Long-standing literary magazines are struggling to stay afloat
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I had a friend drop out of Ph.D in Japanese Lit because he felt the only way to progress in his dept. was to purposefully try to come up with the most wild interpretation he could that leaned extremely left and he felt that was intellectually dishonest and disrespectful of the author.
This not only alienates people outside the literary bubble but makes it harder to communicate in good faith inside of it. This would have a chilling effect on subscriptions even inside the literary community.
I’m getting high school Lord of the Flies english class flashbacks.
Teacher: why did they kill the pig
Me: because they were hungry.
Teacher: NO! It was the author telling you that they were descending into savages!
Me: I’m pretty sure they were hungry. This is the first time they ate anything in the book. I’m also wondering about the bathroom situation
On the other hand, good (or even just competent) authors usually put things in the book for a reason, usually for a narrative, character development, or thematic/message reason.
Everything in a book was put there on purpose. In most books that aren't terrible, there's some reason the author chose one thing over another. The pig may be there because the author felt a need to explain how the kids could eat and survive, so that's one purpose—but there were other ways to do that. It's entirely reasonable to wonder why a pig and why is the scene exactly that way when both things could have been totally different.
It's difficult to write well, yourself, without really embracing the idea that a book is crafted and the parts are there on purpose and for a reason. Some choices may genuinely end up being arbitrary, even in a very good book, but lots of them will not be.
This is nonsense. Having published two novels, I'll say with confidence that a lot of things makes it into books just because it happened to come to mind while you were writing.
Some authors will pay attention to every phrase or every word. Many do not.
This is true even for famous authors - I vividly remember an interview with one who was painted a dramatic picture of symbolism in one of his novels by an interviewer, and then asked about it, and answered that he wished he'd thought of that - he'd just liked how the sentence sounded.
A whole lot of people's interpretations are fine as people's personal head canon, but all to often people project intentions on an author they never had.
For example:
In real life someone goes to the kitchen and makes a sandwich because they're hungry. Sure, good enough.
In a book, an author including a scene in which a character makes a sandwich probably included it for reasons beyond "the character was hungry", even if the reasons are purely structural or for the author's convenience ("I needed them in the kitchen to smell the gas leak") rather than to advance a theme or mood or anything like that. Characters don't have needs, and the degree to which their satisfying normal human needs must be included in a story to maintain suspension of disbelief is typically minimal—so why spend three pages on sandwich making? There should be a reason. If that scene includes two paragraphs on the character's choice of mustard, there should be a reason (even if it's just "I thought it was funny"). That's what I mean.
It's worth interrogating the purpose of the inclusion or exclusion of elements in a book, and the details, because the construction of a book in a certain way is deliberate. That doesn't mean every book stands up to close reading. Sometimes books don't have much going on beyond the surface level (but there are still, guaranteed, reasons behind much of what makes it in, even if they're mundane structural ones—lack of reasons, or bad ones, can amount to mistakes if the included purposeless elements don't, by happenstance, improve the book) but sometimes they really do.
In The Lord of the Flies, there's no island. There are no kids. Golding made them up. Golding didn't put pigs on the island and choose to have the kids notice and then kill a couple them because that was his only option. Even if it had been, he didn't need to devote as much page-space to it as he did. He also wrote in a kid whose nickname is "Piggy", and who features prominently in the book. And there's a whole thing with a pig head on a stick in it. So yes, I think it's totally reasonable to ask "why pigs?" or "what did killing the pig mean?" or all kinds of things along those lines, without any risk whatsoever of disappearing into poorly-supported fancy.
There may well have been in that scene in Lord of the Flies, or not. I don't find it a very interesting question, because absent a statement from the author it's guesswork. And in cases where we do have authors views it is not unusual for it to turn out the guesses were wrong.
And even when there is a purpose it will often be trite or different from what you expect and unrelated to the themes of the story. E. g. a very prominent part at the start of one of my novels, which people might very well think is significant is there just because I found it amusing, with no other significance. I'd concede that counts as purpose, though, if not a purpose anyone would be likely to guess at.
> After reading this, I stand by what I wrote. There often is no reason other than that it sprung to mind while writing, with no additional intent.
But you kept it in the book. All kinds of things sprung to mind and didn't make it in, surely.
[EDIT] Also:
> I'd concede that counts as purpose, though, if not a purpose anyone would be likely to guess at.
Sure, which is why some books don't reward close reading. Which is fine. But an author's still deciding what goes in and what doesn't, what gets edited out (perhaps with some help) and what stays.
[EDIT EDIT] I don't want to quibble over your writing process or anything, my core point is simply that "there's a whole section about killing pigs because the characters were hungry" would represent poor reading, period. Lack of awareness of structural, character, thematic, allegorical, symbolic, allusive, et c., reasons for choosing to devote page space to one thing over another (or nothing), will make becoming a better reader and writer challenging at best, so it is a good idea to try to teach students those things. Whole kinds of reading would be unapproachable, and even constructing a basic narrative of one's own, unduly difficult. It's possible and sometimes rewarding to ask those sorts of questions about literature because they're not set-in-stone depictions of reality, but something a human constructed. Even documentaries typically exhibit some of these traits, and those intend to depict reality itself in some fashion—editing, shot choices, et c. In a documentary you're not watching someone eat a sandwich, you're watching a specific view of someone eating a sandwich which a human decided to show to you at exactly this point in the film. There's a reason that shot's there and not somewhere else, or some other shot isn't in its place—or there better be, at any rate. So it's likely worth asking why, if only to hone one's own documentary-making skills.
This is missing the point, which is not that you can't see meaning and that it's very likely you can guess at the authors intended meaning, but that writing with any kind of certainty about the intent of specific phrases or choices is quickly descending into an experiment in writing fiction.
> But you kept it in the book. All kinds of things sprung to mind and didn't make it in, surely.
Sometimes I kept it in the book because it sprung to mind and fit and there were no reasons to remove it. Sometimes I kept it in the book because it mattered to the plot. Sometimes because it's a fun little joke for my own enjoyment and nobody elses. Sometimes it just fit the pacing but served no other purpose. Sometimes it just sounds cool (in fact, I have a whole file of little fragments I intend to drop into future books when I find somewhere they fit for no other reason than that they sound cool as one-liners or isolated paragraphs). Sometimes because I enjoyed writing it and it's my damn book and I'll put it there if I want to whether or not it serves a purpose.
Maybe, sometime, I'll decide to put in some symbolism (likely not, I have no interest in chasing interpretations of symbolism when reading; I find it trite and conceited and wouldn't want to inflict it on readers with similar views on it as myself, which are ultimately the only readers I particularly care about).
I'm not Golding, and I don't aspire to write work that'll get picked apart in literary reviews. It has no interest to me to even try to hone my skills to Golding's level (and no illusions I'd stand much chance of achieving it). It's a hobby to me, not a life work.
You can well argue that it's different with a writer who appears to have invested a great deal more effort and skill in mastering the craft, and succeeded very well. But the point remains that unless he has spoken to it you don't know whether specific scenes were subject to agonising over phrasing or just sounded right at the time.
Some writers spend ages writing and rewriting. Some churn out a draft and fixes broken sentences and are done. Some spend ages rewriting but only the parts that are important to the plot. Without knowing the specific writers process, and how it was applied for that book, whether or not a given phrase is in there by chance or because it mattered deeply to the author is guesswork.
You can certainly analyse why it works to you as a reader. I have no objections to that. What I object to is the notion that you can say with much certainty why an author placed a given sentence there.
