Writers are, first and foremost, readers. They read a lot and as a result know what has been done so many times that doing it once again would be a horrible cliché.
To give just an example, a contemporary writer starts a famous novel as follows. The main character’s mother died when he was an infant. So there was nobody to “raise him in tenderness” and he grew up wild. Because all women are tender, obviously. And without their civilizing presence men remain wild. But that’s OK because the character had a special talent he discovered at the age of 7. And now let me cover thousands of pages with words to tell you all the details of that special talent.
Without even starting on the artistic qualities, just the plot premise itself is excruciatingly boring. “Orphaned and wild” has been done so many times that one begins to wish for an orphaned and domesticated character just to relieve the tedium. The special gift one discovers all of a sudden serves as a foundation for every TV show featuring children or adolescents.
Everything turns to a parody of itself with repeated use. Wild motherless orphans made sense in the early 19th century. The need for women to civilize men by applying their “softer” influence to them was all the rage in the 1500s. Golden locks and rosebud mouths sounded just fine in the 17th century. Eos of the rosy fingers worked out fantastic for Homer but you just can’t do this shit without a trace of irony in the postmodern era and still be a writer.
This is not to say that the cheap pop psych of dead mothers, softening women, and sudden talents can’t be entertaining as hell. Just like an occasional meal at Wendy’s might be fun and delicious. Yet a person who sees no difference between a dish prepared by a Michelin-star chef and an outing at Applebee’s is missing many exciting experiences that constitute culinary education. And in the same way, the person who believes that literature is Hunger Games and 50 Shades has had an impoverished range of intellectual and artistic experiences.
What I’m expressing here is a point of view that is hugely unpopular in North American academia. We are all so terrified of rating or ranking and so into the idea of total equality that we spent months last year at my department interviewing people for a job they were not even remotely qualified to do just because it would be unfair not to interview everybody who NEEDED a job.
But hey, when did I care what anybody else thought? The literary canon was created to prop up the nation-state. And now that the nation-state is tottering, preserving the idea of Great Books might offer some support to the nation-state.
Clarissa's Blog 
sometimes it’s good to ignore reading while writing, in todays world you just need to observe, it’s a zoo everywhere you look..
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Reading is what teaches writers how to communicate in the first place. They gain a sense of what works and what doesn’t, how best to convey things they might have no idea how to convey otherwise. You can ignore reading while you are actively, physically writing. You still need to be able to say what you want to say. Writers tend to read in the spaces of time in which they are not physically writing. And many writers tend to get ideas from books they’ve read, more so than from anything they’ve ever observed in real life.
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Ah, yes, what am I doing with this writing of mine? I should march straightaway toward Porlock Weir to witness the “zoo” of beauty …
OH, WAIT …
STOP BEING MY VISITOR FROM PORLOCK
🙂
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“Ah, yes, what am I doing with this writing of mine? I should march straightaway toward Porlock Weir to witness the “zoo” of beauty …
OH, WAIT …
STOP BEING MY VISITOR FROM PORLOCK
:-)”
-I’m sorry, your comments make no sense. How is anyone to respond to you when you’re completely incoherent?
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The Porlock reference is lost on me, too.
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“Writers tend to read in the spaces of time in which they are not physically writing …”
[guffaw] OH YES THE PG-RATED VERSION PLEASE
🙂
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Ok, yes, the plot premise you describe here is stupid. But what about Ursula LeGuin? You still haven’t explained why her novels aren’t art in your opinion.
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Sorry, I spazzed out. I guess I’m ready for the weekend. 🙂
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It’s ok. This is not a hugely memorable author. 🙂
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morreth too has just written something about literature (in Russian):
http://morreth.livejournal.com/2712038.html#comments
People in the comments think that preventing wars (and, supposedly, preserving the nation state) is not among literature’s goals.
// And now that the nation-state is tottering, preserving the idea of Great Books might offer some support to the nation-state.
I don’t think books will change anything in practice. Many people don’t read and among those who read – probably the more educated / mentally fluid a person is, the less he may want to do this preserving.
I also remember you criticising The Greatest Authors in both (!) English and Russian – Tolstoy and Shakespeare, so the call to preserve Great Books is partly ironic. If everybody can say “he is mediocre and precisely this contributed to the author being convenient to use for nation-building purposes,” it heralds the end of Great Books. Not the end of great art / books, of course, but of Great Books as an idea.
// This is not to say that the cheap pop psych of dead mothers, softening women, and sudden talents can’t be entertaining as hell.
I am unsure about black and white division between Art and Entertainment, even though I understand your point and it is true for many books.
For instance, the book I finished reading today, “Little Failure: A Memoir,” truly made me feel something which happens very rarely even when reading supposedly Great Books. It also provided quite a lot of things to think about, but it will not enter English literary canon. Or, are the rules of judging memoirs (as opposed to novels) different?
Gary Shteyngart mentioned that post-2000 many ‘Russian’ – American authors appeared, have you read them? Are any of them good?
In “Little Failure,” Nabokov’s “Speak, Memory” is mentioned and now I want to check it.
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“People in the comments think that preventing wars (and, supposedly, preserving the nation state) is not among literature’s goals.”
And by the way, the Ukrainian nation-building since 1991 has been so pathetically weak, in a huge measure, because nobody made the effort to identify and glorify the country’s literary canon. Today, finally, I’m getting lists of Ukrainian writers and electronic libraries of the Ukrainian greats from Ukrainians at least once a week. There is no nation-building without that. Nation-building is a very formalized process.
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“I don’t think books will change anything in practice. Many people don’t read and among those who read – probably the more educated / mentally fluid a person is, the less he may want to do this preserving.”
