Gabriel García Márquez: Sons publish novel that late author wanted destroyed
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
Though, I doubt the line is always straightforward. There must have been reasons (hopefully not solely profit driven…). For example, Kafka. Granted I read, skimmed really, in an article that while his instructions were to destroy his writings, that he wanted them published.
No clue, but it certainly won’t be up to me. When I’m dead that’ll all be up to the ones left behind. What point is there in satisfying the wishes of someone that’s already dead? They won’t care any more.
I'd say the law is a good reference for that. Some countries legislate inheritance and related topics different from others. Some let the person decide exactly what happens with their inheritance and under which conditions, others have more generic rules to go to the next of kin and don't have the concept of wishes.
Because the concept of honor should transcend death, come on.
Sure, most people would feel terrible about doing that. But you would keep that promise out of respect, not because the dead are hurt by breaking it.
What would human kind have gained from not having read The Metamorphosis or The Trial and so many others?
I made this argument in this thread, but come to think of it there's an opposite argument too:
If honor was worth more, Kafka's works describing life as a hellish landscape of bureucratic indifference, betrayal, control, and alienation, wouldn't have been as descriptive of the state of humanity.
>What would human kind have gained from not having read The Metamorphosis or The Trial and so many others?
If they have gained honor, that would have been worth 1000 Trials and Metamorphosis.
If they haven't, and just read them violating Kafka's request, they'd be the person The Trial and Metamorphosis protested about, just another cog in the machinery of humilliation and degradation.
Nailed it!
Betrayal, control and alienation are exactly what informs Kafka's request. Faith (in his friend, in art) and openness are what inspired his friend not to obey Kafka's wish born out of that alienation and shame.
Bureaucracy never enters into this at all. There is no humiliation, Kafka is considered to be one of the greatest writers ever.
First of all, the request was in a letter. His friend (they were friends for decades) found the letter, it's not like he agreed beforehand. Secondly this friend was a writer himself. No one knows more the embarrassment and shame that can come from looking at one's own art as much as another artist, but this is just inherently the nature of making art, and what are friends for if not to shake us out of that wrong view that we get from our perspective being too close?
Frankly I think you're making lofty claims for their own sake. This is not a matter of "humanity gaining honor", it was a matter of a man believing in his friend's art, and the rest of us benefiting from that "betrayal".
Well, that's why wills exist.
If you decided to split your wealth between your grandchildren when you passed away, should that wish be discarded now because you're dead so who cares?
Because you're (hopefully!) not an asshole of a human being?
If the dying wish of a man costs you nothing to execute, why not? Men are brought into this world regardless of their wishes, can't men at least exit this plane of existence according to their wishes?
That’s not a very good argument in the case in question. The sons made money by publishing the book.
Sure, but this is for the satisfaction and closure of the living, not for the dead. The dead aren’t satisfied, or anything else really.
I doubt the "morbid curiosity of the general public" could ever succeed as a justification on ethical grounds, but as a literature scholar, I can say that there are usually other purposes in view. At some point, the work of an author like García Márquez becomes an important part of the world-wide human record and historians who study that record are not doing so out of morbid anything. In this case, we're trying to understand the evolution of one of the most important authors (and associated literary movements) in the twentieth century.
I've seen these kinds of decisions being made on the scholarly side (opening archives, publishing letters, etc.). I can tell you they aren't made lightly, and one of the ways we tend to adjudicate these dilemmas is by weighing the "privacy and last wishes" of an individual against the desire of the broader culture to understand itself and its history. Sometimes that latter claim isn't strong enough. But sometimes it really is.
> "And we decided, yes, it was a betrayal. But that's what children are for."
If it is of significance to the living world, then yes, it'll be published. Anne Frank's dairy is an example of that.
Is it the right thing to do? I'll leave the question for an ethicist.
Tell me you've never read Anne Frank's diary, without telling me you've never read Anne Frank's diary.
From Wikipedia’s page on Anne Frank[1]:
> Otto, the only survivor of the Frank family, returned to Amsterdam after the war to find that Anne's diary had been saved by his female secretaries, Miep Gies and Bep Voskuijl. He decided to fulfil his daughter's greatest wish to become a writer. He published her diary in 1947.
