By the way, I have just read the Will Self article again. It is devastating. It’s clear that very few people commenting here actually read it (only one has mentioned it, blowing off its content as “sour grapes,” which is bullshit) and no one has taken it seriously. But he backs up what I have said; or have learned from what he wrote; or a mixture of both.
I don’t find what he writes to be happy stuff at all; it’s quite depressing. But I can’t see any way in which he appears to be wrong. I can therefore understand the knee-jerk reaction against what I’ve written in the OP and this thread: I wouldn’t want to believe it either. For those who said I wasn’t making sense or didn’t argue my position well, did you read the Will Self article? He’s in the game and cites plenty of examples that back up what I’m saying.
I have read it:
[ul]
[li]ideas have been used and re-used for centuries, [/li][li]the diversity and independence of publishing houses is diminishing, [/li][li]the traditional printed word is nowadays complemented by digitized content, which turns a once permanent and self-contained presence into a mutuable and conditional one,[/li][li]and new technological methods of consuming entertainment are already changing writing itself from start to finish and beyond: producers, distributors, recipients and archives all add and adapt to this process; and we don’t know yet, where this is going.[/li][/ul]
But does this mean the novel is dying?
Others have already said that he never actually defines novel; it’s hard to argue with someone who isn’t telling us what his subject is. Finnegan’s Wake is, as he alludes, an outlier, an experiment - not exactly the norm that tells you what a novel is supposed to be.
Just like Goethe’s Faust looks like a play, but is something different, even unique. Yet, its appearance didn’t terminate the production of plays, neither did technology: Cinema and TV have pushed the theatre away from the centre of cultural interest - but they haven’t shut it down. It’s still alive, still evolving, still an experience worth to make. At times. Just like movies, just like TV.
During Plato’s time, the older generation was mourning the decline of oral presentation. The Iliad and other works weren’t meant to be read but told and sung. The old guys castigated the written word and the younger generation’s interest in reading, because that was so much less than what they had, and it sure was a sign of a decline of civilization itself.
And true enough, you won’t find many people nowadays able to tell stories for hours and hours, while imitating different voices, switching between word and song, captivating a diverse audience for hours … no, wait they do exist, they still live from oral presentation, it has just adapted to its different yet still listening audience.
And we can even see a boom in the oral presentation of novels due to digital technology: I listen to more novels than I could hope to read - and I have listened to novels that would have never been read.
For example, I put down Catch 22 in written form twice before I found an audio version read by Jim Weiss. The first few sentences took me aback - why was he reading this way? But then it dawned upon me that he gave the words the voice they needed, that I needed them to have to get through a book that was likely to get to me. It did. But not too much.
Did audio kill that novel? The experience was different, but the words were still Heller’s. And this way, they found a way to me.
Digitized words read on a screen are different as well from the printed gestalt, and the medium itself rewards a different kind of story in its narrative and presentation - it *might * turn the traditional novel into something quite different, but just like cinema didn’t render the theatre extinct, the electronic medium won’t terminate the solidly printed word on its own.
Social changes might do it, but any change that renders it obsolete, is also going to turn out a different society; if the novel isn’t a voice to articulate its culture in any meaningful way, it’s perfectly fine if it is not relevant or even produced any longer.
But even then, the novel might make a comeback, just like the oral presentation is doing nowadays.
I said you two had matched your signal-to-noise ratios. I didn’t say you’d stated anything worthy of discussion yet.
I read the article. His basic point is that novels are a rigorous art form, and as new generations are not trained to dig into such a rigorous form, the accessibility of Big Novels will decline hugely. True. Sad for a novelist like him, but not a commentary on the art form itself. I am sure countless earlier art forms had practitioners of subtlety and range that later generations simply can’t appreciate. There will be an audience, but it will be smaller and eclectic. So?