“I also remember you criticising The Greatest Authors in both (!) English and Russian – Tolstoy and Shakespeare, so the call to preserve Great Books is partly ironic.”
“For instance, the book I finished reading today, “Little Failure: A Memoir,” truly made me feel something which happens very rarely even when reading supposedly Great Books. It also provided quite a lot of things to think about, but it will not enter English literary canon.”
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Found a review here:
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/feb/21/gary-shteyngart-little-failure-memoir-review
// Most people react more positively than to anything else to hearing something that supports their worldview.
I did love the book partly since I recognized many things both about Russian culture and the experience of immigrating as a child. But “telling me what I already believe in” seems a wrong way to put it. I do still recommend it to you.
As a literary critic, do you think analyzing such a book is a waste of time? Even if those post-2000 Russian authors won’t enter the English canon, can’t one learn valuable things about identity, Jewish multiculturalism, (Russian) immigrant narrative and developments in the genre of the novel? May be, one can, but the difference lies in examining a phenomenon (many authors) vs. works of one great writer?
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Jesus fucking Christ. The poor guy. (I read the linked review.) I wouldn’t be able to read the book because it would traumatize me too much.
I’m not into the memoir genre because it’s always too self-serving and one-dimensional. I have published one article on a memoir by favorite author but I couldn’t touch his books for years after that because I was massively disappointed. He didn’t come off as either very self-aware or smart in the memoir.
If you want to analyze the book as a literary critic, it can definitely be done. Just remember not to get too hung up on “what really happened.” Just work with it as a work of art. Look at the artistic means the author uses. If there is a lot of repetition, as the review says, you can relate that to the process of identity – building that requires repetition. It makes sense to check out the definitions of a Bildungsroman and see how they apply. The classic definition by Buckley might work great here.
Ultimately, you’ve got to analyze whatever you feel passionately about. It doesn’t matter what that is because it’s your own substance that you bring to the analysis.
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// Jesus fucking Christ. The poor guy. (I read the linked review.) I wouldn’t be able to read the book because it would traumatize me too much.
The ending is good though. He became a successful writer, got married and wrote the memoir. As I understood, it all happened thanks to psychoanalysis, about which Gary wrote the following “It saves my life. What more can I add to that?” and in more detail:
“I will continue to see [parents] and love them and call them … but their opinions of me, the fanged hurt of their own childhoods, will not render my world asunder, will not send me to the nearest bar, will not be unleashed upon the woman I share my bed with.”
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“As I understood, it all happened thanks to psychoanalysis, about which Gary wrote the following “It saves my life. What more can I add to that?”
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ORPHANS GONE WILD
SEE ORPHANS IN THEIR NEW FOSTER HABITATS
HEAR ORPHANS TELL EXCRUCIATINGLY HORRIBLE YET BANAL STORIES IN THEIR OWN WORDS (regrettably)
HOPE ORPHANS HAVE AN EARLY ENDING TO THEIR DYSPEPTIC NARRATIVES
[this film is rated “A” for “Awful”] 🙂
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ORPHAN CAGE MATCHES, SEASON 1
-Pollyana v Shirley
-Romulus v. Remus
-Pip v Copperfield
-Rousseau v Russell
-Targaryen v Gale
-Tolkien v Poe
-Cosette v Cinderlla
-Ice T v Vidal Sassoon
-Oedipus v Antigone
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“Most people react more positively than to anything else to hearing something that supports their worldview …”
O bother! How many artless creatures there are here!
How bilious mankind is! O brave new world,
That shan’t have such people in it.
🙂
Perhaps this is why I prefer to imagine dystopias managed by whisky priests, false messiahs, and the occasional Prime Minister …
[points out that few seriously want to live in the dystopia represented by “The Hunger Games”, and yet the punters can’t get enough of that …]
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“The main character’s mother died when he was an infant. So there was nobody to “raise him in tenderness” and he grew up wild. Because all women are tender, obviously”
Odd way to read that, I understood it as saying not that all women are tender, but that in the story’s environment children would not receive tenderness from anyone besides their mothers (if they got it from there which was far from certain). And ‘tenderness’ is shorthand for adult-child bonding. In other words, the passage is meant to tell the reader that the protagonist didn’t bond with any adult as an infant or small child and that lack would continue to have consequences for him.
“now let me cover thousands of pages with words to tell you all the details of that special talent”
If this is about the Earthsea books, IIRC only the first book really treats Ged’s magic and the development of his ‘gift’. It’s mostly irrelevant and useless in the second (much stronger) book where he’s no longer the protagonist and he’s at most a kind of co-protagonist in the third and his ‘gift’ no longer exists in the fourth (where he’s a supporting player).
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The main issue is that the tenderness bit has been done, many many times before. We have all seen this point made a million times. Yet this author repeats the platitude with the pomposity of somebody who has just cured diabetes.
And this is just a single paragraph. The flood of cliches itensifies as we proceed.
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“Tell them what they already believe (like the tenderizing women from Le Guin’s book that I quoted in the post), and they will feel all warm and fuzzy and proclaim that this is the best book known to humanity”
Okay, I’m not recognizing my own experience with Le Guin here. I can think of few authors that are better at putting the (or at least this) reader into someone else’s head, someone who perceives the world very differently. The experience may or may not last long but she’s shaped my perceptions a lot more than say, Jane Austen (the deifiication of I absolutely do not get).
Now that’s completely true of 50 shades which is thousands of pages dedicated to the meme: “Every girl wants a bad boy who will be good just for her, and every boy wants a good girl who will be bad just for him.” Which is not a sentiment I want to recognize as even being human.
I’ve avoided Hunger Games so I have no idea what’s going on there… (nor do I especially want to).
I think of art and entertainment being a continuum (actually a couple of different continuums).
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