> Books like Pride and Prejudice, War and Peace, The Brothers Karamazov, etc still sell many thousands of copies every year, more than even big hits in contemporary literary fiction.
I think the author skips past the real answer right here. The old books haven’t gone away. Even if we assume there are good new books, they have to compete with the supply of existing books, which grows without bound - unlike the time and attention of consumers.
Every form of media has this problem. A human lifetime can only consume so many books, so many films, so many hours of music. A new movie comes out: what are the odds of it being more worth your while than one on the existing IMDb Top 1000? Decreasing.
Books are no different. What are the odds that something new is going to displace something existing off the shortlist of greats that you already don’t have time to read?
This reason doesn’t seem to be correct. Why do we have so many YouTube videos published that still garner views? Why TV shows? We still make culturally relevant movies every year. Why?
Books don’t need to compete with all previous books but just have to be culturally relevant now.
Putting aside the issues with manipulated IMDB ratings, look at the volume of Marvel movies ranked equal or better than classics like "Vertigo" or "Lawrence of Arabia".
Film lovers (or perhaps snobs?) feel jaded about recent output. Pop culture dictates that superhero movies are more accessible. The coarsening of culture is a continual, evergreen observation.
This is all built on an assumption that arts/media can all be strictly ranked “best” to “worst.” There are a million metrics by which we might try to measure it, but well… that’s just not how art works. Thinking this way indicates a fundamental lack of understanding of what art is.
Probably one of the most important metrics is “relevance to, and effect on, the state of the world as it is right now.” And pretty much any arbitrary “1000 best” list is not going to take that into account.
That’s why people listen to Chappell Roan, and near-instinctively belt her songs out out after a few drinks, instead of Beethoven symphonies or Mozart operas, even if the latter may be “superior” in nearly every measurable way. Part of art is how it speaks to the listener. In fact… I might argue that that’s all of art, with metrics about it being an entirely different, not-art thing.
(I say all this as a classical musician and senior software engineer with a math background, myself.)
You don't need to rank strictly and linearly. An objective ordering need not exist. It's enough to see that on shortlists of "great" works, common themes emerge. Is The Great Gatsby better than The Catcher in the Rye? It doesn't matter. They both come with universal acclaim, and that's stiff competition for anything new. Besides, are great works not promoted as being timelessly relevant to the state of the world?
Stan Lee made a comic about how he and his co-workers made comics, and in one frame he says something like "How dare it he say it is hackneyed? I stole it from the best classic I could find!" That is, if superhero movies sell today, stories about Hercules and Theseus sold 2500 years ago.
And I loved Catcher in the Rye, but not so much The Great Gatsby. I've found this "shortlist" of classics that have universal acclaim has always been hit or miss for me. The classics I was assigned to read in high school would seem to lurch from riveting to a slog to get thorough. I don't blame the books, it's just what captures my particular interest. Given that, I have never really used "the classics" as a guarantee that I will find the reading fulfilling over other, more obscure, recommendations that I may receive, whether they be old books or new.
I read both twice, once in high school and again a few years after I graduated (this was over 15 years ago). I loved The Great Gatsby even more (that opening first page is magnificent), and couldn't help but feel like The Catcher in the Rye as being so incredibly naive and juvenile. The latter experience is similar to reading (or watching) Fight Club and thinking Tyler Durden is a hero of sorts and something to aspire to, which is not the ultimate lesson.
I've felt this before. A librarian taught me a trick: chug the book. You were probably trained to really analyze what you're reading, look for symbolism, etc, but you can enjoy a book as almost an emotional-sensory experience instead.
Parent's point is not some abstract personal value problem.
Think about public libraries. They have limited space and budget, and already abundantly hold loved classics. They'll still take in some amount of new books, but when a 8 yo kid goes in to decide what to read, the vast majority will be older books.
> That’s why people listen to Chappell Roan, and near-instinctively belt her songs out out after a few drinks, instead of Beethoven symphonies or Mozart operas, even if the latter may be “superior” in nearly every measurable way.
As someone who grew up on Looney Tunes and the like, I absolutely start humming and making up words to classical music far more often than anything from this century.
>This is all built on an assumption that arts/media can all be strictly ranked “best” to “worst.”
Not at all. The only assumption the OP needs is that old media can still appeal to modern people, at which point quantity and accessibility may give it a certain advantage.
Sure you don't have an objective best to worst, but I'm sure that most serious listeners will venture to music from all kind of eras and cultures.
I find that it's much harder ( than visual art ) to say "I don't like this" and more "This sounds really fun but I can't budget time to listen to this kind music".
> This is all built on an assumption that arts/media can all be strictly ranked “best” to “worst.”
No it isn't. It's just based on the objectively true assumption that contemporary fiction is competing with all fiction ever written.
It absolutely doesn't have to be the case that people buy more classics because the classics are objectively better. (Although that is, in fact, he case).
Art has no objective measure. I cannot stand classical music because it has very little rhythm and emotion compared to the other, more modern music I listen to. Does that make classical music worse? No.
Just because something may have been popular in the past and is now seen as "smart" e.g. the opera, books, classical music, painting, does not make it better than what's popular now, e.g. television, video games, and rhythmic music.
If anything I'd argue art has gotten significantly better and more advanced over the years. I don't play many video games but the combination of visual, auditory, interactivity, and storytelling still blows me away.
Art is indeed subjective, but saying classical music has no emotion is a pretty controversial opinion. I've wept from plenty of classical symphonies and don't know much about the genre. A lot of movies just aren't the same without some Hans Zimmerman or John Williams.
Unless you're listening to extremely niche heavy metal, electronica, or the kind of jazz that they don't play on the radio you aren't listen to anything with the skill and complexity of classical. And the people who do also show up to new music.
I don't think there is any video game that comes close in depth to the Ring Cycle.
I thought you were going to link to the incessant ominous col legno (hitting the strings with the stick of the bow) at the start of Holst's Mars for rhythm, so please allow me to add that one to the list.
That would be emotion to _you_, not to me. You've also missed this point:
> compared to the other, more modern music I listen to.
Additionally, complexity is not an accurate measure of how "good" art is. But if you want to argue about complexity - and this would mean total complexity, not just sheer storytelling complexity, an easy refute to your point is GTA V, which is arguably one of the most complex pieces of art ever made.
I guess anything is arguable, but I think it would be pretty difficult to make a very good argument that GTA V is one of the most complex pieces of art ever made. I mean, first we’d have to define a piece of art, then we’d have to define what it “complexity” means in that context…
Depends what we mean by better. If you prefer rock music to Bach then great. Enjoy! I love popular music and classical for different reasons
But if we're talking skill, intellectual depth, craft, then there are objective criteria. Take Bach, his music is like a masterpiece of engineering with its unparalleled compositional complexity and craftsmanship. His mastery of counterpoint being but one example. His work represents a pinnacle of musical architecture, establishing foundational principles that profoundly influenced centuries of Western music.
That just doesn't compare to most pop music does it?
The fact that you can belt out Chappel Roan drunk is pretty much an objective assessment of its "worse'ness." Beethoven takes many years of dedicated practice to be able to achieve and you would have to be very skilled to perform it drunk.
Man, you should go to an open air classical concert in Europe sometime.
Sure we are just quietly getting shitfaced for most of it but if they play Ode to Joy you can be certain that the 10000 drunks in Waldbühne will belt it.
Also not Beethoven but I'm pretty sure some violins will get broken if they don't play Berliner Luft here in town.
Like how it's probably law in the UK that any classical concert with a large crowd in attendance must end with Jerusalem for a good ol singalong, or else they tar and feather the conductor.
I can belt out (and am known to occasionally do so when walking home from the pub solo) Ein Schwan by Grieg (in the German, didn't learn the Norwegian version) and Ave Verum Corpus by Byrd while drunk, so you're saying these two pieces suck?
(I also like to throw the occasional Magnificat or Nunc Dimittis to mix it up. As you can tell, I'm a reformed choir boy. Oh, and Jerusalem by Parry/Blake is custom designed for drunken singalongs.)
I beg you to listen to the first two pieces and perhaps reconsider your chosen metric.
A friend of the family gave my son a guitar a while back and more recently tried to get him to play Sugar Mountain by Neil Young. He worked at it pretty hard and struggled with it because even though it is simple it has to be played with great precision to sound good. Then he discovered grunge and bar chords and had a breakthrough with The Day I Tried to Live by Soundgarden and Rooster by Alice in Chains.
Now he's looking for good songs he can play and that's gotten him into David Bowie songs from The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. For a long time I thought of David Bowie as one of those classically trained musicians like Frank Zappa who played rock because it had commercial potential, but he found many songs on that album to be great songs that were within his reach. Now when we have houseguests who say they like Rush he will be able to play the chorus of a few songs in 24 hours and he's building instruments like a Guitar-harp-ukulele (fretless guitar with two bridges, one of which has a harp section) and he's asking me about the physics to build a bass guitar tuned an octave or two below a regular bass guitar.
> he's asking me about the physics to build a bass guitar tuned an octave or two below a regular bass guitar.
I barely know anything about music, and probably less about guitars, but if he can do barre chords, then you can try to build a simple capo with him, since he might readily grasp the utility of having a clamp that essentially gives you another hand on that side of the guitar.
He's been experimenting with clamps, he has one for the fretless guitar section of the guitar-ukulele.
As for the electric quadro- or octo-bass the variables you can tweak are:
* length
* mass/length
* tension
There's some limit to how long you make the strings or you can't play it or otherwise you need something to extend your reach like the levers on the octobass. The other two are inside a square root which is not in your favor. Probably the easy thing to do is find some really heavy strings for a normal bass and see how low you can get the tension.
But really he's the one to build things. Back when I was in physics they kept trying to get me to do experiment rather than theory, if I have any regret it is that if I had studied experiment I'd be able to build all the things that my son wanted to build but, hey, he can build those things now.
There was once a company making a bass ukulele with inch-thick polymer strings. Playing them was kind of hilarious, and would be fun to see it scaled up to the size of an actual bass guitar... Probably someone has done it...
Life is the ultimate test. We see ourselves reflected in the eyes of others. There may be nothing more humbling than being confronted with our own ignorance, except when we have an audience.
I guess once the strings are too loose, then they can’t vibrate consistently enough for long enough to be tunable/playable? I am wondering if a kind of lap guitar or a guitar laid flat might allow for pedals to be used that could bisect the strings to do octave changes upward in pitch. Going downward in pitch from an open position is going to be hard unless you have some excess tunable string beyond the last point of contact with the strings, and that contact could be released to increase the string length?.
You might be able to find an 8 string bass, and have two different string gauges. The top four could be heavier gauge and tuned at a lower octave. Or you could alternate gauges and silence the strings? I don’t know much about playing technique, but it sounds like it might be hard to build in such a way so idiomatic playing technique and style is preserved, but many alternate tuning methods and tools do affect how the guitar is played, so that may not be such a big deal if he’s the only one playing it, but if he wants the mechanics to translate to playing other guitars, those concerns might be more relevant.
It might also be possible to teach him how to build simple guitar pedals, which can easily pitch bend in post-processing once you know how the parts fit conceptually together.
Your guitar projects sound interesting and would be a good post for HN if you can find the time.
I would not say that the value of art is strictly equivalent to technical difficulty. But I would say that there is a level of technical competence required for art to be good. Something that takes no skill to create (e.g. that absurd banana duct taped to a wall "piece") is not good art, if indeed it can be called art at all.
I would argue art is not about how "good" it is, but rather how it makes you feel. And the duct tape banana, just by referencing it, is successful in making you feel something.
The fact that people still talk about it and ridicule it 6 years after it was created, and it lives on in the cultural zeitgeist as that, makes it good art. It's literally called Comedian.
To be clear: I have spent the years to memorize and be able to perform a few Beethoven sonatas (not to mention the years required to even get to that point). I can also play them drunk (though not as cleanly, and wouldn't do that in any paid/professional performance situation). I literally did this sort of thing for a living before deciding to use my CS/Math degree to be able to better provide for my family (https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonlatane/).
And none of that makes Beethoven "better" than Chappell Roan. Because there is no objective assessment of "better/worse"ness in art. That's not how art works, or what art is.
On the other had, your inability to correctly spell the name of an influential contemporary artist, with 40+M listeners per month, replying to a comment that did correctly spell her name, is a pretty objective reason to not trust anything you have to say about art (or, perhaps, much else, at least until you address whatever underlying issues/pathologies have you thinking this way).
Perhaps this will offer you some perspective: back when I did music for a living, I often did think this way. I thought most contemporary music was trash if it didn't offer the harmonic or contrapuntal complexity of classical, or even jazz. Really, being a young man from a poor background, I believe it was more a survival instinct (trying to gaslight myself and others into measuring me as "good enough" for gigs). It nearly ruined music for me, though. It required me being dishonest with myself about what I really enjoyed. Letting all that go has been a multi-decade process, and it's made me a much more well-adjusted individual. It also applies in many ways to the software world (as long as you stay out of Google-/Meta-/Oracle-type bigtech misery-inducing rat races).
Precisely the opposite. Rent-seekers eagerly invite comparison for purposes of valuation, and push the lens of art towards technical and political measurements. When a work is incomparable in the way in which it achieves verisimilitude it is escaping this system.
You are basically talking about the part where the system is so broken or rent captured that the only way out is through the bottom. Sure, but that doesn't make it good automatically.
There's art that moves you, or does not move you. That's the measure that matters most in your unique and finite life. You get to choose for yourself what to spend your time on, objectivity be damned.
Are you honestly tell me that you would let someone correct you on a matter of taste? That an authority could tell you, "no, you're wrong for enjoying this piece of art. It's bad and you ought to dislike it," and you would obey?
If so, you're a dupe. Trust your own taste. That's the first step to connoisseurship.
Is there an article (so you don't have to write an essay) that explains what you mean here? I don't think I'm familiar with the short hand point you're making here. I understand the terms rent seeking and familiar with the argument made in the quote fwiw.
> I think the author skips past the real answer right here. The old books haven’t gone away. Even if we assume there are good new books, they have to compete with the supply of existing books, which grows without bound - unlike the time and attention of consumers.
That's a real phenomenon in music. New works have to compete with the entire body of existing work, some of which is pretty good.
True, but I'd say it's worse for books than for music.
For music there's still plenty of network effects in favor of new music... things like live concerts, radio and DJs playing the latest stuff, playlists that make actual money being all about new stuff, younger people wanting to connect to their own generation, pop culture enthusiasts always chasing the "new thing".
Sure there are oldies stations and DJs and listeners rediscovering vintage stuff, but network effects for books are rarer, there's not that many Dan Browns anymore.
Yeah I would say books got it worse, there's a strong tradition of re-arranging old classics in new music, e.g.: kamasi washington remaking clair de lune. so listening to old pieces are not only rewarding, it's even necessary.
To note, books have a different networks: they can get movie/TV/game adaptions and get pushed to the news forefront, their author can also play the SNS game.
There's still no Spotlight for books, and I'm with you how tougher than other media it is.
I heard a joke that you don't write a political book for people to read, you write it so you can go on all the talk shows to be interviewed about your book.
That is of course not a joke at all depending on the field. It's kinda like being published in prestigious papers.
While specialists and enthusiasts will enjoy and peek at the content, being recognized as someone who writes about the subject and can be presented as an expert of the field can absolutely be the main impact for the author.
I don't think that's true at all, plenty of my friends has some kind of aversion to "old" music because they could not "get" the aesthetic.
Plus I'm sure most people are sick of Fur Elise.
and the author of course is only sampling a very tiny dataset of the works pushed by the algorithm. Many authors like me will never get on their radar.
And movies and TV. Why try some random new stuff when any of the classic movies is both guaranteed to be good and probably available for free from the library's DVD collection?
eg: What's it like to be a teenager alongside the rise of AI? It's a hell of a lot different than the old sci-fi imagines, and old sci-fi generally skipped to the 'end-phase-ubiquitous-AGI' instead of focusing on the transitionary 'awkward teenage' period of the technology.
This might prove too much, particularly for the case of literature. There were people writing commercially successful and culturally relevant literary fiction in 1970; back then you already had Austen and Tolstoy and Dostoevsky and Cervantes, plus Joyce and Woolf and Hemingway and Faulkner. I think there’s books published in the last 50 years that deserves a place on a short list of Best Novels, but I don’t think it has much overlap with the best-selling literary fiction being published at that time.
I agree. I've often thought about this via a thought experiment : How much money would it take for you to agree not to consume any new instance of a particular media type? In other words, you're offered fifty thousand dollars (or some other non-trivial but not outrageous amount of money) and in agreement you won't read a book released after June 2025.
Clearly this is going to vary from person to person but I might accept $50k to not read any new fiction title, but wouldn't accept the same deal for video games as it's likely new technology will result in some new classics in the coming years - the amount of money you'd need to offer would need to be much higher. Movies are somewhere in the middle.
This effect is self-reinforcing since at least part of the value in watching a movie / reading a book / etc is the ability to discuss it with other people. Not seeing any new movies would reduce my ability to participate in discussions with people. As less people watch new things, this becomes less of an issue.
It's a deep problem with music and video games. I mean, can a Mario game really top Super Mario World? Not to say some later games aren't fun, but Persona 6 could only really top Persona 5 by being something really different, and if it was different it wouldn't be Persona 6.
Not so much with video games. The industry is so young that most of those "classics" are actually much less fun than I remember them. (Super Mario World does hold up very well though.) But since you mention Persona, consider how much better Persona 3 Portable is than Persona 3 FES. Game design has come a long way, and I believe it still has a long way to go. Not to mention the technical improvements that allow a game like Uncharted to exist, which cannot be compared to any 16-bit or earlier game.
I have to disagree. Evidence for this being wrong is right on many games websites a la Backloggd with plenty of people rating older games very highly, more than many new releases. More evidence: numerous games being re-released with mainly surface-level changes (older Final Fantasy’s, arguably Oblivion Remastered).
While I absolutely agree some games age like milk (IMO Persona 3 FES/Portable mechanically play like garbage and P4 ain’t much better) there are many games that were either the pinnacle of their of their craft in pretty fundamental ways or were just doing very odd, interesting things that no one tries to do anymore (outside indies). JRPGs are honestly the big genre I see for aging well, but there’s a bunch of PS1/PS2 era games having a big second life with the younger generation.
That might be true about the time period from the SNES to the present but it's not clear to me that we're really getting better games post the PS3.
I have Persona 5 Royal on my mind because I am playing through it now maybe a decade after I played Persona 4 Golden on the PS Vita. I love the story, I love the art, but the music isn't up there with P4G (how can you beat Reach out or Make history?) and I think it's a disappointment as a game.
Hypothetically it matters if you develop relationships with the characters and raise your social stats but practically you're not required to make hard choices because you have enough time to do everything -- and since the game is so long you feel compelled to do it all in one playthrough which stretches out the game even longer.
It's not so much a P5R problem as a general problem in the industry. In my current playthrough status ailments, buffs, debuffs and such just don't matter. That's the case for most turn-based games, just as the weapons triangle ceased to matter in Fire Emblem games a long time ago.
My son and I have been thinking a lot about a "visual novel + something else" game which is maybe 30 minutes - 6 hours per playthrough but requires multiple playthroughs. I'd be happy to have NG+, but he thinks that's cheap.
Dialogue has been a weak point in "interactive fiction" since the beginning, maybe LLMs will change that. Fictional VR games like Sword Art Online and Shangri-La Frontier have NPCs you can just talk to, I'd love to see that in real games. For now we get Meta's absurd model that you can make a storefront in Horizon Worlds but you need to have a real person to staff it which makes sense to exactly one person.
>It's not so much a P5R problem as a general problem in the industry. In my current playthrough status ailments, buffs, debuffs and such just don't matter. That's the case for most turn-based games, just as the weapons triangle ceased to matter in Fire Emblem games a long time ago.
You can try Etrian Odyssey series by Atlus. It's all about status ailments, binds, buffs and debuffs.
