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Comment by tqi | Hacker News Reader

> The elevation of an undifferentiated mass of online voices has instead resulted in a large-scale manifestation of what American critic Elizabeth Hardwick, in 1959, referred to as “a sort of democratic euphoria that may do the light book a service but will hardly meet the needs of a serious book.”

I'm not sorry that we no longer have a monoculture with a generally agreed upon definition of what a "serious book" is, bestowed upon us by "serious critics." I don't buy the idea that literary criticism accomplished anything except act as gate keepers that ensured only the right voices were celebrated.

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>I'm not sorry that we no longer have a monoculture with a generally agreed upon definition of what a "serious book" is

I am. Instead of having something for people reading to aspire to and get to something better, and people serious about books and literature, we just have each person's arbitrary "taste".

Plus leisure reading being at an all time low.

Personal taste is not a bad thing. But it's something people develop, among other things by having guidance and a compass.

Instead, today we build a god of our whims and facile enjoyment, and declare our personal uniformed and under-developed taste the ultimate arbiter.

That's basically arrested literary development.

> just have each person's arbitrary "taste"

cocks gun

https://i.imgur.com/iRtrBOr.png

Always has been

You'd be surprised.

At it's worst, criticism (of any type) is mere gate keeping. At it's best though, it's intelligent informed contextualization. Which takes real work.

Your odds of finding the latter by randomly sampling the mass opinion is approximately zero. But clearly it has value. So it's a quandary, how do you tear down the institutionalized gate keeping without reducing everything to superficial opinion? How do you find a better way to pull signal out of all that noise?

Literary criticism isn't it though, the reason people don't care is that those critics doesn't laud the books people like. If they dug up new Harry Potters to take the world by storm people would care, but as is there is little value in their work. If you think that Harry Potter isn't good then you are one of the bad gate keepers since that kind of book is what people wants to read.

To speak sensibly about what is good, we have to define what we mean by 'good' in this context. You can define 'good' as 'popular' if you like, but I don't think that corresponds with how most people use the word, and nor is it particularly useful. (We already have a word for popular.)

This doesn't mean that 'good' = 'lauded by highbrow critics', either. But it's okay to have a concept of literary quality that isn't reducible to popularity or pure entertainment value; it's okay to value things like psychological insight, or beautiful complexity, or the capacity of a book to broaden its readers' circle of empathy.

We will never all agree on which qualities matter most or which books best exemplify them. Employing these unavoidably fuzzy and subjective concepts certainly opens the door for pretentious charlatans to barge in and do their thing. We should adopt a sceptical stance toward any and all cultural gatekeepers, and exercise our own judgment. But there's still no need to flatten our concept of literary quality down into something objectively measurable.

... and by definition, John Grisham, Danielle Steel, David Baldacci, Janet Evanovich, Brandon Sanderson, Michael Connelly, Nicholas Sparks, and Lee and Andrew Child are the best writers in the world.

Don't know the others, but Grisham is really good in his field (not the best, but good), and Sanderson is probably the best in the fantasy realm, although maybe Cook is better for some? , and others might argue Feist wrote the best trilogy yet.

Those are the top-selling authors from 2020; by the only objective criteria, Grisham is the best book length fiction author and Sanderson is fifth. Everything else is subjective, personal opinions.

A critic who only recommends what's on the best-seller list seems rather redundant.

They're imagining a kind of critic who can identify the _next_ best-seller while it is still in obscurity.

By that measure Coca-Cola is the best drink ever made, and pablum like the Avengers is the best movie ever made.

You are conflating good and popular which leads to a lot of confusion. They aren’t unrelated, but all these positions are false:

- something can't be really popular and really good

- something can't be really good but not popular

- something can't be popular but not very good

It is, of course, also quite possible to be not good and not popular but this isn't very interesting.

You suggest that gatekeeping is always a bad thing.

> I don't buy the idea that literary criticism accomplished anything except act as gate keepers that ensured only the right voices were celebrated.

Go back to 1959 then. You had serious literary critics. You also had the New York Times bestseller list. How much overlap was there? I can't be sure, since that was a bit before my time, but I strongly suspect that the answer is "not much". The public didn't pay much attention to the highbrow critics back then, either.

What the highbrow critics did was gatekeep what the highbrow people read. Or perhaps what they admitted to read, or claimed that they read. The general public may have read the highbrow reviews - aspirational high-brow-ism was more of a thing in that day than it is now, I suspect - but I doubt it swayed the public's actual buying and reading habits all that much.

It's hardly a monoculture, the canon of literary classics is pretty diverse.

It's about attention again. You are saying that we shouldn't give all the attention to a few arbitrarily selected writers. That it is better that our attention is shattered into innumerable fragments and dusted across the vast landscape of democratised content.

This is replacing literature with social media, and I can't agree it is a good thing.

That's a facile comparison. Novels written by people who aren't millionaires isn't "replacing literature with social media" any more than teaching the classics is replacing literature with religion. More creatives having more opportunity to reach an audience is a good thing. People being able to read what makes them happy is a good thing.

Millionaires? I have no idea what you are talking about. Anyway what you describe is a version of the 'repugnant conclusion' except for art [1].

[1] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/repugnant-conclusion/

"Non-millionaires" was how I described the recent surge of small-time authors whose work was early referred to as "social media".

> You are saying that we shouldn't give all the attention to a few arbitrarily selected writers.

No, actually what I'm saying is we no longer need some Oxbridge Harold Bloom knockoff to select those few arbitrary writers for us.

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