessible medium etc
The remaining question should then be if our new media are lacking something compared to old media and if it's a ~bad~ for them to be lacking.
Both the seemingly higher popularity of reading and writing in the past came from a lack of other viable options.
They obviously wouldn't.
The important question though is not whether they would, but whether they should.
In other words, the victorian times people reading might very well have been a byproduct of them not having TV, games, internet, etc. In fact it totally was.
But that's totally uninteresting, and not an argument as to whether losing that kind of activity is bad or good.
In other words, just like etymology doesn't tell us what a word means, just how it got started, the historical factors that led to people reading and revering books back in the day don't tell us whether doing so is good or bad, and whether we'd be better of continuing it even if the conditions that made it popular have changed.
The conditions that made physical activity for the cavemen popular (collecting food, not being eaten by lions, etc.) have changed totally, but physical activity is still good for us. To the point that sitting still most of our days kills us prematurely compared to what we could achieve given our advancements in medicine.
Things can be historical accidents, and still be better than the items that replaced them (either through conscious effort or as historical accidents themselves).
(To quote Hoare on a similar issue: "[ALGOL 60] is a language so far ahead of its time, that it was not only an improvement on its predecessors, but also on nearly all its successors").
Because I'd personally agree with most people that video games and television are relatively shitty, but that's not a function of the artform, but the artists, who themselves are a function of the culture they are embedded in. And additionally there is a lot of pulp or generic genre lit that's similarly devoid of meaning as most vidyas or tv series.
Jonathan Franzen is turning his books into TV series. And the writing on long-form TV shows follows a similar sort of depth and narrative fashioning as conventional literature.
But I'm not really the expert on this topic. I should get my wife to comment here.
No, neither are. And it's not just "something written", it's something written in a particular form (and as part of a particular historical legacy).
There is no authority proclaiming something as or as not literature.
That's because it's been explicitly written as such (e.g. Dostoyevsky's Poor Folk). Those letters are in fact just chapters of a novel telling a story. A series of non fictional letters wouldn't be considered literature (and generally hasn't).
>Some beloved novels today were once considered "cheap", quickly churned out crap (aka "blogspam"), such as the pulp thrillers from the Chandler era.
The weren't considered worthy (or high) literature. They however had literary form (and often pretentions).
The same goes for the serialized Victorian (and of course 19th century French) works, whether their initial outlet (newspapers or whatever), they still followed the same overall structure.
Tons of others wrote lots of different formats even then (from manifestos, once a very popular form of expression, to dadaist word collages, lettrism, newspaper joke columns, quips (e.g. from Karl Kraus, or Ambrose Bierce, Brecht, etc.), published travel correspondence, and so on.
But unless they told a story over an extended number of pages they weren't considered literature (whether good or bad).
If handwritten scrolls, newsprint released a few pages every week, and pages printed out of a wordprocessor and bound can all be literature I'm not sure why hypertext on a website can't be (even using links and embedded media, the same way scroll authors added marginalia and early book makers illuminations, of course contemporary book makers also include marginalia (like page numbers and the book/chapter title). Even pseudo-links appear in works like Nabokov's Pale Fire.
My point is that extension and experimentation with form are part of any creative tradition. It's really hard to create a useful and consistent definition of literature that includes everything that's similar to War and Peace and excludes everything that's similar to Breaking Bad. It might be more fun to cast a wide net.
That's not the distinguishing point though. It's the form (of the story), not the medium. It could be clay tablets or bits on an SSD too.
But if we say "Breaking Bad" is literature then we lose distinguishing characteristics, which is not just "telling a story".
In we call TV or games "literature", we we could just go on an call "Breaking Bad" architecture or music too, why not? Like music, it evokes emotions and is shifting. Like architecture it has a structure and certain tolerances, etc.
We give more restrictive names for a reason, to not lose track of concepts and things in an amorphous blob.
>My point is that extension and experimentation with form are part of any creative tradition. It's really hard to create a useful and consistent definition of literature that includes everything that's similar to War and Peace and excludes everything that's similar to Breaking Bad.
Actually it sounds very easy, and every literary criticism magazine for example has managed to achieve it in its review section...