To be fair, Persona 5 is my least favorite out of 3/4/5. Most fans of the series agree it's embarrassingly easy. Persona 3 (Portable is best, or FES if you're a masochist, but not Reloaded) offers a perfect challenge on the hardest difficulty, and Persona 4 was pretty well-tuned also. It wouldn't surprise me if P6 was closer to P4 or P3 than P5.
We aren't getting good games past 2015 or so because the industry has become incredibly risk-averse and realized there's more profit to be made releasing sequels and remakes than producing something innovative. That being said, that's not a sustainable strategy and we are seeing the limits of that.
>It's not so much a P5R problem as a general problem in the industry. In my current playthrough status ailments, buffs, debuffs and such just don't matter. That's the case for most turn-based games, just as the weapons triangle ceased to matter in Fire Emblem games a long time ago.
I think that's more a function of the games you are playing, in Kiseki or Xenoblade or (some) Final Fantasy there is alot more strategy involved than in Persona, whose primairly appeal I believe is more of a social life simulator than a deep rpg experience. Even with music, it's just a different style where P4 is pop while P5 is jazz, but other games draw from instrumentals or ecelectic mixes like Ar Tonelico. To say one is better/worse isn't a good term because they aren't easily comparable.
>Fictional VR games like Sword Art Online and Shangri-La Frontier have NPCs you can just talk to, I'd love to see that in real games.
Well that's just a MMORPG or a RPG or ImSim. And the MMORPG is probably closer to needing a fresh start than being anywhere close to a solved genre. But as the riskiest and most expensive genre, nobody is going to funding something that really pushes the line due to the sheer risk involved.
I would say every genre of media has this problem. A form of media might exist for thousands of years, but genre and fashion always evolve in new directions, because what's the point of creating more of what exists already.
There's a cave in France where somebody started painting a horse and 10,000 years later (but still tens of thousands of years ago) somebody finished it in the exact same style and technique. Novelty isn't required in art though it's currently prized.
Video Games were immune for a while because technology was changing so fast, but in the last decade or so its become really clear players don't care nearly as much about graphics as they used to.
People will quite happily pickup and play games from many years ago. Many of my teenage kids favourite games were made before they were born.
Oblivion is nearly 20 years old now and looked terrible at the time. (compared to other games that shipped at the time) Oblivion is a _big_ game not a polished game.
update: I found this screenshot and I think I was remembering Morrowinds characters.
Morrowind had very janky animations, but it wasn't too bad for 2002 otherwise. Definitely not top notch, but, well, look at faces in Deus Ex for another example from this period...
Oblivion had those weird faces but was otherwise pretty good actually, especially the lush outdoor environments.
There is also an issue that ranking is easily available now.
Of course, recommendations existed in the past as well, and stuff like classic literature was ranked for centuries at this point, but still, I think we relied on word of mouth more.
Nowadays you can easily get a list of "top ..." in any area and chances are high that it is all old stuff.
It goes beyond this. Reading is a form of entertainment. There has been an explosion of new and different forms of personal entertainment, so books now have to compete not just with old books, but movies, video games, social media, etc etc etc
> Even if we assume there are good new books, they have to compete with the supply of existing books, which grows without bound - unlike the time and attention of consumers.
There is a lot of supply, but language change makes existing books impossible to read over time. You're always limited to whatever's been made in the last X years.
The consumption of media is exponential, if you read something good and you expect more from a genre, the number of consumable works quickly dwindles down to the point that you often end up waiting for new works. In the same way, as people get a better understanding of their own preferences, entire subgenres will become less relevant.
That's why I find that the true enthusiasts of a hobby tend to prefer works that are less well known or even not even high in "quality", primairly because "quality" is no longer a suitable metric for them. The kind of "hobbyists" who just stick to the classics strikes me more as lifestyle hobbyists that aren't neccessairly interested for intrinsic reasons.
> A new movie comes out: what are the odds of it being more worth your while than one on the existing IMDb Top 1000? Decreasing
Not really? This is a rather "mechanical" view missing the bigger social part - for example, a big part of that worth is the social conversation, and the chances of your friends to watch that new movie vs the top 1000 isn't decreasing.
Also there is this factor of new films being able to incorporate "current" events which old films can't, and that's
another factor of worth that's not decreasing with time
Perhaps the "bigger" social part is what is missing. I've found I stop reading books or watching movies now days all the time. It seems like no media/author can resists SHOVING their micro-politic issue down your throat rather than simply presenting it as part of a story that you digest.
Its not that the social parts are missing. Its that there are 1,000,000 competing social issues and everyone is trying to make theirs heard.
I'm not sure if its the creator's or the publishing companies watering things down. Either way someone is doing it intentionally. No book where the prominent theme is is a micro politic will ever stand the test of time, or even gain a significant following.
> It seems like no media/author can resists SHOVING their micro-politic issue down your throat rather than simply presenting it as part of a story that you digest.
That may say something about the declining quality of writing.
You have to be a real pro to write propaganda for any topic that is also good literature. But most people are not Jack London :)
>That may say something about the declining quality of writing.
It might but I'm not sure its all of the story.
I know how business and money works. I can say for sure there are forces out there saying. "Our focus group didn't understand this, make the message POP more,more,more" To writers/producers before they are willing to cut a check.
I think it's due to a general decline into literalness.
I'm not sure which came first: audiences that no longer understand symbolism, metaphor, allegory, or writers who no longer use it. In any case, all of these things are basically completely absent from any modern piece of mainstream media. Wherever there's an attempt, it's decidedly conspicuous. There's little nuance and subtlety.
I've found I've stopped watching TV or movies or reading written fiction, but it's because fiction in general has ceased to do something for me. It's as if there's a willing suspension of disbelief needed that I can no longer muster. Fiction comes across to me as inherently false. This seems to transcend the particular political position taken, if any.
I think the first half of the article is the strongest, most plausible part. The argument:
Economic opportunities for professional writers have declined dramatically. The two crucial pathways were mentioned for novel writers to support themselves economically: (1) magazine writing and (2) academia. In the first case, magazine circulation has suffered because advertisers left for the internet, and in the second case, academic job oportunities have declined because of governmental cutbacks to universities, especially in the humanities.
The second half of the article argues that authors have made a tradeoff, deciding to maximize critical praise instead of book sales, thereby turning off general audiences who don't share the obscure and trendy tastes of the critics.
This argument felt weak. As far as I can tell, there's no real explanation of how it supposedly came about. Even the article author seems to admit there are holes in the argument: "There are still some important open questions: the exact role of the critics in moving authors away from popular taste." Indeed.
I'm personally a fan of contemporary literary fiction. My own suspicion is that the problem in literature is the same as the problem in music and movies: corporate consolidation and the ascendancy of data-mongering penny-pinchers with no taste except for profit maximization. Their preference in all the arts is derivative dreck that's easily marketed, ideally with a built-in audience and reproducible, with the goal of spawning an endless series based in the same "universe." The leaders of the industry don't want to take chances on new artists, unless they can guarantee a massive hit.
Magazines were so flush with cash that Vonnegut was paid $750 for his first story. That's unadjusted for inflation. I'm no expert, but I think a first time author getting $750 from a magazine would be doing pretty well these days. He saw that market fall apart within his lifetime, and blamed it on th audience moving to TV, for what it's worth.
Many well known authors got their start in magazines like Hunter S. Thompson; Where would he be if he was starting out today? Probably doing podcasts and the youtube circuit instead.
I agree with you that the economic factors are much more persuasive.
I'm curious though, if you're a reader of contemporary literary fiction, do you think that it hasn't undergone a transformation to become more obscure and trendy compared to where it was in, say, the 1960s? Are the critics' favorites now just as accessible and of the same standard as, say, Lolita or Portnoy's Complaint were back then? Or do you agree there was a transformation and just disagree with the vague reasons he gives for it?
Also, do you have any recommendations of contemporary literary fiction for us here on Hacker News? Asking as someone who mostly only reads literary novels by dead people, contemporary sci-fi or speculative fiction, and of course, inevitably, books by Sally Rooney.
> My own suspicion is that the problem in literature is the same as the problem in music and movies: corporate consolidation and the ascendancy of data-mongering penny-pinchers with no taste except for profit maximization
Agreed. I think this was a big miss in the article.
>Economic opportunities for professional writers have declined dramatically. The two crucial pathways were mentioned for novel writers to support themselves economically: (1) magazine writing and (2) academia. In the first case, magazine circulation has suffered because advertisers left for the internet, and in the second case, academic job oportunities have declined because of governmental cutbacks to universities, especially in the humanities.
>The second half of the article argues that authors have made a tradeoff, deciding to maximize critical praise instead of book sales, thereby turning off general audiences who don't share the obscure and trendy tastes of the critics.
I think that the second half of the article seems weak because the first half contains a critical flaw. Academia hasn't declined nearly as much as magazines. Government funding is down, but departments are open and there are still thousands of English professors out there. Meanwhile, enrollment is up and university budgets are broadly still quite healthy. The situation is much worse for traditional long-form entertainment media, which has been squeezed by the blogosphere and the algorithmic feed.
This is not to diminish the argument that the arts have suffered as a whole, but in order to look at changes within the field, we need to consider changes in the relative importance of various factors.
The expected consequence of this is that authors become more dependent on academic jobs, which often react more favorably to critical appraisal than book sales. The second argument in the article then follows.
There is a little more to say here: the old magazine audience was not quite the broad popular audience of the bestseller lists. Rather we have to hypothesize some particular "literary" interest among the magazine audience that creates a market for the writers of literary fiction in a way that today's media does not. But since I have only a passing familiarity with that world and I am not a big reader of literary fiction I do not have any useful insight here.
I love how this article cuts right through a lot of bad trite explanations for literary fiction’s decline that have been pushed by its adherents (“the internet made people stupid”) to really try and analyze the supply side and demand side factors of why not many people buy contemporary literary fiction anymore.
His point that people still read challenging literary fiction, just by dead people, also seems an important one (see HN’s recent discussions of reading Ulysses) and rather damning for contemporary literary novelists. So is the point that many good writers who wanted to actually earn a living that way ended up writing for prestige TV in the 2000s instead.
I do wish he’d discussed more why Sally Rooney seems to be the exception, in terms of commercial success. What is it about her books that’s different? What did she do (or avoid doing) to appeal to a wide readership?
Finally, he seems to draw a pretty hard boundary between literary and “genre” fiction that I’m not sure always exists. Ursula Le Guin is a good counterexample here.
Because Rooney writes dressed-up romance novels. They’re mediocre. But to the author’s point, at least they’re readable and touch on real emotion, even if I find them a bit trite. Some balance could be struck between Rooney and the more highbrow experiments the author bemoans. Elena Ferrante is a decent example here, and she does get sales. But even then, I do think the author understates the competition reading faces from new forms of media - yes, there are more people, but the amount of distraction has scaled disproportionately to the number of new people. Massively.
Something hinted at in the essay is what I consider a funnel effect. If you have N people starting on some project, N/2 will get distracted after a while, some proportion of those who remain will just suck, some smaller proportion will be OK, and so on until you manage to find a few real geniuses. If you shrink the size of the funnel, you get less geniuses.
An important part of having a large funnel is giving people a way to really spend their time doing the thing. For example, writing short stories for magazines was once a reasonable way to support yourself for a few years as a young writer, and led to a very large funnel. Take away that infrastructure for young writers, and you get a smaller funnel, and an attrition in quality of the best work.
(Now, consider what happens 10-20 years after we stop hiring new grads for programming jobs...)
> I do wish he’d discussed more why Sally Rooney seems to be the exception, in terms of commercial success. What is it about her books that’s different? What did she do (or avoid doing) to appeal to a wide readership?
I suppose part of the reason is that the Irish have cultivated a strong literary culture.
One thing I got from reading Sally Rooney is I can relate to the many of the character's situations, thoughts/opinions and emotions even though I am almost forty years older than they are and her books are easy to read for lack of a better description (though this latter features in much contemporary writing). Is that her secret sauce, I dunno.
Even the most challenging work of fiction wasn't challenging to an 18 year old contemporary reader of average intelligence. The fact that in order to appreciate these works in present day requires more intellectualism doesn't actually say anything about the works themselves.
I feel like this is a pretty bold statement for a population that depending on what year you're calling contemporary was probably somewhere between 30-50% illiterate.
I really wouldn't expect reading proficiency to be radically different from the distribution we have today which is to say the distribution centers around levels 2/3 which is "can make basic inferences from text."
Yes, and the amount of people being taught to read was a lot lower than "basically everyone" (assuming we're talking about the developed countries where this is measured). Literature being considered a hobby anyone can get into is a relatively recent concept.
In some ways we are 30-50% literate now which means I completely agree with you. I only meant the above about the literate 18 year old. If a 17 year old kid with a 3.2 GPA can't follow the prose without a headache then it isn't the same kind of writing that Tolstoy did. That's not to say that same person would appreciate the content of the novel in its richness.
People seem to forget that many of the books we find to be "literary" today were 1800s smut. These were commercial successes in their time, and weren't considered "highbrow," that was just what people read. Dismissing all of the books people read today as "genre" and not literary is the problem.
Don't have to go back that far :) - the author mentions Portnoy's Complaint (1969) which contains the big sight gags for the raunchy comedies Something About Mary(1998) and American Pie(1999).
Interesting idea. Literary fiction never actually existed; it’s an artificial construct.
I’d really love some professors to analyze a furry solarpunk story I wrote and dig through the symbolism like Virginia Woolf wrote it.
It would be interesting to see if a random internet dog’s scribblings can provide just as much content for discussion. From what other people have told me, it does.
Literary is a genre. Like all genres it has its popular tropes, fandom, cliches, etc.
A long time ago someone on a forum described a new lit fic book as a “TOBADNY” — a “trendy overhyped book about dysfunctional New Yorkers.” I LOLed and then realized this was totally the case and that this was a popular lit fic trope.
> What made the fiction literary was it spoke the language of memory, where the reader inhabited the experience of the characters, and this changed how readers experienced the world after.
>
> — https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36882341
People don't turn to books for this sort of experience anymore. People are not "literary minded". For the average person, interpolating another person's experience against their own through the written word is counterintuitive if not impossible and detached.
It takes a literary mind to feel through text. Electronic media of all sorts, aside from long form text displayed electronically is just that; electrifying.
I think that the quote I pulled from motohagiography applies to all writing and when we go further:
> Writing on the internet is participatory, impersonal, performative, and anti-intimate.
The cultural decline of all writing becomes more obvious.
Anyone who cares about this sort of stuff needs to understand that their brain is rewired but their spirit still craves the same old stuff that it sought out for when the mind could stomach total absorption in a dry block of pulp.
We are living in the tower of Babel. No one speaks the same "language" anymore. I truly believe this was the true metaphor behind that story. Once a civilization reaches a certain level of standard wealth people hyper converge on their personal beliefs to the point where they can literally no longer speak about other forms of personal belief or preference that conflicts with their own. And they no longer are coerced into going along with another belief system (compromise) due to economic need from the majority. At that point the civilization unravels due to lack of coherent direction.
Look at all the arguments about definitions of clearly defined words in modern politics.
Even so, mass media today is better posed to present a shared language.
I'd go as far as to think that there is a shared language in society today, but it's more like athletes jawing off amongst each other than something like what we expect the effects of culture and art to be.
In my original comment, I said that I believe that our brains are rewired but our spirits still crave the same things as before.
Tech changes the actions and reasonings behind how our nature is exercised, at the material level.
Now, if you don't believe in the material/immaterial dichotomy that typifies man then what I'm saying may not register.
I'm not sure if this applies to you, but either way I'm curious what made you make the claim that took us in this direction because it's apparent that you've noticed a logical step that I was only aware of subconsciously.
I vaguely recall some sociology and media theory strands that make arguments similar to the quoted post—that we are entering or have already entered an era of post-literacy. Our new language is a language of images, (tiktok, instagram), immediacy, and literalness (does anyone even understand allegory anymore? Does the average piece of media ever express a metaphor?). I don't have numbers on it, but my teacher friends tell me that the typical student's reading comprehension skills have tanked in the past few years.
It's not just reading comprehension, it's the imagination that goes with it.
Text is active. It triggers the imagination. Visual imagery - especially electronic imagery - is consumed passively. What you see is what you get.
Especially with Gen Z, there's been a catastrophic collapse in the public's ability to imagine anything that hasn't been pre-digested by Hollywood movies, video games, D&D, and anime.
It's the same stock imagery over and over and over.
Older culture is "boring" because it doesn't follow the standard tropes, and that makes it incomprehensible.
It's a bizarre kind of deja nostalgia - the only futures that can be imagined are the ones that have been imagined already.
Older works often conform less closely to the tropes, because the tropes weren't established at that point. When a medium or genre is new it often goes through a Cambrian explosion phase where there are all kinds of wildly varied pieces, and then things settle down and coalesce on the specific approaches that have proven successful.
I wonder if people are downvoting you in good faith because I think you're on to something. My assumption is that denigrating mass media and pop culture comes across as "elitist".
Oh well. I mean, for the person who can look around and feel disdain toward these things, they deserve whatever shred of dignity the allegation subscribes them to.
"Second Order Illiteracy" is precisely what cripples imagination, or the ability to perceive things beyond the immediate senses. Passively consuming electronic media does the heavy lifting that the literary mind achieves.
> It's a bizarre kind of deja nostalgia - the only futures that can be imagined are the ones that have been imagined already.
If we toss the word "capitalism" into the fray of what you're saying I think this is what Mark Fisher meant by the "Slow cancellation of the future".
Possibly the idea is just too new / people who haven't seen it think it's just dunking on the young generation again. But for example there's an unexpected trend on social media just within the past month of a large amount of Gen Z not being able to read "third person omniscient" (a term I hadn't heard before but is pretty much just what it sounds like; from examples appears to be how all fiction I've read is written).
That’s the old standby argument, and it may be right. I can’t really read John Barth or George Saunders the way I can read Richard Russo or Lionel Shriver or Kurt Vonnegut or Michael Chabon or Barbara Kingsolver. For me the experimental writers are very unpleasant to actually read. David Foster Wallace is just inside that frontier for me, and I can enjoy IJ. Bernard Malamud was pretty dark but I could hang in. But Paul Auster … I love what nonfiction writing I’ve seen, but the New York trilogy is so dark and Spartan it makes Joy Division look like disco.
Nitpick: I finally gave up on Pynchon, but is he really postmodern??
I'm in a sci-fi book club with friends and we decided to read one modern literary fiction book and while I am enjoying it, the prose is beautiful and the deep dive into the characters is interesting, it's literally exhausting to read.
The unpleasantness is definitely a problem. It's like the cool writers want to prove they are making something challenging by stripping away all of the sugarcoating that we normally love in narrative (and food!). I realize that the kind of pat endings that are so common in broadly popular narratives are a bit dull and predictable, but they're better than watching the protagonist go through the realities of life. We all have to suffer the worst parts of life each day. No need to do it at night too.
Right. It's just like music. Some people can appreciate noise music, some people view it as just that: abrasive noise. It's a matter of taste. For some, the unpleasantness is of aesthetic interest and they have an aesthetic appreciation for it.
Great example. It is absolutely a matter of taste. Sadly noise music doesn’t support a lot of full-time jobs compared to writing songs more or less the way the Beatles did. Which was all new and stuff, but not completely foreign to what Stephen Foster did.
We can try to reinvent writing, or we can focus on writing. But one may come at the expense of the other.
It is true that there isn't that much literary stuff that breaks through, and the stuff that does is usually somewhat crossover (e.g., All the Light We Cannot See in 2015 or Song of Achilles in 2021) but it exists. These two books are shelved under literary codes (though also historical). Song of Achilles in particular is beautifully written and a personal favorite of mine, at least among books published in recent years.