> "there's a whole section about killing pigs because the characters were hungry" would represent poor reading, period.
Would it? It worked, clearly. What the intent of putting it there originally was is entirely irrelevant to your subsequent experience of it. It's quite possible, maybe even likely, that your assumptions about Golding's intent are correct. The point remains that absent any statements from him it still remains a guess. And it's still not very interesting as long as it remains a guess (if Golding has spoken about it, that would be interesting to me). What is interesting is why it works for you as a reader.
I don't think anyone here has suggested you can't (or shouldn't) pick apart why a work is effective for you as a reader.
That is indeed well worth understanding if you want to write, not least because there's often a vast chasm between how writers think they'll be interpreted and how readers will take what they've written and twist it into something unrecognisable and infer all kinds of intent that was never there. You don't need to understand - or try - to avoid that when writing fiction.
On the contrary, writing works that leave lots open to interpretation is a great way of being taken way more seriously than you intended to be.
But understanding what is likely to achieve certain goals or appeal to certain types of readers certainly matters.
And it also matters to those authors, because they certainly do exist, who do have messages they want to convey. Golding certainly seems to want to hit the reader over the head with messages in a very unsubtle way, and so it's not at all unlikely you're right to read things into his choices, but it's still guesswork.
For my part, I have no intent of imparting any deeper message in my own books. I'm just playing with things I find fun, and I know that to be the case for a lot of other writers too, including many substantially better than I am.
What narrative purposes something serves are absolutely an interesting question-- whether the author intended it or not. And, in quality literature, there's a lot less put there on accident that survives the editing process.
In the end, we can't know anything about intent, but we can figure out a whole lot about what makes the book work, at least for us.
Studying this type of thing makes people into better writers and more astute readers.
I've not read your books, but you have Goodreads reviews indicating that you do a whole lot of telling the reader about your world and things rather than setting up scenes that show them. The bits with pigs in Lord of the Flies are very clear showing, with a combination of literary intent and leaving room for readers' own interpretations.
I have no problem with people discussing what purpose it serves for you. What I have problem with is this frequent notion that you know the intent of the author. Unless they told you.
> And, in quality literature, there's a lot less put there on accident that survives the editing process.
I've witnessed enough discussions with authors to not accept this for a second. It's pure fiction.
> you do a whole lot of telling the reader about your world and things rather than setting up scenes that show them.
I absolutely do, very much on purpose, because I utterly detest this obsession with showing when it comes at the cost of slowing down the story.
I much prefer older style novels that don't make you wade through paragraph after paragraph of descriptions of events that I have no interest in to get to the bits that interests me. I hate books that are afraid of delving into the thought processes of the characters or that are afraid to take shortcuts to describe the why of aspects of the world you can't reasonably show without derailing the story.
I fully accept this is a niche view, and not one that caters to mass appeal, and I'm fine with that.
(In fact, I'll give you one specific story about actual intent: I agonised for a month over feedback from my editor about breaking up the telling in the first chapter of my first novel and rephrasing it to be more "showing", and I specifically decided not to, not because I didn't agree that it'd probably have broader appeal, but because I decided I'd rather put readers that don't like my style off right from the start than lull them into false expectations; that consideration took more time than the rest of the editing combined because setting the right expectations about style from the outset mattered to me far more than any specific sentence)
I'm bothering to tell you this because it clearly does colour my attitude to analysis of literature. I write what I like reading, and I hate it when people try to guess at meanings the author haven't made clear rather than discuss it in terms of what it means to the reader, because I've seen so many utterly ridiculous outcomes of it, but also because I find it dreadfully annoying when writers are coy about their intent and encouraging that.
Now, I don't think Golding was coy in any way, but ironically, when you're being clear about your message, that too tend to egg people into over-interpreting every word to support an interpretation that doesn't need it.
I think the eating of the pig is a good example, because on one hand it's entirely possible, and likely, Golding meant it the way you think. But it is also entirely unnecessary to interpret it that way to understand the book, so it doesn't matter.
You could delete the whole thing, and the rest is still intact. In fact, you could delete most of the book and still get the message, because he keeps hammering you over the head with it - it's not a subtle book (that does make your interpretation more likely; it'd certainly seem to be in keeping with the rest for this to be Golding appearing to hammer us over the head with symbolism, but it's still a guess)
I'd argue that irrespective of the purpose of individual words or paragraphs, most of the book is there not to make the message clear, because the apparent message is trivial and bordering on trite, but to make the book a compelling read. (And yes, that is intentionally reductionist)
> The bits with pigs in Lord of the Flies are very clear showing, with a combination of literary intent and leaving room for readers' own interpretations.
And accordingly inability for you to know the actual intent. That's fine. There's nothing wrong with that. It's the presumption of to what extent you can say anything about the purpose of specific phrasings I take issue with.
I think everyone, even dedicated lit crit advocates, know that we can't know what the intent of the author is. But we can see the purpose it serves in the writing, and with a decent author be moderately confident that the important elements here are not complete accidents.
> I've witnessed enough discussions with authors to not accept this for a second. It's pure fiction.
K.
> I absolutely do, very much on purpose, because I utterly detest this obsession with showing when it comes at the cost of slowing down the story.
OK. I don't really like reading massive amounts of exposition drivel, where the author tries to convince me that the world is interesting and makes sense without example.
If I drop in a couple page digression about a character making a sandwich-- why?
- Does the character make the sandwich in the expected way, consistent with the way I, as the author, view them in general?
- Does this fastidious, fussy character carefully arrange his ingredients like I would normally picture him doing so, or does he throw them together?
- If he does something different from how the reader probably pictures them to this point, is it an accident, or am I revealing something about his state of mind or an unexpected other side of his character?
- Do I need some obvious break in the action; some downtime. Do I need to make it clear that the characters are obviously unhurried and open to leisurely talking or exploration next? Do I need to put the characters in some specific place for the next step to happen?
- Did I just run out of things to write that advance the main story, and I'm just doing random things at this point? If I'm taking a digression, or I'm doing something different from what would seem to be in character, I'd hope I'm doing it for a reason.
- Yes, there's still aspects that are totally without purpose. Putting a tomato on the sandwich may not be super meaningful (though it actually does still tell us small things about the world the characters inhabit, and is hopefully still consistent with other things we've been shown/told).
Authors have a whole lot of freedom, but what makes a cohesive story is already a highly constrained sequence of events compared to what could be written on the page. If you want that story to hit with maximum impact, there's yet fewer good choices.
> but also because I find it dreadfully annoying when writers are coy about their intent and encouraging that.
OK, so--- you detest hidden and layered meanings, and assert your writing doesn't have many. That's OK, but assuming that this is representative of most literature isn't valid.
> I'd argue that irrespective of the purpose of individual words or paragraphs, most of the book is there not to make the message clear, because the apparent message is trivial and bordering on trite, but to make the book a compelling read.
For most books, sure! But -why- is it a compelling read? As Chekhov said -- "If you say in the first chapter that there is a rifle hanging on the wall, in the second or third chapter it absolutely must go off. If it's not going to be fired, it shouldn't be hanging there." Every word is a chance to create tension and to play with readers' expectations for what may happen next-- and then fulfill or subvert these expectations. Good literature does this a lot.
This can be a beautiful thing. Reading Mending Wall by Frost, and all of his ambiguity --- wait, does the author like walls or not, and why won't he tell me? Realizing that the first couple sentences were talking about frost not liking a wall was a pure hidden delight. Perhaps this was an accident, but I doubt it... and the meaning's there whether he intended it or not.