A little earlier than that (Balzac in the 1830s, Eugène Sue and George Sand in the 1840s) the same thing had happened in France. Other than that I totally agree with you, the TV series (Netflix especially) are the new Balzac and Tolstoy.
Countless millions of young people read. Many of them enjoy reading the classics and many enjoy reading contemporary stuff. Many also write.
Literature isn't dying any time soon, despite what one person's son's experience might suggest.
I like reading free stuff and it's mostly non fiction.
You couldn't convince me to read something like Paper Towns.
I'd never heard of Paper Towns and I suspect it isn't what people would call literature in the sense the linked article meant the word, but a quick Google tells me it sold millions of copies.
* Many of my conversations with friends now go "did you see that new show X on netflix?" << Usually I reply that I did! Usually because it was conveniently recommended to me or advertised to me when I turned on the TV before bed.
* I got turned onto the japanese reality TV show "Terrace House" thanks to a NYT op ed https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/25/magazine/letter-of-recomm...
* NYT book review and the front bookcase of today's bookstores still have impact. I buy books based on that sometimes.
* Amazon's best sellers list is important now the same way netflix's front page is important; if you open your kindle or go to buy books on amazon, you'll get recommendations.
* My youtube habits are mostly thanks to subscriptions + recommended videos based on my watch history and subscriptions.
> If everything can be published, since the costs in this day and age are greatly reduced, nothing is filtered, signal to noise ratio is much lower, and there are many signals available, which one(s) do you bandpass?
To me it definitely seems like my bandpass is a mix of old tastemakers + recommendation algos, the algos being the relatively new addition.
It even acknowledges the ability of the written word to get huge readership numbers in the modern day, so I think think it would make much sense if it was about written works as a whole.
All of which have been completely forgotten now.
Fiction has always been faddy and ephemeral. The idea that it has to be immortal to be worth anything is rather Victorian.
We may not like our nineteen-century three-volume encyclopedic novels nicely packaged in dead-tree bricks anymore, but popular fictional writing is alive and well as it adapts to the possibilities of the new media, where immediacy is a primal element.
Literature didn't even become popular as novels in the first place; many popular works were published as serials in newspapers, and before that there were booklets and romances. The article strikes me as a yell of nostalgia for a particular dying format.
Or he might have heard of them. That's all the more reason to consider literature dead.
Not any form and format that includes text and fiction is literature.
The word is usually meant to refer to a particular format and a particular history, not just anything that uses words to tell a story.
>The article strikes me as a yell of nostalgia for a particular dying format.
And what's bad about this? Not every dying format is bad, and not every new format is better (or even "more fit for the times").
And if some particular format gave thousands of great works that influenced billions, whereas the new one has meager results at the level of young adult fiction (and in an age of reduced cultural impact of fiction anyway), it could very well be a regression (history has those too, it's not all a smooth path to increased greatness or equally good at all times).
In the end, it's a subjective value-judgment. But that's exactly what's attempted here.
The latter definition probably is the best one can come up with without resorting to notions like "stuff that I like".
Other than that, literature often means a body of works that have been canonized because somebody thought they have artistic or intellectual value, in other words: What does and what doesn't constitute literature is highly subjective.
What argues against Twitter sagas as literature though is their inherent transience. Literature usually is thought of as something that has literary value not just for the current generation but for future generations, too.
Just like poems, then?
I dare you to find any property that can be said of written poems with respect to those being transcendent, which can't also be said of Twitter threads (other than "they've existed since the beginning of writing").
A poem written on Twitter and deleted the next day is no more permanent or long-lasting than a poem that's solely available in the oral tradition, perhaps much less so.
Why are epics such as Beowulf or the Epic of Gilgamesh considered literature while others aren't? It's because someone at some point recorded them in a more permanent manner so future generations could read them in their unadulterated form (as much as that can be said of stories that probably had been changed and embellished multiple times already before someone wrote them down).
A thread on Twitter however can be deleted, added to, remixed, retweeted and forked at any time, which certainly are very interesting properties for creating art but I'm not sure if that art should be called literature or rather something else entirely.
Anyway, as originally stated what does and doesn't constitute literature isn't very precisely defined. So, this probably is hairsplitting anyway.