Then there are other works like Little Fires Everywhere and The Midnight Library that I might not consider super literary but nonetheless are also often considered so by book shops or libraries (e.g., https://lightsailed.com/catalog/book/the-midnight-library-a-... the lit fic code is FIC019000).
I was really surprised that Ferrante's Neapolitan series, the best example (I would have thought) of recent work with both high literary acclaim and popular appeal, did not actually make the top 10 list for any year.
Yeah, and looking through the lists makes one suspect that there's a problem of incommensurate measurements... There's a lot of 'very hungry caterpillar' in the recent lists, but I'm unsure whether children's books were even in the running in the 1960's. Or else there's been a revolution in buying books for children since the 60's, which, honestly, I wouldn't be sad about...
This is a really good analysis article. Thank you for posting it. I think the critic vs consumer decoupling rings true to me, and this is obviously the worst economy to exist in as a "struggling" anything.
There are a lot of industries that are struggling right now to figure out how to re-monetize independent from large corporations (like magazines/ publishers/ movies/ etc) because those corporations are cutting out anyone not already hugely profitable.
I feel like whatever solution we eventually land on to 'democratize' media funding will also be a good solution to our FOSS funding problem.
Affording someone status for being someone with an opinion on cultural artifact X no longer exists. No one is impressed, there's too many people with thoughtful opinions on important books doing absolutely nothing valuable in society.
Self publishing your opinions in a way that is cheaply (freely) accessible to anyone became a thing. Previously if you wanted a book review you had to spend a chunk of time and/or money to even find a review, and when you did there was like a handful of reviews. If the thing was more esoteric, maybe zero reviews.
This remind me of something. In music criticism there are two terms, Rockism and Popism.
I feel like the intial drive against "Rockism" was to embrace different subcultures, like punk and post-punk, but later the result was "Popism", which became its own kind of orthodoxy, pushing critics into treating label-engineered chart pop as deep just because it’s popular or polished.
Back when I was a journalism student wanting to work in music in the early 2000s I used to frequent early internet hangouts for critics and it was interesting to see the change happening progressively, with critics increasively and progressively adopting a certain air of superiority over anyone who couldn't conflate popularity with genius.
For me the big chasm was over brazilian funk music. Sure I could see it a few times as somewhat interesting, and I could understand the appeal as dance music, but the old guard was trying to use old arguments to push it as "descendants of Kraftwerk" while the new guard was using socio-anthropological arguments to defend it. The music rarely stood for itself, and when it did was often on the back of previous music. I'm not saying it's automatically "bad" but its positive qualities were blown out of proportion by critics for me that it become grating.
Today the internet made it all even worse, lots of "pop culture centric" communities are 5% about music and 95% about the personal life of artists, the TMZ-level gossip, the memes, the constant fighting virtual wars with other pop-music fandoms, the metacircular discussion around the fandom itself...
I think these are factors to the extent that one sort of needs formal training and schooling in the historical development of the form to appreciate experimental and more contemporary work. The same can generally be said about visual art.
Because of that, yeah, hyper-specialization in schooling and a general movement toward stem means that a lot of people don't actually acquire the requisite background to engage with and appreciate modern work in a sufficient way—just like someone untrained in computing probably would not have an easy time understanding or appreciating significant breakthroughs in computer science.
If it's true that lit fic started leaving the best seller lists around the early 70s, could that also be due to people finding other media to express themselves? Like experimental music, film, and other fiction genres?
If I or anybody else publishes a novel about LLMs taking over the world, it would be classed as science-fiction, not as social commentary.
We suffer the same vices and the same diseases of one hundred years ago, and by then we had already invented capitalism and “enjoyed” it for quite some time. So I recon nobody would be able to write something like Les Miserables or David Copperfield and expect to have the same impact.
Our technological world and the nature of our collective miseries are constantly changing, and IMO are fertile ground for literary creation, but writers trained on the classic literary fiction works would not be prepared to handle the intricacies of our broad technology sectors and its social implications, and if they did were prepared and did write on those topics, they wouldn’t be recognized by their peers and the New Yorker as literary fiction writers… Think about The Martian, and a long list of wonderful works that have never made it to any of the high-brow lists this article refers to.
Is the author using Drury, Michener, and Morris West to beat up on 2023? I haven't read Colleen Hoover, but I have read the others, and they haven't made my must-reread list.
Honestly, if one takes the best-seller lists of a few arbitrary years, one will find an awful lot of dross.
There are better ways to tell stories now; good story tellers are doing fine.
The only ones left holding the bag are people who wanted specifically to be 'literary fiction writers' because they have some conception of what that is and why it's important to have a story physically printed on paper.
My own issue with modern literary fiction is the pretension. It’s been shoved in my face from middle school through college. Everyone writing “genre fiction” is not a Real Author.
Writing to be like one of the great writers of the past is completely missing the point. It’s one thing to follow a tradition. It’s another to think that tradition makes you great.
To be fair, those were fun, but extremely information sparse. You'd have a main story or two, some mail inbox stuff, a listing of a selection of cars you probably could never afford, and 35 pages of advertisements.
The car magazine has been replaced by forums and other online tools that are likely free and vastly superior. I do miss physical magazines though.
I can still sort of remember that in the 90s, but was mainly reading magazines in the late 90s and early 2000s, so I probably missed out on some of that. I did go back and read a lot of old magazines on microfiche at the library a few years ago (I think Byte magazine) and yeah...a lot of ads, but I guess they would have been super useful pre-internet. Did you use the BBS as well? I was too young when that was common.
when has litfic ever been relevant to the wider culture? There are exceptions of course but those are remarkable specifically because they are the exception. The average reader has always wanted Peyton Place, not Proust
There is a very simple explanation for the decline. The books are garbage that only masochists enjoy and that sadists force children to read in school. The description “Literary fiction may involve a concern with social commentary, political criticism, or reflection on the human condition” is full of antipatterns that are largely the mark of bad literature, since they miss the core purpose of fictional literature, which is to entertain. This is why “light novels” out of Japan and adaptations of them are popular while literary fiction is not.
Younger people don't read books as frequently as they did when I was young (pre-internet). Bookstores are flooded with junk, with the SEO-equivalent of publishing spam having won out on the bookshelves. Libraries are as bad or worse. Students do not pursue Greek and Latin and classical literature, and have no reference point of high culture apart from the distracting now.
And the English language has declined. English has always been a scraped-together, something-of-everything tongue. But jargon and abstractisms have killed expression. Meanwhile, French and German have eaten so many Americanisms that they're in terminal indigestion, and now the whole planet thinks and talks like a slightly below-average bumpkin American with a college journalism degree.
"A good deal of literary criticism serves only to reinforce a caste system which is as old as the intellectual snobbery which nurtured it. No one can be as intellectually slothful as a really smart person.”
Sour grapes. I've read enough of Stephen King in my youth to know that he is a very skilled writer, but he only produced large amounts of popular genre literature. The literature equivalent of enjoyable but forgettable popcorn movies. He wasn't taken seriously by literature criticism because he didn't produce anything sophisticated.
I just read The Body (basis for Stand By Me) and it was as personal and emotionally complex as any literary-approved fiction. It reminded me a lot of The Things They Carried, actually.
I think the biggest issue is that once he was pidgeonholed into being a "trope-master, scary fiction guy", no one would look at his writing any other way. And to be fair, MOST of his writing is overwrought genre stuff, but he has certainly developed into a fine craftsman at his best.
The reality is that most "literary" fiction is terrible and navel-gazing, seemingly written to land tenure somewhere or push some stupid literary trend that is just as vapid as any other publishing trend, only less fun. Historically, most fiction (or art in general) that persists was wildly successful in its time as a prerequisite.
> The reality is that most "literary" fiction is terrible and navel-gazing, seemingly written to land tenure somewhere or push some stupid literary trend that is just as vapid as any other publishing trend, only less fun.
I think that's just prejudice. Literary fiction simply has artistic or intellectual value beyond entertainment, and beyond using familiar tropes.
It's possible that King has some of these qualities somewhere. I have only read ten to fifteen of his novels. But that was enough that I could e.g. predict the ending of The Shining after about 50 pages.
Calling Stephen King enjoyable but forgettable I don't think works as an argument because I think it's pretty rare for an author to have 5+ novels that are so influential as to be cultural touchstones for multiple generations. The amount of fiction that he directly inspired or can trace their ideas back to one of Stephen King's novels is overwhelming.
Of all the criticisms I expected to be leveled at the man forgettable was perhaps the last one on my list.
I think the analysis of the declining pipeline is spot on. Up until around 2016 or so, I was on track to try my hand at the world of literary fiction—I had participated in several circles in college, sat on the review board of a lit mag, joined a group of writers post graduation, all just to eventually...set it aside.
I always had a "day job" during this time, but other than that I was single and had few responsibilities. This made holding a typical nine to five and actually getting some writing done somewhat tenable.
As my sphere of responsibility expanded (relationships, etc) this quickly became untenable. There's only so much time in a day, unfortunately, and as we continue along a career path, we're incentivized to invest ever increasing amounts of time into that, rather than a far-from-lucrative gamble on literary pursuits.
When you're able to actually make money on your literary work, it establishes a virtuous circle. Writing more makes you a better writer and writing more gets you paid (allowing you to support those other aspects of your life). Contrast this with the modern experience of desperately trying to carve out whatever time you can to make at least a brief writing session happen, amidst being exhausted already by the other demands on your time (your non-writing job being a big one).
From the critical side, I think the situation is pretty much analogous to that of contemporary art. The common person would meet most experimental literary works with a quizzical look, just as they meet most contemporary and conceptual art with the a quizzical look. Artists, however, have had better success with this because their objects are not generally mass produced. This has allowed the critical narrowing and distance from the common taste to be buoyed up economically by natural scarcity and the concomitant transformation of the object into a value-holding asset. That can never happen with literature, which is definitionally reproduced at scale.
I’ve been wanting to buy a copy of Flowers for Algernon. It’s easy too, my local Barnes and Noble has it in stock. But it’s $19 (in paperback!) for a book published almost 60 years ago.
I wonder if part of it is that culture is more fragmented. There is lot more of it and it is often in other mediums. Like say TV-series. So there is no need to read certain type of fiction to stay on top of the recent thing...
Science fiction, and related or subgenres like sci-fantasy and sci-horror is just much better these days than literary fiction. The literary snobs won't admit that One Hundred Years of Solitude (which I read years ago and liked) could have been a scifi novel placed not in historical south/central america but instead on a set of planets orbiting a star 100 light years from here. If it had, they wouldn't consider it 'real literature'.
Science fiction is more fun to read, and often more creative - authors aren't limited to the sociopolitical realities of 18th century South America, they can invent whatever systems they like, and then the question is whether their world-building skills are good enough to avoid obvious inconsistencies.
Yes, people are still reading - but they're reading Adrian Tchaikovsky, Iain M. Banks, William Gibson, Susanna Clarke and host of others who aren't limited to scenes of 'historical realism' (which to be honest are often distorted pictures of history that were socially acceptable to the publishing houses of their day).
You can still read the classics - Conrad is my favorite late 19th/early 20tth century author - but Lovecraft is just as worth reading.
99% of science fiction settings are historical fiction but now In Space(tm).
I'm not saying that is a bad thing, and some fiction explores forms of government that haven't been tried on earth, and also explores systems of government and commerce that may need to happen on a post scarcity society. That is all good, and arguably those explorations need to happen, but still most sci-fi is just some portion of earth society thrown into space. (Banks explores alternatives, but arguably most Gibson doesn't, though I haven't read anything by him in a decade or more so they may have changed).
This is frequently useful as it allows us to examine our existing biased from an outside view. I am definitely less racist/bigoted for having read science fiction.
As a final point, it has been noted that a lot of sci-fi has an undertone of "wow isn't this benevolent monarchy great!" Which is rather disturbing if you think about the implications too much.
99% is far overstating it. SF is a wide genre with pretty much every other genre inside it. At this point it’s infiltrated popular culture; just think how many movies and shows are not billed as SF but contain SF ideas or settings.
I'm of the belief that the TV and movie sci-fi are a completely different genre than book sci-fi. There are occasional faithful adaptations, but none of the far out stuff ever gets adapted.
But even discarding cinema (Star Wars famously being a samurai movie set in space), most sci-fi books written after the golden age, are focused on societal changes and people. Stories are metaphors for our world.
That is fine, fiction that cannot be related to rarely gets read.
Bobiverse is a nerd's power trip fantasy. 90% of what Heinlein wrote is just "external observations on sociey".
Even Greg Egan, who writes super hard sci-fi (his books have footnotes linked to actual science papers!) has his novels largely focus around societies and people (or aliens that are easily related to!)
It has honestly been 80 or so years since science fiction was mostly "here are a few poorly fleshed out people, and some really damn good science!"
I've read a lot of those stories, they are cool and I kind of miss them, but honestly almost every major plot point possible was already thought up by the boards of scientists turned sci-fi authors of the 1930s through 50s. An occasional new story of that type makes its way out now and then (some of the SCP stories are actually this in a very pure form), but IMHO that genre of pure science writing with minimal focus on people or society is 99.9% dead.
The homage and direct copy of shots of Kurosawa's The Hidden Fortress nothwithstanding, George Lucas is on record saying the Alliance represents the Vietnamese, and The Empire is the United States of America and the films are partly commentary on the civil war in Vietnam.
Star Trek makes 0 effort to explore the impacts of its technology on people. Some good books have been writing exploring what post scarcity means, but ST in general does nothing with the premise except make tea.
The novels that do explore a world like what ST posits end up going off the rails very quickly. Fun reads, people who live for eternity spend time terra forming planets (why not) cloning themselves into endless bodies and exploring the universe, or just becoming something not human at all.
ST still has people dying, never mind that immortality would be trivial to accomplish with that science level. But that isn't the point of Star Trek.
Part of it, I think, is that genre fiction simply has more tools available. That lets an author do their thing a lot easier, and in the hands of a master, is how you get masterworks. (I decided to check The Left Hand of Darkness off my list last week. Its introduction hits intellectually heavier than the last three books I've read put together. The introduction. And it's about five pages long.)
Of course, 90% of genre fiction is crap. (Bare minimum, I'll not argue with anyone who wants to argue for more.) But we know that. There's enough of it that I can find something interesting to read. I can't say the same for the last 20 years of literary, non-genre works. (I'll take pointers, though.)
Oh boy, Left Hand of Darkness is a good book. And I always tell people to not skip the introduction, because it is brilliant. “Prediction is the business of prophets, clairvoyants, and futurologists. It is not the business of novelists. A novelist's business is lying.”
I get the feeling Ursula Le Guin could have been a pretty successful realist “literary” writer if she’d chosen to. I am grateful that she chose genre instead.
I love that first chapter where the main character meets a politician and says something like "I'd seen his type before, was confident I'd see it again, and would probably see it in hell". I must have reread that line 10x.
I really like magical realism, but mostly ones where everything isn't so depressing like the Night Circus and the Starless Sea books.
One Hundred Years of Solitude is just too depressing. The closest I got was playing through Kentucky Route Zero, which is kind of like a theatrical play in video game form with lots of references to Marquez. A phenomenal game.
Eh, I think there's a difference that make both terms useful. Fiction set strictly in the real world with mysterious yet mundane magical/supernatural elements, versus fiction in a fantastical world or a "real world" where the existence of magic™ must be extensively explained.
I think the whole "all fantasy/sci-fi is slop" wasn't that big of a thing in LATAM, so the term isn't some euphemism for making it palatable to elitists.
I also disagree with GP, a lot of what makes One Hundred Years of Solitude good comes from the Colombian setting and it's cultural context. True, it wouldn't be impossible to translate that to a alien planet, Mars isn't fully Mars The Martian Chronicles after all.
> versus fiction in a fantastical world or a "real world" where the existence of magic™ must be extensively explained.
Well now if we're drifting, I don't consider "fantasy" has to explain everything like it were an AD&D manual.
Take Glen Cook's Black Company series where magic just happens without explanation. Compare with something like Brandon Sanderson who describes "magic systems" in great detail always. I find the former enticing and the latter boring.
Sorry, I meant that fantasy usually is in a unrelated-to-our-own fantastical world or it's in the real world (e.g urban fantasy), but the fact that magic exists and the reader "didn't know" about it must be explained (e.g Harry Potter, Dresden Files).
> authors aren't limited to the sociopolitical realities of 18th century South America, they can invent whatever systems they like, and then the question is whether their world-building skills are good enough to avoid obvious inconsistencies.
To do that authors need to very well versed in the sociopolitical realities of 18th century South America, and ancient China, and moden Europe, and... Most modern authors couldn't be bothered to do even basic research. Or can't afford to, because the pay is shit, and the deadlines are tight, and you have to produce a trilogy a year just to survive.
I've read a lot of scifi over the past few years. Most books are bad rehashes of existing ideas written in an extremely poor language (nouns and verbs with complete lack of adjectives and adverbs, poor and nonexistent metaphors, middle-school-level sentence structure etc.)
Fantasy books fare much better because they can easily borrow and steal "sociopolitical realities" and transfer them to pages wholesale.
>Literary fiction, serious fiction,[1] high literature,[2] or artistic literature,[2] and sometimes just literature,[2] encompasses fiction books and writings that are more character-driven rather than plot-driven, that examine the human condition, or that are simply considered serious art by critics.
Same reason new christmas carols dont land. And people dont listen to new classic music styles. It has to meet arbitrary rules regarding art, seriousness and get past critics to even be added to the category. I say category because anyone can write fiction, its just magical fairy dust better than you wankery when you add literary to the front.
Much easier to instead simply write good fiction and let idiots clutch pearls over its literariness.
Boils down to "This arbitrary category with a bunch of great nostalgia based entries doesn't have modern competition"
Meanwhile genre fiction printer goes brrrrrr which contains a lot of shit, but due to sheer quantity contains so many gems you never even need to worry about critics or "literary" fiction.
Actually I feel like this is yet another example of how stupid it is to gatekeep art as higher than process. Art comes from process. It isnt a single part of the process that can be separated from it. People complained video games could never be art. People complain that genre fiction cant be art. These days its AI image generation. Its all art, or can be art.
Isn't this easily solved by reading part of the book and then deciding whether you like it enough to continue?
The typical novel takes no longer than watching a season of a serialized TV show... and because it is written as a coherent whole rather than piecemeal, it is much less likely than a TV show to suffer from a bad ending that undermines everything that came before it.
"Meta-analyses show fiction reading has stronger associations with cognitive skills than nonfiction, with medium-sized benefits for verbal abilities and general cognition. Fiction enhances social cognition by exercising the brain's default network involved in theory of mind. Reading fiction increases brain connectivity, particularly in language areas and sensorimotor regions, with effects lasting beyond the reading session."
But does it have to be inaccessible to be so? It's easy to write something incomprehensible that says nothing. Is the writer writing about something that is inherently complex, and that's why it is inaccessible? Not typically in a novel. The prospective reader may then ask, why should I bother? I'm also curious what Pynchon has to say, but not enough to justify the investment.
Is it inaccessible? Some books are, but there is a huge amount of literary fiction that follows traditional narrative and is comprehensible to anybody with a high school education. There are more than enough such books to fill a lifetime.
Don’t be a d**k. Lots of literary fiction is perfectly readable for normal humans. Lots of what isn’t accessible is just not that enjoyable to anybody. I’m happy to debate … but only using specific examples. Authors and titles.
The example of noise music came up elsewhere in the discussion. It’s an important example. Most people won’t ever like it. You fill the pipeline with noise music, 99% of us will literally listen to anything else, or to nothing. I like a little bit of it, but in general I’m simply not going to acquire that taste.
>Lots of literary fiction is perfectly readable for normal humans. Lots of what isn’t accessible is just not that enjoyable to anybody.
The PIAAC surveys, while imperfect, indirectly address what percentage of adults can read and appreciate "literary fiction."
The first part of the definition of level 3:
>Adults at Level 3 are able to construct meaning across larger chunks of text or perform multi-step operations in order to identify and formulate responses. They can identify, interpret or evaluate one or more pieces of information, often employing varying levels of inferencing.