Her diary was published because her father had reason to believe it was something she would have approved of. In Márquez’s case we’re talking about going against the author’s expressed wishes. The situations are polar opposites.
Also, 'wanting to be a writer' does not necessarily mean that you would have wanted to have a specifically private piece of writing published.
This, on the other hand, is someone going against explicitly stated wishes. It's not a very comparable situation.
There’s also the point parallel comments make that public figures private works are often of general interest. The will and desires of the deceased carry weight - but it decreases over time as they are in fact dead. If we found Julius Caesar’s private diary with admonitions to not read it, would we honor that?
>We did think about it for about three seconds - was it a betrayal to my parents, to my father's [wishes]? And we decided, yes, it was a betrayal. But that's what children are for.
Judging by modern morals, Julius Caesar would be guilty of multiple genocidal war crimes. His private diaries would be rather evidence.
"that public figures private works are often of general interest."
This argument is basically, that if only enough people want something, they get the right. Which is not something I am a huge fan about. And Garcia was no Imperator, deciding the fate of millions, but a private writer.
And the argument about dementia, if he would have been so far away in dementia, while making the decision, I do not think his sons would have judged so harshly about themself:
"We did think about it for about three seconds - was it a betrayal to my parents, to my father's [wishes]?
"And we decided, yes, it was a betrayal. But that's what children are for."
I think this is mainly a internal familiy thing if his sons decide to publish and ignore their fathers wish. But I probably won't read it.
And it is a different case with Kafka:
"Before author Franz Kafka died from tuberculosis in 1924, he told friend Max Brod to burn all of his work. However, between 1925 and 1935 Brod published his collection of works including The Trial, The Castle and Amerika."
Because he told his friend Brod before, that he will ask him to destroy his works once he dies - and Brod told him clearly, that if he will do that, he will refuse and publish it anyway. So rather a kafkaesk joke all in all and no betrayal. If Kafka really would have wanted someone destroy his works, he could have asked someone else.
Fine, great, they were once something awesome - but do we really need to rob every future generation of that building or use? It must forever be a memory of distant past?
I think you are being too aggressive in your cause for personal freedom and justice. I mean, I do understand where you are coming from but perhaps saying "I'd really prefer to go, instead of being subjected to people like you" goes a bit too far.
Do you understand that most people, even in a stable state of mind, can't reasonably decide to just "end it there"? Let alone someone with advanced dementia... Maybe one day if society stops putting so much value on empty life and we can peacefully end it when it's time, but that day is likely far away.
As others have pointed out, if his children really thought this was important for his legacy and he only had the destructive wish due to dementia, they could have made the writings available without profiting from that.
Even if he was out of his proper mind, choosing not to publish was the elegant thing to do. They already milked their father for years, now they should earn their own money.
Giving away the novel to a national university for academic discussion would also be more elegant than this.
If they think it's important to release the work, they shouldn't be profiting from it.
Except a national university will almost certainly buy a copy, so your desired academic discussion will be unimpeded.
An argument can be made to the effect that he could not give his full consent given that he probably lost his capacities to make an informed decision.
A moral quandary nonetheless.
In any case, it's only a problem for the living. Dead you won't be bothered by it.
There's no need here. Only want.
What's so shocking about it? When you are dead, you have no rights or property. It all belongs to whomever you left it to.
If marquez didn't want his work published, he should have destroyed it himself rather than leaving up to someone else. As others have mentioned, kafka did the same thing. Left instructions for his publisher to destroy his works after his death.
> Do we get to look at your personal journals, browser history and hidden photo gallery once you kick the bucket?
Who cares? If you are so paranoid about it, destroy your personal journal while you are alive. Otherwise, whoever gets it after your death can do whatever they want with it.
It isn't their rights. They are dead. It's a very simple concept. The rights belong to whoever gets the property. Also intellectual property rights isn't about respecting artists. It's about protecting corporate rights since most intellectual property is owned by mega-corporations and not the artists who created them.
> but we don't respect the artist's desires about what to do with that property.
Who is 'we'? The only person who has a say in the matter is whoever gets the property after the artist's death.