My point is that there is a form of literature that is native to Twitter (or public IM in general), which takes advantage of the specifics of the medium (in particular, unfolding the story at piecemeal bits in real time, and reacting to users comments to tweak the next elements of the story).
The end result may be transcribed to more persistent written storage, but it's not the whole experience (just like reading The Three Musketeers as a book is slightly different to what people waiting for the next chapter in the newspaper would have experienced).
Many of which were originally serials published in newspapers ... see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feuilleton - Herman Hesse, for one, griped about the "age of the feuilleton".
Gore Vidal, who for a while earned his living writing for TV and movies, used to argue that the post-1960 emphasis on film directors was misplaced, and that writers actually were the essential factor. But he also remarked that pretty soon speaking of a famous writer would be like speaking of a famous ceramicist.
Curiously, some of the recente movie/TV series are putting directors back in the hired-hand category that Vidal said was their place, and emphasizing producers-writers, e.g. Game of Thrones.
(People like tales, like continued tales with familiar characters, like having some sort of tag to identify what they're picking - an author name is best, and sometimes it is fake, as in "house names" used by publishers as a brand for stories actually produced by a stable of multiple writers. Which is not new either ...)
Clearly Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings do. Think how old The Hobbit is!
Maybe he was onto something with respect to polemics, philosophies, propagandas. Maybe kids are tired of that shit, they'd rather just be ironic.
> Then television, with no malice whatsoever—just a better buy for advertisers—knocked the magazines out of business.
I think Kurt Vonnegut is right here. The sad thing is, all those talented people working at Google didn't get us the quality of writing that magazines did or TV does. They gave us eHow.
Maybe that's not so bad: in the past you were either famous or not. Now I think we get these common interest communities that all read the same blogs / follow the same people on twitter and great art proliferates in those niches. Maybe it doesn't enter the total public consciousness; maybe it doesn't have to.
I think most of this moved online to be honest. Almost any factual or opinion based content you can think of is now primarily posted on the internet rather than released in book form.
>This is why reading is over. None of my friends like it. Nobody wants to do it anymore
Yeah, when I was a kid I felt that way too... Mainly because 99% of what was available to me and my friends was boring and none of my friends like them either...
Fast forward 20 years, and I read between 50 and 80 books a year in either paper, my Kindle or some form of audiobook and I get them in topics that I want to read, not just the small selection of books my small town library had...
Like when I was a kid my library had no books on anything related to computing except one which basically was a guide for 4 year olds in how to type... They had little on history and most of it was Irish history, given that it was Ireland and there's nothing wrong with that, but when your interest is elsewhere in history and with more technical elements of history like weapons development, you're not going to be satisfied.
I grow up, I get access to all the technical books I could imagine on computers, I get access to esoteric books tank design and novels about things that are interesting to me and I'm reading at a fair rate.
Give me what I want and I'll read and I bet it the same with her son. Give him books him and his friends will like and I bet they'll read too! Try something like comic books, that's what my brother got into as a kid when we visited the US and he went from not reading to lots of reading really fast.
The problem isn't literature, the problem is access to it
Do authors explicitly write subtext? As the author says, I don't think so. I think authors use writing and editing as a way to organize their thoughts over time such that all the subtext comes out naturally. For most, I think, this is a subconscious thing. That's why you can't teach it.
Milton (the real one, anyway) was part of a lineage, a conversation, in which books—indeed, print itself— made a difference in the world
This may be the most important point of all. As a society with lots of different interests, literature has allowed the "subconscious of man" to have a multi-generational conversation about what's important. You write a book, you pick up that conversation. The public at large reads the book, they begin participating in it.
I'm not saying people sit around and study books to determine deep understanding of universe, but that's what happens. It's just not evident. You spend many years dedicating large portions of your time to climb inside the minds of great people throughout history, eventually you get a gut feel for what it means to be human -- no matter what your circumstances. You begin to see the same dramas and questions arise. You see the mosaic of life itself.
Of course, you see all of that other ways too. You can probably go to YouTube right now and watch a video on any kind of deep topic you'd like. But the key point was this shared subconscious journey, created by dedicated time in a book where your concentration and imagination were required to follow along with the story. Doing that, you live inside the heads of great thinkers in ways the click-and-move on crowd never will.
