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.
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.
"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.
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...
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".
He won't mind.