> but none of it is a natural law: it's a set of somewhat arbitrary legal decisions that we made as a society.
I know. That's my point. But regardless, it doesn't change the fact that the artist is dead and has no rights.
Should the sons have respected marquez's wish? Maybe. But then again, the sons probably knew their father better than you did. And marquez must have left the works to his sons for a reason.
As far as I understood it, he was still working on it. And he did not wanted the sketch to be published.
"But then again, the sons probably knew their father better than you did."
Probably. But I would not rule out the possibility, that they have selfish reasons like fame and money.
I think that really depends on what theory of copyright you have operating in your society, many European societies have a theory of copyright that is about respecting artist's moral rights to own what they have created.
If that was the case, nobody in europe would be reading much of franz kafka's works nor anne frank's diary.
But good try!
I thought it was just about money.
Respect could be shown through the production of fan fiction, that isn't compatible with IP.
I hope so. If the radical "privacy and security" advocates truly had their way, the only "history" left from the current era will be "carefully curated" and thus obviously biased. No one should have the "right to be forgotten".
Personally, I think only an absolute bastard would agree to what a dying person asked them to do—or not to do, in this case—and then go back on it after they died.
The classic legal example is the Rule Against Perpetuities (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_against_perpetuities), which limits how much control a will or trust instrument can exert over real property. You wouldn't believe the lengths people have historically gone to make sure their notion of "the right thing" happens for many years after they die.
As a sibling commenter said, if you don't want people to truly own your personal property when you die, then you should destroy it. Or consider giving it to someone else.
If I want to use something while I'm alive but don't want others to have/see/use/know about it, what's the best way to handle this? The problem here is that no one knows when they're going to die, or if they'll be lucid enough when they're close to take care of things like that.
I guess for online stuff make sure all means of access are behind passwords that will be lost when you die.
For physical property, seems like a hard problem unless you booby trap your stuff, which is illegal and inconsiderate -- not to mention that it will likely accelerate your own demise.
But that agreement should be a private one, not something that the society should be enforcing. My 2c.
A Google Drive folder which has a sharing policy set to expire in 30 days, is a dead man's switch
You don't need to be technical to use a dead man's switch.
It's not up to me as I'll be dead.
We should keep in mind that our wishes may or may not be respected and plan accordingly. Get rid of journals that can't be read by anyone else, set your browser to forget its history, encrypt the hidden photo gallery.
Once you are dead, you are dead, it's the same as if you never existed in the first place. I completely fail to understand how my wishes are relevant after I no longer exist.
What shame or embarrassment can I feel when I'm dead? Promise me on my death bed my secrets will never be revealed and the second I'm gone, share them and it won't change the peace of mind I had. Likewise the state of my mind at the moment of death is irrelevant because I'll be dead.
It's bizarre to me to see you are so troubled by this. Do you care what happens after your dead? Do you care what's happening on a planet so distant and foreign you do not even know it exists or what it's inhabitants are like? The world after you are dead will be far more foreign to you than such a world that exists today.
In time all humans will be dead. In time all evidence of this planet will be erased. If alien life should come across some rock with Gabriel García Márquez last writing and note saying "do not read" are found should that alien life honor that request? What moral system are you deriving these beliefs from?
Of course not, yet no one will donate to my non profit “refill all of the excavated Pompeii cavities” project. There is a sort of arbitrary and hypocritical “dead” vs “even more dead” position that people take with their misgiven concepts of “history”
Once we kick the bucket yes. Just ask us then, and you'll see that we don't mind. And even if we did, you still get to do it, provided you have access.
Do you think your kids wont, if they find them? Or if you're a public figure, that the world at large wont?
Not to mention that a work of art of a great novelist (as opposed to the private journals of some random person) might be of more benefit to the world than following the instructions in their will.
And then after death, the executor has that same right. Twice over, it's their call, not ours. It's more wrong for us to say they are wrong than it is for them to say their fathers will is wrong.
I would go even further and say you have very few to maybe zero rights after death. We do some things out of respect for each other but really I don't see how it can be claimed as any sort of actual right. Once you're gone, whatever's left behind is for other people to do what they will with. It's not yours any more. If you want something not to exist, destroy it yourself or don't create it yourself in the first place. That is probably the limit of anyone's reasonable right to control something. You can ask, and if someone chooses, maybe they comply, but I think you really should only expect to be able to ask, and live with the eventual no as the answer, or even a yes and then failure to deliver.