I've personally had discussions with lit crit advocates who argue not only that they can know the intent of the author, but that they can know the intent of the author even when the author contradicts their interpretations.
I'm glad you're not one of them, but they very much do exist, and rejecting the notion that you can know the intent of the author with any reliability was the main point of my original reply.
> But we can see the purpose it serves in the writing, and with a decent author be moderately confident that the important elements here are not complete accidents.
Depends on what you mean by "moderately confident". There are enough cases of authors completely shooting down claims of critics about the meaning of paragraphs that it's clear it's often not at all obvious you can have much confidence in it. (I'd love to see someone try to quantify the accuracy of critics by surveying authors; that'd be fascinating)
Nobody here is objecting to you setting out your theories. My objection was solely to the notion we know the authors intent.
> OK. I don't really like reading massive amounts of exposition drivel, where the author tries to convince me that the world is interesting and makes sense without example.
To me the most interesting parts often are the parts where the author tries to convince me that the world is interesting by telling me about the world. I often find myself skimming past dialogue and descriptions of the characters actions to get to the part that lets me see the world with a birds eye view in exposition because I find the world building and the concept far more interesting than characters that are usually insignificant in the grand scheme of things (and most characters are). I've done that with many fantastic pieces of highly renowned literature because I know it's not the characters I remember once I'm done with a book - often not even the story - but the world and the concepts. Often I find the focus on showing to result in overwrought drivel that is contrived because the author is afraid of just telling us something and need to concoct contrived conversations etc. to show us instead.
We clearly value books for very different reasons. That's fine.
> Authors have a whole lot of freedom, but what makes a cohesive story is already a highly constrained sequence of events compared to what could be written on the page. If you want that story to hit with maximum impact, there's yet fewer good choices.
The problem with this is that you're presuming a specific, fixed story. But absent a statement from the author you have no direct knowledge of the set of possible variations over the story the author might have considered. Some outline in great detail, but that just introduces a step of regression. Others let the story unfold from nothing. For my part, I recursively iterate until I have about 1 line per 1k-2k words. At that point I've somewhat constrained myself, and so there won't be 4000 word digressions, but there sure as hell can be and are multiple paragraphs that I hadn't thought about and that just ends up there without any particular purpose because it felt right when I wrote it.
Back to the point: You won't know whether a given section was a result of that, or was something deeply meaningful to me without asking. You can speculate, and you're of course free to do that.
> OK, so--- you detest hidden and layered meanings, and assert your writing doesn't have many. That's OK, but assuming that this is representative of most literature isn't valid.
This, to me, is an illustration of why you can't presume to know the authors intent, as you here infer an intent behind my words that was not there. It's not strange - I did not elaborate. But it does show how easy it is to think you know the intent behind something and miss it.
To start with, I don't assume that this is representative of most literature. Nowhere did I say it was. That's an inference you made without support in what I wrote. I do assume that given there is a significant number of works for which this is true, and statements where it is true even in works for which it is not for the work as a whole, there is no reliable basis for drawing conclusions about the intent of the author unless they've spoken about it.
That does not mean you can't present possible interpretations and discuss those, of course. The two are entirely orthogonal. It doesn't matter what Golding intended with the pigs as long as it can be read in a given way, to bring it back, and you can discuss to what extent it contributes to the readers interpretation. That remains possible whether or not Golding just happened to be eating bacon when he wrote it or planned it out.
I also did not say that I detest hidden and layered meanings. I said that I find it dreadfully annoying when writers are coy about it and "encouraging [making unsupported guesses]". What I meant was not that there can't be purpose, and layered purpose behind decisions, but I don't like it when it appears the writer is intentionally trying to make it hard to get at the intent of a passage in ways which encourages overwrought interpretations or leave people hanging.
To take a concrete example, in my novels one of the characters have had her eyes replaced by artificial eyes. On purpose. It serves a direct and very overt purpose in the story in that it allows for abilities that are used and directly impacts the plot. As such there's a very obvious surface purpose there. I'll concede that in those cases there's a case to insist people can know my purpose, because there's a direct causal link to the plot.
But for my own part I also liked adding them rather than e.g. giving her wearable tech to achieve the same purpose because I hate wearing glasses and love the idea of being able to use tech to replace the need entirely. So there's a hidden meaning there to me, but not one I've dropped hints about in the text. I don't object to writers doing that at all, as it doesn't affect me as a reader.
If I do feel the urge to reveal that purpose in the text, however, I'll be direct about it rather than drop hints. I won't have her react negatively to someone wearing glasses or talk about how annoying it must be, or otherwise be coy about it by implying there's another layer to that choice but leave the reader hanging. I'll have her give someone that as reason for having made her change. I might well do that at some point. I fully get that some people love it when the writing is all mysterious and the writer isn't giving up their secrets. For my part I find that just about as annoying as if they'd ended a book on a cliffhanger. I want to dive into the reasons and what lies beneath them, not be stuck speculating because the author refuses to tell me after they've teased it by dropping hints. If you prefer the mystery that's fine, that's your choice. To me it feels lazy - you avoid having to find ways of giving an answer without it being contrived or disappointing. This does also tend to make me dislike symbolism embedded in works that are external to the work and can't really be revealed "in world" because it feels gratuitous.
> For most books, sure! But -why- is it a compelling read?
The why is separate from the writers intent. So we're back to my purpose with my initial response on this thread: I don't object to people exploring why it's a compelling read at all. On the contrary. What I object to is the idea you know the authors intent. By all means, explore why it's a compelling read.
> As Chekhov said -- "If you say in the first chapter that there is a rifle hanging on the wall, in the second or third chapter it absolutely must go off. If it's not going to be fired, it shouldn't be hanging there." Every word is a chance to create tension and to play with readers' expectations for what may happen next-- and then fulfill or subvert these expectations. Good literature does this a lot.
I find it fascinating that you first give this Chekov quote here and then argue for subverting expectations after a quote that tells you explicitly to excluding objects unless you're prepared to meet the expectations their presence creates. For my part, I strongly disagree with Chekov there. I get the why - it creates a strong focus on the story. If you want that, then it's the right thing to do. But to me it leaves the resulting worlds cold and barren in a way that strips it of interest to me. I want to know about all of the details that do not matter to the story but tells me about the world and creates an atmosphere. A book where a rifle on the wall means it will be used, to me is one stripped of wonder and mystery.
> This can be a beautiful thing. Reading Mending Wall by Frost, and all of his ambiguity --- wait, does the author like walls or not, and why won't he tell me? Realizing that the first couple sentences were talking about frost not liking a wall was a pure hidden delight. Perhaps this was an accident, but I doubt it... and the meaning's there whether he intended it or not.
You don't need to know or claim to know the writers intent to be able to take delight in that. You're free to imagine whatever interpretation you choose. I'm not arguing you shouldn't. I'm arguing against assuming you know the writers intent, and only that. I used to write a lot of poetry, and more than once ended up in arguments with people who claimed to have found some hidden meaning I'd supposedly inserted. I had to explain to them that I had no objections to them finding those meanings in it, but those were not mine, they were theirs. That's not at all to say that others don't insert all kinds of hidden meanings in what they write, but I would not presume to know, that's all.
Can’t you ask yourself why this is what came to mind, and why you kept it on in later drafts? It seems like the same question. Said differently, it’s asking why this part works, rather than why you wrote it, right?