That's not for everybody to do. Some folks gravitate towards that kind of thing. Some don't. But it has to be for somebody. And it has to be for enough somebodys that the conversation continues.
I'm not sure that's the case anymore.
So there is only one subtext to a text? If a subtext was intended by the author and never discovered by any reader, is it still a subtext? If a reader constructs a subtext that contradicts the intentions of the author, is it a subtext or a vision? How exactly do you define subtext? Similar questions could be asked about the concept of "lineage".
I will assume that they were not.
Do authors explicitly write subtext? Sure. In the same way that you can purposefully decide what your subconscious will focus on. But it wanders here and there. Over time, authors coalesce around a narrative to the universe that feels pleasing to them.
So there is only one subtext to a text? Not at all. Stephen King used to say that there was no subtext to any of his work. Of course there was -- but it was nothing he ever recognized, organized, or struggled with mentally (I assume).
If a subtext was intended by the author and never discovered by any reader, is it still a subtext? Sure. It very well can be. Authors that begin organizing their subconscious around a topic may purposefully add subtext. Nobody may ever catch it.
If a reader constructs a subtext that contradicts the intentions of the author, is it a subtext or a vision? It is a process of subconscious transferal. It's not a math problem. There's no correct subtext.
How do you define subtext? I don't think you can, at least in way people want it defined. I read somewhere once that fiction was actually more true than nonfiction. This, of course, sounded like idiocy to me as a programmer. But then I got it. It's true because we're sharing impressions of life in a way that can't be explicitly said. It's one thing to say "Local man escapes execution". It's another to read "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge"
To clarify, if the questions were rhetorical, we're agreeing. That's because those are exactly the questions to ask as you begin to absorb the author's world. Is this the way they feel about the world in general, is it only in this situation? Is what I'm experiencing intentional? Do others experience these same insights? Does the author have a way of looking at things that nobody else does (or can see)? And so on..
There's no one answer to your questions for any one book/reader combination. Making the questions universal just makes it into nonsense.
Virtue signaling via books is dead, however, and that's a good thing.
Long-form TV and long-form podcasts have almost entirely replaced literature in my life, as someone who loves both grandiose fiction and nitty gritty non-fiction. Coincidentally, I don't watch many movies - they're too short to tell a great story.
The medium is not the thing.
2. In re:
> To dominate their markets means they degrade the value of the written word.
I don't see how you draw that conclusion. Marketing copy is utilitarian. The existence of advertising has nothing to do with literature's value.
3. It's not hard to see the shift in literature's import to our society. There's more media to consume than ever today, and modern storytellers have more ways to convey their ideas than just written literature. If you're going to get gripey about something degrading the written word, ad copy should be at the bottom of your worries and TV / new media is a more likely culprit (...which is kind of the point of the article).
All that said there's a good argument to be made that television is one of the greatest storytelling mediums to date, with unprecedented reach and a lot of expressive latitude for artists.
Well yes, since books or print in general aren't the culutally defining medium any more. Anyway, I think some people will get bored with TV & movies and will learn to find new interesting things you can do in literature. Movies are much too complex to create in order to be truly innovative. Too much money is involved. So, I don't think literature is dead, but there will be fewer readers, it will be more difficult for authors to make a living from writing literature alone and the number of professional critics will probably decline. On the other hand, literature as a mass media for everyone was, in a historical perspective, a rather young intervention anyway.
Besides other comments making good points, writing a novel for example is by far the cheapest way to get a story out of the door in a final way (the way the author sees it). How otherwise would you publish a story without involvement of other people and/or tons of money?
I guess this is the case with the 10x programmers.
but my anecdote is only going to get published as a hn comment. neither the skill nor interest to do more, and it's not angsty enough to generate handwringing.
I just personally don't bother reading as there's just more engaging forms of media out there (for me).
This is the words of a child self absorbed, with both the limited perspective and the illusion of knowledge that childhood provides to us all.
It's not profound or insightful writing an eloquent blog post around it doesn't make it so.
This entire thesis is a shallow waste of time designed to provoke passionate refutations. Its like a young girl who cries I'm so ugly hoping for a chorus of praise to bolster her ego.