The first part for Level 4:
>At level 4, adults can read long and dense texts presented on multiple pages in order to complete tasks that involve access, understanding, evaluation and reflection about the text(s) contents and sources across multiple processing cycles. Adults at this level can infer what the task is asking based on complex or implicit statements. Successful task completion often requires the production of knowledge-based inferences.
Based on that, what level of literacy do you think indicates someone capable of reading and enjoying literary fiction? I think the hypothetical cutoff is somewhere between Level 3 and 4.
Based on all of this, let's use Sally Rooney's book "Normal People" as an example. If we're being super charitable, at most 50% of people would be able to read and comprehend that book. If we're being less charitable with our definition of "comprehension," I think we're probably looking at closer to 30% of people really understanding it.
Based on this, you could reach both of these conclusions:
1. Most literary fiction is inaccessible to the average adult.
2. It's a big problem that even moderately complex novels are inaccessible to the average adult.
The first statement (which I think is where you're coming from) is absolutely true. If you want to write a very popular book, it should be easily readable at a 6th grade level.
The second statement is more a statement of values. Some people (such as myself) find it problematic that the average adult can't read/understand a book that is more complex than Harry Potter.
You don't have to agree with the second statement. A lot of people don't. But I think understanding why someone might find that problematic is important. Personally, I think there are a lot of things worth knowing that can't be written at a 6th grade level.
If their goal is to write bestsellers, sure. That's where the €5 leisure novels come from. OTOH, if their goal is to push boundaries or be original, being subservient to the desires of the customers is counterproductive.
This is fundamental misunderstanding of literature.
This is like saying to a musician: I like the melody but you chose all the wrong instruments.
Obviously, the entire character of a song depends not only on the melody (idea) but also on the instruments chosen, the performance, etc. (material).
For literary fiction, the words are the material. What distinguishes literary works is not merely the "ideas" they present but the way in which they are presented. The words are the author's instruments, his paints. This is the difference between writing/reading for information and writing/reading as an aesthetic experience. Literary fiction of course imparts information and ideas, but it is predominantly about the latter experience insofar as the point is the evocative expression of those ideas.
This is why just reading the cliff notes for a literary work is missing the point.
Actually, I'd agree that "fundamental misunderstanding" is too strong. Obviously there is a certain threshold of comprehensibility one needs to achieve regardless of whether one is pursuing aesthetic ends or informative ones.
That said, I would stand by the assertion that reading literature only for the information it imparts is missing much of the point. We esteem authors not solely for their plots and characters, but also for their stylistics—the difference between a great writer and a passing one is often little more than the well considered phrase. The arrangement, use, and rhythm of words are a major component in a literary work.
My point is that asking a writer to "express it more simply or more accessibly" may in many cases amount to asking them to butcher the stylistics that they felt achieved the highest aesthetic quality for the kind of work they wanted to produce.
If one is given a business briefing it is probably the apex of reason to ask a writer to simplify. Are there cases in which this or that phrase in a literary work would benefit from simplification? Yes, but to ask an author to simplify their entire aesthetic approach generally, really seems to me to fail to have appreciated a large part of what distinguishes literature from basic expository writing.
I’d agree with your original assertion. Liking the content but not the form is like looking at a Turner and wishing the ship were closer and he’d chosen a clearer day, or thinking that Monet had some nice flowers in his garden but you’d like him to have painted them more clearly to be sure.
Faulkner,
Thomas Bernhard,
John Barth,
Henry James,
Herman Melville,
Fleur Jaeggy,
Dostoyevsky,
Marguerite Duras,
Poe,
Hawthorne,
Rosemarie Waldrop,
Kraznahokai,
These are just a couple that came to mind. Among them, probably Waldrop, Jaeggy, and Bernhard are the most experimental, but I would argue that none of them aesthetically speaking write books that are simple, and I don't think I could argue that any of them should have simplified their themes or style or general employment of language to be more accessible.
Kraznahorkai and Bernhard are great examples. Are walls of text without paragraph breaks harder to read? Yes. But this is an important aesthetic choice. In both cases (all of bernard, melancholy of resistance for Kraz) it speaks to an overbearing oppressiveness that ties directly into their thematics. If you missed this I think you missed out an essential point of their aesthetic and what they were trying to say. We cannot sever form and content. This is why I think it's absurd to complain that someone's work is "not accessible" —its really silly to demand any sort of aesthetic capitulation on the part of any artist, literary or otherwise, in the first place.
Edit: Faulkner is another good example that's less experimental. I'm sure some readers would have found As I lay Dying or The Sound and the Fury more accessible if a narrator mediated between the various first person voices he presents, but this would so drastically change the aesthetic character of these works that I doubt you'd be able to claim they aren't essentially different and would not be equivalent pieces of art.
But that’s new. Until ca 1970-2000, people read literary fiction because it was high quality, much more than because it was unrelateable. O’Hara, Salinger, and Franzen were not writing about the outer edges of human experience.
There's nothing more effective than a piece of fiction at transmitting the subtle complete world-view ideas of an author directly into your brain.
I mean that in the sense that non-fiction is still very much fictionally presenting a world view of the author or the subject, but in a way that's bounded by real facts. Literary fiction doesn't have that constraint.
Human history and society is actually made up of ideas and by taking 2-300 pages to digest a set of ideas you come away with a new perspective you can't get any other way.
Fiction is alive and well. This article is specifically about the decline of literary fiction.
I think people simply realize how boring and pretentious much of contemporary literary fiction is; many choose to go pick up a science fiction, or thriller, or even romance novel that can convery all the same ideas in more interesting and accessible ways.
I think it's pretentious too, but I also think it's a useful distinction in the sense that the category aspires to deeper and broader ideas than a lot of fiction- Harry Potter, Hyperion, Dennis Taylor, We Are Legion, Twilight.
Not to say that the distinction itself, literary vs non-literary fiction, isn't extremely pretentious. But we all recognize that some book's ideas are more shallow than others.
I agree with what seems like the article's main point, namely that literary fiction has declined because it's not actually good anymore, it's just targeted at a tiny subculture of critics with weird tastes. In a way this is prefigured by the whole idea of "literary fiction"; the article never explains what this is, but it seems to mean something like "fiction that intends to be something other than pure entertainment".
> after postmodernism a kind of MFA minimalism came to dominate literary fiction
I totally agree with this and it more or less sums up why I hardly read any contemporary literary fiction. (And I'm one of those people the article talks about who does read a lot of novels, just not many new ones.) Although it's contrasted here with postmodernism, in a way I see a contiguity between them, as the irritating background sensation I get from most such writing, is a deliberate attempt by the author to create a distinctive "voice". Some of the postmodernist stuff does it by being very weird, but the new stuff can be even worse because so many writers are trying to create "their own voice" within this tiny range of the style space. I make an effort to sample this sometimes when I'm in a boosktore, but I'll pick up a book and read the first page or two and a wave of ennui washes over me.
Around 20 years ago, in college, I went to a talk by a classics scholar (as in, ancient Greek classics), who made an offhand reference to "The sort of story you read in the New Yorker, you know, one everyday American preaching a gentle sermon to another." I've always remembered that line and it still rings true today.
The article seems to talk about the "wokeness hypothesis" on this issue in terms of attributes of authors (e.g., their race or gender) rather than of stories. I don't know much about that. But if there's a way that wokeness or something like it has influenced writing, I'd say it's from a different angle: I just get the sense that there's a lot more risk today in writing about characters very unlike the author. It can be perceived as trying to "tell [insert group name here]'s story" without their involvement or consent. I think the severity of this is overstated by right-leaning reactionaries, but it's hard to argue that it's not a genuine shift in societal mood and values.
I think this is somewhat unfortunate, because it has a chilling effect on the role of imagination in writing. When we assume that a writer writing about some character is "telling the story" of people in the real world who are somehow similar to that character I think we sometimes close ourselves off to interesting stories that can potentially speak to many readers across cultures and categories. Like I say, this effect isn't decisive, but it's real.
When reading the article I also kept thinking about "classical" music, which seems like the musical counterpart to "literary" fiction. I've met people my age, younger, even kids, who respond with visceral enjoyment to Beethoven, Chopin, etc. I've met people who genuinely like stuff like Debussy and Ravel. I'm not sure I've ever met someone who unironically liked contemporary classical music on that level. Like literary fiction, it's become an inside game for people who want to push boundaries and move beyond conventions, and making something that sounds nice is secondary. There are exceptions to various degrees (Philip Glass comes to mind) but on the whole I get the sense of the same phenomenon mentioned in the article, which is that everyone seems to take it as given that no one is writing any music today that is even in the same league as Beethoven or Bach.
In the realm of fiction, that kind of connects to this:
> For the last twenty years American literary culture has been unable to produce a writer we can describe as great without at least feeling a tinge of embarrassment about. We should be worried.
That feeling of embarrassment feels connected to the rise of irony in art in general, and I wonder if it's another reason literary fiction has suffered. It's hard to write in the modern world without working in a significant wink-wink-nudge-nudge about how stupid and banal things are, not in the sense of satire or even witty commentary but just a kind of devil-may-care acceptance.
But there may be hope for us yet. According to a story that may be apocryphal, around 100 years ago someone asked Andre Gide who the greatest French poet was and he answered: "Victor Hugo, alas!"
While I disagree that “the publishers went woke” is a salient reason (or even true in any real sense), I give the essay props for resisting the urge to reduce a very complicated problem down to a single causal factor.
Some better versions of this take might be “In the culture war many people are only willing to consume media that perfectly signals their virtues, so even innocuous content can seem antagonistic.” or “Our culture changed and I don’t like it anymore, get off my lawn.”
For the most part I think this culture war is a figment of the media's imagination/desire. I think people just don't want to read for the most part—even those who purchase the books.
It seems to me pretty clear that the article is arguing that "wokeness made fiction crap" is really just the most current result of "authors are optimizing for critics and editors, who are competing for status, and neither are interested in producing stuff readers like".
My issue with the wokeness is that it makes the stories very predictable. One race of characters is pretty much bad. The other race needs some saviorism. It's not the message of wokeness that is boring, but the repetitive and insistent manner in which it is delivered.
Not the message, but the fact there's little else besides the message to keep you interested.
As opposed, for example, to Richard Morgan's A Land Fit for Heroes. Where the main character is gay. He was persecuted for being gay. There are gay sex scenes.
However this is not what the book is about. Stuff is happening in that series. He's the hero of a decent story.
But then I'm talking about a fantasy series so it's not "literature" :)
To produce a good work of fiction its important to both 1) have a story to tell and 2) tell it masterfully.
By the time people collect enough life experience to satisfy (1) they've aged out of the demographic that's willing to put in the work to learn (2). This is why great writers are and will always be rare. People who write slop in their 20s will either fail and give up or be a victim of their success and produce more slop to satisfy their audience.
Perhaps a generation+ of explicit institutional discrimination at every level of the pipeline very specifically targeted against the demographic that created 90% of all previously valued literary fiction, played some role in its decline.
TFA starts with the sentence “Recently, there has been a lot of talk about the “decline of the literary (straight) (white) male” and then goes on to explore that with much more nuance, as well as many other factors.
Of course that’s punishing, though 75% may be closer than 90%. But I don’t buy it as the root cause. Where is the new Susanna Kaysen or Lionel Shriver or Laurie Moore or Barbara Kingsolver?
Wild leap to a conclusion there. The article you linked makes some similarly strange leaps, based apparently on poor reading comprehension:
> A baffling New York Times op-ed (“The Disappearance of Literary Men Should Worry Everyone”) casually confessed to systemic gender discrimination in MFA admissions. “About 60 percent of our applications come from women, and some cohorts in our program are entirely female,” lamented David Morris, a creative writing professor at UNLV[.]
That's not discrimination? The fact that men are not applying as often as women does not imply that men are actively being kept out—in fact, quite the opposite. Men are not even asking to be let in. The rest of the NYT op-end goes on to point out the ways in which men being underrepresented in literary circles parallels their underrepresentation in the rest of academia:
> In recent decades, young men have regressed educationally, emotionally and culturally. Among women matriculating at four-year public colleges, about half will graduate four years later; for men the rate is under 40 percent.
If men are dropping out at higher rates and are less represented in liberal arts programs, it's absurd to leap to the question, "who is doing this to men." That's a very grievance-oriented mentality. The real question is simply, "why is this happening," and a cursory investigation will indicate that the most likely answer is, men simply choose to avoid pursuits they perceive as feminine. As the number of female participants in a college major rises, men stop wanting to take it.
> “There was really only one variable where I found an effect, and that was the proportion of women already enrolled in vet med schools… So a young male student says he’s going to visit a school and when he sees a classroom with a lot of women he changes his choice of graduate school. That’s what the findings indicate…. what's really driving feminization of the field is ‘preemptive flight’—men not applying because of women’s increasing enrollment.” - Dr. Anne Lincoln
> For every 1% increase in the proportion of women in the student body, 1.7 fewer men applied. One more woman applying was a greater deterrent than $1000 in extra tuition!
As tempting as it may be to cry discrimination, there's really no evidence of that. The decline in popular male writers is most likely a product of the same cultural forces that caused a decline in male veterinarians. Women started doing it more often, and men decided they wanted to go somewhere with less female competition.
I don't know what could possibly make me read books. Reading is a chore, and not very efficient at the best of times. There's also the eye strain and the neck pain, and comfort in general. Best would be to read from bed, but bed is for sleepy time, a hard earned lesson.
But that's just me. Here's why I think books are no longer being read in general.
It's simply a format that time has moved on from. First came the radio, but radio wasn't gonna compete with books. Radio was succeeded by television though, and that sure could, but television is presently being succeeded by the internet, with TV companies desperate for any remaining attention, attention that they keep bleeding.
All this time the format has failed to find a foothold, and carve out its stay. You may discover that this is not universally true across the world, such as in Japan, where light novels are decently popular. It has its own place, but in the Western world, the only reliable place books have is in the classroom. I stipulate that the reason you see a prominently female readership is for the same reason: girls are (were?) taught in school that they're the more artsy type, that humanities should interest them more, and so they proceed(ed) to take that on the chin. Fast forward a few decades, and there you go.
The same applies for all other foregone forms of art. Theater? Opera? Ballet? Classical music performances? You'd have to pay or coerce me to attend these. Where I live, all the institutions hosting these are living off of government money, as they're simply unable to sustain themselves otherwise. People just don't care. The shows put on are basically live-action museum exhibitions. Although I guess even museums should be included in this list. Modern audiences are simply completely out of tune with these, they are an exercise in anachronism. And until the communities behind these continue to hammer in their formal position in art over their actual one, rather than try to connect with said modern audiences, this trend will continue. That is assuming such a connection is even possible still at this point.
Plenty of people still read and read a lot. I also have other hobbies, but I don't think it's going away. There are more books being published than ever before. There are also genres like science fiction and fantasy that are HUGE now and were once much smaller.
I mean happy for you, but that's a bit of a non sequitur, isn't it? The thread we're in is literally called "The cultural decline of literary fiction", and none of what you say is actually mutually exclusive with that.
Indeed, it's about the decline of literary fiction - a very specific subset of literature that comprises a tiny part of fiction, nevermind the totality of all literature. People still read books, just not these particular books.
> Books like Pride and Prejudice, War and Peace, The Brothers Karamazov, etc still sell many thousands of copies every year, more than even big hits in contemporary literary fiction.
I think the author skips past the real answer right here. The old books haven’t gone away. Even if we assume there are good new books, they have to compete with the supply of existing books, which grows without bound - unlike the time and attention of consumers.
Every form of media has this problem. A human lifetime can only consume so many books, so many films, so many hours of music. A new movie comes out: what are the odds of it being more worth your while than one on the existing IMDb Top 1000? Decreasing.
Books are no different. What are the odds that something new is going to displace something existing off the shortlist of greats that you already don’t have time to read?
This reason doesn’t seem to be correct. Why do we have so many YouTube videos published that still garner views? Why TV shows? We still make culturally relevant movies every year. Why?
Books don’t need to compete with all previous books but just have to be culturally relevant now.
Culture evolves. There's no accounting for taste.
Putting aside the issues with manipulated IMDB ratings, look at the volume of Marvel movies ranked equal or better than classics like "Vertigo" or "Lawrence of Arabia".
Film lovers (or perhaps snobs?) feel jaded about recent output. Pop culture dictates that superhero movies are more accessible. The coarsening of culture is a continual, evergreen observation.
This is all built on an assumption that arts/media can all be strictly ranked “best” to “worst.” There are a million metrics by which we might try to measure it, but well… that’s just not how art works. Thinking this way indicates a fundamental lack of understanding of what art is. Probably one of the most important metrics is “relevance to, and effect on, the state of the world as it is right now.” And pretty much any arbitrary “1000 best” list is not going to take that into account.
That’s why people listen to Chappell Roan, and near-instinctively belt her songs out out after a few drinks, instead of Beethoven symphonies or Mozart operas, even if the latter may be “superior” in nearly every measurable way. Part of art is how it speaks to the listener. In fact… I might argue that that’s all of art, with metrics about it being an entirely different, not-art thing.
(I say all this as a classical musician and senior software engineer with a math background, myself.)
You don't need to rank strictly and linearly. An objective ordering need not exist. It's enough to see that on shortlists of "great" works, common themes emerge. Is The Great Gatsby better than The Catcher in the Rye? It doesn't matter. They both come with universal acclaim, and that's stiff competition for anything new. Besides, are great works not promoted as being timelessly relevant to the state of the world?
Stan Lee made a comic about how he and his co-workers made comics, and in one frame he says something like "How dare it he say it is hackneyed? I stole it from the best classic I could find!" That is, if superhero movies sell today, stories about Hercules and Theseus sold 2500 years ago.
And I loved Catcher in the Rye, but not so much The Great Gatsby. I've found this "shortlist" of classics that have universal acclaim has always been hit or miss for me. The classics I was assigned to read in high school would seem to lurch from riveting to a slog to get thorough. I don't blame the books, it's just what captures my particular interest. Given that, I have never really used "the classics" as a guarantee that I will find the reading fulfilling over other, more obscure, recommendations that I may receive, whether they be old books or new.
I read both twice, once in high school and again a few years after I graduated (this was over 15 years ago). I loved The Great Gatsby even more (that opening first page is magnificent), and couldn't help but feel like The Catcher in the Rye as being so incredibly naive and juvenile. The latter experience is similar to reading (or watching) Fight Club and thinking Tyler Durden is a hero of sorts and something to aspire to, which is not the ultimate lesson.
I've felt this before. A librarian taught me a trick: chug the book. You were probably trained to really analyze what you're reading, look for symbolism, etc, but you can enjoy a book as almost an emotional-sensory experience instead.
Parent's point is not some abstract personal value problem.
Think about public libraries. They have limited space and budget, and already abundantly hold loved classics. They'll still take in some amount of new books, but when a 8 yo kid goes in to decide what to read, the vast majority will be older books.
> That’s why people listen to Chappell Roan, and near-instinctively belt her songs out out after a few drinks, instead of Beethoven symphonies or Mozart operas, even if the latter may be “superior” in nearly every measurable way.
As someone who grew up on Looney Tunes and the like, I absolutely start humming and making up words to classical music far more often than anything from this century.
>This is all built on an assumption that arts/media can all be strictly ranked “best” to “worst.”
Not at all. The only assumption the OP needs is that old media can still appeal to modern people, at which point quantity and accessibility may give it a certain advantage.
Sure you don't have an objective best to worst, but I'm sure that most serious listeners will venture to music from all kind of eras and cultures.
I find that it's much harder ( than visual art ) to say "I don't like this" and more "This sounds really fun but I can't budget time to listen to this kind music".
Or maybe this is just me.
> This is all built on an assumption that arts/media can all be strictly ranked “best” to “worst.”