(Not speaking as a lawyer. I'm sure there are all kinds of legal things that make wills and contracts into legally more binding documents, but that is artificial legal construct, I'm talking about right & wrong & reason. And besides, if one wants to take the legality seriously, then they obviously had the legal right to do this since they did, and so no problem.)
ok, but then there wouldn't really be any Kafka if instructions to destroy writing was reliably carried out.
I think many here would argue yes
If you discover a lost manuscript of Shakespeare along with the note: "These papers must be burnt!", would you do it?
I am not arguing in either direction, I am trying to say that things are not so simple and there might be some nuances. Vincent Van Gogh was mentally ill for a long period. Would you destroy his works if you find out that he expressed his wishes in that direction?
He wanted it destroyed? He could have done it himself.
Don't put weird things in your will. Do them before you die. At least then, you know they got done. And get to see them get done!
All these people who leave things to their granddaughter or whatever, jewelry, the family dingus, just give it now! Enjoy their thanks, see them enjoy it.
Assuming they weren't estranged or anything, they obviously knew their father and understood his wishes better than any of us.
Replace "novel" with "nude pictures" and the moral side of this becomes much more obvious.
It doesn't matter if he had dementia. It doesn't matter if people appreciate the novel or if his kids feel that "it's important to release it". The novel was his creation and he specifically did not want it released.
Unsurprisingly though, money outweighs his requests.
And Kafka as mentioned in this thread is probably the most well-known example of an author who wanted most of his work destroyed (he literally wanted it burned) but was betrayed by his executor of will.
So I wonder, given his legendary playful personality and the fact that he must have been aware of the Kafka example, if Marquez knew how this will end up, and made it so the unpublished novel will turn out to be filled with allusions of literary ghosts hunting down those who betray them and how those who are reading the book are deranged bastards for poking the corpse of the writer.
But their imagination certainly seemed to come from the same place as many who read them noticed without even being aware that one influenced the other.
Iirc Paul Thomas Anderson has said he's a fan of Michael Bay.
That was no betrayal.
Because Brod told Kafka before, that he will refuse this last wish to burn everything, and instead publish it all, should he be tasked with it. Kafka still ordered him with his last wish - knowing the person said he will refuse. That's rather a kafkaesk joke to me.
If Kafka really would have wanted to burn it all his works - he could have a) do it himself b) ask someone who would not outright refuse
Are we lucky, or was Kafka unlucky?
I find the lack of respect about authors' wishes very shocking.
Frankly, all I'd ask of a literary executor would be that they 1) humor my requests while I'm alive, 2) respect the wishes of my family. Other than that, whether they actually follow through on my wishes? Put it this way, if I find myself in an afterlife, as an atheist, I doubt whether my executor stuck my wishes will be high on my list of things to care about. And without an afterlife it's not as if I'd be able to care. Or know,
Of course, a movie studio is almost certain to finish off a movie if a director dies and may remove them for other reasons.
It works better if there is mutual respect.
My point though is when generalizing and reframing this about the deceased vs living, more often than not, it is no longer about respecting (even respectfully disagreeing) with the creative and more about disrespecting the deceased.
If it's a studio film, they may well fire the director and hire a new one. And, of course, screenwriters are casually script doctored with or without their consent.
With books, the balance of power isn’t so skewed to the publisher, though I suppose it depends on what it is.
I don’t know what circumstances Tolkien’s unfinished work was released, though it seems like his son toiled away at them for years.
I always assumed Christopher Tolkien had some sort of "do with them what you think best" agreement with his father although I don't actually know. Not that there's anything particularly special in written word beyond Tolkien's originals.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symphony_No._8_(Schubert)#Earl...
I mean they’re dead right? Everything meaningful and special about them is gone.
The corpse doesn’t know if it was desecrated nor does it know if it was subject to necrophilia. So if desecrating a corpse is “ok” according to the above commentators, why is necrophilia not ok too? And if necrophilia is not ok, then perhaps there’s a flaw in their argument.
