Entry tags:
The Break
(I was going to post something about Robert A. Heinlein generally, but then I realized that I had nothing to say that had not been said, one way or another, multiple times on Usenet and in the blogosphere. I'm not sure there is anything left to say that hasn't been said. So here's this, instead.)
In recent fannish discussions, the idea that (say, or for example) Heinlein's work has shifted from being accessible to being of "historical interest" only, at least for new or younger readers. There's been some argument about it, but I think there's a general consensus in some quarters that (in particular) the Heinlein juveniles do not now consitute an accesible gateway into SF in the way that they used to. Some people take the view of "after all, they're sixty years old by now" as a simple explanation.
As a completely separate datapoint, I have occasionally seen people writing about their reading experiences saying that (at least in general) works with what would have been a typical level of gender or racial inequality taken for granted make them "bounce off" -- in effect, that with a few exceptions, they don't enjoy reading anything older than the 1980s.
For other readers, older-style omniscient narratorial voices seem to be a barrier.
Some books which had held on as cultural standards for a very long time indeed have dropped off the map in the past generation or so. John Bunyan, Robert Louis Stephenson, and Walter Scott were omnipresent (and actually read) up to the time of my childhood; I don't think that this is true any longer.
In the preface to The Anathemata, David Jones refers to "the Break", a perceived gap between the culture post-WWI (not necessarily identifying the war itself as the (only) cause of the Break) visible as early as the 1920s. In that case, this seems not to have consituted a barrier to reading works from the earlier civilization, but more a sense of being deracinated from the preceding age.
I wonder whether we have passed over, or are in the process of passing over, a slightly different kind of break.
In general, historically, literary works do not simply "age". Better (and sometimes second-rank) works tend to hang around and remain accessible, although fashions in taste may vary. (I was happily reading John Buchan novels in the 1970s, when they were about as far away in time as Heinlein's Juveniles are now.) Sometimes, however, whole blocks of read experience drop out in a relatively quick period of time.
It has happened before.
Consider the mediaeval prose romance.[1] These were tremendously popular for centuries: and then, quite suddenly, they go "poof". Major examples include the Prose Lancelot (13th century), Amadis of Gaul (early 14th century), Palmerin of England (16th century), and the Sidneys' Arcadia (late 16th century).
A typical English-speaking reader who is not a mediaevalist will encounter only works which are spin-offs or parodies of the form. Malory (late 15th century) uses the prose romances -- he relies heavily on the Prose Lancelot, for example -- but he modifies and simplifies the form of the narratives so that Le Morte d'Arthur is really a cousin, or maybe a child, of the prose Romance rather than an example of it. Don Quixote and (in a different mode) The Knight of the Burning Pestle are both parodies / critiques of the form.
There's very little continuity between these works and the narratives that follow. The picaresque narrative (beginning in the 16th century with Lazarillo de Tormes) plays off the romance form in its origins. The form itself just vanishes; people stopped being interested. (Even Malory is not reprinted between 1634 and 1816.)
The prose romance did not die out simply as a result of changing literary fashion; it was sandbagged by a general cultural shift which included a revolt against anything viewed as "gothic" (a term of disdain until the Romantics and Victorians came along) and in fvaour of classicism. The Seventeenth Century in England produces no major romance, verse or prose; it does produce an epic.
We have clearly not crossed over any general line involving the eclipse of a formal type: the novel, literary and popular, is still going strong. (Insofar as there was a formal gap, it lies between about 1900 and 1925 and involves narratorial technique.) We have seen the relative eclipse of the Western as a form post-Louis L'Amour.
If we have crossed over a significant gap, then it's arguable that instead of being a separate discontinuity it's "merely" a second stage of the Break that Jones refers to -- that we're at another step of a single century-long shift in values which is now making even the relatively recent past a very distant country, at least to those who were born after a certain point in time.
There's a ton of non-literary markers; the biggest and most obvious one has been the shift in accepted gender roles since the mid-60's. The role of the classics as a reference point has been eclipesd: when my father graduated from High School, Latin was required to get into university in any non-science stream; I and both my siblings have some classical language background, but it was not mandatory at the end of high school; none of my nephews and nieces have any Latin or Greek. The social changes following on (in succession) the introduction of television, home computers, the general availability of the Internet, and portable computing have a role to play, and are by no means anywhere near final yet. An increasing awareness of the concerns of indigenous peoples has to be one of the reasons for the decline of the conventional Western. A general rise in affluence during the 20th Century (even if that rise has slowed or stalled in the very recent past) has meant a radical change in living conditions for most people in the Western world (and the developing world has changed as well, although not in quite the same way or at the same pace). Better medical and public health factors have lengthened life expectancies.
So maybe its not a surprise that people born in, say, the past twenty-five years (it's been about that long since the collapse of the Soviet Union) lie in a different enough world that their reading responses will reflect it in a broad-based way. There will still be outliers, of course, (and even a reasonable number of them) who will happily read golden age SF or Scott/Stevenson/Haggard, and those authors will stay in print (Gene Stratton-Porter's Freckles is still in print, but I don't think it has a wide readership).[2]
[1]As distinct from the equally popular verse romance. These also went out of style, but earlier: their arc runs from the Roman d'Eneas (12th century), through Sir Orfeo (13th-14th century), to Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (late 14th century). If you are willing to follow the arc that (covering the Matter of France) runs from middle French romances through Boiardo and Ariosto to Spenser, you can make an argument that The Faerie Queene is a late example, but you would have to push it. Ariosto really represents its last flourishing as a tour-de-force.
