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Should smart men prefer the fiction of the past?
Razib thinks so:
I think that it is somewhat peculiar that many of us find fiction from the past more engaging than popular contemporary works. Aupelius' Golden Ass gets my attention; most contemporary fiction does not. I am arguing here that this is partly due to the fact that in the past those who read copiously were, on average, much more like me than they were like the typical human. Not only were readers by and large men (usually of some means and comfort), but they were often also disproportionately eggheads who were eccentric by their nature. How many elite scholars were there such as Claudius who were not attracted to the public life of politics and do not appear in the annals of history? With the printing press, cheaper paper, and the rise of mass literacy, things changed, the distribution of taste shifted. And so did the distribution of genres.
Read the whole thing. I believe that literary "market taste" was closest to mine in the 1920s, a remarkable decade that saw the publication of major works by Proust, Mann, Joyce, Rilke, Kafka, and numerous other masterpieces. That may be more a "spirit of the times" effect than an audience composition effect, since I prefer it to earlier and more elite periods as well. (Or maybe only by then did fiction get dumbed down to my level!)
When it comes to Roman literature there is also a significant selection effect, namely what later manuscript collectors thought was worth preserving and protecting. Many novels were written during Roman times, but not many of them have come down to us and thus the average quality of Roman literature may look artificially high, just as the average quality of today's literary menagerie looks artificially low.
Posted by Tyler Cowen on May 2, 2008 at 05:56 AM in Books | Permalink
Comments
Anyone who thinks of Apuleius as an example of eggheadedness can kiss my Golden Ass. It doesn't reflect well on his literary judgment.
Posted by: Tom T. at May 2, 2008 7:22:15 AM
Yeah, The Golden Ass were popular as hell in my high school, and more so among the girls.
I hardly think Madame Bovary or Anna Karenina are valued for their "exotic ideas, novelty of story arc and exploration of startling landscapes." And plenty of more recent fantasy classics (like Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast books) aren't archetypes of "plots, not people." And yet, their audience was probably primarily men—disproportionately donnish too.
Probably people prefer contemporary fiction in large part for the same reasons they prefer contemporary music: the shared social experience.
Posted by: Raghav at May 2, 2008 8:10:11 AM
Of course, the same effect operates in all media, including music and video. Which explains rap and Paradise Hotel.
The plus side, for everyone who believes that culture is going downhill, is that this phenomenon has just about run its course. Now that just about all of us have access to the means of cultural production, there's no lower common denominator left toward which to sink.
Posted by: Mitch at May 2, 2008 8:14:49 AM
The 1920s was also the zenith of American literature in my opinion (Hemmingway, Fitzgerald, O'Neill, the Harlem Renaissance, etc.) The '30s was pretty good, too.
Martin Scorsese, who was considered one of the young mods in the '70s, say all the time lately that he only reads books from the 18th and 19th centuries.
Posted by: Ted Craig at May 2, 2008 8:41:59 AM
I have always said that I prefer my non-fiction published yesterday and my fiction out of copyright. Time is an efficient and brutal editor. Even among the classic authors of the past, it cuts their output to the core. Have you read Mark Twain's "A Tramp Abroad?" How about Thoreau's "Herald of Freedom?" What, other than "The Prince," have you read by Machiavelli?
I agree that the 20s were an amazing decade, but I tend more toward the now forgotten James Branch Cabell, Don Marquis and Christopher Morley with a side of Damon Runyon... All of whom bid fair to be forgotten within the next hundred years. The possible exception is Cabell... there's something about southern decadence in full bloom... :-)
Posted by: apikoros at May 2, 2008 8:58:43 AM
"Many novels were written during Roman times, but not many of them have come down to us and thus the average quality of Roman literature may look artificially high, just as the average quality of today's literary menagerie looks artificially low."
I understand how Rome’s literature has been selectively preserved to improve average quality, but I don’t understand how the average quality of today’s literature is artificially low. Could someone explain?
Posted by: Mason at May 2, 2008 9:28:47 AM
Because as Sturgeon's law goes, 90% of everything is crap and that old Chronos takes care of the weeding. I think what he means is that there will always be a negative bias against contemporary productions as a whole, because the filter of time hasn't yet relegated lower-quality works to the dustbins of history.
Posted by: Chris at May 2, 2008 9:48:30 AM
I'd agree that's probably what he means, but it's not what he said.
I don't mean to be nit-picky, I just want to know if I'm missing anything.