That is, some things are morally wrong, even if there is no apparent “victim” as the victim is dead.
To be fair, I have practiced shaivasana (“corpse pose”), specifically including “corpse don’t care” as a response to existential anguish arising and passing. But I also know quite a good bit about what it means to regret and long for second chances or a path not taken. I think it is quite rare for anyone (regardless of beliefs) to die without regrets. If you are able to pull that off for yourself, I’m glad for you.
In a belief system where there is a Creator, and the Creator is a Mother, all of Creation are her children. Thus, as humans, raising and nurturing a child is as much of an act of creation as art, music, etc. And conversely, our artistic creations tend to develop a life of its own.
That means it's illegal to not respect the dead person's wishes. The copyright is theirs, not their descendant's.
That said, I do think once someone is dead, there's some argument whether you have to respect that. But I at least understand the desire.
"According to tradition, Virgil traveled to Greece around 19 BC to revise the Aeneid. After meeting Augustus in Athens and deciding to return home, Virgil caught a fever while visiting a town near Megara. Virgil crossed to Italy by ship, weakened with disease, and died in Brundisium harbour on 21 September 19 BC, leaving a wish that the manuscript of the Aeneid was to be burned. Augustus ordered Virgil's literary executors, Lucius Varius Rufus and Plotius Tucca, to disregard that wish, instead ordering the Aeneid to be published with as few editorial changes as possible. As a result, the existing text of the Aeneid may contain faults which Virgil was planning to correct before publication. However, the only obvious imperfections are a few lines of verse that are metrically unfinished (i.e., not a complete line of dactylic hexameter). Other alleged "imperfections" are subject to scholarly debate."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeneid#Virgil's_death,_and_edi...
I don't really mean this as an accusation, but I suspect these death-bed demands are simply a pose. Not that they are essentially insincere, but rather a final gesture of conscientiousness that should be ignored.
What is lost to the world by retaining the imperfect, incomplete?
Otherwise, they wouldn't spend months and years meticulously editing and improving their works before release.
It's uncomfortable, embarrassing even, to have your unfinished work consumed and reviewed as if it were finished, and as if it were an accurate measure of your intentions and talent.
Yes, but when the unfinished work is published, it is well known that it was incomplete.
That said, I can understand the author not wanting it to be published. If is a shitty thing to publish it against the author's will when they are alive, it is equally shitty to do it when they have died.
Just as a rose by any other name is still a rose, shit is still shit no matter how you frame it, and unfortunately shit tends to stick better than roses.
It's definitely not _equally_ shitty. It's arguable whether it's shitty at all. For an action to be a shitty thing to do, someone must suffer as a result.
I can see a couple of ways to argue that the author's beneficiaries might suffer, and perhaps even that the author themself might suffer depending on your religious beliefs.
But surely it's not anywhere close to _equally_ shitty.
I am firmly on the side of releasing everything. Great works of art are so incredibly valuable (to the culture) that the chance of finding one that might have been missed trumps these other concerns.
GP mentioned that most of Kafka's best works would have been destroyed if his stated wishes were honored (it is debatable whether these were his actual wishes).
A web search turns up that Monet destroyed a lot of his works before he passed.
How many Aeneid's are we 'missing' because the author was successful in destroying their unfinished work?
Does somebody suffer if you urinate on the grave of a random person who died a hundred years ago? Is it a shitty thing to do?
(I acknowledge this is specious!)
Society suffers, because people do not wish to be subjected to the sight and smells associated with urination.
A cemetery is usually something of a public park, of sorts. Urinating on a random grave is around the same order of shittiness as urinating on any part of a public park meant to be appreciated or contemplated by people.
If the grave of the random person matters a lot to you, ask yourself, would it matter if the headstone were not there? Would it matter if you did not know there was a grave there?
Every time you urinate on the ground, you are urinating on the remains of millions of people.
With every breath you take, you are inhaling the remains of everyone who has ever been cremated longer ago than it took for their burn gases to homogeneously mix in into the atmosphere (which really does not take very long).
If the intent is to insult a group of people or that person’s descendants, yes. If not, honestly, no. Which is why we generally chase drunk teenagers out of graveyards instead of jailing them.