This of course does not hold for everything. Some parts are essential plot elements. Some writers in some works absolutely do pound you over the head with symbolism on purpose, or layer in things you might never notice. But that doesn't mean everything in a book has a message or a purpose other than to read well. Some things are just filler.
Nathaniel Hawthorne didn't choose scarlet because it was his favorite color.
> there's some reason the author chose one thing over another.
Like the significance of the number 42?
Sometimes you just put in pig because it was the first thing the author thought of. Not everything has hidden meaning.
Over-analyzing something happens quite a bit. Sometimes it's just there, for no particular reason.
> Like the significance of the number 42?
Maybe 42 was arbitrary. Maybe Adams just like the sound of it (still a reason!) Making the answer a number with no particular obvious meaning was surely not arbitrary or accidental (would it read the same if he'd picked 3.1459...? Or 7?)
Adams was stuck on what the answer should be.
He eventually decided it should be "should be something that made no sense whatsoever – a number, and a mundane one at that"
He was writing radio plays, too. I am sure he was thinking of how it sounded, too.
Could another number hold up there? Sure. Could any number hold up? Thirteen or seven or two hundred sixteen wouldn't have been a cultural touchstone, and this isn't entirely by accident.
Where'd I write anything like that?
> Plenty of times, things are there, because it experiment or atmosphere or even needing to make it longer.
Even then, the author's picking one thing to put in over a bunch of others they could have chosen. Novels are artificial, what goes in them is what the author decides is best to be there. Often, there's a reason for their choice. Stopping at "the characters were hungry" is leaving a lot of potential meaning on the table. OK—but why, of all the ways that could have been addressed, did the author write that they killed a pig? Why wasn't it sufficient for that to be "off-screen"? Why was that more important to include than other things that could have filled those same pages?
This is especially a valid path to pursue when there are other cues that a book may be operating on more than a strictly literal level, and there definitely are such indications in that one. The final line does all it can without grabbing the reader by the lapels and slapping them, to communicate that the book's more than just a simple story about some kids stuck on an island. At a minimum, it's got some allegory going on, because it all but says as much at the end.
[EDIT] The killing of a pig features heavily in a book that tells you at the end it's got at least some allegory going on, and a major character is nicknamed "Piggy", I might add. Like... yes, I think it's very fair to say that's included and plays out the way it does for reasons other than "the kids were hungry".
Why did she wear a red sweater? Why was it set at the equator? Why did it rain? Why is the only named plant a phylodendron? Why did they leave for 2 days and not 3? Why did journey go north instead of east?
People convinced that all art is created by careful choice-making at every possible juncture seem to find it a little difficult to accept that the creator(s) of a piece of art that they like may not even have experienced a particular story/view/sound/structure point as a choice at all.
There's flights of fancy, and then there's not being able to understand literature.
That is not the issue.
The issue is to then assume that this must have been the intent of the author all along unless they've actually told you.
There's nothing wrong with not knowing with certainty the intent of the author. That does not take anything away from your interpretation. But often people seek to ascribe intent to the author in an attempt to assert authority over what the "true" meaning of a work is.
Where are these magical strawpeople? :D
This is high school level analysis. These are straightforward reasons.
> Everything in a book was put there on purpose
This I think is just not true. This is true in simple literature, in adventure books and in streamline writing production.
Yes. The hang up here seemed to be at exactly that level, though. At the very least it's useful to keep those things in mind and look out for them. That does not mean it's where things end. I took the original post to suggest that even this is too much, which is simply incorrect unless one wishes to be stuck at about a 6th grade reading level forever. There are bad teachers who don't even convey the basics well, and analyses may sometimes go pretty far into fairy-land at higher levels, but considering why pig-killing features so much in Lord of the Flies is something worth thinking about for a good reader, beyond "the characters were hungry". But yes, of course that's not exactly an advanced analysis, death of the author, et c. But it is table stakes for even beginning to appreciate literature or understand how stories (even blockbuster film scripts!) are typically assembled. Some amount of purpose plays a role in at least some decisions in practically all stories, and understanding how that works will make a person a better reader and writer. But I agree with you, it's not the end of that journey, nor is it advanced, and I don't think I wrote that it was.
> This I think is just not true. This is true in simple literature, in adventure books and in streamline writing production.
Short of experiments in randomly-assembled literature, it is true. It does not mean every single little detail has a grand purpose, but it does mean that the words on the page were placed there by a person, who could have instead put different words there, or nothing at all. Some things may still be arbitrary, but their inclusion was not—you don't get an arbitrarily-chosen type of flower without both choosing to include a flower and choosing to name what kind of flower it is.
Details may be chosen simply because the author likes the image they paint, or just has a preference (which are still reasons!) Others details may be dictated by the needs of the narrative ("why did this take two days, and not one or three? Because it needed to to fit some other piece of machinery in the narrative, no special meaning beyond that") or simple fidelity to reality in cases where there's no reason to strain suspension of disbelief. Of course all that's true—but it's also true that an author can do anything with a blank page, and instead of all the other things they could have done, did what you see before you.
It is other way rounds- these are way more manufactured and processed up to details. That is why they are so repetitive, formulaic and predictive. The studios don't take risks with these. They always have the same ending, are designed to cause same feelings etc. It is also current method of writing scripts and analysing movies.
That is not the case for all books a cross cultures and history of literature. Authors, including famous ones, in fact did placed things in "just because" and were not ashamed of it. At times super proud of it even (or lying about it too). They did experiments too. And they had deadlines they had to fill, which was very real thing that did notnalways even allowed them to gauge every detail. And this includes famous writers.
There are two different things here: It certainly is table stakes for understanding why and how works function for the reader. As such it matters for writers who want to achieve a certain effect.
Then there's the question of the intent of the author, and that is an entirely different question.
The first you can determine, the latter you can only speculate about unless the author has flat out told you.
But very often an investigation into the former is presented as an investigation into the latter, and turned from a reasonable objective and supportable process into little more than speculative fiction.
I guess a better teacher could argue that the way they killed the pig was important to the message in the book.
> He picked his way up the scar, passed the great rock where Ralph had climbed on the first morning, then turned off to his right among the trees. He walked with an accustomed tread through the acres of fruit trees, where the least energetic could find an easy if unsatisfying meal. Flower and fruit grew together on the same tree and everywhere was the scent of ripeness and the booming of a million bees at pasture.
There's more than enough fruit for everybody to eat. That's not why the boys hunt. Hunting is explicitly equated with the military; with the human urge to fight and kill.
> "The choir belongs to you, of course."
> "They could be the army--"
> "Or hunters--"
> "They could be--"
> The suffusion drained away from Jack's face. Ralph waved again for silence.
> "Jack's in charge of the choir. They can be--what do you want them to be?"
> "Hunters."
The hunters eventually start ritualistically killing the other boys in their "hunts." The ending links the boys' savagery to the savagery of WWI, when the naval officers find them.
> And in the middle of them, with filthy body, matted hair, and unwiped nose, Ralph wept for the end of innocence, the darkness of man's heart, and the fall through the air of the true, wise friend called Piggy.
> The officer, surrounded by these noises, was moved and a little embarrassed. He turned away to give them time to pull themselves together; and waited, allowing his eyes to rest on the trim cruiser in the distance.
This is the last line in the book. Golding isn't being subtle about this.
For instance, you're factually wrong about Lord of the Flies. The pig wasn't the first thing they ate. The island is described at the very start as a natural paradise with more than enough food to feed all the boys.
