Dickens is analogous to King in that both had great mass appeal, but I think there is a large difference in their work that distinguishes Dickens as literary fiction (and I enjoy King). Certainly his work has been criticized, most often for his often-idealized characters and sentimentality, but his gift for social criticism, caricature, wit, moral purpose, complexity, and the fluency of his prose is something King can only admire. A Great Expectations is not within King’s capabilities. Dickens is masterful where King is serviceable. Dickens’ genius was cited as inspiration by writers such as Tolstoy, Chesterton, and Orwell.
I do agree with you, though, that time tends to filter the great from the merely entertaining. But (and I realize this is subjective), Dickens was a great writer in his day–time did not render him so–and King is not in his own, as entertaining as King’s work certainly is.
Time is certainly a cruel filter. How many here have ever heard of Hamlin Garland? At one point, he was America’s best-selling author. Now?
(I tried reading one of his, and couldn’t get into it. Dry as sawdust.)
But, then, the music of Johann Sebastian Bach also fell into neglect, and was almost unknown, until Felix Mendelssohn led a campaign to bring it back to the world’s attention. Time is a quirky filter, and discards good stuff as well as bad.
Also…stuff that isn’t really so very good sometimes gets rewarded. Hemingway really isn’t that good. At very least, he has severe stylistic problems (dire over-use of naive compound sentences. I found one in “The Moveable Feast” that consisted of six separate sentences linked with “and.”)
I made that suggestion to one of my professors when I was in college. While he knew what I was getting at, he said, “No, Wilkie Collins was the Stephen King of his day. Dickens was more the Danielle Steel.”
I don’t understand longevity as a positive test of “literature” - Ian McEwan and Paul Coehlo are writing literature now regardless of who will be reading them in fifty years. I suppose you could say that time creates a sieve that will catch some literature, but the fact that Flowers in the Attic is still selling great after 35 years makes me cautious. I might add Ben Hur to that list as well.
Ben Hur…which way? Bad literature that’s still being read (a little) or good literature that isn’t being read today (much?) I thought it was a pretty doggoned good book.
It wasn’t self-consciously “literature,” but it certainly did have a message. It wasn’t set in the “here and now,” but most of it was really about the characters’ inner lives and thoughts. But it did have one hell of a car chase!
I think that’s right. Great literature tends to have a longevity that lesser works do not, but not all genuinely great literature gets past the time filter. Who knows why.
But time tends to be a very efficient filter for no-so-great literature. Literary works tend to explore themes and aspects of the human condition that resonate across time, and in a way that is artful and moving. Even if it’s a bit more work to navigate the prose the further we are from it in time, it’s still satisfying. Much, much less so with typical mass appeal works, which tend to be more topical and in tune with a specific moment-in-time zeitgeist and pop sensibility. I’m not going to wade through wooden 19th-century prose in some “scandalous” potboiler. One currently on the best-seller lists in the current vernacular? Sure, I might take that one to the beach.
The time filter does a good job of sorting out books that deal with truly universal issues from those that deal with problems that exist solely within the time in which they were written. (I’m sure someone will come along and rephrase that less clunkily, which is why my comment is not literature ).
The great literature that doesn’t get past the time filter gives English majors a reason to exist, so they can dig it out of the archives centuries later and make a name for themselves.
The growing volume of new reading available in the last few decades (lit or not), plus the increasing backlog of accumulated works, has rapidly squeezed out opportunities for singular books to poke their heads above the waves. I’m not sure if anyone writing now will clear the fifty-year barrier without being both popular AND prolific, but we’ll see…colleges tend to carry the canon along with them, and to the extent they can agree on that canon, perhaps some current writers will still live among the Spark’s Notes fifty years from now.
Being both popular and prolific would be a good thing, for it would help reign in the tendency of some academicians to mutually masturbate, and it would raise the level of general novel reading.
It’s kind of like asking the difference between a religion and a cult. (Size and Duration.)
I can think of half a dozen SF titles that either are or should be considered literature. (Brave New World, Fahrenheit 451, to name two.) But let any genre book gain success and it’s magically no longer considered genre.
Dennis Lehane’s “Mystic River” comes pretty close to transcending its’ roots as well.
Come to think of it, most novels that are standards in the academic world were very well received when they were written – not all, but most of them.
I had the unfortunate experience to be in Two Harbors, Minnesota, on a Sunday last March, in need of a novel (skiing was rained out). The biggest selection in town was at a Shopko, which had a whole row of novels, none of which could remotely be considered literature, and few of which could be considered good genre novels.
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