[QUOTE=Will Self]
the gist of which was already familiar to me: everything in popular music had been done before, and usually those who’d done it first had done it best. […]
ifyou took the long view, the advent ofthe 78rpm shellac disc had also been a disaster for musicians who in the teens and 20s of the last century made their daily bread by live performance. […]
when Iwas a young man. In the early 1980s, and I would argue throughout the second half of the last century, theliterary novel was perceived to bethe prince of art forms, the cultural capstone and the apogee of creative endeavour. […]
There is one question alone that you must ask yourself in order to establish whether the serious novel will still retain cultural primacy and centrality in another 20 years. This is the question: if you accept that by then the vast majority of text will be read in digital form on devices linked to the web, doyou also believe that those readers will voluntarily choose to disable that connectivity? If your answer to this isno, then the death of the novel is sealed out of your own mouth.[…]
more books of allkinds have been printed and read byfar than in the entire preceding halfmillennium since the invention ofmovable-type printing. If this was death it had aweird, pullulating way ofexpressing itself.[…]
but I would contend that these were, taking the long view, zombie novels, instances of an undead art form that yet wouldn’t lie down.[…]
As I said at the outset: I believe theserious novel will continue to be written and read, but it will be an art form on a par with easel painting or classical music: confined to a defined social and demographic group, requiring a degree of subsidy, a subject for historical scholarship rather than public discourse.
[/QUOTE]
[QUOTE=Aeschines]
Someone earlier mentioned “Guernica” by Picasso. The thing is, yes, that painting is not subtle, but it was still fresh in its time. It’s mad and violent, right? Yet if you did anything close to that, someone would just say, “That’s just another ‘Guernica.’” Similarly, Pulp Fiction was fresh in 1994 because it was non-linear, extremely violent, etc. Now the easiest thing is getting called Tarantino Lite for doing something like that.
[/QUOTE]
Thank you for giving me a proper conversation Aeschines, and for being so kind and patient with my naiveté! Also, sorry for mixing you up with WordMan, and sorry if I read into your post more than you said WordMan.
[QUOTE=WordMan]
I was 12. I was obsessed with Star Wars. I read stuff that pointed me towards Lucas
[/QUOTE]
I guess that my thoughts align with Will Self’s interpretation of Marshall McLuhan being optimistic over “the global village” (the internet’s ability to connect everyone instantaneously) being a larger net good for exposing people to new things, than a net negative via diluting the necessity of paper books or of having everyone compete on a global scale for their audience, when before locals could make a good sum in their own local community.
[QUOTE=Aeschines]
it would just exacerbate the Long Tail and further dilute the degree to which any one work would garner attention.
[/QUOTE]
I think that you are seeing things from an up-and-coming author’s perspective. Where in the past the authors only competed within the smaller pools of local/national/Western markets. Now with every artist in the world concurrently vying for all 8 billion people’s attention; being seen and able to stand out is much harder in that respect (to that I say, get good scrub. Don’t hang your hat on fart jokes for children’s parties, and then bemoan the fact that no one “gets” your jokes now that you have to do stand-up at the Apollo Theater). Our connectedness on the internet allows consumers to turn up their noses at anything less than the best, as there is just so much variety and choice now.
Fine, I agree. In that sense things are worse. But I lean more towards seeing things from the consumer’s perspective, where we should not have to settle for less. Where there are so many sub-groups of so many interests on the Web that almost anything can gain a “cult” following; and through the direct donation supports available today, even those niche artists can make an ok living, even if in the past they might have made more in a smaller real world community. I believe in the power of word-of-mouth to push artists, that are good enough, into the limelight.
I disagree with Will Self when he says that home recording/replaying media was a disaster for bands, as that lessened their need to do live shows. Back then and through today, most bands make most of their money off ticket sales from their constant touring and, as we progressed technologically, direct fan support. The big record labels were always money grubbing trash towards the artists. The difference is that now musicians are not beholden to their predatory contracts as the only way to make a living. The best part about today is our ability (thanks to the global village connecting everyone to give bands 8 billion potential customers, and sites like Patreon or Itunes only charging 2 bux per whatever song you actually want) to vote directly with our wallets and buy just exactly what we want. We do not have to wait for anyone to come to town, or are forced to pay 30 bux for 2 songs that we really wanted off a CD. Or wait for a song to come back on rotation through a radio program.