Jack starts hunting because he wants to kill, not because he needs to eat, and it unfolds into this whole primitive religion celebrating murder. It gets pretty explicit when the boys start killing each other while chanting ritualistic hunting chants. The ending very directly links the savagery which inexorably unfolded on the island to WWI when a bunch of British naval officers show up and say, "wow, can't believe nice civilized boys would do something like this," while staring at their battleship on the horizon.
If you commit yourself to this weird attitude that subtext and metaphor don't exist and everything is literal, you miss out on the ideas underlying the text. That's exactly why high school English class tries to get you to dig deeper.
edit: In real life, talking about meaning and purpose and God is a matter of opinion and culture (or maybe direct revelation, I don't know your experiences) but in fiction, there's always a God, and it's the person who wrote it.
The "explanation" you're referring to is what criticism is attempting to provide.
edit: That's why it hopped from a psychological theory of everything like Freudianism in the first part of the 20th century to a materialist theory of everything in Marxism in the 60s. They're frameworks for answering questions that weren't directly answered in the work. Part of making writing interesting is prompting questions that you trick people into answering themselves.
- Assume the author didn't just mean what they wrote (and suppress any possible evidence to the contrary such as interviews where the author specifically stated that they meant simply what they wrote)
- Impose a binary oppositional worldview onto the text to "find meaning". I used to flip a coin or roll a dice to select "communism vs. capitalism", "fascism vs freedom", "gender politics", "racial politics", etc. It didn't matter what it was, you simply had to pick one. In advanced classes you pick two or more. So an analysis might be themed around "gender politics as viewed by the anti-fascist communist author".
- Direct the analysis to favor the more leftist viewpoint(s) unless it was specifically understood that the author favored the alternative.
- Evidence to support your views are generally direct quotes from the text, liberally interpreted to fit the assumed analysis.
then
Mechanically create paper, receive "A" grade, be asked to sit in the advanced analysis, and gender studies lit classes the next semesters.
Only a Sith deals in absolutes! (As you dismiss all dismissals).
Literary criticism has reached increasing levels of "sophistication" where frankly a big fraction of it deserves to be dismissed.
Conversely, people who dismiss looking for literary intentions, possible alternative interpretations on other axes of thought, and reasons that the structure works are foolish as well.
I think where one goes awry and too far is when one insists that a specific interpretation is particularly valid without any real evidence of authorial intent or that other readings don't make sense. The lit crit world is buried in these insistences.
There's a tremendous value to being able dissect a text, form an argument, and defend it. But what students ultimately find is that executing this well and demonstrating the validity of a viewpoint is not really the primary evaluation point but rather that the content conforms to pre-decided avenues of thought. These departments have the trappings and ceremony of rational thought, but none of the ability to face the revelations of diverse truths and viewpoints that challenge the established status quo.
As a result millions of students leave the classes without the tools to read and analyze for comprehension and to form coherent and rational opinions that reflect the things that are important to them. Even worse, when they are presented with these cognitive models, they've "learned" to reject them. These tools can not only reflect thought, but also help shape it. Critical thinking results from it.
Even if it is the minority (from my anecdotal understanding it isn't) it would become like toxic waste in a professional community.
Also how would you even survey that? "Do you have zero disregard for objective truth and only interpret things to gain political capital by in-group signaling?"
Why not a survey given to undergrads of if they think this is the case? If you can detect this is going on surely others in your position could too.
You could also find a way to analyze the results of research produced now vs before in a particular field. Not sure how that would work necessarily
If the only way to measure this is someone's individual's general opinion, then the premise may be flawed from the start.
I am not saying it IS the reason. Just surmising that it might be. If you feel the need for a survey and review to think things then that is admirable but time is not in your favor.
In any case, this is not a statistical argument, and your comment adds nothing but noise to the discussion.
As someone else pointed out below, speculative fiction magazines are doing just fine, and you'd be hard-pressed to find ideas that WOULDN'T be considered "wild" in the field of SciFi or Fantasy.
1) Wild ideas INSIDE a given work of literature
2) Wild ideas ABOUT a given work of literature
Eg. Most recently this surfaced outside of the literary community around Sam and Frodo's relationship in LOTR and whether or not they were gay.
This seems to me like a perfectly legitimate question.
>No. I think it's become something of a parlor game for some people to read that kind of thing into everything they encounter. HAL was a "straight" computer.
From an interview with Kubrick in 1970[0]. The attempt to transform every male-male relationship in every piece of media to homosexuality has sadly killed the concept of friendship in media, just like it did to Xena and Gabrielle. It's okay for friendship to just be friendship.
I think what is interesting, and most valuable, is that people will find one way or another to attack any normalization of non-cisnormal sexuality. Why is that?
(Also, one example doesn't prove anything.)
To sum it up in a snarky pithy phrase: the culture was so misogynistic that it became gay, because romance requires another person. It is reflected a bit in sheer rarity of female characters in LOTR.
Romantic friendships were a norm in the past largely forgotten in more open times where we are used to noticing obvious repression and "closet cases". In a way the real past manages to be even more alien than fantasy worlds with elves and dwarves.
I think the way to approach that is, what makes it necessarily 'wild', and why does that matter? Nonbinary sexuality is hardly political - it's been a natural part of the human race (and our ancestors and cousins) forever, long before current politics.
What makes it 'wild' is that it challenges norms to even ask the question. What makes it political is that anyone challenging norms tends to have their views politicized and suppressed - grab the torches and pitchforks. Later, when the same thing becomes normalized, it becomes something the next generation of conservatives defends.
The old saying is very true: 'First they laugh at you, then they say it violates the scripture, then they say they believed it all along.' (Except it omits the hatred and lynching.)
F&SF is down to six issues a year (they had 8 in 2009, and 11 from 1991-2008). Analog and Asimov's each dropped from 10 to 6 in 2017 (and each went from 11 to 10 in 2003).
That's not what I'd call 'just fine'.
50 years ago, it was largely considered pulp and not real literature (though I would argue that plenty of "real literature" was being written in the genre, it just wasn't widely accepted as such by contemporaries). Even the few works that were accepted, people often claimed that it wasn't really SF.
More recently, it is increasingly being accepted that being SF doesn't inherently reduce something's literary value, so SF magazines have had more room to grow.
Even with that, a lot of the traditional leaders among SF magazines have been struggling. What's doing well are the newer online-first magazines, most notably Tor.com, which has boatloads of money to throw around (by short fiction standards) and doesn't need to be financially self-sustaining because it is effectively a loss-leader for their novels.
Mid-tier literary journals generally don't, and their editors often act insulted if the topic is raised, so the issue doesn't seem to just be that they can't afford to pay. There's seemingly an expectation that until you've already "made it" you should be working for free.
Indeed, I would suggest that we encourage curiosity in others when we see it.
Isn't this what happens on every HN thread, people expressing opinions relevant to the topic? Or is it only forbidden when criticizing descendants of the Frankfurt School?
Without a framework, literary criticism seems completely pointless, though. There's only so far you can go with trying to figure out what the author is trying to say - the author is usually very articulate and said it.
With due respect, that is a common and almost complete misunderstanding literature and literary criticism. It's not about decoding the author, but about exploring the things (to use the most generic term possible) that the author conveys, both in what the author writes and how the critic responds, and out in the world.
> the author is usually very articulate and said it.
The author isn't writing a technical manual; they are not complete, correct, consistent, nor are they deducing from perfect knowledge. A much closer analogy, and to speak very broadly, is that they are setting off on a voyage into the unknown - which is what we all do in life and reality - and expressing their perspective on it.
Try a review in the London Review of Books or New York Review of Books; you'll get a much better sense of what the real thing is like. Unfortunately, many only know high school book reports.
