This came to my mind today, while I was writing a review of Jane Austen's Persuasion, which I finished yesterday. In a way, literature is always a form of flattery: it might try to be didactic, but it has to catch the reader's attention. Sometimes it pays to (partially) antagonize them, or subvert their expectations, though.
I'd say one of the virtues of reading classics that Humanists used to get right (not that most of the people working in those areas care about that stuff anymore, though) is that reading cultivates empathy, as it implicitly forces you to see things through the eyes (and through the values) of different times and places, including ones that you as a reader *do not* share.
One sees this with levels of summary, from "news headline" to full detail at the highest resolution and granularity. Levels of summary obey the market of consumer demand for that level of attention.
They don't summarize so much as provide a summary heavily distorted to satisfy the biases of the filter of a self-selecting audience that is going to both trust the summarization, be too ignorant to catch distortions, and talk to each other about the subject at that level without motivation from expertise, skepticism, or curiosity to invest more time and effort to drill deeper to learn more.
In coverage of science research, as one moves from headline to overview paragraph to full journalism article to study abstract to full article to supplemental materials to intimate familiarity with criticisms and references and the state of replicability in the particular field, one notices decreasing opportunity for big distortions and also decreasing attempts to make big distortions and probably also decreasing 'demand' for it from readers of that level. It's like a quest or tournament where only a tiny few will ever have what it takes to make it to the end.
Imagine a different kind of distorting bias for levels of literature summary. Maybe the customers paying for summaries are students looking for the lowest effort way to get a target grade. They don't do much want an accurate summary as one which is the most likely to help them please the teacher, and if the typical teacher of a work of literature doesn't give As for accuracy but for essays placing exaggerated emphasis on analysis of dynamics of social position, then the most popular summaries will mirror that distortion, and summaries of summaries will get progressively more distorted, like copying hand notes distilling the commercial summary from a student who used them to write an essay which received an A, or just copying the essay itself.
The kind of person who reads every word in a book by Tolstoy because they want to because they enjoy the experience and appreciate the detailed realism and insight into the human condition isn't looking for bias confirmation or the filtering out of everything not strictly necessarily to accomplish some alternative purpose. They want the truth, they are willing to work for it, and from him, they get it.
Eventually we may use personal AIs to summarize directly from the underlying data sources. They aren't perfect but at least they don't suffer from the same attention-seeking biases that journalism has fallen into.
We're trending toward the future of Accelerando, where we need technology to mediate the chaotic mess for us: Scam detectors, spam filters, bias detectors, ad blockers, deep fake detectors, ... All of these problems are becoming rapidly more acute.
This is why the correct way to test people isn't for whether they agree with your ideas or not, it's for whether they can add to them. Agreeing without understanding doesn't help. Disagreeing without understanding is promising (it points to maybe they will agree if they understand)
Adding to an idea is the unfakeable signal that you get it, or as you say "getting the details right".
I will say, though, that I've achieved a niche success by telling readers stories they don't want to hear, and which deeply upset them. If you just step over the line of what readers want, like JK Rowling having Harry marry wossername instead of Hermione, that just annoys them. If you go farther, and make the bad guy win, they'll hate you. But if you go even farther, and destroy the frame the reader brought into the story--say, show that the good guys and the bad guys are all good and yet unable to avoid destroying themselves and each other--they'll cry, or have nightmares. Some will never read anything you write again; some will read everything you write from then on.
This reminds me of a course in French Literature I took as an undergrad at Caltech, wherein the professor, an older Frenchwoman, had us read de Sade's Justine. There was something endearing about the peculiar delight she took in discussing that book.
I'm not disagreeing, but want to clarify that I don't do shock art. Whether de Sade was doing something more than shock art is debated, but he can be read that way. I mean more like Greek tragedy, which presents a dilemma and proves that no known moral system has a solution for it.
(That's not what Aristotle said it did, nor what English Renaissance scholars said it did; but it is a thing genre fiction sometimes does, and modern literary fiction used to do. The recent elimination of that kind of tragedy from literary fiction is a striking example of why I lambasted literary fiction in another comment on this blog for only telling its readers what they want to hear. Readers of literary fiction today don't want to hear about difficult moral dilemmas that force them to think, but about corruption, ennui, or dysfunction that they can reflexively blame on the "systemic" corruption of bourgeois America. Different rules apply to literary fiction set outside America, or in American non-white cultural enclaves or social circles. That work can be honest and quite good, and might have fewer rules. But I doubt that even Chinua Achebe's /Things Fall Apart/ could be published today; it's anti-colonial, but it's too honest about certain things.)
