Timeless pop art and ephemeral classics

Texts worth reading--worth reading now, and worth reading two hundred years from now--coordinate the personal with the national and the international; they embed the instant in the instant's full context and long history. It's what the Odyssey does and what Middlemarch does and what Invisible Man does and what Jonathan Franzen and Marilynne Robinson's recent novels try to do.
--Eric Bennett, "The Pyramid Scheme", in (Harbach 2014), p. 71-72:

Bennett implies something very strange: that for a novel to be a timeless classic worth reading 200 years from now, it must be about current events. It must be about a person grappling with the burning issues of the day, or it must capture the zeitgeist and contrast it with its historic context.

Do great novels do this? Or are they more about things people have found important for centuries?

Invisible Man does, certainly. The Odyssey, not at all. The others he mentions, I don't know.

Jane Austen's novels are quite specific to their time and social class, though note they didn't become popular until the 20th century. The novels of Charles Dickens and John Steinbeck were both about contemporary social problems, though both were thought of as commercial hacks while they were writing. Henry James often wrote about the cultural clashes between upper-class English and Americans taking advantage of modern technology to travel between the two countries. So, yes for all those novels.

Those are just off the top of my head, though. I'll go down the most-often assigned books on the Open Syllabus Explorer: Were they about then-current social issues?

Frankenstein (1818)--Yes. It dealt with the growing power of science. But according to Google n-grams, it was ignored until 1914.

Canterbury Tales (1390s)--I guess? Seems to (perhaps accidentally) deal with the growing middle class, the growing independence of people and multiplication of social roles, in that some of the people on pilgrimage were not supposed to be on pilgrimage according to the rules of the day; some of the stories represent conflicting social value systems, such as those told by the night versus those told by lower-class pilgrims; and the variety of occupations of the travelers did not fit well into the four-class medieval model of society. On the other hand, Canterbury Tales was not considered great until centuries after it was written. According to Google n-grams, they weren't written about until 1760. (The hits left of 1760 are false; try clicking on them.)

Paradise Lost--No. (The graph for frequency of reference to Paradise Lost on Google n-grams, in contrast to that for the Canterbury Tales, starts just after its publication in 1669.)

Hamlet--In Collateral damage in Hamlet and the Merchant of Venice, I wrote that the theme of Hamlet was whether 'tis nobler to suffer insult and disgrace, or to end it with violence that will inevitably spin out of your control. (It turns out this isn't what Shakespeare had in mind originally; an earlier version of Hamlet indicated that his soliloquy was about contemplating suicide. But, hey, Bill changed it, so I'll stick with my story for the moment.) That is a timeless problem, not one of particular relevance to England in 1609; the revolution was still over 30 years away. So, No.

Heart of Darkness (1899)--Yes, I think so. HoD was an early novel about disillusionment with modernity and civilization. (Did not become popular until 1912.)

"The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" (1915)--It's a poem, but, Yes. It's about angsty modernist midlife alienation.

"The Yellow Wallpaper" (1892)--Tricky. It's about the repression of women by the patriarchy, which was happening in 1892, but was seen as normal. It was an issue at the time it was added to the canon, in the 1970s. So a story that wasn't a "great story" when it came out can become a "great story" if society turns its attention to the things that story deals with.

"Oedipus" (429 BC)--No. It's about questions of fate that were important to the Greeks, but they were important to the Greeks for hundreds of years, not specifically in the -420s.

The Great Gatsby (1925)--No. Gatsby was about the failure of the American Dream to fulfil. Not the right note for 1925, I think. It would have been more appropriate to the mood of the early 1960s.

Well, what do you know. The Great Gatsby wasn't a "great book" when it came out. It became great in the 1960s.

The Awakening (1899)--Another book that was added to the canon in the 1970s, because it was about women's issues that were being debated in the 1970s.

I think that's enough. So. Yes, to get assigned in English courses, a novel must deal with social issues of the day when it is first assigned. Once it has been assigned, it may remain a "great novel" indefinitely.