The “Death” of the CD store is like the “death” of cable television. If it does die out, then that is only a good thing. As people were fed up with the constant ads (and there being nothing good on anyway), or wheat-to-chaff ratio on CD’s. Now that we have better, more convenient, options that give us more and cost us less (Hulu, Itunes, online news, etc) we can more directly support exactly what we want. And our smaller monetary amounts of direct support are far greater than what the artists would have gotten when they were tied to a Big Music Contract, and we bought a $30 CD.
The book stores dieing off are not a bad thing, it is a natural fate when people no longer need a U-store-it to own all of our loved stories at once. Before the e-readers existed, did anyone really want to carry around a whole book or 2 so that they might enjoy reading something throughout their day? What did we do when the bookstore did not have the author or the book that we wanted? Before Amazon, we just waited and suffered in silence. Now I hold an entire library at once on my e-reader. When someone recommends an author, such as your recommendation of Robert Sheckley, I just buy it at once. I read his short story collection Citizen in Space and liked it very much. Aeschines, your name-drop (through this SD sub group bringing us together in this global village) expanded my horizons and has canonized his work in my mind as another must-read. (hmm, you write better than I do. Do you think that you could start up a Straight Dope book recommendation / short story thread where everyone writes a short synopsis of the stories they like? As a hook to get others to read them as well? I would like to shill for that book in that thread). Is this better or worse than the old way of pen-pals and having vast works completely sealed off from our knowledge if they were not found in our local library/bookstore? I will happily take the “death” of paper books if it means the thriving life of e-books.
I think I see your/Will Self’s point. That truly great works need to be novel~(ha) in some major way, and as those avenues of unique expression are used up, everyone else can only stand upon the shoulders of those giants and grind those ideas into clichés. Furthermore, the masses in their search for simplistic entertainment, will overlook truly great works as being too complex/subtle; this will damn those works to obscurity and be forgotten by history because no one bought it or shared it enough to be remembered. These problems only compound when the masses have a wider pool of literature to wade through; as there is too much choice at this globalized banquet, and not enough appreciation of the food at hand (as would at least happen in a smaller community/market). Ok, I grant you those points are legitimate; but I just do not think that any medium will ever be fully tapped-out. Our new technologies or ideas can remix with the old to bring something novel back to anything eventually. And with everyone rehashing everything, eventually when the populace is ready, someone else will write some similar point to what was once lost anyways. Like the 1846 doctor Ignaz Semmelweis who championed washing hands as a way to stop the spread of disease, but was ahead of his time and was ignored and put in a loony bin. I see it as sad, but no use crying over spilled milk. We as a people came back around to that “washing hands” idea eventually.
I just got up in arms over the use of “dead.” To me a death of paper books, writing as an art, or artistic expression in the form of the Novel would be akin to the death of horse buggy manufacturing. Shoved into such a small niche, only enjoyed for its quaint retro quality, and wholly supplanted by the new conveyance of cars.
Sure, I agree that in the 1980‘s the novel was the prince of all art forms. Just as in 5000BC the mud and straw brick was the prince of building material, or 1780‘s the horse and carriage was the prince of conveyance. Luckily things change, so what was the best and highest form of technology/expression of the time, becomes played out and out-dated. I agree with you there. For all the genius of Mozart, he did not have our electric instruments and synthesizers. Nor did he pluck his piano’s strings directly with hair pins to get that distinctive twang that the Beach Boys had in their 1966 album: Pet Sounds. I like to think that the Beach Boys showed that an old dog still has tricks we have not seen yet (they got a new sound out of a piano) and while the true novel expressions on that instrument, or in any artistic case, quickly fall off in a logarithmic fashion, it never really reaches the limit of 0. People will tinker and find new ways of wringing unique expressions out of old limitations. Take Gadsby, It took until 1939 to write a provocative story without the use of the letter “E.” Or even the mud and straw brick, Nowadays in the Tech Museum in San Jose, they have kids mix mushroom spores into semi-wet mud, and have them sit out long enough that the mycellum (the “roots” of the mushroom under the earth) grows through the mud brick, having the “roots” act at a similar strength to the old hay way (or similar to how the rebar in concrete acts).