Reflecting on your comment made me wonder if there is an inverse relationship between how much change and ambiguity people experience in their daily lives, and what they hope to get out of literature.
Someone in a more static social situation might be looking for adventure or moral uncertainty as an outlet. Conversely someone in a tense or uncertain situation might instead want the literary equivalent of comfort food.
I'm writing an article right now arguing that the status of tragedy as the pinnacle of literature, and of happy endings as lowbrow, is because the canon is chosen by elites, and the plot of a tragedy is relevant to the needs of elites, who already have a hold on their happy endings, and need fear only being cast down from their high status.
I think that "comfort food" literature serves a real need for the most-troubled people, although it has a nasty tendency to tell people comforting lies, and to oversimplify the world, especially into "good" and "evil" people. Many Marxists say literature is inherently evil for the same reason, because they think comfort is inherently bad.
Have you read Proust? I thought Tolstoy was the greatest until I read Proust, who I now place (potentially far) above the rest. The first book of Lost time is hard to get through, but the middle chapter A Love of Swan (I’m translating from memory) will do Proust justice.
For example, IMHO Tolstoy ruined the ending of Anna Karenina by turning it into a morality play; he required Anna to have an unhappy and ignoble ending, even though he had to jerk her on strings like a puppet to do things and feel things her character would not. But the rest of the book is full of wonderful character studies.
Yes, the characters in Anna Karenina are amazing. I thought the ending was good but I don’t mind a moral tale. War and Peace had similarly incredible characters, but I thought Tolstoy went a little TOO far sometimes to make sure the characters were not one-dimensional.
As a writer and editor, it sounds like you're talking about genre fiction. There are expectations that a genre such as sci-fi or romcom will conform to these expectations, although mashups of genres are growing, such as science fantasy and paranormal romance. Where you will find the representation of 'real humans' is in literary fiction. A small fraction of the total publications, but you don't have to turn to classics to find 'real humans'. You'll find them in the works of Philip Roth, Barbara Kingsolver, Margaret Atwood, Toni Morrison...the list is long. But don't dismiss genres. The best in the genre have much to teach us about 'real humans' too.
No, I've read enough literary fiction to see that their large scale structures of character and plot are also greatly influenced by story telling needs.
This came to my mind today, while I was writing a review of Jane Austen's Persuasion, which I finished yesterday. In a way, literature is always a form of flattery: it might try to be didactic, but it has to catch the reader's attention. Sometimes it pays to (partially) antagonize them, or subvert their expectations, though.
I'd say one of the virtues of reading classics that Humanists used to get right (not that most of the people working in those areas care about that stuff anymore, though) is that reading cultivates empathy, as it implicitly forces you to see things through the eyes (and through the values) of different times and places, including ones that you as a reader *do not* share.
One sees this with levels of summary, from "news headline" to full detail at the highest resolution and granularity. Levels of summary obey the market of consumer demand for that level of attention.
They don't summarize so much as provide a summary heavily distorted to satisfy the biases of the filter of a self-selecting audience that is going to both trust the summarization, be too ignorant to catch distortions, and talk to each other about the subject at that level without motivation from expertise, skepticism, or curiosity to invest more time and effort to drill deeper to learn more.
In coverage of science research, as one moves from headline to overview paragraph to full journalism article to study abstract to full article to supplemental materials to intimate familiarity with criticisms and references and the state of replicability in the particular field, one notices decreasing opportunity for big distortions and also decreasing attempts to make big distortions and probably also decreasing 'demand' for it from readers of that level. It's like a quest or tournament where only a tiny few will ever have what it takes to make it to the end.
Imagine a different kind of distorting bias for levels of literature summary. Maybe the customers paying for summaries are students looking for the lowest effort way to get a target grade. They don't do much want an accurate summary as one which is the most likely to help them please the teacher, and if the typical teacher of a work of literature doesn't give As for accuracy but for essays placing exaggerated emphasis on analysis of dynamics of social position, then the most popular summaries will mirror that distortion, and summaries of summaries will get progressively more distorted, like copying hand notes distilling the commercial summary from a student who used them to write an essay which received an A, or just copying the essay itself.
The kind of person who reads every word in a book by Tolstoy because they want to because they enjoy the experience and appreciate the detailed realism and insight into the human condition isn't looking for bias confirmation or the filtering out of everything not strictly necessarily to accomplish some alternative purpose. They want the truth, they are willing to work for it, and from him, they get it.
Yes, good points, this applies to news and academic summaries as well.
Eventually we may use personal AIs to summarize directly from the underlying data sources. They aren't perfect but at least they don't suffer from the same attention-seeking biases that journalism has fallen into.