But. The old canon, the works which were considered great before the 19th century--the Greeks, Beowulf, Shakespeare, Milton--were not especially relevant to the year they were written nor to the year they entered the canon. They were closer to what we call "timeless works", though they were each specific to the concerns of the culture they came from. (Don Quixote is probably an exception to this, and it's interesting to note it's often called the first modernist novel.)

Now let's think about popular genre / commercial novels. I'm just going to "yes" or "no" them as best I can. I realize these aren't "correct" objective judgements.

the novels about Admiral Horatio Hornblower--No.
The Lord of the Rings--This is about coming of age, courage, temptation, the dangers of power, the virtue of the simple life, the Platonic and Catholic model of the world as slowly running down. So, No.
Gormenghast--No?
The Spy Who Came In From the Cold--Yes; a cold war novel, and also post-modern in its moral nihilism.
Red Storm Rising--Yes; another cold war novel.
Stephen King novels--No? Vaguely? Horror can be about popular fears, but that's too subtle for me to dissect.
Harry Potter--No.
Game of Thrones--No.
The DaVinci Code--No.
Twilight--No.

Now popular movies:

Modern Times (Charlie Chaplin)--Yes.
Gone With the Wind--No.
The Wizard of Oz--No.
Pinnochio--No.
The Seven Samurai--No.
Rebel Without a Cause--Yes.
The Godfather--No.
Star Wars--No.
Alien--No.
When Harry Met Sally--Partly, in that there was a subplot about closing a small bookstore.
Toy Story--No.
X-Men, esp. X-Men 2--Yes.
the rest of the DC and Marvel universes--Often Yes in the original comics, but No in the movies.

Now movies made from literary novels:

Frankenstein (1818, 1931)--Yes for the novel; no for the movie, which was a metaphor for child abuse.
The Handmaid's Tale--Yes for both.
Fried Green Tomatoes (1987, 1991)--Yes for the novel. Much less so for the film, which didn't say that the two main characters were lesbian.
The Remains of the Day (1989, 1993)--Yes for the novel, which was about the British class system; less so for the movie, which IIRC dwelt more on the (missed) romance. (I haven't seen it in a long time, though.)
The English Patient (1992, 1996)--Sort of, for both the novel and the film, which were anti-colonial and had nationality, race, and identity as a theme, but many timeless psychological themes as well.

There's a definite pattern here. Popular fiction--genre novels and movies--is mostly about timeless issues. So was literary fiction, way back when. Movie adaptations for literary novels may tone down the current-events angle and ramp up the timeless issues. Sometime between 1670 and 1910, someone decreed "literary" fiction must be current.

My first guess as to who it was is the avant garde, who began dictating what was and was not high Western culture around 1910. But I could also point to Voltaire and Dickens. I suppose it was a gradual process.

Ironically, then, it isn't popular art that has the short attention span and the egocentric fixation on itself, but high culture. The elite are more interested in trendy issues; the masses are more interested in important issues.

If we’ve grown up at the movies we know that good work is continuous not with the academic, respectable tradition but with the glimpses of something good in trash.
--Pauline Kael, "Trash, Art and the Movies", 1969

This makes sense--the elite have more power to change things, so they have a greater obligation to think about the things that seem ready to change. It also explains why all of the new books, stories, and essays introduced to the canon since 1970 are about oppression. It doesn't prove that a bunch of leftists got together and conspired to load the curriculum with identity politics. It's just that, to the elite, if something isn't what everybody [1] is talking about, it isn't great.

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[1] "everybody" =~ "everybody in Manhattan"

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This may also explain why novels today follow social change, when they used to lead it. (It would take another blog post to argue why I believe that--which I suppose I'll post someday, since I've already written it up for Bronycon.)