No it isn't. It's just based on the objectively true assumption that contemporary fiction is competing with all fiction ever written.
It absolutely doesn't have to be the case that people buy more classics because the classics are objectively better. (Although that is, in fact, he case).
Mozart can be really singable. The catalogue song, the Figaro aria, etc. it's not all hell's fire burns in my heart.
Art has no objective measure. I cannot stand classical music because it has very little rhythm and emotion compared to the other, more modern music I listen to. Does that make classical music worse? No.
Just because something may have been popular in the past and is now seen as "smart" e.g. the opera, books, classical music, painting, does not make it better than what's popular now, e.g. television, video games, and rhythmic music.
If anything I'd argue art has gotten significantly better and more advanced over the years. I don't play many video games but the combination of visual, auditory, interactivity, and storytelling still blows me away.
Art is indeed subjective, but saying classical music has no emotion is a pretty controversial opinion. I've wept from plenty of classical symphonies and don't know much about the genre. A lot of movies just aren't the same without some Hans Zimmerman or John Williams.
> saying classical music has no emotion is a pretty controversial opinion
That's very clearly not what they said at all.
Very little rhythm and emotion?
First emotion https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=JzFi-7H9TKs
https://youtu.be/rVw6NRXSDhM?si=wchNK9I3RO_XJxeG
Rythym: let's start with the most infamous percussion sequence of all time https://youtu.be/wZtWAqc3qyk?si=B47DQZ1auKx53OaD
Unless you're listening to extremely niche heavy metal, electronica, or the kind of jazz that they don't play on the radio you aren't listen to anything with the skill and complexity of classical. And the people who do also show up to new music.
I don't think there is any video game that comes close in depth to the Ring Cycle.
I thought you were going to link to the incessant ominous col legno (hitting the strings with the stick of the bow) at the start of Holst's Mars for rhythm, so please allow me to add that one to the list.
https://youtu.be/cXOanvv4plU?si=WrIuBfmofTo6szRa
And as for emotion, this version of the 1812 Overture always sends chills up my spine.
https://youtu.be/uYnCCWsfx3c?si=OQEA5_JYpWn1kHFj
You didn't correctly read my comment.
> Art has no objective measure.
That would be emotion to _you_, not to me. You've also missed this point:
> compared to the other, more modern music I listen to.
Additionally, complexity is not an accurate measure of how "good" art is. But if you want to argue about complexity - and this would mean total complexity, not just sheer storytelling complexity, an easy refute to your point is GTA V, which is arguably one of the most complex pieces of art ever made.
I guess anything is arguable, but I think it would be pretty difficult to make a very good argument that GTA V is one of the most complex pieces of art ever made. I mean, first we’d have to define a piece of art, then we’d have to define what it “complexity” means in that context…
Depends what we mean by better. If you prefer rock music to Bach then great. Enjoy! I love popular music and classical for different reasons
But if we're talking skill, intellectual depth, craft, then there are objective criteria. Take Bach, his music is like a masterpiece of engineering with its unparalleled compositional complexity and craftsmanship. His mastery of counterpoint being but one example. His work represents a pinnacle of musical architecture, establishing foundational principles that profoundly influenced centuries of Western music.
That just doesn't compare to most pop music does it?
The fact that you can belt out Chappel Roan drunk is pretty much an objective assessment of its "worse'ness." Beethoven takes many years of dedicated practice to be able to achieve and you would have to be very skilled to perform it drunk.
Man, you should go to an open air classical concert in Europe sometime.
Sure we are just quietly getting shitfaced for most of it but if they play Ode to Joy you can be certain that the 10000 drunks in Waldbühne will belt it.
Also not Beethoven but I'm pretty sure some violins will get broken if they don't play Berliner Luft here in town.
Like how it's probably law in the UK that any classical concert with a large crowd in attendance must end with Jerusalem for a good ol singalong, or else they tar and feather the conductor.
I can belt out (and am known to occasionally do so when walking home from the pub solo) Ein Schwan by Grieg (in the German, didn't learn the Norwegian version) and Ave Verum Corpus by Byrd while drunk, so you're saying these two pieces suck?
(I also like to throw the occasional Magnificat or Nunc Dimittis to mix it up. As you can tell, I'm a reformed choir boy. Oh, and Jerusalem by Parry/Blake is custom designed for drunken singalongs.)
I beg you to listen to the first two pieces and perhaps reconsider your chosen metric.
https://youtu.be/BNuT7-6zBds?si=fbyim815cp6tiD4R
https://youtube.com/watch?v=R3vuU7XAaUM
This equates the value of art with technical difficulty, which is not how most people actually evaluate art.
A friend of the family gave my son a guitar a while back and more recently tried to get him to play Sugar Mountain by Neil Young. He worked at it pretty hard and struggled with it because even though it is simple it has to be played with great precision to sound good. Then he discovered grunge and bar chords and had a breakthrough with The Day I Tried to Live by Soundgarden and Rooster by Alice in Chains.
Now he's looking for good songs he can play and that's gotten him into David Bowie songs from The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. For a long time I thought of David Bowie as one of those classically trained musicians like Frank Zappa who played rock because it had commercial potential, but he found many songs on that album to be great songs that were within his reach. Now when we have houseguests who say they like Rush he will be able to play the chorus of a few songs in 24 hours and he's building instruments like a Guitar-harp-ukulele (fretless guitar with two bridges, one of which has a harp section) and he's asking me about the physics to build a bass guitar tuned an octave or two below a regular bass guitar.
An electric bass that's tuned an octave lower exists - https://www.lignum-art.com/product-page/4-string-sub-octave-...
When trying to learn the guitar I fell in love with Santa Monica by Everclear, and Go With The Flow by Queens Of The Stone Age.
> he's asking me about the physics to build a bass guitar tuned an octave or two below a regular bass guitar.
I barely know anything about music, and probably less about guitars, but if he can do barre chords, then you can try to build a simple capo with him, since he might readily grasp the utility of having a clamp that essentially gives you another hand on that side of the guitar.
He's been experimenting with clamps, he has one for the fretless guitar section of the guitar-ukulele.
As for the electric quadro- or octo-bass the variables you can tweak are:
There's some limit to how long you make the strings or you can't play it or otherwise you need something to extend your reach like the levers on the octobass. The other two are inside a square root which is not in your favor. Probably the easy thing to do is find some really heavy strings for a normal bass and see how low you can get the tension.But really he's the one to build things. Back when I was in physics they kept trying to get me to do experiment rather than theory, if I have any regret it is that if I had studied experiment I'd be able to build all the things that my son wanted to build but, hey, he can build those things now.
There was once a company making a bass ukulele with inch-thick polymer strings. Playing them was kind of hilarious, and would be fun to see it scaled up to the size of an actual bass guitar... Probably someone has done it...
Life is the ultimate test. We see ourselves reflected in the eyes of others. There may be nothing more humbling than being confronted with our own ignorance, except when we have an audience.
I guess once the strings are too loose, then they can’t vibrate consistently enough for long enough to be tunable/playable? I am wondering if a kind of lap guitar or a guitar laid flat might allow for pedals to be used that could bisect the strings to do octave changes upward in pitch. Going downward in pitch from an open position is going to be hard unless you have some excess tunable string beyond the last point of contact with the strings, and that contact could be released to increase the string length?.
You might be able to find an 8 string bass, and have two different string gauges. The top four could be heavier gauge and tuned at a lower octave. Or you could alternate gauges and silence the strings? I don’t know much about playing technique, but it sounds like it might be hard to build in such a way so idiomatic playing technique and style is preserved, but many alternate tuning methods and tools do affect how the guitar is played, so that may not be such a big deal if he’s the only one playing it, but if he wants the mechanics to translate to playing other guitars, those concerns might be more relevant.
It might also be possible to teach him how to build simple guitar pedals, which can easily pitch bend in post-processing once you know how the parts fit conceptually together.
Your guitar projects sound interesting and would be a good post for HN if you can find the time.
I would not say that the value of art is strictly equivalent to technical difficulty. But I would say that there is a level of technical competence required for art to be good. Something that takes no skill to create (e.g. that absurd banana duct taped to a wall "piece") is not good art, if indeed it can be called art at all.
I would argue art is not about how "good" it is, but rather how it makes you feel. And the duct tape banana, just by referencing it, is successful in making you feel something.
The fact that people still talk about it and ridicule it 6 years after it was created, and it lives on in the cultural zeitgeist as that, makes it good art. It's literally called Comedian.
This guy
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Readymades_of_Marcel_Duchamp
killed off the argument that "X isn't art" for all X.
killed off the argument that X isn't art for some Y, where Y is people trying to decide if X is art or not.
I don't see any art in the linked article.
To be clear: I have spent the years to memorize and be able to perform a few Beethoven sonatas (not to mention the years required to even get to that point). I can also play them drunk (though not as cleanly, and wouldn't do that in any paid/professional performance situation). I literally did this sort of thing for a living before deciding to use my CS/Math degree to be able to better provide for my family (https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonlatane/).
And none of that makes Beethoven "better" than Chappell Roan. Because there is no objective assessment of "better/worse"ness in art. That's not how art works, or what art is.
On the other had, your inability to correctly spell the name of an influential contemporary artist, with 40+M listeners per month, replying to a comment that did correctly spell her name, is a pretty objective reason to not trust anything you have to say about art (or, perhaps, much else, at least until you address whatever underlying issues/pathologies have you thinking this way).
Perhaps this will offer you some perspective: back when I did music for a living, I often did think this way. I thought most contemporary music was trash if it didn't offer the harmonic or contrapuntal complexity of classical, or even jazz. Really, being a young man from a poor background, I believe it was more a survival instinct (trying to gaslight myself and others into measuring me as "good enough" for gigs). It nearly ruined music for me, though. It required me being dishonest with myself about what I really enjoyed. Letting all that go has been a multi-decade process, and it's made me a much more well-adjusted individual. It also applies in many ways to the software world (as long as you stay out of Google-/Meta-/Oracle-type bigtech misery-inducing rat races).
> there is no objective assessment of "better/worse"ness in art. That's not how art works, or what art is.
You've been fooled by the rent seeking class.
Precisely the opposite. Rent-seekers eagerly invite comparison for purposes of valuation, and push the lens of art towards technical and political measurements. When a work is incomparable in the way in which it achieves verisimilitude it is escaping this system.
Agreed here. Every time my kids bring up tier list rankings I have to again explain this to them.
You are basically talking about the part where the system is so broken or rent captured that the only way out is through the bottom. Sure, but that doesn't make it good automatically.
There's art that moves you, or does not move you. That's the measure that matters most in your unique and finite life. You get to choose for yourself what to spend your time on, objectivity be damned.
Are you honestly tell me that you would let someone correct you on a matter of taste? That an authority could tell you, "no, you're wrong for enjoying this piece of art. It's bad and you ought to dislike it," and you would obey?
If so, you're a dupe. Trust your own taste. That's the first step to connoisseurship.
Is there an article (so you don't have to write an essay) that explains what you mean here? I don't think I'm familiar with the short hand point you're making here. I understand the terms rent seeking and familiar with the argument made in the quote fwiw.
> I think the author skips past the real answer right here. The old books haven’t gone away. Even if we assume there are good new books, they have to compete with the supply of existing books, which grows without bound - unlike the time and attention of consumers.
That's a real phenomenon in music. New works have to compete with the entire body of existing work, some of which is pretty good.
True, but I'd say it's worse for books than for music.
For music there's still plenty of network effects in favor of new music... things like live concerts, radio and DJs playing the latest stuff, playlists that make actual money being all about new stuff, younger people wanting to connect to their own generation, pop culture enthusiasts always chasing the "new thing".
Sure there are oldies stations and DJs and listeners rediscovering vintage stuff, but network effects for books are rarer, there's not that many Dan Browns anymore.
Yeah I would say books got it worse, there's a strong tradition of re-arranging old classics in new music, e.g.: kamasi washington remaking clair de lune. so listening to old pieces are not only rewarding, it's even necessary.
To note, books have a different networks: they can get movie/TV/game adaptions and get pushed to the news forefront, their author can also play the SNS game.
There's still no Spotlight for books, and I'm with you how tougher than other media it is.
I heard a joke that you don't write a political book for people to read, you write it so you can go on all the talk shows to be interviewed about your book.
That is of course not a joke at all depending on the field. It's kinda like being published in prestigious papers.
While specialists and enthusiasts will enjoy and peek at the content, being recognized as someone who writes about the subject and can be presented as an expert of the field can absolutely be the main impact for the author.
On the other hand, music is arguably more timeless, in that the contents of lyrics is less crucial for the enjoyment of music.
I don't think that's true at all, plenty of my friends has some kind of aversion to "old" music because they could not "get" the aesthetic. Plus I'm sure most people are sick of Fur Elise.
and the author of course is only sampling a very tiny dataset of the works pushed by the algorithm. Many authors like me will never get on their radar.
And movies and TV. Why try some random new stuff when any of the classic movies is both guaranteed to be good and probably available for free from the library's DVD collection?
Relevance!
eg: What's it like to be a teenager alongside the rise of AI? It's a hell of a lot different than the old sci-fi imagines, and old sci-fi generally skipped to the 'end-phase-ubiquitous-AGI' instead of focusing on the transitionary 'awkward teenage' period of the technology.
This might prove too much, particularly for the case of literature. There were people writing commercially successful and culturally relevant literary fiction in 1970; back then you already had Austen and Tolstoy and Dostoevsky and Cervantes, plus Joyce and Woolf and Hemingway and Faulkner. I think there’s books published in the last 50 years that deserves a place on a short list of Best Novels, but I don’t think it has much overlap with the best-selling literary fiction being published at that time.
I agree. I've often thought about this via a thought experiment : How much money would it take for you to agree not to consume any new instance of a particular media type? In other words, you're offered fifty thousand dollars (or some other non-trivial but not outrageous amount of money) and in agreement you won't read a book released after June 2025.
Clearly this is going to vary from person to person but I might accept $50k to not read any new fiction title, but wouldn't accept the same deal for video games as it's likely new technology will result in some new classics in the coming years - the amount of money you'd need to offer would need to be much higher. Movies are somewhere in the middle.
This effect is self-reinforcing since at least part of the value in watching a movie / reading a book / etc is the ability to discuss it with other people. Not seeing any new movies would reduce my ability to participate in discussions with people. As less people watch new things, this becomes less of an issue.
It's a deep problem with music and video games. I mean, can a Mario game really top Super Mario World? Not to say some later games aren't fun, but Persona 6 could only really top Persona 5 by being something really different, and if it was different it wouldn't be Persona 6.
Not so much with video games. The industry is so young that most of those "classics" are actually much less fun than I remember them. (Super Mario World does hold up very well though.) But since you mention Persona, consider how much better Persona 3 Portable is than Persona 3 FES. Game design has come a long way, and I believe it still has a long way to go. Not to mention the technical improvements that allow a game like Uncharted to exist, which cannot be compared to any 16-bit or earlier game.
I have to disagree. Evidence for this being wrong is right on many games websites a la Backloggd with plenty of people rating older games very highly, more than many new releases. More evidence: numerous games being re-released with mainly surface-level changes (older Final Fantasy’s, arguably Oblivion Remastered).
While I absolutely agree some games age like milk (IMO Persona 3 FES/Portable mechanically play like garbage and P4 ain’t much better) there are many games that were either the pinnacle of their of their craft in pretty fundamental ways or were just doing very odd, interesting things that no one tries to do anymore (outside indies). JRPGs are honestly the big genre I see for aging well, but there’s a bunch of PS1/PS2 era games having a big second life with the younger generation.
That might be true about the time period from the SNES to the present but it's not clear to me that we're really getting better games post the PS3.
I have Persona 5 Royal on my mind because I am playing through it now maybe a decade after I played Persona 4 Golden on the PS Vita. I love the story, I love the art, but the music isn't up there with P4G (how can you beat Reach out or Make history?) and I think it's a disappointment as a game.
Hypothetically it matters if you develop relationships with the characters and raise your social stats but practically you're not required to make hard choices because you have enough time to do everything -- and since the game is so long you feel compelled to do it all in one playthrough which stretches out the game even longer.
It's not so much a P5R problem as a general problem in the industry. In my current playthrough status ailments, buffs, debuffs and such just don't matter. That's the case for most turn-based games, just as the weapons triangle ceased to matter in Fire Emblem games a long time ago.
My son and I have been thinking a lot about a "visual novel + something else" game which is maybe 30 minutes - 6 hours per playthrough but requires multiple playthroughs. I'd be happy to have NG+, but he thinks that's cheap.
Dialogue has been a weak point in "interactive fiction" since the beginning, maybe LLMs will change that. Fictional VR games like Sword Art Online and Shangri-La Frontier have NPCs you can just talk to, I'd love to see that in real games. For now we get Meta's absurd model that you can make a storefront in Horizon Worlds but you need to have a real person to staff it which makes sense to exactly one person.
>It's not so much a P5R problem as a general problem in the industry. In my current playthrough status ailments, buffs, debuffs and such just don't matter. That's the case for most turn-based games, just as the weapons triangle ceased to matter in Fire Emblem games a long time ago.
You can try Etrian Odyssey series by Atlus. It's all about status ailments, binds, buffs and debuffs.
I got that on my New 3DS, gotta try it some day!
To be fair, Persona 5 is my least favorite out of 3/4/5. Most fans of the series agree it's embarrassingly easy. Persona 3 (Portable is best, or FES if you're a masochist, but not Reloaded) offers a perfect challenge on the hardest difficulty, and Persona 4 was pretty well-tuned also. It wouldn't surprise me if P6 was closer to P4 or P3 than P5.
We aren't getting good games past 2015 or so because the industry has become incredibly risk-averse and realized there's more profit to be made releasing sequels and remakes than producing something innovative. That being said, that's not a sustainable strategy and we are seeing the limits of that.
>It's not so much a P5R problem as a general problem in the industry. In my current playthrough status ailments, buffs, debuffs and such just don't matter. That's the case for most turn-based games, just as the weapons triangle ceased to matter in Fire Emblem games a long time ago.
I think that's more a function of the games you are playing, in Kiseki or Xenoblade or (some) Final Fantasy there is alot more strategy involved than in Persona, whose primairly appeal I believe is more of a social life simulator than a deep rpg experience. Even with music, it's just a different style where P4 is pop while P5 is jazz, but other games draw from instrumentals or ecelectic mixes like Ar Tonelico. To say one is better/worse isn't a good term because they aren't easily comparable.
>Fictional VR games like Sword Art Online and Shangri-La Frontier have NPCs you can just talk to, I'd love to see that in real games.
Well that's just a MMORPG or a RPG or ImSim. And the MMORPG is probably closer to needing a fresh start than being anywhere close to a solved genre. But as the riskiest and most expensive genre, nobody is going to funding something that really pushes the line due to the sheer risk involved.
I got stuck 1/3 of the way through Xenoblade on my New 3DS, I oughta figure out how and finish it!
I would say every genre of media has this problem. A form of media might exist for thousands of years, but genre and fashion always evolve in new directions, because what's the point of creating more of what exists already.
There's a cave in France where somebody started painting a horse and 10,000 years later (but still tens of thousands of years ago) somebody finished it in the exact same style and technique. Novelty isn't required in art though it's currently prized.
Video Games were immune for a while because technology was changing so fast, but in the last decade or so its become really clear players don't care nearly as much about graphics as they used to.
People will quite happily pickup and play games from many years ago. Many of my teenage kids favourite games were made before they were born.
People do care enough about graphics for Bethesda to spend time and money making e.g. Oblivion Remastered, though.
Oblivion is nearly 20 years old now and looked terrible at the time. (compared to other games that shipped at the time) Oblivion is a _big_ game not a polished game.
update: I found this screenshot and I think I was remembering Morrowinds characters.
https://slayweb.blogspot.com/2011/08/elder-scrolls-evolution...
Morrowind had very janky animations, but it wasn't too bad for 2002 otherwise. Definitely not top notch, but, well, look at faces in Deus Ex for another example from this period...