Thus, while I agree with your points, I do not really see any cause for worry. The death of paper back novels is just the birth of holding our entire world’s literature in the palm of our hand. The very fact that people are still writing books is proof enough to me that those writers think, at least to themselves, that they have something meaningful to say which is best conveyed through text. Just as artists still paint, and sculpt, and make movies, and perform in theaters, etc. Each one tries to use the medium to its fullest, and work within that medium’s inherent flaws and limitations in order to get the viewer to feel/think as the artist does on the subject. To me, art is the sharing itself; the give-and-take between artist and audience as they “talk” to each other, and try to understand the other a bit better.
The ultimate artistic act is also the ultimate death of art itself. I think that the artist’s holy grail would be something that would reach into everyone’s hearts and unify them to the artist’s feelings. Some kind of grand mind-meld. Well that is just great, now everyone would understand each other. But now there is nothing new to be said. It would be like talking to yourself in a mirror. Until our different circumstances diverged us again, we could only dig deeper into our echo-chamber of collective navel-gazing. At least separate, we can gaze into each other’s navels and find novelty there.
I guess I have a more communalistic outlook than Will Self, when he talks about books being, in the future, "confined to a defined social and demographic group, requiring a degree of subsidy, a subject for historical scholarship rather than public discourse.” I say, yeah every part of life’s experiences are confined to a “defined social and demographic group,” everything we do as individuals is through the “subsidy” of the others in our community. And if “the public” ever moves on from discussing books, (as we have moved on from discussing easel paintings, or music from way before our time, I guess?) it is because they have found a more complete and meaningful and up-to-date experience to share within their groups.
Sorry for being snarky. I stand by my frustration with the approach to the thread, but no need for that. But man, you overtalk when your point isn’t clear yet. Not good for your readers. If you can’t summarize it, I would argue you don’t quite have it yet. And you inundate with examples, yet many are have glaring errors or subjective assertions that would take threads to unpack.
The novel. Serious question Aeschines: are you asserting that the long-form of a novel limits it durability as an art form and is therefore flawed?
There are no new stories. Novels enable certain types of exploration of the classic stories. But the long form requires commitment and effort to produce and consume. It is not like a Japanese woodblock print, or a sonnet. Or a Netflix mini-series, or a video game.
If there is nothing “new” to novels, and the “same” experiences can be accessed and consumed in much less-demanding formats, then is it surprising the novel is fading?
I don’t agree with the position, but continue to attempt to clarify a position out of the OP that gets more focus than Python-esque thread clarification.
I can see a point: if Joyce writes Ulysses in a forest, and no one is there, does he still count as the 20th Century Novelist Badass Motherfucker he is regarded as currently?
I find that to be an incredibly arrogant statement. Who appointed you arbiter of what is and is not art? I believe that same statement was made of Dumas and The Three Musketeers back in the day.
Things like this add nothing to the discussion and only really serve at being a threadshit. Don’t make them. If you don’t like a poster’s topics, just don’t reply.
Notice my use of the passive: “is not considered.” I did not proclaim myself that Harry Potter is not art. In general, children’s books are not considered art, and I have not seen HP considered art for the ages.
I already explained why I don’t think HP will be read 100 years from now, and it doesn’t have a lot to do with quality.
Thanks for your thoughtful response. I agree with most of what you say, but much of it it is beside the point that I (and I think Will Self) were making. I think you get the import of the Will Self article. Some responses:
Sure, by the criteria for “dying” that Will Self and I have in mind. Self says at the very start that serious novels will continue to be written and read. I agree with that. The novel will be “dead,” however, in that it won’t have social impact any more. The canon of “great novels” will be closed. People will read Jane Austen 100 years from now but won’t be reading anything written in 2016.
I mean, you can say, “Poetry is alive and well because people still do poetry slams!” Yet… There is no such thing as a famous poet any more. The canon is closed, and it’s been closed for decades. I don’t think anyone is going to choose to argue with me about poetry. It’s pretty unambiguous. Well, novels are heading in that direction. I think that’s pretty “dead.”