This also explains why literary novelists must live in New York City. You don't write a "great novel" today as one did in the 19th century, by sitting in a garret or in one's manor library and struggling with your novel for years. You do it by hanging out with the right writers, editors, and publishers in Manhattan (or Oxbridge), figuring out what they most want to hear at that precise moment, then writing just that, quickly, and sending it in before anybody else can. In "MFA vs NYC" (in Harbach 2014, p. 26-27), Chad Harbach wrote,

It could be objected that just because the NYC writer's editor, publisher, agent, and publicist all live in New York, that doesn't mean that she does, too. After all, it would be cheaper and calmer to live most anywhere else. This objection is sound in theory; in practice, it is false. NYC novelists live in New York — specifically, they lived in a small area of West Central Brooklyn bounded by DUMBO and Prospect Heights. They partake of a social world defined by the selection (by agents), evaluation (by editors), purchase (by publishers), production, publication, publicization, and second evaluation (by reviewers) and purchase (by readers) of NYC novels. The NYC novelists gathers her news not from Poets & Writers but from the [New York] Observer and Gawker; not from the academic grapevine but from publishing parties, where she drinks with agents and editors and publicists. She writes reviews for book forum and the Sunday Times. She also tends to set her work in the city where she and her imagined reader reside: as in the most recent novels of Shteyngart, Ferris, Galchen, and Foer, to name just four prominent members of The New Yorker's 20-under-40 list. … Even eight years away from finishing her first novel, she constantly and involuntarily collect information about what the publishing industry needs, or thinks it needs.

See also my post White Teeth: Anatomy of a 'quality' bestseller for more proof that writing what publishers want is the most-important factor in literary fiction. Zadie Smith wrote White Teeth between cramming for exams, so it was not exactly a Proustian effort. ("To write books you have to be bored and exams are good for that," she said.) But this means the new literary canon meets the needs of the elite, not of the masses it gets pushed onto in literature classes.

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Reference

Chad Harbach, ed., 2014. MFA vs NYC: The Two Cultures of American Fiction. n+1, NYC..

Comments

[BatwingCandlewaxxe]

(Don Quixote is probably an exception to this, and it's interesting to note it's often called the first modernist novel.)

It's also important to remember that Don Quixote was a parody of a type of Romantic novel popular at the time.

[Unknownlight]

Ironically, then, it isn't popular art that has the short attention span and the egocentric fixation on itself, but high culture.

This line is hilarious.

[Georg]

"They can only talk about things that people are talking about."

Correction: They can only talk about things that they are talking about within their own social circle. This is not a new thing, particularly in politics. Remember Pauline Kael, New Yorker film critic and her quote "How could Nixon have won? Nobody I know voted for him." The same stunned disbelief happened in 2000 with George W, and to a greater extent with our current stunner. The high social circles watch PBS, listen to NPR, attend the same parties and social events, and are totally baffled at the habits of the Great Unwashed living in flyover country.

upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/4/4d/Steinberg_New_Yorker_Cover.png

[Jordanis]

4526733

I would suggest the move toward currentness coinciding with rapidly increasing industrialization?? When things change so quickly, "now" becomes more relatively important with respect to "timelessness" I would think...

Or at least, people think it must be more important. The upheavals in their everyday lives are so great that they must be rocking the fundamental nature of humanity, mustn't they?

[Bad Horse]

4526733

I would suggest the move toward currentness coinciding with rapidly increasing industrialization?? When things change so quickly, "now" becomes more relatively important with respect to "timelessness" I would think...

I was going to say the Enlightenment, but same basic idea, yes. In the Middle Ages, people didn't believe in and didn't want change. By 1850, change was hip.

But--romanticism & modernism are a reaction against industrialization & science. So it seems odd that the people in Manhattan publishing, who are mostly modernists or postmodernists, would be on team industrialization.

[Orbiting Kettle]

Are we sure that this intellectual "inbreeding" hasn't always been the norm in academic fields without objective evaluation criteria? After all, when we look at the great art of the past, we are looking at a pretty selected representation of stuff that survived fads.

I suspect we will need a historian (as somebody who approaches the whole topic systematically and over a long time) who has studied the issue (just so we don't start looking again at a filtered sample) to confirm or deny that it has always been this way, only with a different set of values at work.

And if it was, well, that doesn't make the current situation a good thing, but it may show at least what would be a foolish way to approach it again.