Oblivion had those weird faces but was otherwise pretty good actually, especially the lush outdoor environments.
Well, graphics plateaued and then we started to remember that fun and highest fidelity graphics don’t necessarily have anything to do with each other.
There is also an issue that ranking is easily available now.
Of course, recommendations existed in the past as well, and stuff like classic literature was ranked for centuries at this point, but still, I think we relied on word of mouth more.
Nowadays you can easily get a list of "top ..." in any area and chances are high that it is all old stuff.
It goes beyond this. Reading is a form of entertainment. There has been an explosion of new and different forms of personal entertainment, so books now have to compete not just with old books, but movies, video games, social media, etc etc etc
> Even if we assume there are good new books, they have to compete with the supply of existing books, which grows without bound - unlike the time and attention of consumers.
There is a lot of supply, but language change makes existing books impossible to read over time. You're always limited to whatever's been made in the last X years.
The consumption of media is exponential, if you read something good and you expect more from a genre, the number of consumable works quickly dwindles down to the point that you often end up waiting for new works. In the same way, as people get a better understanding of their own preferences, entire subgenres will become less relevant.
That's why I find that the true enthusiasts of a hobby tend to prefer works that are less well known or even not even high in "quality", primairly because "quality" is no longer a suitable metric for them. The kind of "hobbyists" who just stick to the classics strikes me more as lifestyle hobbyists that aren't neccessairly interested for intrinsic reasons.
I kind of think a lot of these are bought as gifts, not really a thing people actually intend to read.
Or for college classes.
> A new movie comes out: what are the odds of it being more worth your while than one on the existing IMDb Top 1000? Decreasing
Not really? This is a rather "mechanical" view missing the bigger social part - for example, a big part of that worth is the social conversation, and the chances of your friends to watch that new movie vs the top 1000 isn't decreasing.
Also there is this factor of new films being able to incorporate "current" events which old films can't, and that's another factor of worth that's not decreasing with time
>bigger social part
Perhaps the "bigger" social part is what is missing. I've found I stop reading books or watching movies now days all the time. It seems like no media/author can resists SHOVING their micro-politic issue down your throat rather than simply presenting it as part of a story that you digest.
Its not that the social parts are missing. Its that there are 1,000,000 competing social issues and everyone is trying to make theirs heard.
I'm not sure if its the creator's or the publishing companies watering things down. Either way someone is doing it intentionally. No book where the prominent theme is is a micro politic will ever stand the test of time, or even gain a significant following.
> It seems like no media/author can resists SHOVING their micro-politic issue down your throat rather than simply presenting it as part of a story that you digest.
That may say something about the declining quality of writing.
You have to be a real pro to write propaganda for any topic that is also good literature. But most people are not Jack London :)
>That may say something about the declining quality of writing.
It might but I'm not sure its all of the story.
I know how business and money works. I can say for sure there are forces out there saying. "Our focus group didn't understand this, make the message POP more,more,more" To writers/producers before they are willing to cut a check.
Well if it works for the movie industry why wouldn't it work for "literature" too...
I think it's due to a general decline into literalness.
I'm not sure which came first: audiences that no longer understand symbolism, metaphor, allegory, or writers who no longer use it. In any case, all of these things are basically completely absent from any modern piece of mainstream media. Wherever there's an attempt, it's decidedly conspicuous. There's little nuance and subtlety.
I've found I've stopped watching TV or movies or reading written fiction, but it's because fiction in general has ceased to do something for me. It's as if there's a willing suspension of disbelief needed that I can no longer muster. Fiction comes across to me as inherently false. This seems to transcend the particular political position taken, if any.
It could be that reality is more "exciting" than any fiction, and your mind can't handle any more.
I think the first half of the article is the strongest, most plausible part. The argument:
Economic opportunities for professional writers have declined dramatically. The two crucial pathways were mentioned for novel writers to support themselves economically: (1) magazine writing and (2) academia. In the first case, magazine circulation has suffered because advertisers left for the internet, and in the second case, academic job oportunities have declined because of governmental cutbacks to universities, especially in the humanities.
The second half of the article argues that authors have made a tradeoff, deciding to maximize critical praise instead of book sales, thereby turning off general audiences who don't share the obscure and trendy tastes of the critics.
This argument felt weak. As far as I can tell, there's no real explanation of how it supposedly came about. Even the article author seems to admit there are holes in the argument: "There are still some important open questions: the exact role of the critics in moving authors away from popular taste." Indeed.
I'm personally a fan of contemporary literary fiction. My own suspicion is that the problem in literature is the same as the problem in music and movies: corporate consolidation and the ascendancy of data-mongering penny-pinchers with no taste except for profit maximization. Their preference in all the arts is derivative dreck that's easily marketed, ideally with a built-in audience and reproducible, with the goal of spawning an endless series based in the same "universe." The leaders of the industry don't want to take chances on new artists, unless they can guarantee a massive hit.
You have got it backwards. Why would economic incentives opportunities not exist if there were still demand?
If you suggest that demand reduced because of internet - wouldn’t internet then be the real cause of decline and not some vague reason about wages?
Magazines were so flush with cash that Vonnegut was paid $750 for his first story. That's unadjusted for inflation. I'm no expert, but I think a first time author getting $750 from a magazine would be doing pretty well these days. He saw that market fall apart within his lifetime, and blamed it on th audience moving to TV, for what it's worth.
The last time I checked (2022), top-tier lit mags will pay about $50-100 for a story. They pay mostly in "exposure" these days.
Many well known authors got their start in magazines like Hunter S. Thompson; Where would he be if he was starting out today? Probably doing podcasts and the youtube circuit instead.
I agree with you that the economic factors are much more persuasive.
I'm curious though, if you're a reader of contemporary literary fiction, do you think that it hasn't undergone a transformation to become more obscure and trendy compared to where it was in, say, the 1960s? Are the critics' favorites now just as accessible and of the same standard as, say, Lolita or Portnoy's Complaint were back then? Or do you agree there was a transformation and just disagree with the vague reasons he gives for it?
Also, do you have any recommendations of contemporary literary fiction for us here on Hacker News? Asking as someone who mostly only reads literary novels by dead people, contemporary sci-fi or speculative fiction, and of course, inevitably, books by Sally Rooney.
> My own suspicion is that the problem in literature is the same as the problem in music and movies: corporate consolidation and the ascendancy of data-mongering penny-pinchers with no taste except for profit maximization
Agreed. I think this was a big miss in the article.
>Economic opportunities for professional writers have declined dramatically. The two crucial pathways were mentioned for novel writers to support themselves economically: (1) magazine writing and (2) academia. In the first case, magazine circulation has suffered because advertisers left for the internet, and in the second case, academic job oportunities have declined because of governmental cutbacks to universities, especially in the humanities.
>The second half of the article argues that authors have made a tradeoff, deciding to maximize critical praise instead of book sales, thereby turning off general audiences who don't share the obscure and trendy tastes of the critics.
I think that the second half of the article seems weak because the first half contains a critical flaw. Academia hasn't declined nearly as much as magazines. Government funding is down, but departments are open and there are still thousands of English professors out there. Meanwhile, enrollment is up and university budgets are broadly still quite healthy. The situation is much worse for traditional long-form entertainment media, which has been squeezed by the blogosphere and the algorithmic feed.
This is not to diminish the argument that the arts have suffered as a whole, but in order to look at changes within the field, we need to consider changes in the relative importance of various factors.
The expected consequence of this is that authors become more dependent on academic jobs, which often react more favorably to critical appraisal than book sales. The second argument in the article then follows.
There is a little more to say here: the old magazine audience was not quite the broad popular audience of the bestseller lists. Rather we have to hypothesize some particular "literary" interest among the magazine audience that creates a market for the writers of literary fiction in a way that today's media does not. But since I have only a passing familiarity with that world and I am not a big reader of literary fiction I do not have any useful insight here.
I love how this article cuts right through a lot of bad trite explanations for literary fiction’s decline that have been pushed by its adherents (“the internet made people stupid”) to really try and analyze the supply side and demand side factors of why not many people buy contemporary literary fiction anymore.
His point that people still read challenging literary fiction, just by dead people, also seems an important one (see HN’s recent discussions of reading Ulysses) and rather damning for contemporary literary novelists. So is the point that many good writers who wanted to actually earn a living that way ended up writing for prestige TV in the 2000s instead.
I do wish he’d discussed more why Sally Rooney seems to be the exception, in terms of commercial success. What is it about her books that’s different? What did she do (or avoid doing) to appeal to a wide readership?
Finally, he seems to draw a pretty hard boundary between literary and “genre” fiction that I’m not sure always exists. Ursula Le Guin is a good counterexample here.
Because Rooney writes dressed-up romance novels. They’re mediocre. But to the author’s point, at least they’re readable and touch on real emotion, even if I find them a bit trite. Some balance could be struck between Rooney and the more highbrow experiments the author bemoans. Elena Ferrante is a decent example here, and she does get sales. But even then, I do think the author understates the competition reading faces from new forms of media - yes, there are more people, but the amount of distraction has scaled disproportionately to the number of new people. Massively.
Something hinted at in the essay is what I consider a funnel effect. If you have N people starting on some project, N/2 will get distracted after a while, some proportion of those who remain will just suck, some smaller proportion will be OK, and so on until you manage to find a few real geniuses. If you shrink the size of the funnel, you get less geniuses.
An important part of having a large funnel is giving people a way to really spend their time doing the thing. For example, writing short stories for magazines was once a reasonable way to support yourself for a few years as a young writer, and led to a very large funnel. Take away that infrastructure for young writers, and you get a smaller funnel, and an attrition in quality of the best work.
(Now, consider what happens 10-20 years after we stop hiring new grads for programming jobs...)
> I do wish he’d discussed more why Sally Rooney seems to be the exception, in terms of commercial success. What is it about her books that’s different? What did she do (or avoid doing) to appeal to a wide readership?
I suppose part of the reason is that the Irish have cultivated a strong literary culture.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/books/article/2024/aug/20/we-all...
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/jul/30/irish-...
One thing I got from reading Sally Rooney is I can relate to the many of the character's situations, thoughts/opinions and emotions even though I am almost forty years older than they are and her books are easy to read for lack of a better description (though this latter features in much contemporary writing). Is that her secret sauce, I dunno.
If someone likes Le Guin, they also like the writing of Toni Morrison. Morrison follows a more complex but similar abstract structure in her writing.
Iain M Banks is another example of "literary sci-fi" or whatever you want to call it.
Even the most challenging work of fiction wasn't challenging to an 18 year old contemporary reader of average intelligence. The fact that in order to appreciate these works in present day requires more intellectualism doesn't actually say anything about the works themselves.
I feel like this is a pretty bold statement for a population that depending on what year you're calling contemporary was probably somewhere between 30-50% illiterate.
I really wouldn't expect reading proficiency to be radically different from the distribution we have today which is to say the distribution centers around levels 2/3 which is "can make basic inferences from text."
Yes, and the amount of people being taught to read was a lot lower than "basically everyone" (assuming we're talking about the developed countries where this is measured). Literature being considered a hobby anyone can get into is a relatively recent concept.
In some ways we are 30-50% literate now which means I completely agree with you. I only meant the above about the literate 18 year old. If a 17 year old kid with a 3.2 GPA can't follow the prose without a headache then it isn't the same kind of writing that Tolstoy did. That's not to say that same person would appreciate the content of the novel in its richness.
People seem to forget that many of the books we find to be "literary" today were 1800s smut. These were commercial successes in their time, and weren't considered "highbrow," that was just what people read. Dismissing all of the books people read today as "genre" and not literary is the problem.
I believe you have got it right. How do you think people will talk about half life in a few decades? Would it be considered high brow?
Don't have to go back that far :) - the author mentions Portnoy's Complaint (1969) which contains the big sight gags for the raunchy comedies Something About Mary(1998) and American Pie(1999).
Interesting idea. Literary fiction never actually existed; it’s an artificial construct.
I’d really love some professors to analyze a furry solarpunk story I wrote and dig through the symbolism like Virginia Woolf wrote it.
It would be interesting to see if a random internet dog’s scribblings can provide just as much content for discussion. From what other people have told me, it does.
I wonder which genre fiction today will be deemed as 'literary' in 2200s?
Literary is a genre. Like all genres it has its popular tropes, fandom, cliches, etc.
A long time ago someone on a forum described a new lit fic book as a “TOBADNY” — a “trendy overhyped book about dysfunctional New Yorkers.” I LOLed and then realized this was totally the case and that this was a popular lit fic trope.
> What made the fiction literary was it spoke the language of memory, where the reader inhabited the experience of the characters, and this changed how readers experienced the world after. > > — https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36882341
People don't turn to books for this sort of experience anymore. People are not "literary minded". For the average person, interpolating another person's experience against their own through the written word is counterintuitive if not impossible and detached.
It takes a literary mind to feel through text. Electronic media of all sorts, aside from long form text displayed electronically is just that; electrifying.
I think that the quote I pulled from motohagiography applies to all writing and when we go further:
> Writing on the internet is participatory, impersonal, performative, and anti-intimate.
The cultural decline of all writing becomes more obvious.
Anyone who cares about this sort of stuff needs to understand that their brain is rewired but their spirit still craves the same old stuff that it sought out for when the mind could stomach total absorption in a dry block of pulp.
> it spoke the language of memory,
We are living in the tower of Babel. No one speaks the same "language" anymore. I truly believe this was the true metaphor behind that story. Once a civilization reaches a certain level of standard wealth people hyper converge on their personal beliefs to the point where they can literally no longer speak about other forms of personal belief or preference that conflicts with their own. And they no longer are coerced into going along with another belief system (compromise) due to economic need from the majority. At that point the civilization unravels due to lack of coherent direction.
Look at all the arguments about definitions of clearly defined words in modern politics.
Even so, mass media today is better posed to present a shared language.
I'd go as far as to think that there is a shared language in society today, but it's more like athletes jawing off amongst each other than something like what we expect the effects of culture and art to be.
Tech doesn't change human nature. We are still the same as 100,000 years ago without tech.
In my original comment, I said that I believe that our brains are rewired but our spirits still crave the same things as before.
Tech changes the actions and reasonings behind how our nature is exercised, at the material level.
Now, if you don't believe in the material/immaterial dichotomy that typifies man then what I'm saying may not register.
I'm not sure if this applies to you, but either way I'm curious what made you make the claim that took us in this direction because it's apparent that you've noticed a logical step that I was only aware of subconsciously.
Thanks.
Then why is Kurt Vonnegut still so popular?
He isn't, and I won't be convinced that he is until Supreme puts his face on one of their shirts.
He’s not that popular, but Billy Pilgrim keeps wandering back and forth in time, buying up all the Vonnegut books, juicing the figures.
What Billy really wants is a good Kilgore Trout book, but the supply of those seems to be dead. So it goes.
I vaguely recall some sociology and media theory strands that make arguments similar to the quoted post—that we are entering or have already entered an era of post-literacy. Our new language is a language of images, (tiktok, instagram), immediacy, and literalness (does anyone even understand allegory anymore? Does the average piece of media ever express a metaphor?). I don't have numbers on it, but my teacher friends tell me that the typical student's reading comprehension skills have tanked in the past few years.
Check these out:
https://patch.com/connecticut/across-ct/hartford-grad-sues-s...
https://kittenbeloved.substack.com/p/mass-literacy-isnt
It's not just reading comprehension, it's the imagination that goes with it.
Text is active. It triggers the imagination. Visual imagery - especially electronic imagery - is consumed passively. What you see is what you get.
Especially with Gen Z, there's been a catastrophic collapse in the public's ability to imagine anything that hasn't been pre-digested by Hollywood movies, video games, D&D, and anime.
It's the same stock imagery over and over and over.
Older culture is "boring" because it doesn't follow the standard tropes, and that makes it incomprehensible.
It's a bizarre kind of deja nostalgia - the only futures that can be imagined are the ones that have been imagined already.
> Older culture is "boring" because it doesn't follow the standard tropes, and that makes it incomprehensible.
The older culture, where the tropes stem from, doesn't follow the tropes? What?
Older works often conform less closely to the tropes, because the tropes weren't established at that point. When a medium or genre is new it often goes through a Cambrian explosion phase where there are all kinds of wildly varied pieces, and then things settle down and coalesce on the specific approaches that have proven successful.
I don't think that's what he means.
I wonder if people are downvoting you in good faith because I think you're on to something. My assumption is that denigrating mass media and pop culture comes across as "elitist".
Oh well. I mean, for the person who can look around and feel disdain toward these things, they deserve whatever shred of dignity the allegation subscribes them to.
"Second Order Illiteracy" is precisely what cripples imagination, or the ability to perceive things beyond the immediate senses. Passively consuming electronic media does the heavy lifting that the literary mind achieves.
> It's a bizarre kind of deja nostalgia - the only futures that can be imagined are the ones that have been imagined already.
If we toss the word "capitalism" into the fray of what you're saying I think this is what Mark Fisher meant by the "Slow cancellation of the future".
Possibly the idea is just too new / people who haven't seen it think it's just dunking on the young generation again. But for example there's an unexpected trend on social media just within the past month of a large amount of Gen Z not being able to read "third person omniscient" (a term I hadn't heard before but is pretty much just what it sounds like; from examples appears to be how all fiction I've read is written).
That’s the old standby argument, and it may be right. I can’t really read John Barth or George Saunders the way I can read Richard Russo or Lionel Shriver or Kurt Vonnegut or Michael Chabon or Barbara Kingsolver. For me the experimental writers are very unpleasant to actually read. David Foster Wallace is just inside that frontier for me, and I can enjoy IJ. Bernard Malamud was pretty dark but I could hang in. But Paul Auster … I love what nonfiction writing I’ve seen, but the New York trilogy is so dark and Spartan it makes Joy Division look like disco.
Nitpick: I finally gave up on Pynchon, but is he really postmodern??
I'm in a sci-fi book club with friends and we decided to read one modern literary fiction book and while I am enjoying it, the prose is beautiful and the deep dive into the characters is interesting, it's literally exhausting to read.
The unpleasantness is definitely a problem. It's like the cool writers want to prove they are making something challenging by stripping away all of the sugarcoating that we normally love in narrative (and food!). I realize that the kind of pat endings that are so common in broadly popular narratives are a bit dull and predictable, but they're better than watching the protagonist go through the realities of life. We all have to suffer the worst parts of life each day. No need to do it at night too.
The time frame for Pynchon fits and, of course, so does the style. He's postmodern.
Right. It's just like music. Some people can appreciate noise music, some people view it as just that: abrasive noise. It's a matter of taste. For some, the unpleasantness is of aesthetic interest and they have an aesthetic appreciation for it.
Great example. It is absolutely a matter of taste. Sadly noise music doesn’t support a lot of full-time jobs compared to writing songs more or less the way the Beatles did. Which was all new and stuff, but not completely foreign to what Stephen Foster did.
We can try to reinvent writing, or we can focus on writing. But one may come at the expense of the other.
I really enjoyed this article but the claim of no literary fiction making the Publishers Weekly yearly top 10 lists since 2001 isn't really true:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Publishers_Weekly_list_of_best...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Publishers_Weekly_list_of_best...
It is true that there isn't that much literary stuff that breaks through, and the stuff that does is usually somewhat crossover (e.g., All the Light We Cannot See in 2015 or Song of Achilles in 2021) but it exists. These two books are shelved under literary codes (though also historical). Song of Achilles in particular is beautifully written and a personal favorite of mine, at least among books published in recent years.
Then there are other works like Little Fires Everywhere and The Midnight Library that I might not consider super literary but nonetheless are also often considered so by book shops or libraries (e.g., https://lightsailed.com/catalog/book/the-midnight-library-a-... the lit fic code is FIC019000).
I was really surprised that Ferrante's Neapolitan series, the best example (I would have thought) of recent work with both high literary acclaim and popular appeal, did not actually make the top 10 list for any year.
