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naraburns nihil supernum
1yr ago
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Just a fun thought. There’s a notion that “great” contemporary “literature” ought to be appreciated along the same lines as older literature. The idea is that they are both approximately the same quality, one just happens to be newer. Hidden within this sentiment is perhaps the assumption that any time period and culture can produce literature of the same quality, you just have to find it. Why would one time period produce better literature?
But actually, a culmination of different factors led to 19th century literature culture and its great works. The culture was far more word-driven, with writing rather than imagery and speech being the primary method of communication. If you wanted to experience something far away you would read about it, and professing love to a girl far away would be done by letter. The tradition of Protestant Bible study gave birth to a rigorous study of Greek and Latin among the upper classes and an emphasis on grammar and rhetoric. Morality de-prioritized entertainment as a good unto itself and was skeptical of newspaper culture. The novel quickly became the method of massed produced artistic creation. If a young writerly man wanted fame, a hot wife, glory, and even his pick of concubines and a great state, he had to pen a novel which was then proclaimed as good by a class of well-trained critics and filtered through a moral and slightly religious lens.
So there’s very good reason to believe that no century will compete with late 18th to 19th century in the novel format. The men had more training, more cognitive capacity for the written word, more incentive, and a better filter through which literature was judged.
I'm skeptical that old literature actually is better than new literature. Many classics seem boring, bloated, and not that deep to me, but it's low status to criticize them. In any objectively measurable art or science, or even arts that are technically subjective but kinda not like photorealistic painting, 21st century skill puts our predecessors to shame. How coincidental is it that the only field where the old masters outclass us is one where the judgement is purely subjective?
You've written a plausible sounding story for with the 18th and 19th century produced better literary iron than the 20th or 21st. These factors are a rounding error to the fact that great literature was written by a tiny subset of the Western leisure class that didn't go for parties, hunting, politics, business, science, or surrogate activities; and the circles that judged their output were a self-congratulation society.
Surely not coincidental, but there's a simple possible causative path: objective judgement lets us identify what characteristics of previous work were worth keeping, which lets us keep them while discarding others, which almost forces new work to be an improvement. Is it really surprising that the fields where we're making less improvement are also the ones where we're half-blindly groping?
I think the need for originality is also a constraint on new art. If you tweak the ideas behind "Light-Emitting Diode" to retain the functionality with a shorter-wavelength output, you can earn a Nobel Prize. But if you could tweak the ideas behind "War and Peace" to retain the impact with a shorter text, would you even bother? Perhaps your masterwork could be published as a Readers Digest Condensed Book under a pseudonym. This isn't because War and Peace was at some perfect local optimum of concision upon which no incremental improvement can be made, it's because the very idea of incremental improvement isn't necessarily considered an improvement in the world of literature; it's considered somewhere between "derivative" and "plagiarism" depending on how small the increment is and on how close to "the canon" the inspiration is.
The disparagement of derivative literature and incremental improvements on classic stories seems to me to be a quite modern development linked with the strengthening of copyright protections in the west. Early epics like the Odyssey were probably composed iteratively over many centuries and you can trace characters in Shakespeare's plays all the way back to Ovid. Our modern equivalents would be comic book and movie characters like Batman and the Joker, whose stories continue to be retold in (sometimes) new and exciting ways. Of course, it's still the case that the things that make one iteration of these stories better than another are less objective and more culture-dependent than something like mechanical engineering.
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