[Bad Horse]

4526576 I clicked on the link to Pauline Kael out of curiosity. What she actually said was, "I live in a rather special world. I only know one person who voted for Nixon. Where they are I don't know. They're outside my ken. But sometimes when I'm in a theater I can feel them."

She wrote a very interesting and depressing article in 1964, Zeitgeist and Poltergeist; Or, Are Movies Going to Pieces? It says that movie audiences in the 1950s wanted their movies to make sense, but audiences in the 1960s preferred movies that didn't. It was the same thing that Annie Dillard wrote about in modernist novels--the fragmenting of the narrative, the actual preference for things that made no sense, a resentment of things that did. The same thing that I've talked about in modern art and contemporary literary novels--the disdain for structure. Only from her perspective, it looked like in the movies, this shift was driven by audience preference, not by the mandate of publishers or creative writing teachers.

We had begun to surprise each other by the affectionate, nostalgic tone of our mock erudition when the youngest person present, an instructor in English, said, in clear, firm tone, “The Beast with Five Fingers is the greatest horror picture I’ve ever seen.” Stunned that so bright a young man could display such shocking taste, preferring a Warner Brothers forties mediocrity to the classics, I gasped, “But why?” And he answered, “Because it’s completely irrational. It doesn’t make any sense, and that’s the true terror.”
...
[Describing the horror film Eyes Without a Face:] The audience seemed to be reacting to a different movie. They were so noisy the dialogue was inaudible; they talked until the screen gave promise of bloody ghastliness. Then the chatter subsided to rise again in noisy approval of the gory scenes. When a girl in the film seemed about to be mutilated, a young man behind me jumped up and down and shouted encouragement. “Somebody’s going to get it,” he sang out gleefully. The audience, which was, I’d judge, predominantly between fifteen and twenty-five, and at least a third feminine, was as pleased and excited by the most revolting, obsessive images as that older, mostly male audience is when the nudes appear in The Immoral Mr. Teas or Not Tonight, Henry. They’d gotten what they came for: they hadn’t been cheated. But nobody seemed to care what the movie was about or be interested in the logic of the plot—the reasons for the gore.
...
In recent years, largely because of the uncertainty of producers about what will draw, films in production may shift from one script to another, or may be finally cut so that key sequences are omitted. And the oddity is that it doesn’t seem to matter to the audience. ... They want less effort, more sensations.
...
In recent years film festivals and art houses have featured a peculiar variant of the trapped-in-the-old-dark-house genre (Buñuel’s The Exterminating Angel is the classic new example), but the characters, or rather figures, are the undead or zombies of the vampire movies. “We live as in coffins frozen side by side in a garden”—Last Year at Marienbad. “I’m dead”—the heroine of Il Mare. “They’re all dead in there”—the hostess describing the party of La Notte. Their vital juices have been sucked away, but they don’t have the revealing marks on the throat. We get the message: alienation drains the soul without leaving any marks. Or, as Bergman says of his trilogy, “Most of the people in these three films are dead, completely dead. They don’t know how to love or to feel any emotions. They are lost because they can’t reach anyone outside of themselves.” This “art” variant is a message movie about failure of communication and lack of love and spiritual emptiness and all the rest of that. It’s the closest thing we’ve got to a new genre but it has some peculiarities. The old dark house was simply there, but these symbolic decadent or sterile surroundings are supposed to reflect the walking death of those within the maze. The characters in the old dark house tried to solve the riddle of their imprisonment and tried to escape; even in No Exit the drama was in why the characters were there, but in the new hotel-in-hell movies the characters don’t even want to get out of the maze—nor one surmises do the directors, despite their moralizing. And audiences apparently respond to these films as modern and relevant just because of this paralysis and inaction and minimal story line. If in the group at the older dark house, someone was not who we thought he was, in the new dull party gatherings, it doesn’t matter who anybody is (which is a new horror).
It is not just general audiences out for an evening’s entertainment who seem to have lost the narrative sense, or become indifferent to narrative. What I think are processes of structural disintegration are at work in all types of movies, and though it’s obvious that many of the old forms were dead and had to be broken through, it’s rather scary to see what’s happening—and not just at the big picture-palaces. Art-house films are even more confusing. Why, at the end of Godard’s My Life to Live, is the heroine shot, rather than the pimp that the rival gang is presumably gunning for? Is she just a victim of bad marksmanship? If we express perplexity, we are likely to be told that we are missing the existentialist point: it’s simply fate, she had to die. But a cross-eyed fate? And why is there so little questioning of the organization of My Name Is Ivan with its lyric interludes and patriotic sections so ill assembled that one might think the projectionist had scrambled the reels? (They often do at art houses, and it would seem that the more sophisticated the audience, the less likely that the error will be discovered. When I pointed out to a theater manager that the women in Brink of Life were waiting for their babies after they had miscarried, he told me that he had been playing the film for two weeks and I was his first patron who wasn’t familiar with Bergman’s methods.)
The art-house audience accepts lack of clarity as complexity, accepts clumsiness and confusion as “ambiguity” and as style. Perhaps even without the support of critics, they would accept incoherence just as the larger audience does: they may feel that movies as incomprehensible as Viridiana are more relevant to their experience, more true to their own feelings about life, and more satisfying and complex than works they can understand.