Yeah, and looking through the lists makes one suspect that there's a problem of incommensurate measurements... There's a lot of 'very hungry caterpillar' in the recent lists, but I'm unsure whether children's books were even in the running in the 1960's. Or else there's been a revolution in buying books for children since the 60's, which, honestly, I wouldn't be sad about...
This is a really good analysis article. Thank you for posting it. I think the critic vs consumer decoupling rings true to me, and this is obviously the worst economy to exist in as a "struggling" anything.
There are a lot of industries that are struggling right now to figure out how to re-monetize independent from large corporations (like magazines/ publishers/ movies/ etc) because those corporations are cutting out anyone not already hugely profitable.
I feel like whatever solution we eventually land on to 'democratize' media funding will also be a good solution to our FOSS funding problem.
Affording someone status for being someone with an opinion on cultural artifact X no longer exists. No one is impressed, there's too many people with thoughtful opinions on important books doing absolutely nothing valuable in society.
So it isn't that we become stupid from browsing, it's that the internet has an unlimited supply of critics?
How has that changed since the mid 20th Century?
Self publishing your opinions in a way that is cheaply (freely) accessible to anyone became a thing. Previously if you wanted a book review you had to spend a chunk of time and/or money to even find a review, and when you did there was like a handful of reviews. If the thing was more esoteric, maybe zero reviews.
I'll toss two theories into the pool:
The rising tide of anti-intellectualism.
The decline of humanities education in favor of stem education. This has both economic drivers and national security drivers.
This remind me of something. In music criticism there are two terms, Rockism and Popism.
I feel like the intial drive against "Rockism" was to embrace different subcultures, like punk and post-punk, but later the result was "Popism", which became its own kind of orthodoxy, pushing critics into treating label-engineered chart pop as deep just because it’s popular or polished.
Back when I was a journalism student wanting to work in music in the early 2000s I used to frequent early internet hangouts for critics and it was interesting to see the change happening progressively, with critics increasively and progressively adopting a certain air of superiority over anyone who couldn't conflate popularity with genius.
For me the big chasm was over brazilian funk music. Sure I could see it a few times as somewhat interesting, and I could understand the appeal as dance music, but the old guard was trying to use old arguments to push it as "descendants of Kraftwerk" while the new guard was using socio-anthropological arguments to defend it. The music rarely stood for itself, and when it did was often on the back of previous music. I'm not saying it's automatically "bad" but its positive qualities were blown out of proportion by critics for me that it become grating.
Today the internet made it all even worse, lots of "pop culture centric" communities are 5% about music and 95% about the personal life of artists, the TMZ-level gossip, the memes, the constant fighting virtual wars with other pop-music fandoms, the metacircular discussion around the fandom itself...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rockism_and_poptimism
I think these are factors to the extent that one sort of needs formal training and schooling in the historical development of the form to appreciate experimental and more contemporary work. The same can generally be said about visual art.
Because of that, yeah, hyper-specialization in schooling and a general movement toward stem means that a lot of people don't actually acquire the requisite background to engage with and appreciate modern work in a sufficient way—just like someone untrained in computing probably would not have an easy time understanding or appreciating significant breakthroughs in computer science.
If it's true that lit fic started leaving the best seller lists around the early 70s, could that also be due to people finding other media to express themselves? Like experimental music, film, and other fiction genres?
If I or anybody else publishes a novel about LLMs taking over the world, it would be classed as science-fiction, not as social commentary.
We suffer the same vices and the same diseases of one hundred years ago, and by then we had already invented capitalism and “enjoyed” it for quite some time. So I recon nobody would be able to write something like Les Miserables or David Copperfield and expect to have the same impact.
Our technological world and the nature of our collective miseries are constantly changing, and IMO are fertile ground for literary creation, but writers trained on the classic literary fiction works would not be prepared to handle the intricacies of our broad technology sectors and its social implications, and if they did were prepared and did write on those topics, they wouldn’t be recognized by their peers and the New Yorker as literary fiction writers… Think about The Martian, and a long list of wonderful works that have never made it to any of the high-brow lists this article refers to.
Is the author using Drury, Michener, and Morris West to beat up on 2023? I haven't read Colleen Hoover, but I have read the others, and they haven't made my must-reread list.
Honestly, if one takes the best-seller lists of a few arbitrary years, one will find an awful lot of dross.
There are better ways to tell stories now; good story tellers are doing fine.
The only ones left holding the bag are people who wanted specifically to be 'literary fiction writers' because they have some conception of what that is and why it's important to have a story physically printed on paper.
My own issue with modern literary fiction is the pretension. It’s been shoved in my face from middle school through college. Everyone writing “genre fiction” is not a Real Author.
Writing to be like one of the great writers of the past is completely missing the point. It’s one thing to follow a tradition. It’s another to think that tradition makes you great.
My car magazines have all disappeared other than Hot Rod Magazine.
Wood-working magazines. I subscribed _because_ of the advertising.
I can't afford Fesstools, but that doesn't mean I don't love seeing / reading their ads.
I dropped my very long time subscription to Maximum Computing when they went digital. The end of an era...
To be fair, those were fun, but extremely information sparse. You'd have a main story or two, some mail inbox stuff, a listing of a selection of cars you probably could never afford, and 35 pages of advertisements.
The car magazine has been replaced by forums and other online tools that are likely free and vastly superior. I do miss physical magazines though.
I knew where to get the upgraded speed parts I wanted from the advertisements. The advertisements were the main attraction.
Some magazines in the olden days were literally nothing but ads - like Computer Shopper.
I can still sort of remember that in the 90s, but was mainly reading magazines in the late 90s and early 2000s, so I probably missed out on some of that. I did go back and read a lot of old magazines on microfiche at the library a few years ago (I think Byte magazine) and yeah...a lot of ads, but I guess they would have been super useful pre-internet. Did you use the BBS as well? I was too young when that was common.
I ran a BBS for a while. Still have it on a hard disk, but no way to read it.
when has litfic ever been relevant to the wider culture? There are exceptions of course but those are remarkable specifically because they are the exception. The average reader has always wanted Peyton Place, not Proust
I had no idea that literary fiction was a genre rather than a generic term for fictional literature until I read this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literary_fiction
There is a very simple explanation for the decline. The books are garbage that only masochists enjoy and that sadists force children to read in school. The description “Literary fiction may involve a concern with social commentary, political criticism, or reflection on the human condition” is full of antipatterns that are largely the mark of bad literature, since they miss the core purpose of fictional literature, which is to entertain. This is why “light novels” out of Japan and adaptations of them are popular while literary fiction is not.
Younger people don't read books as frequently as they did when I was young (pre-internet). Bookstores are flooded with junk, with the SEO-equivalent of publishing spam having won out on the bookshelves. Libraries are as bad or worse. Students do not pursue Greek and Latin and classical literature, and have no reference point of high culture apart from the distracting now.
And the English language has declined. English has always been a scraped-together, something-of-everything tongue. But jargon and abstractisms have killed expression. Meanwhile, French and German have eaten so many Americanisms that they're in terminal indigestion, and now the whole planet thinks and talks like a slightly below-average bumpkin American with a college journalism degree.
"A good deal of literary criticism serves only to reinforce a caste system which is as old as the intellectual snobbery which nurtured it. No one can be as intellectually slothful as a really smart person.”
— Stephen King
Sour grapes. I've read enough of Stephen King in my youth to know that he is a very skilled writer, but he only produced large amounts of popular genre literature. The literature equivalent of enjoyable but forgettable popcorn movies. He wasn't taken seriously by literature criticism because he didn't produce anything sophisticated.
I don't know if that's entirely accurate.
I just read The Body (basis for Stand By Me) and it was as personal and emotionally complex as any literary-approved fiction. It reminded me a lot of The Things They Carried, actually.
I think the biggest issue is that once he was pidgeonholed into being a "trope-master, scary fiction guy", no one would look at his writing any other way. And to be fair, MOST of his writing is overwrought genre stuff, but he has certainly developed into a fine craftsman at his best.
The reality is that most "literary" fiction is terrible and navel-gazing, seemingly written to land tenure somewhere or push some stupid literary trend that is just as vapid as any other publishing trend, only less fun. Historically, most fiction (or art in general) that persists was wildly successful in its time as a prerequisite.
> The reality is that most "literary" fiction is terrible and navel-gazing, seemingly written to land tenure somewhere or push some stupid literary trend that is just as vapid as any other publishing trend, only less fun.
I think that's just prejudice. Literary fiction simply has artistic or intellectual value beyond entertainment, and beyond using familiar tropes.
It's possible that King has some of these qualities somewhere. I have only read ten to fifteen of his novels. But that was enough that I could e.g. predict the ending of The Shining after about 50 pages.
Calling Stephen King enjoyable but forgettable I don't think works as an argument because I think it's pretty rare for an author to have 5+ novels that are so influential as to be cultural touchstones for multiple generations. The amount of fiction that he directly inspired or can trace their ideas back to one of Stephen King's novels is overwhelming.
Of all the criticisms I expected to be leveled at the man forgettable was perhaps the last one on my list.
This was a great read!
I think the analysis of the declining pipeline is spot on. Up until around 2016 or so, I was on track to try my hand at the world of literary fiction—I had participated in several circles in college, sat on the review board of a lit mag, joined a group of writers post graduation, all just to eventually...set it aside.
I always had a "day job" during this time, but other than that I was single and had few responsibilities. This made holding a typical nine to five and actually getting some writing done somewhat tenable.
As my sphere of responsibility expanded (relationships, etc) this quickly became untenable. There's only so much time in a day, unfortunately, and as we continue along a career path, we're incentivized to invest ever increasing amounts of time into that, rather than a far-from-lucrative gamble on literary pursuits.
When you're able to actually make money on your literary work, it establishes a virtuous circle. Writing more makes you a better writer and writing more gets you paid (allowing you to support those other aspects of your life). Contrast this with the modern experience of desperately trying to carve out whatever time you can to make at least a brief writing session happen, amidst being exhausted already by the other demands on your time (your non-writing job being a big one).
From the critical side, I think the situation is pretty much analogous to that of contemporary art. The common person would meet most experimental literary works with a quizzical look, just as they meet most contemporary and conceptual art with the a quizzical look. Artists, however, have had better success with this because their objects are not generally mass produced. This has allowed the critical narrowing and distance from the common taste to be buoyed up economically by natural scarcity and the concomitant transformation of the object into a value-holding asset. That can never happen with literature, which is definitionally reproduced at scale.
I’ve been wanting to buy a copy of Flowers for Algernon. It’s easy too, my local Barnes and Noble has it in stock. But it’s $19 (in paperback!) for a book published almost 60 years ago.
Take a slow and steady look through every second-hand book store within travelling distance.
You might find it or you might not. But the search will be far more interesting than browsing any website.
Keep an eye out for library sales in your area. The selection is usually very good and you can buy books/CDs/etc. by the pound.
I wonder if part of it is that culture is more fragmented. There is lot more of it and it is often in other mediums. Like say TV-series. So there is no need to read certain type of fiction to stay on top of the recent thing...
Science fiction, and related or subgenres like sci-fantasy and sci-horror is just much better these days than literary fiction. The literary snobs won't admit that One Hundred Years of Solitude (which I read years ago and liked) could have been a scifi novel placed not in historical south/central america but instead on a set of planets orbiting a star 100 light years from here. If it had, they wouldn't consider it 'real literature'.
Science fiction is more fun to read, and often more creative - authors aren't limited to the sociopolitical realities of 18th century South America, they can invent whatever systems they like, and then the question is whether their world-building skills are good enough to avoid obvious inconsistencies.
Yes, people are still reading - but they're reading Adrian Tchaikovsky, Iain M. Banks, William Gibson, Susanna Clarke and host of others who aren't limited to scenes of 'historical realism' (which to be honest are often distorted pictures of history that were socially acceptable to the publishing houses of their day).
You can still read the classics - Conrad is my favorite late 19th/early 20tth century author - but Lovecraft is just as worth reading.
99% of science fiction settings are historical fiction but now In Space(tm).
I'm not saying that is a bad thing, and some fiction explores forms of government that haven't been tried on earth, and also explores systems of government and commerce that may need to happen on a post scarcity society. That is all good, and arguably those explorations need to happen, but still most sci-fi is just some portion of earth society thrown into space. (Banks explores alternatives, but arguably most Gibson doesn't, though I haven't read anything by him in a decade or more so they may have changed).
This is frequently useful as it allows us to examine our existing biased from an outside view. I am definitely less racist/bigoted for having read science fiction.
As a final point, it has been noted that a lot of sci-fi has an undertone of "wow isn't this benevolent monarchy great!" Which is rather disturbing if you think about the implications too much.
99% is far overstating it. SF is a wide genre with pretty much every other genre inside it. At this point it’s infiltrated popular culture; just think how many movies and shows are not billed as SF but contain SF ideas or settings.
I'm of the belief that the TV and movie sci-fi are a completely different genre than book sci-fi. There are occasional faithful adaptations, but none of the far out stuff ever gets adapted.
But even discarding cinema (Star Wars famously being a samurai movie set in space), most sci-fi books written after the golden age, are focused on societal changes and people. Stories are metaphors for our world.
That is fine, fiction that cannot be related to rarely gets read.
Bobiverse is a nerd's power trip fantasy. 90% of what Heinlein wrote is just "external observations on sociey".
Even Greg Egan, who writes super hard sci-fi (his books have footnotes linked to actual science papers!) has his novels largely focus around societies and people (or aliens that are easily related to!)
It has honestly been 80 or so years since science fiction was mostly "here are a few poorly fleshed out people, and some really damn good science!"
I've read a lot of those stories, they are cool and I kind of miss them, but honestly almost every major plot point possible was already thought up by the boards of scientists turned sci-fi authors of the 1930s through 50s. An occasional new story of that type makes its way out now and then (some of the SCP stories are actually this in a very pure form), but IMHO that genre of pure science writing with minimal focus on people or society is 99.9% dead.
The homage and direct copy of shots of Kurosawa's The Hidden Fortress nothwithstanding, George Lucas is on record saying the Alliance represents the Vietnamese, and The Empire is the United States of America and the films are partly commentary on the civil war in Vietnam.
I hate when my Science Fiction doesn't have any Science.
Eh, popular sci-fi is zero sci.
Star Trek makes 0 effort to explore the impacts of its technology on people. Some good books have been writing exploring what post scarcity means, but ST in general does nothing with the premise except make tea.
The novels that do explore a world like what ST posits end up going off the rails very quickly. Fun reads, people who live for eternity spend time terra forming planets (why not) cloning themselves into endless bodies and exploring the universe, or just becoming something not human at all.
ST still has people dying, never mind that immortality would be trivial to accomplish with that science level. But that isn't the point of Star Trek.
I think there is a LOT of sci-fi that doesn't try to sugarcoat monarchy. I'm looking at my book shelf and don't even see any that do.
Part of it, I think, is that genre fiction simply has more tools available. That lets an author do their thing a lot easier, and in the hands of a master, is how you get masterworks. (I decided to check The Left Hand of Darkness off my list last week. Its introduction hits intellectually heavier than the last three books I've read put together. The introduction. And it's about five pages long.)
Of course, 90% of genre fiction is crap. (Bare minimum, I'll not argue with anyone who wants to argue for more.) But we know that. There's enough of it that I can find something interesting to read. I can't say the same for the last 20 years of literary, non-genre works. (I'll take pointers, though.)
Oh boy, Left Hand of Darkness is a good book. And I always tell people to not skip the introduction, because it is brilliant. “Prediction is the business of prophets, clairvoyants, and futurologists. It is not the business of novelists. A novelist's business is lying.”
I get the feeling Ursula Le Guin could have been a pretty successful realist “literary” writer if she’d chosen to. I am grateful that she chose genre instead.
I love that first chapter where the main character meets a politician and says something like "I'd seen his type before, was confident I'd see it again, and would probably see it in hell". I must have reread that line 10x.
A well-known observation!
“Sturgeon's law (or Sturgeon's revelation) is an adage stating ‘ninety percent of everything is crap’.”
One Hundred Years of Solitude is "magical realism" :)
No, you can't say it has fantasy elements. Then it wouldn't be culture.
Marquez is great btw. Blame the critics.
I really like magical realism, but mostly ones where everything isn't so depressing like the Night Circus and the Starless Sea books.
One Hundred Years of Solitude is just too depressing. The closest I got was playing through Kentucky Route Zero, which is kind of like a theatrical play in video game form with lots of references to Marquez. A phenomenal game.
Eh, I think there's a difference that make both terms useful. Fiction set strictly in the real world with mysterious yet mundane magical/supernatural elements, versus fiction in a fantastical world or a "real world" where the existence of magic™ must be extensively explained.
I think the whole "all fantasy/sci-fi is slop" wasn't that big of a thing in LATAM, so the term isn't some euphemism for making it palatable to elitists.
I also disagree with GP, a lot of what makes One Hundred Years of Solitude good comes from the Colombian setting and it's cultural context. True, it wouldn't be impossible to translate that to a alien planet, Mars isn't fully Mars The Martian Chronicles after all.
> versus fiction in a fantastical world or a "real world" where the existence of magic™ must be extensively explained.
Well now if we're drifting, I don't consider "fantasy" has to explain everything like it were an AD&D manual.
Take Glen Cook's Black Company series where magic just happens without explanation. Compare with something like Brandon Sanderson who describes "magic systems" in great detail always. I find the former enticing and the latter boring.
Lord of the Rings didn't explain anything either.
Sorry, I meant that fantasy usually is in a unrelated-to-our-own fantastical world or it's in the real world (e.g urban fantasy), but the fact that magic exists and the reader "didn't know" about it must be explained (e.g Harry Potter, Dresden Files).
Turning a personal preference (I like sci-fi) in to a universal statement (sci-fi is more fun to read) is so unbecoming.
And yet we somehow excuse it when the fans of literary fiction do it.
Yeah, I can't for the life of me see why Regency/Victorian fiction or US civil war fiction wouldn't be "genre".
> authors aren't limited to the sociopolitical realities of 18th century South America, they can invent whatever systems they like, and then the question is whether their world-building skills are good enough to avoid obvious inconsistencies.
To do that authors need to very well versed in the sociopolitical realities of 18th century South America, and ancient China, and moden Europe, and... Most modern authors couldn't be bothered to do even basic research. Or can't afford to, because the pay is shit, and the deadlines are tight, and you have to produce a trilogy a year just to survive.
I've read a lot of scifi over the past few years. Most books are bad rehashes of existing ideas written in an extremely poor language (nouns and verbs with complete lack of adjectives and adverbs, poor and nonexistent metaphors, middle-school-level sentence structure etc.)
Fantasy books fare much better because they can easily borrow and steal "sociopolitical realities" and transfer them to pages wholesale.
What sci-fi books are you reading with a "complete lack of adjectives, non-existent metaphors, and middle-school sentence structure"?
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>Literary fiction, serious fiction,[1] high literature,[2] or artistic literature,[2] and sometimes just literature,[2] encompasses fiction books and writings that are more character-driven rather than plot-driven, that examine the human condition, or that are simply considered serious art by critics.
Same reason new christmas carols dont land. And people dont listen to new classic music styles. It has to meet arbitrary rules regarding art, seriousness and get past critics to even be added to the category. I say category because anyone can write fiction, its just magical fairy dust better than you wankery when you add literary to the front.
Much easier to instead simply write good fiction and let idiots clutch pearls over its literariness.
Boils down to "This arbitrary category with a bunch of great nostalgia based entries doesn't have modern competition"
Meanwhile genre fiction printer goes brrrrrr which contains a lot of shit, but due to sheer quantity contains so many gems you never even need to worry about critics or "literary" fiction.
Actually I feel like this is yet another example of how stupid it is to gatekeep art as higher than process. Art comes from process. It isnt a single part of the process that can be separated from it. People complained video games could never be art. People complain that genre fiction cant be art. These days its AI image generation. Its all art, or can be art.