That doesn't even start to describe it [0]. You can get fired for using a Chinese word that sounds vaguely like a slur!
[0] https://nypost.com/2020/09/06/professor-placed-on-leave-for-...
Hacker News!
In this case, people aren't analysing a molecule or RFC that exists in isolation from its context, and has limited content. It's not a problem to solve.
What they are analysing (not a great word IMHO - 'exploring', perhaps) is something heavily defined by its context - the book (or any art) is defined by its specific words, the world around it, and the person reading it. Its content is almost unlimited. Shakespeare's Julius Caesar means something much different in 2022 than in 1822, and something much different to you than to me than to Shakespeare than to George Bernard Shaw, and it there is so much to explore that you will never exhaust it, that shifts and changes as you travel through it.
It's not a problem to solve, but an entire world to explore. You don't run out of things to learn and say about the real world either.
I've read some analyses of Lord of the Rings. 98% just sounds like bullshit. Maybe JRR Tolkien just wanted to write a great story! and there's nothing more than that. Sure the story was influenced by his life experiences, like trench warfare. So what.
I wish I could read it again for the first time :-)
On one hand, there is nothing like it and I wish I had that unmatched emotional surge again, like a drug! On the other, I get much more out of LOTR now than the first time - a more sublime, but still incredible experience.
> 98% just sounds like bullshit.
Well that's circular, not evidence. 'I hate Chinese food, and 98% of it tastes terrible!'
I wish I could find a way to say this without sounding like a condesceng a--, but I truly mean it genuinely: There is really something there, that I think (without presuming) you are missing - something incredible, life changing, intellect expanding to an incredible degree. It gives access to not just one idea, but the entire world of art in incredible technicolor that few see. If you decide to, maybe start with the Tolkien book below. Or I recommend the London Review of Books - the art and book reviews, not the political stuff - there are people with an unabashed, unhesitating passion for art.
> Maybe JRR Tolkien just wanted to write a great story!
Maybe it's a secret code of the Illuminati. The evidence says strongly otherwise: read On Fairy-stories by Tolkien [1], which is pretty short, absolutely stunning, and where he lays out much of his approach to art. Tolkien was also an all-time leading scholar of Old English (Anglo-Saxon) - arguably as important in that field as in fantasy fiction, a two-domain genius - and studied much of historic myth, which he read in their original languages; he studied and thought more about it than almost anyone who lived.
And what is a 'great story'? Obviously, the LOTR is much more to people than a fun plot, as is all art. I don't think a great story exists that isn't more, or people wouldn't experience it as great. And like a great bottle of wine, many will miss out on much of it if they don't learn to understand it. If you limit your experience to a fun plot, that's your choice but your loss, like going to a musuem and never leaving the lobby.
[1] Get the recent edition, ~2008 or 2014; the fantastic editor's notes explain many of Tolkien's references that come from deep in his knowledge of myth.
Maybe, but an author is not somehow magically insulated from their own context and cultural experience. We can explore, for example, how an author's life experiences affect(ed) their work - even if that author didn't put those effects in intentionally.
I find it interesting (and, admittedly, frustrating) that a community like HN that likes to think of itself as being intellectually curious will at the same time insist on only the most surface-level art analysis.
'Cause I guess if it's not software it's not worth thinking deeply about.
Lots of people like to think of themselves as intellectually curious, including me and you! Let's not look at the mote in our HN neighbor's eye ... :)
Art challenges norms and people instinctively reject things that challenge their norms. On top of that, extreme reactionary culture is very 'normalized' now, so being closed-minded is legitimized rather than being seen as an embrace of ignorance.
Hah fair enough. I may not be an art critic, but my point is that I try not to just outright dismiss the entire field the way I often see in tech communities.
(Also, aside: I've really appreciated your contributions in this thread.)
> if it's not software it's not worth thinking deeply about
I'm not offended if people don't think deeply about D. It's designed to be fun and highly useful. If somebody wrote an essay about D having some metaphysical deep meaning, I'd probably have a good laugh!
What basis is there to say they are more radical? People who follow the norms have been complaining about it for forever. The difference, I suspect, is that now reactionary, radical capitalist politics (we really need a word for that part of the spectrum) have become dominant, and they do not value, respect, or believe in the freedom of other perspectives. They think that if they don't like something, it should be suppressed, and they do it.
Universities have always been 'radical'; that's the idea. They are supposed to nurture free, unconstrained thinking. It's not hard to think beyond what is mainstream and normative; if people an universities aren't saying and writing things that most people think goes too far, then they aren't trying. Also, much that was radical then is normal now, and much that is radical now will be normal in the future.
I disagree that they're necessarily more radical as the other commenter suggested, by they are absolutely far more bias towards left-leaning viewpoints. So much so that in many cases I believe its restricted free thought more so than nurtured it. Many students fear that if they have an opinion which doesn't align with the administrations stated political narrative then they could face academic, social, and/or administrative repercussions.
I could go on and on and on about this subject. I am very near to opening a coffee shop in Chicago that will also function as a kind of arcade for writing and reading. I have also been developing a web app to attempt to formalize the process and craft of literary production. I believe literature, and even new literature, to be resilient, and novel implementations will be discovered. Long-standing literary institutions do perhaps needs to fail first.
Mainly because if the government funds it, then they become the customer. Arts programs become designed to appeal to whatever the current set of civil servants think is worth funding. Academics get pulled in and join the bubble. The whole mess starts moving away from any kind of relevance to wider society and disappears up its own intellectual orifice.
And the sheer arrogance of arts intellectuals saying "we're invaluable for society, so we should be paid by the government to do whatever we want to do" beggars belief.
I'm way happier for the market to decide. There are viable business models out there for good quality content with niche appeal. It doesn't all have to be mass-market pap to be commercially sustainable.
Failing that, there's always UBI. We should all be paid by the government to do whatever we want.
I don't necessarily disagree that there are business models that could support good quality content, or that UBI is a good way to keep arts alive; maybe we could have all three.
I mean, we don't live in a representative democracy. Not in the sense you're describing.
(Assuming you, like me, live in the U.S.) Civil servants are not elected, are not directly accountable to elected officials, and are certainly not drawn from a representative cross section of the public. You may feel like they represent you, but that is (to be frank) little more than an expression of your own place in society. Civil servants form a discrete and powerful class, with their own interests, unions, and lobbying groups. Ignoring this is, optimistically, naive.
I will say I think your general picture of civil servants as a cabal of lobbyists and special interest does apply to a portion (arguably a disproportionately powerful portion) of them, but the population of civil servants is huge and is definitely not monolithic.
More accurately, they want someone else to fund it. They don't find it worthwhile to spend their own money on it.
> the sheer arrogance of arts intellectuals saying "we're invaluable for society, so we should be paid by the government to do whatever we want to do" beggars belief.
The arts aren't the only place where this happens. A lot of scientific/medical research is in part or whole funded by public money. Is your belief just as beggared by "the sheer arrogance of scientists saying: we're invaluable for society, so we should be paid by the government to study whatever we want"?
> I'm way happier for the market to decide. There are viable business models out there for good quality content with niche appeal. It doesn't all have to be mass-market pap to be commercially sustainable.
I see a connection between people trying to carve out a living in OSS and in the arts. Many artists and OSS developers are just people who work a day job that they may like, hate, or be indifferent to--and then go do something they are passionate about in their spare time.