I wonder how many devs on here publish their feature branches prior to merge? Do they push up all the WIPs too?
>It is unlikely that Marcus Aurelius ever intended the writings to be published.
It is lore that one of his jesters burned himself to save the writings from a fire.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johannes_Brahms#Works ("...once claimed to have destroyed 20 string quartets before he issued his official First in 1873...")
> In the Realms of the Unreal is a 15,145-page work bound in fifteen immense, densely typed volumes (with three of them consisting of several hundred illustrations, scroll-like watercolor paintings on paper derived from magazines and coloring books) created over six decades. Darger illustrated his stories using a technique of traced images cut from magazines and catalogues, arranged in large panoramic landscapes and painted in watercolors, some as large as 30 feet wide and painted on both sides. He wrote himself into the narrative as the children's protector.[3]: 64
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Darger#In_the_Realms_of_...
Bind the executor to a contract before hand? Perhaps have two additional watchdog entities setup to sue if the executor disobeys? Have a smart contract oracle escrow on the blockchain to automatically pay out to the law firm for suit if the number of ISBNs associated with your name increases?
I think it's best to publish these things, but treat them as more archival biographical than anything else, like a journal. I honestly don't think "Daisy-Head Mayzie" is bad, or even the worst thing with Dr. Seuss' name on it, and it's an interesting look into his opinions on becoming famous. I'm glad it was published, even if he wouldn't be.
> Pratchett told Neil Gaiman that anything that he had been working on at the time of his death should be destroyed by a steamroller. On 25 August 2017, his assistant Rob Wilkins fulfilled this wish by crushing Pratchett's hard drive under a steamroller at the Great Dorset Steam Fair.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terry_Pratchett#Unfinished_tex...
I make it black and white but it's not obvious to me you always want to publish things just because some people will devour them.
Since you'll be dead and utterly unaffected either way, I'd go with pleasing the fans. Also, it's really a freebie for your legacy if it's understood that it was written under the influence of dementia and published posthumously.
On the other hand, if I thought it would be depressing or unpleasant to fans more than please them, I would want it destroyed.
But that's what I'd do. Terry Pratchett had every right to make his own decision on this. Even with dementia, that's 100% his call. (Of course, his assistant should make sure he was fairly consistent on this point, when most lucid.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moon_Zappa
(Oh, and Dweezil is the one who's trying very hard to maintain his father's legacy, the rest of the family is cashing in and selling out at every opportunity.)
But I noticed that a number of the ones he wanted me to throw away were works he had signed. So when he made them, he had been proud of them. My thinking was similar to Marquez's sons: why should I trust his opinion now rather than his opinion then?
So I put them aside and labeled them as "rejected" rather than throwing them away. They will always be listed as "rejected" but I still think they were worth keeping.
Kafka wanted the same, if his will wasn't violated, we wouldn't know Kafka's novels, just a few stories here and there (who didn't make a spash anyway, so they'd vanish without works like the Trial and the Tower to drive interest to them). Though one could argue that how Kafka's wish was treated was itself Kafkaesque. We didn't liberate the works from his death wishes, we stomped on Kafka once more.
The real moral of the story is: delete your browser history.
Maybe he wanted to keep working on it and if it had reached a standard that he found acceptable, he would have published it, and if he had died before then, he didn't want it published"
https://www.npr.org/2024/03/06/1236246186/gabriel-garcia-mar...
There's also a related story about the author at the time of his death (April 17, 2014):
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7606131 (160 comments)
Gabriel García Márquez, Literary Pioneer, Dies at 87 (nytimes.com)
The humanity behind the romantics was so obscured because of their careful crafting of their images, and a loss like that is impossible to even fathom. I'm sure she was in her opinion protecting people, but from this futuristic vantage point where we recognize the humanity in people, the human connection and loss from such willful destruction is painful to contemplate, and everybody involved is long dead.
If a friend of mine asked me to destroy their unpublished work I would, but I would probably hate myself for doing it.
Good Black Mirror premise tho.
Could be another masterpiece... or it could be one of the 3480 new "Dune" novels allegedly written from Frank Herbert's notes. Quality stuff, that.