That depends on what your standard is. I’ve done four plays in community theater in New York. It was fun and rewarding, but, you know, it’s all about asking your friends to come see the plays you did. If your dream is to become a “great playwright” and that implies some level of fame or people deeply caring or having fans or any of that, nope, not going to happen.
I am focusing on the novel in this thread, but we are fast becoming a global society in which we don’t have famous creatives any more–in any genre. We still do in the genres of movies, TV, and music, but music is in deep trouble right now. TV and movies, yes, because the money behind them is still good. TV is actually in danger too (really interesting article: Network TV in 1994: How the Big Four's last golden age happened 20 years ago.).
We’re turning into a society in which, if you’re a creative person, you can pretty much just go eff yourself. You’re not going to make money doing your craft, you’re not going to become famous, and you’re not going to join the rolls of the Great. I find that to be a dispiriting social trend. Others may not have a problem with and may even find it to be a good thing. But that is the point of this thread.
You have answered your own question here a bit. I would say there are no new unsubtle stories. As I have said, novelists can do detailed, high-quality character studies until the cows come home and never be redundant. But trying to be impressive with the plot is very tough at this point.
But people want an impressive plot! They want the Big Badda Boom story (to paraphrase The 5th Element). That’s the problem. They want Luke vs. Darth Vader and Harry Potter vs. Voldemort. And 5 years from now there will be another series that does that and sells a lot, and 10 years from now there will be, and 15 years from now there will be. And each time it will be totally unoriginal and totally stale and for that reason won’t be considered either “serious” or “art.” Well, it is questionable whether it will keep selling ad infinitum, but if anything sells it will be Big Badda Boom and not Sensitive Story of Old Lady Eking Out a Living in Post-Katrina Louisiana and Dealing with Her Heroin-Addicted Nephew Who Lives with Her oh and Somebody Dies (I just made that up, but you get the point, I think).
Yes, you’re right, it’s not surprising, and you do not think the novel is fading? I mean, what seems obvious is that novels and novelists are not in the same place as in 1960, right? No? Let’s say you’re a smart, literate person who has some real writing ability. If you could go back to any time to try to achieve literary success, what year would it be? Of course, you could choose 2016 too. Would you choose, say, 1650? Probably not. The novel in theory existed but not many were being published, the percentage of the population that was literate was limited, and what you could achieve probably limited as well. How about 1920? That has potential. Your knowledge of the future of literature would allow you to do all kinds of interesting things. Just barely tweaking the standard way of writing the novel could seem outrageously interesting. Virtually any type of novel that is considered stale today (serial killer thriller, yawn) would seem blindingly original then. You could clean up.
I mean, who would pick 2016? Nobody! It’s a shitty time to try be a novelist, for a wide variety of reasons. Yet, let’s sweeten the pot. Let’s say you could read any literature you wanted from the year 2116 and try to apply any techniques that may have been invented by then to your novel today. Now, it would be indeed cool to read books from 100 years in the future, but do you believe you’d really get any secret weapons that would give you an advantage similar to the one you’d have taking today’s knowledge back to 1920? I could be wrong, but I truly have my doubts. For one thing, the market is shitty no matter what knowledge you bring to it and I also think that the novel is a fully mature art form.
No. There is a certain point with any art form at which “avant garde” simply loses its meaning and people cease to be impressed or to care.
That’s always been the case. Only a very small number of writers ever become (or became) famous. Only a small number of people make a living by creative writing. Rejection slips have always outnumbered acceptance letters, probably by 100 to 1.
The proportion today is about the same as it was a century ago. A small number of superstars, a midlist (the thick part of the dinosaur,) and a gob-ton of losers who keep turning out pages anyway.
Heck, in one way, today is better than ever in the past: we can put our stuff up on Amazon and get $50 a year for it!
And – here’s where I really, really, really disagree with you – some of those losers on Amazon are actually producing very serious, very credible, very artistic books.
The correlation between artistic greatness and high sales figures – and remaining memorable for many decades – is damnably low.
I thought a couple things you said were naive but did not mean to imply you are a person characterized by naivete.