Do we, at scale, have a better society when most of these people's productive hours are fettered to whatever pays their bills (whether it uses their talents or squanders them) and they have to squirrel away energy for those passions--or are we better off when they can chase what makes them want to wake up on this side of the dirt every day?
Here's a very simple model of an art ecosystem which can't be sustained by the free market: "Popular art" is widely consumed, but can only be produced by "good artists." "Good artists" are a minority, and must be inspired by "high art." "High art" isn't popular enough to sustain itself, but without it, "popular art" can't exist. Voila, grants are a necessity within the model.
Obviously the model is pretty simplistic, but my point should be clear: You can't just assume that the free market leads to the best outcomes. Lots of the time, incentives just don't line up.
> Academics get pulled in and join the bubble. The whole mess starts moving away from any kind of relevance to wider society and disappears up its own intellectual orifice.
Surely politicians would rather be seen as supporting popular art than academic art, no? "Disappearing into their own orifices" won't impress voters.
Besides, lots of great art gets government grants. I suspect this isn't a real-world problem.
Popular art usually comes from street art, not high art.
If the point of funding a park is to "fund parks" and some people get allocated a bunch of money to create whatever they feel like creating, while others get nothing, based purely on the whims of whoever allocates the funding with no accountability, then yes.
Even participatory theatrical work like the TSA?
I think that is out of touch with the way that American culture has been trending. (Yes, the world is much bigger than America, but this article is focused on US literary mags.) There is a continual push for efficiency & profit - driven by capitalism & technology - so I think it's clear the audience for this 'literary lifestyle' is continually shrinking.
Getting a bachelor's degree in the Arts in America basically is just a setup for entering graduate school (ie, spending more money + time, and even then, only making a fraction after graduation compared to other degrees... like CompSci). Pew Research Center found almost 25% of Americans in their survey admitted to not reading a book in the last year - and this is during the pandemic[0].
Our middle class is shrinking and being squeezed in ways that haven't been seen for over a century. The gig economy means people are often working multiple jobs, for low pay and no benefits. And most of the upper class is also continually trying to hustle and stay atop all the new technologies/products.
I love reading and completely agree that it is valuable -- I just don't believe that our society agrees. Most of the 'Bar Arcades' in my area have closed down during the pandemic (along with many restaurants, also a 'lifestyle brand'), so I can't help but feel your potential business model has a long road ahead of itself. I wish you the best in it though!
[0]: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/09/21/who-doesnt-...
The pandemic was an illuminating study of the failure of literature in the 21st century. It seems like it should have produced a great work and a great moment, but it did not. Many writers need to go through the humbling process of discovering that the world writ large, despite the writer’s estimation of their own intellect, remains too confusing for them to say anything of value. This tension is also, I think, what accounts for our more absurd, even hallucinatory, ideas about what literature, and by extension man, was, is, and can be. I went through that process and had to come to terms with the tension between my appreciation for the aesthetic wonder of literature and my often unaesthetic and distracted upbringing. I then thought extensively about my environment and how little of my linguistic life was a matter of course. I did not pen letters, nor discuss literature extensively with peers. My peers did not read or respond to my writing. I ultimately came to understand what the problem set is. My solutions are yet unlikely to solve the big question of whether or not literature can survive in the 21st century, but they ease my load. The road ahead is a long one, and appropriately Quixotic, but I undertake it with the notion that it will ease the tension of others as well, even if they only end up being accomplished writers in search of accomplished readers.
I don't really see any reasons to doubt that literature will survive the 21st century. Its place is always going to be there, right? But the publishing industry and academia? I think that is a different issue altogether and they are certainly having their day(s) of reckoning. I think we feel its impact even more strongly because other economic & technological forces have intersected to completely destroy adjacent industries like, well, bookstores :P
For many of us growing up, books (esp. fiction) were the best possible form of escape/recreation. Now we're seeing a generation growing up with high powered tablets & phones that must seem magical. To socialize with friends they can talk while playing video games, send videos, or take pictures. The written word doesn't seem very incentivized for them... & I just don't see any of this changing. Luckily for us, though, you can spend a few lifetimes digging through all the literature produced up to this point, and I don't see that going anywhere.
Interesting in regards to writing as a solitary vs social act. Have you ever read Paul Auster's The Invention of Solitude? For me, similar to computers/the Internet, one of the beauties of literature is how it is both a solitary & deeply connected 'thing.' How do you feel about some of the common criticisms of MFA programs[0]? Obviously a throwback beatnik/bohemian cafe/store has a very different barrier of entry than these graduate programs, but sorta relevant when we're talking about writing as a solitary act vs social.
[0]: https://erikhoel.substack.com/p/how-the-mfa-swallowed-litera...
Edit: I wanted to say that if you haven't been, Quimby's Bookstore in Wicker Park is a really cool spot! Been over five years since I was living there but the nerd in me thought their selection of zines was amazing.
I’ll pick up the Invention of Solitude straight away.
On the subject of the advantage to solitude in engaging with literature, a distinction can be made between the beam of white light and everything after the prism. Reading literary fiction, in particular, is edifying, and the result of this experience is the feeling that it is full of nuance and could be understood to a greater degree. Reading books on criticism will tease out some of the frequencies, but the full spectrum becomes realized when the private act of reading is put into conversation with another’s private act of reading. Novels of once seemingly enjoyed a network effect of sorts. They had the capacity to be private and public experiences. I can tel you, too, that engaging more and more with reading, and less therefore with the other cultural mediums available to us, means that one has fewer people with which to connect. A retreat into literature was in my case the result of reading waste and trivia into the alternatives that the culture encouraged. It is this loneliness that may be the primary problem in need of a solution.
I read the mfa article linked above. In general, mfas seem to do what Rome did to Christianity. It routinized it to such an extent that it largely denuded it of its most radical capacity. For me, the most vital aspect of literature, the one that is, in Bottom’s own terms, bottomless, is the constitution of characters that go just beyond understanding. The tilt that occurs when a character demonstrates its reflexivity, its comprehension of the moments it experiences, is a profound beauty, even Bodhisattvian. When you treat the process of writing like it is prescriptive, the writer is unlikely to realize that what they are creating is a notion unto itself. So, the publishing industry is staffed with people that have lost the capacity to recognize writing’s purpose. They instead have come to recognize a collection of shorthand cheats and the feedback loop draws the whole structure away from meaningful production. It merely produces.
I'm curious about the actual volume of literary work being produced compared to days past. For those who still partake: is the work still being produced? Is it harder or easier to find? Is the quality changing?
I reckon they really could, with a bit of smarts. The brands alone are worth so much, in these times of winner-takes-all. Look at the news: anybody can start a blog, but the actual "papers" we turn to are almost invariably old, established brands, even when they clearly suck. And there is so much shit online, respected filters are worth their weight in gold.
One of the problems is indeed the competition with bazillions of stimuli coming down the internet hosepipe every second. People have to make a conscious effort to sit down and read certain material, rather than using it as escapism - on escapism, the mobile internet cannot be beaten.
Another is that there is no economic model anymore. People bought books and magazines convinced that they were paying for distribution costs; in fact, they were also retroactively paying to produce the material. Now that distribution costs are virtually zero, nobody wants to pay anything, and the industry has not been good at making clear that writing and editing cost money.
Another again is that there is massive digital fragmentation: some people will read on kindle, some on phones, some on laptops, and some still want paper. The numbers are so small, for each mode, that they cannot individually sustain much; but supporting them all costs real money.
This was the whole "Why aren't ebooks a lot cheaper?" theme. A lot of people assumed that most of the cost was in printing, shipping, and selling physical books whereas that was actually a pretty small slice of where the purchase price went.