But I feel like I’m being disloyal if I read something he explicitly wanted no one to read. On balance I think I’ll skip it. I got plenty of other books to read anyway.
Sure, if you also ignore the obvious economic reasons attached to it.
He then left everything in hands of his secretary, who proceeded to, among other things:
* Sell plenty of Kafka's letters and postcards to private entities.
* Attempting to smuggle (out) some manuscripts without filing photocopies to the Archives of the National Library of Israel, which is required by law and is also, again, kind of a weird behavior for somebody acting under the premise that "it was important for the world to read it".
* Auctioned an original manuscript of The Trial, fetching about 2 million USD.
I couldn't find evidence of one single piece of material that was willingly donated to a museum or similar entity by either Max Brod or Esther Hoffe during the 83 years (!) they had it under their possession.
Even squinting very very very hard at the situation, it's hard for me to not see "the obvious economic reasons attached to it".
>But there are other things you relinquish by giving it to public domain
Like what?
What you relinquish when you release something into public domain is control over how publishes and possibly who edits it.
I believe the world would not have been a better place without these books.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Brod#Publication_of_Kafk...
He won't mind.
There is a question about at which point personal belongings become part of history, i.e. get museumified, but we all know that at some point we stop thinking of those private endeavors as secrets to keep forever and they become part of public history.
Let's start by looting rich dead people fortune the day they die: Steve Jobs money could have been used to reduce the US national debt!
If I respect an author enough to spend hours of my life reading her work, why should I discard her opinion the moment she dies? If you're going to honor one thing about a person it probably ought to be their will.
I do wish my close ones to obey my will. I don’t care about some random person 50 years later after I die.
I will also obey the will of my relatives and close ones to show that I respect the will so when it is my turn to go away others will treat me as I treated others.
Cold War historians exist and have to deal with people both recently deceased or still alive. Should Cold War history research be locked away for a century or more?
For example, it could be argued that the best way to dispose of corpses is composting and not cemeteries or cremation. With that in mind, should the state not impose that everyone is composted?
Even though I personally wouldn't care if that's the ultimate fate of my body, lots of people DO care about that. There would be a harm done to society if something like this was forced on the remains of their loved ones.
So the round about answer is, because it's a nice thing to do that makes people feel good and that has value.
The fact that we are having this discussion sort of underlines the issue with going against the wishes of the dead. It makes people uncomfortable and upset.
That being said, it probably wouldn't feel nearly as ghoulish if Garcia was dead for more than a couple of years. The reason it feels uncomfortable is her family is going against her wishes to publish his book ostensibly for the money. That feels a little like grave robbing. (Which, again, could be viewed in the same light. Why does grave robbing matter?)
Also yeah. Disrespecting a perfectly reasonable wish of a deceased and tainting their legacy is just a deeply dishonorable thing and I will actively shun people who do so.
What was even your point about "someone's curated image"? Was that supposed to go somewhere or are you planning to impart pieces of your wisdom one statement at a time, hoping people will extrapolate some sort of argument in the most charitable manner?
I really cannot be bothered, especially since it seems like we're just splitting hairs here and arguing about definitions.
The point is that refusing to publish a work because it might "taint" someone's legacy is the same as refusing to public a historical academic paper because some new findings you discovered might "taint" some medieval king's legacy. You're not tainting anything, you're just uncovering more truth and more details which will be useful to future people to reach their own conclusions.
However adding to an artist's/writer's oeuvre without their consent is no better than changing the works themselves. You might as well be painting over things or change passages willy-nilly.
Additionally our social contract mandates that relatives and other trustees faithfully execute any reasonable last wishes of the deceased. If my sons disrespected my wishes like that, they might as well write "fuck you dad" in my epitaph. Historians years later are bound by no such thing and their insults would mean very little.
It is in the context of being a historical fact.
>You might as well be painting over things or change passages willy-nilly.
Non sequitur. Adding a book to a bibliography does not change the content of the books that have come before.
You seem to confuse historical importance with artistic importance. If I only want to read Marquez's good books I will not read this last unofficial one. If I am a student writing a PhD dissertation about him I absolutely want every single fact I can get my hands on. Original sketches are extremely important in every subfield of history: from poetry to literature to music to painting. Many things we have from past artists are private and yet fundamental for understanding their life and their craft.