Posted by: Mason at May 2, 2008 10:11:45 AM
I tend to disagree with this statement from Razib:
To be short about it men are into plot, while women are into character. This means that modern literary fiction emphasizes psychological complexity, subtly and finesse. In contrast, male-oriented action adventure or science fiction exhibits a tendency toward flat monochromatic characters and a reliance on interesting events and twists.
I would replace women with sophisticated readers. I know this sound snobbish, but the move away from plot-driven works has more to do with less educated readers migrating to TV in the 1950s. That was the death knell for the pulps.
Posted by: Ted Craig at May 2, 2008 10:17:27 AM
Men? Pardon me -- what about us classics-reading grrls?
Posted by: Patricia Mathews at May 2, 2008 10:21:02 AM
...though, I'm a guy and pretty picky about character these days.
I'm mostly not so into the '20s. I've been known to throw books from that era against walls. No, gimme some nice SF from after '50, or something from the Age of Reason or Classical Greece and Rome.
Yay, grrls, I say!
Posted by: Jon Kay at May 2, 2008 11:58:47 AM
Machiavelli:
Comments On Livy
Art of War
Mandragora
Posted by: karl at May 2, 2008 12:19:49 PM
Genji was not the first novel but it is a excelent one.Its like Byrons Don Juan.Every novel or narrative work is psycological.Even the plain Ivanhoes characters had a mind.Im latinamerican with african, native, spanish , german and french blood.Born in the USA and raised in Venezuela but i can identifie myself with Lara or the first pages Faust better than any "Boom" character.I like Vargas Llosa literature but stiil his characters are strangers to me than the ancient romans.
If time selection is a factor why Nobel Prize winners of the fisrt half of the the xx century are too hard to read. Kafka , Joyce and Proust the 3 greatest authors of the century dint won it.Kafka won by surrogate i know.
There is good new literarure that will survive:Naipaul, MacEwan, Kundera,Amis, both father and son,Roth, Phillips, Wolfe,Vargas LLosa,Murakami,Haruki,Gao Xi Huan, Moravia, Marias
Posted by: k at May 2, 2008 12:58:03 PM
I think this has more to do with the experimental (character-driver) vs. conceptual (plot-driven) dichotomy than with the sex of the readers.
Posted by: Sarah at May 2, 2008 1:04:45 PM
A couple of additional things y'all may get a kick out of chewing on:
* When you're talking about contempo fiction, most of you seem to be thinking about contempo "literary fiction." Literary fiction generally sucks. It's wimpy, depressive, and fussy. It's also an artificial construct. Literary fiction as we currently know it is an invention of the '60s and '70s, something in arts terms akin to the Great Society programs of the era. Fitzgerald, Hemingway, O'Hara ... There were higher and lower forms of fiction being written in those days, but it was all part of a continuum. They wrote for popular magazines, after all; they had bestsellers. More about this here.
* One of the reasons contempo fiction seems weak to many people is that ... well, to be frank, book publishing is one of the most feminized industry around. Back in, say, 1970, the editorial side of book publishing was probably 80% male, and many of them were hetero. These days, the editorial side of book publishing is probably 75% female, and many of the guys are gay. Good for them, of course, and they bring many virtues. Unfortunately, the ol' rampaging-male-stallion energy is not one of them. Book publishing is a bit like Vassar or Smith these days. Guys sense this, and they avoid the field -- red-blooded yet arty types tend to go into music, or TV, or movies instead. Same holds for creative types. The more outgoing, dynamic creative guys are writing TV these days, or creating webseries, not trying to put their thing across in book publishing.
* Despite all this, there's some awfully good new and newish fiction out there, even for the tastes of people who prefer action to contemplation. The reason you may not know this is that you're being ill-served by the reviewers and the press. They're anxious, striving, Ivy wimps, generally, eager to impress each other with their fussy taste. A couple of suggestions: try more crime ficiton -- Westlake, Leonard, Gorman, Hillerman, Crais and many more in America ... Ruth Rendell, Peter Dickinson in England ... And have any of you read Steven Pressman's "Gates of Fire," about the Spartans' defence at Thermopylae? That's a really amazing, stirring novel. This is high-quality fiction. But a lot of it is flying under the radar.
Posted by: Michael Blowhard at May 2, 2008 1:04:52 PM
karl said:
Machiavelli:
Comments On Livy
Art of War
Mandragora
Well done, sir! You are two up on me. I've read "Art of War" many years ago, and knew there were others but was surprised at the length of the list over at Wikipedia. I'm going to have to go shopping!