We're trending toward the future of Accelerando, where we need technology to mediate the chaotic mess for us: Scam detectors, spam filters, bias detectors, ad blockers, deep fake detectors, ... All of these problems are becoming rapidly more acute.
This is why the correct way to test people isn't for whether they agree with your ideas or not, it's for whether they can add to them. Agreeing without understanding doesn't help. Disagreeing without understanding is promising (it points to maybe they will agree if they understand)
Adding to an idea is the unfakeable signal that you get it, or as you say "getting the details right".
Nabokov: “Caress the detail, the divine detail!”
I will say, though, that I've achieved a niche success by telling readers stories they don't want to hear, and which deeply upset them. If you just step over the line of what readers want, like JK Rowling having Harry marry wossername instead of Hermione, that just annoys them. If you go farther, and make the bad guy win, they'll hate you. But if you go even farther, and destroy the frame the reader brought into the story--say, show that the good guys and the bad guys are all good and yet unable to avoid destroying themselves and each other--they'll cry, or have nightmares. Some will never read anything you write again; some will read everything you write from then on.
This reminds me of a course in French Literature I took as an undergrad at Caltech, wherein the professor, an older Frenchwoman, had us read de Sade's Justine. There was something endearing about the peculiar delight she took in discussing that book.
I'm not disagreeing, but want to clarify that I don't do shock art. Whether de Sade was doing something more than shock art is debated, but he can be read that way. I mean more like Greek tragedy, which presents a dilemma and proves that no known moral system has a solution for it.
(That's not what Aristotle said it did, nor what English Renaissance scholars said it did; but it is a thing genre fiction sometimes does, and modern literary fiction used to do. The recent elimination of that kind of tragedy from literary fiction is a striking example of why I lambasted literary fiction in another comment on this blog for only telling its readers what they want to hear. Readers of literary fiction today don't want to hear about difficult moral dilemmas that force them to think, but about corruption, ennui, or dysfunction that they can reflexively blame on the "systemic" corruption of bourgeois America. Different rules apply to literary fiction set outside America, or in American non-white cultural enclaves or social circles. That work can be honest and quite good, and might have fewer rules. But I doubt that even Chinua Achebe's /Things Fall Apart/ could be published today; it's anti-colonial, but it's too honest about certain things.)
Reflecting on your comment made me wonder if there is an inverse relationship between how much change and ambiguity people experience in their daily lives, and what they hope to get out of literature.
Someone in a more static social situation might be looking for adventure or moral uncertainty as an outlet. Conversely someone in a tense or uncertain situation might instead want the literary equivalent of comfort food.
I'm writing an article right now arguing that the status of tragedy as the pinnacle of literature, and of happy endings as lowbrow, is because the canon is chosen by elites, and the plot of a tragedy is relevant to the needs of elites, who already have a hold on their happy endings, and need fear only being cast down from their high status.
I think that "comfort food" literature serves a real need for the most-troubled people, although it has a nasty tendency to tell people comforting lies, and to oversimplify the world, especially into "good" and "evil" people. Many Marxists say literature is inherently evil for the same reason, because they think comfort is inherently bad.
Have you read Proust? I thought Tolstoy was the greatest until I read Proust, who I now place (potentially far) above the rest. The first book of Lost time is hard to get through, but the middle chapter A Love of Swan (I’m translating from memory) will do Proust justice.
Yes, vol1 of In Search of Lost TIme.
For example, IMHO Tolstoy ruined the ending of Anna Karenina by turning it into a morality play; he required Anna to have an unhappy and ignoble ending, even though he had to jerk her on strings like a puppet to do things and feel things her character would not. But the rest of the book is full of wonderful character studies.
Yes, the characters in Anna Karenina are amazing. I thought the ending was good but I don’t mind a moral tale. War and Peace had similarly incredible characters, but I thought Tolstoy went a little TOO far sometimes to make sure the characters were not one-dimensional.
I might be wrong. At the time I formed that opinion, I'd never been cast out by my community. The experience is far worse than it sounds.
PS these days Pride and Prejudice would be classed as a romcom
As a writer and editor, it sounds like you're talking about genre fiction. There are expectations that a genre such as sci-fi or romcom will conform to these expectations, although mashups of genres are growing, such as science fantasy and paranormal romance. Where you will find the representation of 'real humans' is in literary fiction. A small fraction of the total publications, but you don't have to turn to classics to find 'real humans'. You'll find them in the works of Philip Roth, Barbara Kingsolver, Margaret Atwood, Toni Morrison...the list is long. But don't dismiss genres. The best in the genre have much to teach us about 'real humans' too.
No, I've read enough literary fiction to see that their large scale structures of character and plot are also greatly influenced by story telling needs.