My problem with books is that it takes a lot of time to read a book, and it's very difficult to tell beforehand if I'll like the book.
Isn't this easily solved by reading part of the book and then deciding whether you like it enough to continue?
The typical novel takes no longer than watching a season of a serialized TV show... and because it is written as a coherent whole rather than piecemeal, it is much less likely than a TV show to suffer from a bad ending that undermines everything that came before it.
I've never been able to give myself a good justification for why I should be reading any of that stuff.
I can give one.
As far as I can tell, as far as your entertainment options go, literary fiction is THE best option to exercise your mind.
Ranked, in order, it's: literary fiction, nonfiction, computer games, movies, TV.
"Meta-analyses show fiction reading has stronger associations with cognitive skills than nonfiction, with medium-sized benefits for verbal abilities and general cognition. Fiction enhances social cognition by exercising the brain's default network involved in theory of mind. Reading fiction increases brain connectivity, particularly in language areas and sensorimotor regions, with effects lasting beyond the reading session."
What's the source of that last quote? I Googled it but got no results....
It's probably AI but you can find the studies here and in the related links below
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38602788/
Literary fiction is a category of fiction. Why read literary fiction over other fiction?
The reason you read literary fiction is because you're curious about the outer edges of human thought or experience.
But does it have to be inaccessible to be so? It's easy to write something incomprehensible that says nothing. Is the writer writing about something that is inherently complex, and that's why it is inaccessible? Not typically in a novel. The prospective reader may then ask, why should I bother? I'm also curious what Pynchon has to say, but not enough to justify the investment.
Is it inaccessible? Some books are, but there is a huge amount of literary fiction that follows traditional narrative and is comprehensible to anybody with a high school education. There are more than enough such books to fill a lifetime.
I don't mean every work of literary fiction; only those commonly regarded as difficult, like Pynchon's.
It's not inaccessible. Its just that you don't have the reading skills from lack of use.
Don’t be a d**k. Lots of literary fiction is perfectly readable for normal humans. Lots of what isn’t accessible is just not that enjoyable to anybody. I’m happy to debate … but only using specific examples. Authors and titles.
The example of noise music came up elsewhere in the discussion. It’s an important example. Most people won’t ever like it. You fill the pipeline with noise music, 99% of us will literally listen to anything else, or to nothing. I like a little bit of it, but in general I’m simply not going to acquire that taste.
>Lots of literary fiction is perfectly readable for normal humans. Lots of what isn’t accessible is just not that enjoyable to anybody.
The PIAAC surveys, while imperfect, indirectly address what percentage of adults can read and appreciate "literary fiction."
The first part of the definition of level 3:
>Adults at Level 3 are able to construct meaning across larger chunks of text or perform multi-step operations in order to identify and formulate responses. They can identify, interpret or evaluate one or more pieces of information, often employing varying levels of inferencing.
The first part for Level 4:
>At level 4, adults can read long and dense texts presented on multiple pages in order to complete tasks that involve access, understanding, evaluation and reflection about the text(s) contents and sources across multiple processing cycles. Adults at this level can infer what the task is asking based on complex or implicit statements. Successful task completion often requires the production of knowledge-based inferences.
The full definitions can be found here: https://nces.ed.gov/surveys/piaac/measure.asp
Based on the full definitions, understanding the use of metaphor in a longer text probably sits in Level 4. A simple metaphor might sit in Level 3.
Based on the recent survey results, only half of US adults read at Level 3 or above. Around 15% read at Level 4 or above.
I invite you to look at this PowerPoint of sample questions for each level: https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&cd=&ved=2ahUKEwjJ...
Based on that, what level of literacy do you think indicates someone capable of reading and enjoying literary fiction? I think the hypothetical cutoff is somewhere between Level 3 and 4.
Based on all of this, let's use Sally Rooney's book "Normal People" as an example. If we're being super charitable, at most 50% of people would be able to read and comprehend that book. If we're being less charitable with our definition of "comprehension," I think we're probably looking at closer to 30% of people really understanding it.
Yes, I'm sure it all our faults, not that of the product.
Yep, skills need to be practiced before you engage with harder material
Or, authors need to be subservient to the needs and desires of the customers.
Around 54% of adults read at a 6th grade level or below: https://www.apmresearchlab.org/10x-adult-literacy
Based on this, you could reach both of these conclusions:
1. Most literary fiction is inaccessible to the average adult.
2. It's a big problem that even moderately complex novels are inaccessible to the average adult.
The first statement (which I think is where you're coming from) is absolutely true. If you want to write a very popular book, it should be easily readable at a 6th grade level.
The second statement is more a statement of values. Some people (such as myself) find it problematic that the average adult can't read/understand a book that is more complex than Harry Potter.
You don't have to agree with the second statement. A lot of people don't. But I think understanding why someone might find that problematic is important. Personally, I think there are a lot of things worth knowing that can't be written at a 6th grade level.
>In the US
If their goal is to write bestsellers, sure. That's where the €5 leisure novels come from. OTOH, if their goal is to push boundaries or be original, being subservient to the desires of the customers is counterproductive.
This is fundamental misunderstanding of literature.
This is like saying to a musician: I like the melody but you chose all the wrong instruments.
Obviously, the entire character of a song depends not only on the melody (idea) but also on the instruments chosen, the performance, etc. (material).
For literary fiction, the words are the material. What distinguishes literary works is not merely the "ideas" they present but the way in which they are presented. The words are the author's instruments, his paints. This is the difference between writing/reading for information and writing/reading as an aesthetic experience. Literary fiction of course imparts information and ideas, but it is predominantly about the latter experience insofar as the point is the evocative expression of those ideas.
This is why just reading the cliff notes for a literary work is missing the point.
“This is fundamental misunderstanding of literature”
No it is not. It is a central and vital part of literature.
Wound you like to have a friendly debate, each of us using quotations from any fiction writers we like?
Actually, I'd agree that "fundamental misunderstanding" is too strong. Obviously there is a certain threshold of comprehensibility one needs to achieve regardless of whether one is pursuing aesthetic ends or informative ones.
That said, I would stand by the assertion that reading literature only for the information it imparts is missing much of the point. We esteem authors not solely for their plots and characters, but also for their stylistics—the difference between a great writer and a passing one is often little more than the well considered phrase. The arrangement, use, and rhythm of words are a major component in a literary work.
My point is that asking a writer to "express it more simply or more accessibly" may in many cases amount to asking them to butcher the stylistics that they felt achieved the highest aesthetic quality for the kind of work they wanted to produce.
If one is given a business briefing it is probably the apex of reason to ask a writer to simplify. Are there cases in which this or that phrase in a literary work would benefit from simplification? Yes, but to ask an author to simplify their entire aesthetic approach generally, really seems to me to fail to have appreciated a large part of what distinguishes literature from basic expository writing.
I’d agree with your original assertion. Liking the content but not the form is like looking at a Turner and wishing the ship were closer and he’d chosen a clearer day, or thinking that Monet had some nice flowers in his garden but you’d like him to have painted them more clearly to be sure.
Maybe we agree, maybe we disagree. You got specific works and authors? That would help a lot.
Sure, here are some of my favorites:
Faulkner, Thomas Bernhard, John Barth, Henry James, Herman Melville, Fleur Jaeggy, Dostoyevsky, Marguerite Duras, Poe, Hawthorne, Rosemarie Waldrop, Kraznahokai,
These are just a couple that came to mind. Among them, probably Waldrop, Jaeggy, and Bernhard are the most experimental, but I would argue that none of them aesthetically speaking write books that are simple, and I don't think I could argue that any of them should have simplified their themes or style or general employment of language to be more accessible.
Kraznahorkai and Bernhard are great examples. Are walls of text without paragraph breaks harder to read? Yes. But this is an important aesthetic choice. In both cases (all of bernard, melancholy of resistance for Kraz) it speaks to an overbearing oppressiveness that ties directly into their thematics. If you missed this I think you missed out an essential point of their aesthetic and what they were trying to say. We cannot sever form and content. This is why I think it's absurd to complain that someone's work is "not accessible" —its really silly to demand any sort of aesthetic capitulation on the part of any artist, literary or otherwise, in the first place.
Edit: Faulkner is another good example that's less experimental. I'm sure some readers would have found As I lay Dying or The Sound and the Fury more accessible if a narrator mediated between the various first person voices he presents, but this would so drastically change the aesthetic character of these works that I doubt you'd be able to claim they aren't essentially different and would not be equivalent pieces of art.
But that’s new. Until ca 1970-2000, people read literary fiction because it was high quality, much more than because it was unrelateable. O’Hara, Salinger, and Franzen were not writing about the outer edges of human experience.
Interesting. That’s exactly why I read science fiction.
This is HN, they may be looking to put a monetary value on it.
There's nothing more effective than a piece of fiction at transmitting the subtle complete world-view ideas of an author directly into your brain.
I mean that in the sense that non-fiction is still very much fictionally presenting a world view of the author or the subject, but in a way that's bounded by real facts. Literary fiction doesn't have that constraint.
Human history and society is actually made up of ideas and by taking 2-300 pages to digest a set of ideas you come away with a new perspective you can't get any other way.
Fiction is alive and well. This article is specifically about the decline of literary fiction.
I think people simply realize how boring and pretentious much of contemporary literary fiction is; many choose to go pick up a science fiction, or thriller, or even romance novel that can convery all the same ideas in more interesting and accessible ways.
I think it's pretentious too, but I also think it's a useful distinction in the sense that the category aspires to deeper and broader ideas than a lot of fiction- Harry Potter, Hyperion, Dennis Taylor, We Are Legion, Twilight.
Not to say that the distinction itself, literary vs non-literary fiction, isn't extremely pretentious. But we all recognize that some book's ideas are more shallow than others.
It's fun
What is that stuff? Is Kurt Vonnegut that stuff?
Folks, downvoting the comment above is literally destroying what you claim to support.
I agree with what seems like the article's main point, namely that literary fiction has declined because it's not actually good anymore, it's just targeted at a tiny subculture of critics with weird tastes. In a way this is prefigured by the whole idea of "literary fiction"; the article never explains what this is, but it seems to mean something like "fiction that intends to be something other than pure entertainment".
> after postmodernism a kind of MFA minimalism came to dominate literary fiction
I totally agree with this and it more or less sums up why I hardly read any contemporary literary fiction. (And I'm one of those people the article talks about who does read a lot of novels, just not many new ones.) Although it's contrasted here with postmodernism, in a way I see a contiguity between them, as the irritating background sensation I get from most such writing, is a deliberate attempt by the author to create a distinctive "voice". Some of the postmodernist stuff does it by being very weird, but the new stuff can be even worse because so many writers are trying to create "their own voice" within this tiny range of the style space. I make an effort to sample this sometimes when I'm in a boosktore, but I'll pick up a book and read the first page or two and a wave of ennui washes over me.
Around 20 years ago, in college, I went to a talk by a classics scholar (as in, ancient Greek classics), who made an offhand reference to "The sort of story you read in the New Yorker, you know, one everyday American preaching a gentle sermon to another." I've always remembered that line and it still rings true today.
The article seems to talk about the "wokeness hypothesis" on this issue in terms of attributes of authors (e.g., their race or gender) rather than of stories. I don't know much about that. But if there's a way that wokeness or something like it has influenced writing, I'd say it's from a different angle: I just get the sense that there's a lot more risk today in writing about characters very unlike the author. It can be perceived as trying to "tell [insert group name here]'s story" without their involvement or consent. I think the severity of this is overstated by right-leaning reactionaries, but it's hard to argue that it's not a genuine shift in societal mood and values.
I think this is somewhat unfortunate, because it has a chilling effect on the role of imagination in writing. When we assume that a writer writing about some character is "telling the story" of people in the real world who are somehow similar to that character I think we sometimes close ourselves off to interesting stories that can potentially speak to many readers across cultures and categories. Like I say, this effect isn't decisive, but it's real.
When reading the article I also kept thinking about "classical" music, which seems like the musical counterpart to "literary" fiction. I've met people my age, younger, even kids, who respond with visceral enjoyment to Beethoven, Chopin, etc. I've met people who genuinely like stuff like Debussy and Ravel. I'm not sure I've ever met someone who unironically liked contemporary classical music on that level. Like literary fiction, it's become an inside game for people who want to push boundaries and move beyond conventions, and making something that sounds nice is secondary. There are exceptions to various degrees (Philip Glass comes to mind) but on the whole I get the sense of the same phenomenon mentioned in the article, which is that everyone seems to take it as given that no one is writing any music today that is even in the same league as Beethoven or Bach.
In the realm of fiction, that kind of connects to this:
> For the last twenty years American literary culture has been unable to produce a writer we can describe as great without at least feeling a tinge of embarrassment about. We should be worried.
That feeling of embarrassment feels connected to the rise of irony in art in general, and I wonder if it's another reason literary fiction has suffered. It's hard to write in the modern world without working in a significant wink-wink-nudge-nudge about how stupid and banal things are, not in the sense of satire or even witty commentary but just a kind of devil-may-care acceptance.
But there may be hope for us yet. According to a story that may be apocryphal, around 100 years ago someone asked Andre Gide who the greatest French poet was and he answered: "Victor Hugo, alas!"
While I disagree that “the publishers went woke” is a salient reason (or even true in any real sense), I give the essay props for resisting the urge to reduce a very complicated problem down to a single causal factor.
Some better versions of this take might be “In the culture war many people are only willing to consume media that perfectly signals their virtues, so even innocuous content can seem antagonistic.” or “Our culture changed and I don’t like it anymore, get off my lawn.”
For the most part I think this culture war is a figment of the media's imagination/desire. I think people just don't want to read for the most part—even those who purchase the books.
I find the culture war to exist primarily in the minds of the terminally online.
Maybe if you include "terminally watching the news on TV". But either way, it's a lot of people.
Most TV news now is talking about stuff in Twitter and I Can't Believe It's Not Twitter.
Those repeated allusions to how _we all know how publishing has gone woke_ really made me cringe.
It seems to me pretty clear that the article is arguing that "wokeness made fiction crap" is really just the most current result of "authors are optimizing for critics and editors, who are competing for status, and neither are interested in producing stuff readers like".
My issue with the wokeness is that it makes the stories very predictable. One race of characters is pretty much bad. The other race needs some saviorism. It's not the message of wokeness that is boring, but the repetitive and insistent manner in which it is delivered.
Not the message, but the fact there's little else besides the message to keep you interested.
As opposed, for example, to Richard Morgan's A Land Fit for Heroes. Where the main character is gay. He was persecuted for being gay. There are gay sex scenes.
However this is not what the book is about. Stuff is happening in that series. He's the hero of a decent story.
But then I'm talking about a fantasy series so it's not "literature" :)
Was Tolkien woke? I wonder.
To produce a good work of fiction its important to both 1) have a story to tell and 2) tell it masterfully.
By the time people collect enough life experience to satisfy (1) they've aged out of the demographic that's willing to put in the work to learn (2). This is why great writers are and will always be rare. People who write slop in their 20s will either fail and give up or be a victim of their success and produce more slop to satisfy their audience.
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Perhaps a generation+ of explicit institutional discrimination at every level of the pipeline very specifically targeted against the demographic that created 90% of all previously valued literary fiction, played some role in its decline.
eg https://www.compactmag.com/article/the-vanishing-white-male-...
TFA starts with the sentence “Recently, there has been a lot of talk about the “decline of the literary (straight) (white) male” and then goes on to explore that with much more nuance, as well as many other factors.
Of course that’s punishing, though 75% may be closer than 90%. But I don’t buy it as the root cause. Where is the new Susanna Kaysen or Lionel Shriver or Laurie Moore or Barbara Kingsolver?
> explicit institutional discrimination
Wild leap to a conclusion there. The article you linked makes some similarly strange leaps, based apparently on poor reading comprehension:
> A baffling New York Times op-ed (“The Disappearance of Literary Men Should Worry Everyone”) casually confessed to systemic gender discrimination in MFA admissions. “About 60 percent of our applications come from women, and some cohorts in our program are entirely female,” lamented David Morris, a creative writing professor at UNLV[.]
That's not discrimination? The fact that men are not applying as often as women does not imply that men are actively being kept out—in fact, quite the opposite. Men are not even asking to be let in. The rest of the NYT op-end goes on to point out the ways in which men being underrepresented in literary circles parallels their underrepresentation in the rest of academia:
> In recent decades, young men have regressed educationally, emotionally and culturally. Among women matriculating at four-year public colleges, about half will graduate four years later; for men the rate is under 40 percent.
If men are dropping out at higher rates and are less represented in liberal arts programs, it's absurd to leap to the question, "who is doing this to men." That's a very grievance-oriented mentality. The real question is simply, "why is this happening," and a cursory investigation will indicate that the most likely answer is, men simply choose to avoid pursuits they perceive as feminine. As the number of female participants in a college major rises, men stop wanting to take it.
> “There was really only one variable where I found an effect, and that was the proportion of women already enrolled in vet med schools… So a young male student says he’s going to visit a school and when he sees a classroom with a lot of women he changes his choice of graduate school. That’s what the findings indicate…. what's really driving feminization of the field is ‘preemptive flight’—men not applying because of women’s increasing enrollment.” - Dr. Anne Lincoln
> For every 1% increase in the proportion of women in the student body, 1.7 fewer men applied. One more woman applying was a greater deterrent than $1000 in extra tuition!
https://celestemdavis.substack.com/p/why-boys-dont-go-to-col...
As tempting as it may be to cry discrimination, there's really no evidence of that. The decline in popular male writers is most likely a product of the same cultural forces that caused a decline in male veterinarians. Women started doing it more often, and men decided they wanted to go somewhere with less female competition.
I don't know what could possibly make me read books. Reading is a chore, and not very efficient at the best of times. There's also the eye strain and the neck pain, and comfort in general. Best would be to read from bed, but bed is for sleepy time, a hard earned lesson.
But that's just me. Here's why I think books are no longer being read in general.
It's simply a format that time has moved on from. First came the radio, but radio wasn't gonna compete with books. Radio was succeeded by television though, and that sure could, but television is presently being succeeded by the internet, with TV companies desperate for any remaining attention, attention that they keep bleeding.
All this time the format has failed to find a foothold, and carve out its stay. You may discover that this is not universally true across the world, such as in Japan, where light novels are decently popular. It has its own place, but in the Western world, the only reliable place books have is in the classroom. I stipulate that the reason you see a prominently female readership is for the same reason: girls are (were?) taught in school that they're the more artsy type, that humanities should interest them more, and so they proceed(ed) to take that on the chin. Fast forward a few decades, and there you go.
The same applies for all other foregone forms of art. Theater? Opera? Ballet? Classical music performances? You'd have to pay or coerce me to attend these. Where I live, all the institutions hosting these are living off of government money, as they're simply unable to sustain themselves otherwise. People just don't care. The shows put on are basically live-action museum exhibitions. Although I guess even museums should be included in this list. Modern audiences are simply completely out of tune with these, they are an exercise in anachronism. And until the communities behind these continue to hammer in their formal position in art over their actual one, rather than try to connect with said modern audiences, this trend will continue. That is assuming such a connection is even possible still at this point.
Plenty of people still read and read a lot. I also have other hobbies, but I don't think it's going away. There are more books being published than ever before. There are also genres like science fiction and fantasy that are HUGE now and were once much smaller.
I mean happy for you, but that's a bit of a non sequitur, isn't it? The thread we're in is literally called "The cultural decline of literary fiction", and none of what you say is actually mutually exclusive with that.
Agreed. Sorry for getting off topic. I interpreted some of the comments as veering off into talking about the decline of literature as a whole.
Indeed, it's about the decline of literary fiction - a very specific subset of literature that comprises a tiny part of fiction, nevermind the totality of all literature. People still read books, just not these particular books.
For a supposedly moribund institution, live theater (esp Broadway) makes a ton of money.