Posted by: apikoros at May 2, 2008 1:44:24 PM
I suspect that for most readers era of authorship isn't a particularly useful selection criterion. Neither is it a convenient one, given that book search implementations rarely make it straightforward (or even possible) to search by date of publish and that bookstores do not shelve books by date. So asking whether smarter men should prefer fiction by date is a bit like asking whether smarter men should prefer fiction that at some point was released in a leatherbound edition. Maybe, but who cares? That strategy is dominated by the universally more successful strategy of reading fiction that's recommended to you by sources that you trust.
Posted by: sidereal at May 2, 2008 2:24:29 PM
Many novels were written during Roman times, but not many of them have come down to us and thus the average quality of Roman literature may look artificially high
Yet somehow much of Ausonius' vapid poetry survived. Wikipedia reminds us:
Edward Gibbon observed in the third volume of his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire that "the poetical fame of Ausonius condemns the taste of his age."
Posted by: tommy at May 2, 2008 2:47:02 PM
sidereal said:
...era of authorship isn't a particularly useful selection criterion.
I have to say that era of authorship isn't a selection criteria that consumers choose, but rather on that is forced upon them. If you were interested in antebellum history, for example, and I was a trusted source then my recommendation of
"Isaac Franklin Slave Trader and Planter of the Old South" would not be useful to you. Time functions as an editor by limiting supply to items with continuous appeal. Let a book go out of print for any length of time and the odds are heavily against its reappearance (with Gilgamesh being an exceedingly rare counterexample).
If you look in "current fiction" at the bookstore, then you are correct, the advice of a trusted adviser or reviewer is valuable. If you look in "classics" the odds of finding a worthwhile book unassisted are much higher (Ausonius excepted, of course)
Posted by: apikoros at May 2, 2008 3:17:52 PM
karl said:
Machiavelli:
Comments On Livy
Art of War
Mandragora
Quite frankly, I think that that name is a poor translation of 孙子兵法。
Posted by: Loki on the run at May 2, 2008 3:40:36 PM
So Razib wants to argue that readers of the classical era were more "Aspergery" (for lack of a better word) than the typical reader today. I think that's debatable, I also think Apuleius' Metamorphoses was not an egghead book at the time, no more than Chaucer or Boccaccio considered themselves eggheads. The truth is the average classical Roman or Greek reader was far less sophisticated than a modern reader in many respects. The modern reader draws on thousands of years of accumulated history, accumulated scientific knowledge, the continued development of abstract philosophical and psychological ideas, etc. The world was a far more concrete and superficial place to the classical reader. Even the sense of the individual as actor was less developed - people were expected to fit into categories and act accordingly - slave, merchant, senator, honorable man, coward, etc. Your external actions defined you, the internal life of the individual simply wasn't valued. And the writing of the time reflects that. It actually takes much less intellectual effort to read Apuleius or Petronius (in translation) than to read DeLillo or David Foster Wallace. Which is not to say the latter are better, just that it's misleading to say a "smarter" reader should prefer older texts. I think Nabokov for example is probably more interesting than most classical writers, and often more intellectually stimulating. However, the classical reader was certainly far more sophisticated than the modern reader in being attuned to the nuances of the rhythym of language, playing with styles, word choice, etc. Most modern readers read for substance and have a poor ear for form and style (Exhibit A - the success of Dan Brown). Unfortunately the modern reader misses all that unless he happens to read Latin or Greek.
Posted by: vanya at May 2, 2008 4:59:29 PM
i never stipulated that Our King of People was "smart" men, did i? ;-)
Posted by: razib at May 3, 2008 4:24:51 AM
I disagree. This seems like an example of a spurious correlation.(I may be using that term incorrectly; someone tell me if that is the case.)
I think what Razib loves is the familiarity. Literature from before a certain era usually follows familiar tropes and proceeds in a linear, recognizable manner. Dismissing newer literature is probably not because people of this day are "unlike you" (I would argue that he is probably more similar to people of the present due to shared experiences) but because (Western) literature has only recently strayed from such themes and formats. Books today are still written predominantly by the well-off, male, educated population. (The percentage of "eccentrics" probably has no reliable measure.)
By dating his favorites to before mass literacy, Razib seems to be saying that he doesn't want to bother to pick through the variety that arose, and finds it easier to stick to the familiar when literary conventions were rather fixed.
Posted by: Laura at May 3, 2008 11:22:36 AM