The thing is, the “de-famous-ization” trend or “category closure” as I call it was happening even before the rise of the Internet. Name a famous person who got their start in any of the following genres after 1970: poetry, painting, sculpture, architecture, straight plays, “classical” music composition? We didn’t have any famous poets in the 80s who were not already old and established. And though we can have a debate about any of these categories, compare to the situation in 1935 or 1955, and there is a universe of difference.
So it’s a social trend that was already happening, and I don’t know if it’s a trade-off per se with the Internet and the “global village.” As far as I can see, this trend has been discussed very little and explained even less.
Yes, the “long tail.” But that’s not the only part of the trend. It’s not as though the “classical music” canon continues to be built but competition is so fierce. No, the canon is completely closed and no new symphony, no matter how effin’ good, is allowed to compete with Beethoven’s at all.
I think each category is different. Physical art, for example, is different from music, since rich people still buy art and have an interest in their art being seen as valuable; whereas a rich person can’t “own” a pop song in the same way. It’s a simple fact, however, that the pop music industry has been nuked as is worth a pretty sad fraction of what it was in, say, the year 2000. All of the trends have added up to making it very, very hard to make it as a pop musician today, and a lot of those who do are backed up by rich family, such as Taylor Swift and Lana Del Rey.
I think you are mixing up what is good for the consumer and what is good for a band. There is a lot to unpack in what you said, but right now is a terrible time to try to make it as a pop/rock/country/hip-hop/you-name-it musician. I have not seen any industry insiders claim otherwise. This is the conventional wisdom.
From the link you quoted:
Before I write another sentence, it’s important to note that Nataly and I feel so fortunate to be making music for a living. Having the opportunity to play music as a career is a dream come true. But the phrase “made it” does not properly describe Pomplamoose. Pomplamoose is “making it.” And every day, we bust our asses to continue “making it,” but we most certainly have not “made it.”
I had actually read that article before. Pomplamoose is a relative success story, but even they are struggling. And the guy in the band is a founder of Patreon to boot.
Bold assertions! And again, you are mixing up what is good for the consumer with what is good for the creators.
This just isn’t true. I have never read anything that agrees with this and have read plenty that runs counter to it. One thing that did work for musicians was songwriting royalties, which have always been substantial and which they received when physical copies were sold. Will Self explicitly refers to this reality in his article. If people are pirating or streaming the music, the songwriters get nothing or close to it.
I mean, I get what you are saying about these technological changes. A lot of them are great for the consumer! I love Amazon myself. But book stores with their physical copies are an “interface” with a different kind of value. Change can indeed bring good things, but things are often lost in the process.
Sure! I don’t own an e-reader myself. To me, they are just a way of trying to monetize books that I could otherwise read on my laptop. I also like reading physical books at times because it’s nice to be free of electronic devices at times!
Not true at all. You would ask the book or record store to order for you the book or record you wanted. It was pretty easy, actually. I’m not saying things aren’t better now, but let’s not overstate the case.
Hey, very glad to hear that! He really is a fabulous writer whose work holds up. Enjoy!
I’m happy to see you summarize and understand my argument. Thank you.
I agree that the medium won’t be tapped out. That’s not really the point. Take poetry. It is infinitely un-tapped-out! You can write an epic poem with a big plot, and you can make a pithy observation about any tiny aspect of life. Poetry ought to be thriving right now. But it is still as dead as a door nail. It is six feet under, my friend. Fully deceased with no zombies appearing. Here’s where your 8 billion readers do no good, since none of those 8 billion readers gives a shit about poetry. OK, that’s an exaggeration, but not much of one.
I don’t think that works as an example. Washing hands has a specific purpose in our daily lives and is a technology for which there is no substitute. It “works.” In contrast, if there isn’t a demand for novels sufficient to have certain social effects (famous books added to the canon, famous writers, etc.), then that’s that and nobody dies.
Well, agreeing that the trend is there and agreeing that the trend is bad are two different things. I agree that the death of the novel does not mean we’re all going to die. I think the death of rewarding creative people for their abilities and output is highly problematic, especially granted the other social trends we face now.