On a popular and critically movie, This Sporting Life, she shows us how reader-response theory, shattering the narrative, the post-modern intolerance for distinctions, and anti-science were clumsily but faithfully expressed by film critics in 1964, as murky photocopies of bad originals:

Walter Lassally says that “Antonioni’s oblique atmospheric statements and Buñuel’s symbolism, for example, cannot be analyzed in terms of good or bad . . . for they contain, in addition to any obvious meanings, everything that the viewer may read into them.” Surely he can read the most onto a blank screen?
There’s not much to be said for this theory except that it’s mighty democratic. Rather pathetically, those who accept this Rorschach-blot approach to movies are hesitant and uneasy about offering reactions. They should be reassured by the belief that whatever they say is right, but as it refers not to the film but to them (turning criticism into autobiography) they are afraid of self-exposure. I don’t think they really believe the theory—it’s a sort of temporary public convenience station. More and more people come out of a movie and can’t tell you what they’ve seen, or even whether they liked it.
An author like David Storey may stun them with information like “[This Sporting Life] works purely in terms of feeling. Only frivolous judgments can be made about it in conventional terms of style.” Has he discovered a new method of conveying feeling without style? Or has he simply found the arrogance to frustrate normal responses? No one wants to have his capacity for feeling questioned, and if a viewer tries to play it cool, and discuss This Sporting Life in terms of corrupt professional football, he still won’t score on that muddy field: there are no goalposts. Lindsay Anderson, who directed, says, “This Sporting Life is not a film about sport. In fact, I wouldn’t really call it a story picture at all.... We have tried to make a tragedy . . . we were making a film about something unique.” A tragedy without a story is unique all right: a disaster.
...
The spokesmen for this cinema attack rationality as if it were the enemy of art (“as/ the heavy Boots of Soldiers and Intellect/ march across the/ flowerfields of subconscious” and so forth by Jonas Mekas). They have composed a rather strange amalgam in which reason = lack of feeling and imagination = hostility to art = science = the enemy = Nazis and police = the Bomb. Somewhere along the line, criticism is also turned into an enemy of art. The group produces a kind of euphoric publicity which is published in place of criticism, but soon it may have semi-intellectually respectable critics. In the Nation of April 13, 1964, Susan Sontag published an extraordinary essay on Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures called “A Feast for Open Eyes” in which she enunciates a new critical principle: “Thus Smith’s crude technique serves, beautifully, the sensibility embodied in Flaming Creatures—a sensibility based on indiscriminateness, without ideas, beyond negation.” I think in treating indiscriminateness as a value, she has become a real swinger.

[Applejinx]

I realize these aren't "correct" objective judgements.