[2]To be fair, Scott, at least, is important and good enough to be in a more permanent category in any case, at worst like Sterne, who has "lasted", pace Dr. Johnson, for more than two centuries. But he's no longer the popular author he was a relatively short time ago.
In recent fannish discussions, the idea that (say, or for example) Heinlein's work has shifted from being accessible to being of "historical interest" only, at least for new or younger readers. There's been some argument about it, but I think there's a general consensus in some quarters that (in particular) the Heinlein juveniles do not now consitute an accesible gateway into SF in the way that they used to. Some people take the view of "after all, they're sixty years old by now" as a simple explanation.
As a completely separate datapoint, I have occasionally seen people writing about their reading experiences saying that (at least in general) works with what would have been a typical level of gender or racial inequality taken for granted make them "bounce off" -- in effect, that with a few exceptions, they don't enjoy reading anything older than the 1980s.
For other readers, older-style omniscient narratorial voices seem to be a barrier.
Some books which had held on as cultural standards for a very long time indeed have dropped off the map in the past generation or so. John Bunyan, Robert Louis Stephenson, and Walter Scott were omnipresent (and actually read) up to the time of my childhood; I don't think that this is true any longer.
In the preface to The Anathemata, David Jones refers to "the Break", a perceived gap between the culture post-WWI (not necessarily identifying the war itself as the (only) cause of the Break) visible as early as the 1920s. In that case, this seems not to have consituted a barrier to reading works from the earlier civilization, but more a sense of being deracinated from the preceding age.
I wonder whether we have passed over, or are in the process of passing over, a slightly different kind of break.
In general, historically, literary works do not simply "age". Better (and sometimes second-rank) works tend to hang around and remain accessible, although fashions in taste may vary. (I was happily reading John Buchan novels in the 1970s, when they were about as far away in time as Heinlein's Juveniles are now.) Sometimes, however, whole blocks of read experience drop out in a relatively quick period of time.
It has happened before.
Consider the mediaeval prose romance.[1] These were tremendously popular for centuries: and then, quite suddenly, they go "poof". Major examples include the Prose Lancelot (13th century), Amadis of Gaul (early 14th century), Palmerin of England (16th century), and the Sidneys' Arcadia (late 16th century).
A typical English-speaking reader who is not a mediaevalist will encounter only works which are spin-offs or parodies of the form. Malory (late 15th century) uses the prose romances -- he relies heavily on the Prose Lancelot, for example -- but he modifies and simplifies the form of the narratives so that Le Morte d'Arthur is really a cousin, or maybe a child, of the prose Romance rather than an example of it. Don Quixote and (in a different mode) The Knight of the Burning Pestle are both parodies / critiques of the form.
There's very little continuity between these works and the narratives that follow. The picaresque narrative (beginning in the 16th century with Lazarillo de Tormes) plays off the romance form in its origins. The form itself just vanishes; people stopped being interested. (Even Malory is not reprinted between 1634 and 1816.)
The prose romance did not die out simply as a result of changing literary fashion; it was sandbagged by a general cultural shift which included a revolt against anything viewed as "gothic" (a term of disdain until the Romantics and Victorians came along) and in fvaour of classicism. The Seventeenth Century in England produces no major romance, verse or prose; it does produce an epic.
We have clearly not crossed over any general line involving the eclipse of a formal type: the novel, literary and popular, is still going strong. (Insofar as there was a formal gap, it lies between about 1900 and 1925 and involves narratorial technique.) We have seen the relative eclipse of the Western as a form post-Louis L'Amour.
If we have crossed over a significant gap, then it's arguable that instead of being a separate discontinuity it's "merely" a second stage of the Break that Jones refers to -- that we're at another step of a single century-long shift in values which is now making even the relatively recent past a very distant country, at least to those who were born after a certain point in time.
There's a ton of non-literary markers; the biggest and most obvious one has been the shift in accepted gender roles since the mid-60's. The role of the classics as a reference point has been eclipesd: when my father graduated from High School, Latin was required to get into university in any non-science stream; I and both my siblings have some classical language background, but it was not mandatory at the end of high school; none of my nephews and nieces have any Latin or Greek. The social changes following on (in succession) the introduction of television, home computers, the general availability of the Internet, and portable computing have a role to play, and are by no means anywhere near final yet. An increasing awareness of the concerns of indigenous peoples has to be one of the reasons for the decline of the conventional Western. A general rise in affluence during the 20th Century (even if that rise has slowed or stalled in the very recent past) has meant a radical change in living conditions for most people in the Western world (and the developing world has changed as well, although not in quite the same way or at the same pace). Better medical and public health factors have lengthened life expectancies.
So maybe its not a surprise that people born in, say, the past twenty-five years (it's been about that long since the collapse of the Soviet Union) lie in a different enough world that their reading responses will reflect it in a broad-based way. There will still be outliers, of course, (and even a reasonable number of them) who will happily read golden age SF or Scott/Stevenson/Haggard, and those authors will stay in print (Gene Stratton-Porter's Freckles is still in print, but I don't think it has a wide readership).[2]
[1]As distinct from the equally popular verse romance. These also went out of style, but earlier: their arc runs from the Roman d'Eneas (12th century), through Sir Orfeo (13th-14th century), to Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (late 14th century). If you are willing to follow the arc that (covering the Matter of France) runs from middle French romances through Boiardo and Ariosto to Spenser, you can make an argument that The Faerie Queene is a late example, but you would have to push it. Ariosto really represents its last flourishing as a tour-de-force.
[2]To be fair, Scott, at least, is important and good enough to be in a more permanent category in any case, at worst like Sterne, who has "lasted", pace Dr. Johnson, for more than two centuries. But he's no longer the popular author he was a relatively short time ago.