Wait a minute, why didn’t you tell us, you own a time machine!? Quite often, relevance is discovered by posterity. Kafka was mostly ignored in his lifetime, yet his influence on writers all over the world is evident.
Right now, someone could be writing a novel that will be considered a milestone by later generations within its culture and beyond, but its creator might never make a dime with it; hopefully, this artist has also a friend who won’t destroy the works he finds. Naturally, I don’t know this person yet, so I can’t give you a name.
Who gave you that idea? Yevgeny Yevtushenko has filled stadiums reading his poetry. Other poets have been or are still relevant and well known where ever censorship makes it dangerous to express criticism too openly.
And right now, we have an incredibly strange yet revealing conflict between two countries, Germany and Turkey, because of a poem recited by a comedian in German TV criticizing the current Turkish head of state, Erdogan.
His reading is considered a serious criminal act in Turkey. And as the Germans found out to their astonishment, insulting a foreign head of state is also a criminal act in German law, a law that has its origin in the Kaiserreich and was never withdrawn, even though it is in obvious conflict with fundamental rights of the citizens, mainly: the freedom of speech and of the arts.
That shitty poem has now become quite relevant for the relation between two countries and the affirmation of the democratic identity of the Germans.
Bertolt Brecht, Dario Fo, Heiner Müller, Harold Pinter, Wole Soyinka. There is also the highly popular musical theatre; and its creators have not just reached an audience world-wide but they have made a pretty penny too: Stephen Sondheim, Webber, Schönberg, Boublil.
In any case, I think you confuse relevance and influence with fame and fortune. Plenty of scientists have changed the world - and no one knows them outside their field. Musicians can tell you about highly relevant colleagues who are neither famous nor rich.
If you want to be famous, your work is far less important than your persona; become a media darling, and you’re half-way there. But that doesn’t make you relevant.
Again, how do you know the future? I hope you do realize that the same argument has surfaced in pretty much every generation. And it was proven wrong again and again and again, and that has never stopped it from re-appearing. But it should give you pause.
Nice. Provides a succinct refutation of the points made. wintertime adds a lot more detail, including a global perspective vs. what we see in the U.S.
Aeschines I am glad you felt my post summarized some of your assertions. It does feel like you are arguing that the Novel is not a durable art form, and we merely have witnessed its peak and decline.
Man, your posts are long and unclear. Would you acknowledge that “The novel is not a durable art form” gets at your fundamental point and would’ve saved us 3 pages of clarification?
Glad you want to have discussions like this, I wish you would take more ownership of your lack of clarity and wordiness.
Chuck Close got his first one man show in NYC (largely the definition of making it in the art world) in 1970. He comes to mind because it’s his birthday today. I know if I think about it, I can find more. A short thought brings up Kieth Haring, Jeff Koons (I don’t like him, but he’s famous), and Banksy. If my wife (a painter) were here, and I mentioned it, she’d go on for hours.
Are they Warhol famous? I dunno. They’re certainly as famous as the other pop artists or abstract expressionists were in their heydays. They get covered on television and have movies made about them.
Do we talk about them in the same sense? No, we don’t talk about any famous people in the same sense as we did in 1935 or 1955. Fame has changed a lot since that time. There’s more opportunity to be famous to tens of millions of people, and still be unknown to the majority of the population. When radio and recordings became popular, the popular music of the time changed with it. I don’t necessarily think that the changing media is the message, but it always shapes it.
Even if for some reason we become generally uninterested in 2-D images that are made by contemporary artists to ourselves, we will still communicate through pictures; even if it’s a 3-D image with a funky beat you can dance to projected by a ray into our brains. Some of those people will become famous for being good at making them.
Similarly, we’ll always have stories. When Europe was mostly illiterate, it seems like our stories were dominated by plays and songs, and were performed live. When writing was the most convenient and profitable way to tell a story or communicate an idea, the novel and poem flourished. When the movie was the most free, convenient and profitable method, it flourished. These days, the TV series seems to be that medium that lies in the nexus of free/fulfilling/profitable that makes it attractive.
Quite often, relevance is discovered by posterity. Kafka was mostly ignored in his lifetime, yet his influence on writers all over the world is evident.