That's good

…Gatsby doesn't speak to the Roaring Twenties? All righty then

I think Google NGrams only exacerbates your tendency to contextless rationalizing. I realize how easy it is… but try and bear in mind that for you, Google NGrams and similar 'big data' toys have a nasty tendency to lead you wildly astray. I could name a few currently well-paid pundits with the same problem, so it's hardly a unique issue…

I guess do as you please, but damn.

[book_burner]

Ironically, then, it isn't popular art that has the short attention span and the egocentric fixation on itself, but high culture. The elite are more interested in trendy issues; the masses are more interested in important issues.

I disagree. The masses aren't interested in "important issues". The masses are interested in whatever's fucking awesome. I don't enjoy hearing about Paradise Lost (or, for that matter, The Horus Heresy) because it speaks to important religious themes in my life. I'm freaking Jewish, the religious themes of Paradise Lost don't even make full sense to me. I enjoy hearing about it because holy shit angels fighting that's so cool (likewise, giant mutant psychic supermen in power-armor fighting that's so cool).

I feel like "having qualities capable of pleasing the Mane Six" (something kind, something funny, something awesome, something beautiful, something about life, something smart) is a better predictor of "timelessness" in art than, you know, issues.

[Bad Horse]

4527206

I enjoy hearing about it because holy shit angels fighting that's so cool (likewise, giant mutant psychic supermen in power-armor fighting that's so cool).

And revolutions! They're AWESOME!

No, seriously, I know what you're saying. When I say "the masses are interested in important issues", I don't mean they want to hear Kissinger explain geopolitics. I mean most people are more interested in a story about romance (which is important) than a story about the problems of subjectivity (which is also important, but not something that requires as much attention in most people's lives).

[book_burner]

4527260 Ooooooh, yeah, that makes sense.

Also, you can make fun, but there's a pretty famous musical about a revolution. The novel is considered a timeless, high-art classic -- despite digressing at some points into detailed descriptions of sewers.

[BatwingCandlewaxxe]

4526922

Are we sure that this intellectual "inbreeding" hasn't always been the norm in academic fields without objective evaluation criteria? After all, when we look at the great art of the past, we are looking at a pretty selected representation of stuff that survived fads.

Well, that is very much the case, and has been as long as there have been discrete organizations and schools. The medieval Guild system bred a certain narrow-focused mindset, the Church's control of the art scene of the day, through being the dominant source of patronage, enforced preferences for a particular type of art. The rise the Academie further reinforced artistic inbreeding (paralleled by the nobility's inbreeding). Many of the popular artists had their own schools, thus promulgating their own visions and styles to a new generation.

By the 18th and 19th centuries, art and the art world had achieved a social status and position that would be easily recognizable today by anyone familiar with the structures and whims of popular culture; with many artists becoming essentially the "rock stars" for their day (and many of them very much acted the part, Mozart was nearly as notorious for his off-stage antics as he was known for his stage productions).

Many artistic movements started as reactions against the insular and stultifying atmospheres of the academies, most notably the Impressionist movement, sort of the "punk rock" of the visual arts in its reaction against the realism-focused Romanticism and traditionalism that was focused on aping the Mannerist schools of the 16th century (or, more accurately, the Mannerists' own obsession with classical themes and images).

[Georg]

I'm really not that socially 'ept' enough to make meaningful comments on art, but I'm on the internet, so I will anyway.

The core of the difference between what I consider art and the modern art world is the same Objective/Subjective phases that have been applied to philosophy and other silly areas, like politics. Truth is objective. That's my opinion. There's a rock over there. That statement is true.

Art has phased into a subjective zone where objective truths no longer matter. That thing over there only looks like a rock. Actually, it's a symbolic representation of a post-humanistic zeitgeist between cybernetic organisms and the evolution of the microbe in order to cope with Man's brutality to the environment. That'll be $50 please. (Strange how the subjective artist insists on being paid in objective hard currency or verified check)

[TheJediMasterEd]

I hereby move that Bad Horse's blog be renamed "The Algonquin End Table."

All in favor say HONK HONK

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