And this isn't just a literary magazine thing. My understanding is that science fiction magazines, and I assume other niche publications, are struggling as well. And it's mostly not a case of going to Kindle shorts or whatever. For the most part, short stories, etc. just aren't really much of an income stream for most authors any longer.
Traditionally authors got around 10% (or less) of the retail price of a book. Same for music. But they also got an advance, which complicates things. But still the bulk of the price was in distribution.
As I understand (largely from contact a while ago from insiders in the TTRPG industry), for print runs of the sizes many non-mass-market books get (which is still going to effect ebooks of similar market sizes the same way) fixed costs like editing, layout, etc. take a lot (layout especially in things that aren't just plain text.)
As for quality, debatable. We're living in a golden age if you're into YA fiction, that's for sure. I'm not an expert, but I've found international literature more interesting than domestic stuff for some time. Unfortunately, a lot of these magazines were also the first places foreign authors appeared in English translation, so that stuff could easily become less accessible soon.
There's a huge difference between controlling access to a niche audience which in large part exists because of the publication itself, and controlling access to publication in general.
Surely if there's no lit magazine to publish them, they'll publish their stuff on the web? And then it'll be available (even if translated with Google translate).
There is no lack of work being produced. My wife (a writer) subscribes to several literary magazines, none of which are associated with a college or university. These journals seem to be doing just fine, between subscriptions and grants. And she is always receiving information about newer journals, or journals that we've not come across before.
In a way I'm not sure there's a decline as much as a consolidation, where a dozen or so major outlets reach a level of prominence that everyone wants to write for them, and a scale such that they can diversify across subjects to suit most tastes. While I know many people interested in the LRB, I know few if any interested in purely literary magazines - which can often be niche and inward looking.
I really like its boldness. I love the fact that they turned over an entire issue to telling the stories of those who died in the Grenfell Tower fire in 2017 (the UK's most lethal residential fire since WWII).
They decided to publish 60,000 words on the fire, replacing all of their usual format. That's the length of a short novel [1].
[1] https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v40/n11/andrew-o-hagan/the-t...
FWIW, you can buy a subscription on Amazon ...
Somehow though, technology has challenged the meaning of what an inner life is. It has turned insides out. Competing with that has made recent literature feel like an identity based gimmick to me. It tries to capture an audience moreso than wait patiently with something strange and unique. Or the selection process which rewarded nuance has stopped functioning.
It's tragic because our shut-in shutdown often trivial feeling lives bear a great need for elevation of the human experience these days.
The demise of some university funded literary journals is a different issue; costly staffing, print, and management costs are not necessary, and remnants of a different era. Yes, they can provide a lot of value, meaning, and career payoff, but they are not as necessary as they used to be, as the proliferation of online journals has only accelerated.
Of note, Ycombinator funded company Submittable used literary journals to fuel their successful start, by providing a service for literary journals to manage submissions. I really hate the role of money that Submittable has injected into the literary journal world, though. They've made the practice of "submission fees" incredibly easy to implement, and encouraged literary journals to charge submission fees to writers. A practice that, unfortunately, has proliferated under their influence.
However, very few people have the energy, care, or knowledge base for the deep reading these texts require. Some of our best writers knew this and used their wit to get around it. For example, Robert Frost wrote expert poetry FOR the people in his rural community. However, his work can also be read on multiple levels, which appeals to the rare reader who lives for literary pyrotechnics.
So maybe writers need to work on multiple levels like Frost. The market is telling us that what we’re producing isn’t up to snuff, and rather than blaming the market, we should ask ourselves whether our creations actually reflect people’s lives back to them. Should the reader come to us, like the article is implying—-people just aren’t appreciating art enough, etc—-or should we go to the reader?
One solution for actual expertise is to manage to be the proper sort of edutainment. One which not only can teach the concepts while being enjoyable and not overtly "textbook" but doesn't become a matter of repeating what is already obvious and known. Sort of a "useful in theory but too hard in practice" idea.
it's a shame they shut down the believer. i'd be curious to see the finances. even if it is a financial issue, maybe literary magazines and other artistic endeavors shouldn't be run like a profit-making business / quantified by money, since you can't put a dollar value on the benefits of art.
here's a different take on why it shut down: https://www.gawker.com/media/the-believer-was-a-victim-of-mi...
edit: so much of the best literature (imo) that's come out in the past 20 years have come from loss-making small presses who do it for the love of it.
As this bubble became more separated from the mainstream, interest in these literary magazines shriveled.
As with the 'free newspapers' of the 1970s and today's many lesser-known podcasts, true lit-mag independence is made possible by the support of a smallish community (including creators and producers). 'Success' changes people.
What this article glossed over far too quickly, in my view, is how there are thousands - literally, thousands - of online or primarily online journals and magazines that are doing just fine or better than fine.
I can vouch to that because I started one last year. Granted, our editors are all volunteers and we don't pay writers, but we've had no problem pulling in all kinds of accomplished writers (and, no, they aren't "quirky" like the article somewhat dismissively referenced, whatever that means).
Our largest operating costs come from submission platform fees and trade organization memberships. Grand total, around $500 per year. For everything else, free resources like Netlify hosting for the site.
These types of articles could be a little more nuanced. Conventional publishing has serious issues, but it's just one piece of the literary landscape.
Perhaps worth noting is that these failing literary magazines are tied to colleges? Perhaps without readily available student volunteers the magazines can't afford to operate.
As you mentioned, it seems that certain literary magazines are still doing relatively well. Maybe if more literary magazines published things that people wanted to read, they'd be better off.
Our journal explicitly rejects 99% of those submissions, just to stand out from the pack.
Is that true? e.g. http://www.mcwetboy.com/mcwetlog/2007/10/the_decline_of_the_...
The general take-away, it seems, is that genre readers are mostly a bunch of freeloaders; and more of them need to pony up some cash to compensate editors and authors for the enjoyment they're providing.
That seems broadly true of web content generally. There's no shortage of content of various levels of quality and no shortage of readers. But it's hard to get people to actually pay.
And, perhaps they also haven't been on the receiving end of the biggest governmental media handout in history over the past 2 years. I'm talking about the coronavirus advertising campaign - billions have been paid by the government to promote their message.
I find this is not the case for anything long-form or literary. I get much more out of 30 minutes spent reading the paper edition of the New Yorker than from spending the same time glancing through articles found on Twitter.
The problem is that I'm not sure how to pinpoint exactly what it is, or if it's a combination of things. Certain things I feel really confident about, but others are more like guesses. And I worry that some of that knowledge that's there in print stuff is going to be lost forever as everything transitions to the current reading UX paradigm.
Ads are kind of interesting to me because people complain about them, but I've realized gradually that I liked a lot of the print ads. They were relevant and usually not intrusive. If I was reading about X, in X journal, the ads were targeted to someone reading that material in that outlet, and were there for me to see if I wanted, and if not, not. Online, they're obnoxious, intrusive, and irrelevant -- even when they are tracking me! (That last part is the worst part of it actually.)
As for other stuff I'm not sure. Flipping through pages is just faster sometimes for browsing? Maybe eink would be better? But I tried that and it was slow and only would do a small fraction of what regular screens (and print) could handle.
I think it's possible to duplicate print experience, maybe be even better than that and laptops/tablets/phones. I'm just not sure exactly how to it should be done.
I don't miss the physical volume of material print would take up. But there are certain things about it, and how it was edited, that was better.