And if someone chooses to have all of their work destroyed, then that is their history. In any case "public interest" outweighs a person's personal wishes only in very rare exceptions such as statesmanship. Here it clearly doesn't.
> Non sequitur. Adding a book to a bibliography does not change the content of the books that have come before.
Only in the same way that a later chapter in a book doesn't "change" the ones that came before. It changes how the previous works are perceived - art is all about perception.
> If I am a student writing a PhD dissertation about him I absolutely want every single fact I can get my hands on.
There's little reason to care about any unpublished books, because they cannot have had any influence. It's fine to be interested in them anyways, but mere interest of the living is not enough to excuse any of this.
But even if the person who wishes to have their works destroyed gave a completely nonsensical reason, their executors still would not have the right to go against it.
If people cannot expect to have their wishes honored, they will merely take more extreme measures to ensure they leave things behind to their liking. Nowadays that likely means encrypted drives and dead man's switches. But do we really have to go there? Can we maybe instead just expect society to behave honorably?
> Original sketches are extremely important in every subfield of history: from poetry to literature to music to painting.
The word "important" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. It is very important to my daily commute that there be a highway from my front door going straight to my place of work, but I don't think it's going to happen.
Did Pale King tarnish DFW's reputation? (Maybe a bad example, his demons did a bit of that) DFW's short stories and earlier novels seem to have stood well on their own and survived the publishing of the incomplete Pale King.
I wouldn't call a draft of an unpublished novel on a personal hard drive, "out there".
"When he said it doesn't make sense he didn't realize it didn't make sense to him anymore."
Is this a valuable literary work that deserves to be published? How would we even go about deciding such a thing, without breaking the deceased's will anyways?
Or, is this just the estate saying, "The money from the previous books is drying up! We can either get real jobs, or go against dad's wishes for free money." In which case, screw that.
But even if you agree with the latter, given the complexity of the former, I feel like the fix there is that the rules for publishing works of the deceased should be different, e.g. it is immediately in the public domain so that there is no (or at least less) financial incentive since the original author has already decided not to profit from it. That would at least let us address the former questions more clearly and with reverence.
sometimes the plan is for the children/successors to benefit from the works. Some do ask for things to be published after they're gone
But honestly, for my part anyways, I'm not sure any of that matters.
I'm a big fan of creativity. It's probably the most valuable thing people have and it ought to be protected and rewarded.
That's why this is even a dilemma for me because I would be disappointed to see a good creative work lost forever just because they didn't see the value of their own work.
But that's also why I'm against that kind of inheritance. Children, especially those who have the luxury and of good upbringing, should be encouraged to pursue their own creativity and produce their own value, rather than riding on the coattails of their forebears.
> "And we decided, yes, it was a betrayal. But that's what children are for."
Haha, fucking brilliant. I love this. Certainly the children of the man. I think this is a good thing they have done. There is no harm done to the man, since he no longer exists. Truly philosophical descendants of Diogenes of Sinope.
Garnering all this attention and going through all this trouble? For money? Over stuff that wasn't even his but just "given to him"?
No way!
I don’t absolve his children of making the decision they did, but I also don’t possess their lived experience and would hesitate to make generalizations about all generational privacy concerns on the basis of a single person of interest, however famous.
Quote by the editor. Highlights a problem to me. Since Marquez is so famous, they feel the need to put this novel on a pedestal, even though it might just be "okay". Which of course is okay in itself.
I also think the sons contradict themselves when they say that their father lost the intellectual power to judge if the book should be published, yet didn't he also write it during this time? So I understand it like Marquez was aware of his mental problems and that's why he decided not to publish.
I think you should have someone you trust to gauge the quality of your work and let them make the call.
Because like people here have pointed out, some authors wanted their works destroyed when they died, but for some that is the work we most know them by.
Gabriel García Márquez Wanted to Destroy His Last Novel. It's Being Published - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39630173
Disgusting.
“What are you doing?” the horrified scholars asked.
“Leave me alone,” Beethoven replied. “I’m decomposing.”
"On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."