Old Books > New Books
By Lance Schaubert | November 30, 2015 |
Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
It took the seventh Harry Potter for me to realize I had it backwards.
I remember driving all over the Rancho Santa Fe and Camino San Bernardo hoods of San Diego with that cinder block of a book propped up on my steering wheel during my morning commutes. Finished it in three days alongside all of my friends, some of whom introduced me to John Granger. John has explained Harry Potter by way of classic literature and Latin. The Aeschylus quote Rowling includes at the beginning of book seven sealed John’s argument for me: Rowling really does pull from a “great compost heap of classic literature.” She wasn’t on her own. She wasn’t trying to be original.
She shoots for derivation.
More on that in a moment. For now, let’s say that many of you are a few books or dozens of short stories deep into your career, which may feel as disorienting as if you were a few beers deep. At every stage in this journey, you may take one of two postures. One is that of the learner who kneels to listen. The other is that of the combatant who takes up arms to strike down his competition. The latter won’t end well for you.
Here’s why:
Everything you create is not true creation. We are not creators. We’re makers. Tolkien taught us that in On Fairy Stories. At no point in this journey will you start truly from scratch. You’re using a borrowed language (English), with a borrowed form (narrative), amplified by borrowed tropes (genres), made fresh by borrowed subversions (humor, genre bending, etc.), magnified by a borrowed audience (you do not own your readership), and I could go on and on for days about paper pulp and the evolution of your genre and the publishing industry and so forth.
There is a qualitative difference between originality and derivation, an unbridgeable gap. No number of incremental steps can ever bridge that gap and make you wholly original. You will always be borrowing something from the land of derivation in order to cross over into the land of originality.
But that’s not a bad thing.
The best artists in history… well Emerson can say it better than me:
There is no choice to genius. A great man does not wake up on some fine morning and say, ‘I am full of life, I will go to sea and find an Antarctic continent: to-day I will square the circle: I will ransack botany and find a new food for man: I have a new architecture in my mind: I foresee a new mechanic power:’ no, but he finds himself in the river of the thoughts and events, forced onward by the ideas and necessities of his contemporaries.
He stands where all the eyes of men look one way, and their hands all point in the direction in which he should go. The Church has reared him amidst rites and pomps, and he carries out the advice which her music gave him, and builds a cathedral needed by her chants and processions. He finds a war raging: it educates him, by trumpet, in barracks, and he betters the instruction. He finds two counties groping to bring coal, or flour, or fish, from the place of production to the place of consumption, and he hits on a railroad.
Every master has found his materials collected, and his power lay in his sympathy with his people and in his love of the materials he wrought in. What an economy of power! and what a compensation for the shortness of life! All is done to his hand. The world has brought him thus far on his way. The human race has gone out before him, sunk the hills, filled the hollows and bridged the rivers. Men, nations, poets, artisans, women, all have worked for him, and he enters into their labors. Choose any other thing, out of the line of tendency, out of the national feeling and history, and he would have all to do for himself: his powers would be expended in the first preparations.
Great genial power, one would almost say, consists in not being original at all; in being altogether receptive; in letting the world do all, and suffering the spirit of the hour to pass unobstructed through the mind.
— from V. Shakespeare
Emerson was speaking about a man whose work has endured for 400 years and become the basis for most stories in the English language. Shakespeare. A man who, as it turns out, borrowed 60% of his material from the greats before him.
[You can go ahead and insert Newton’s quote about seeing farther by standing on the shoulders of giants, if you like, but I’m moving on…]
I really don’t understand why we bristle at this. The medievalists certainly didn’t. In medieval writing, you weren’t ready to write your own work until you could do Virgil well. And some people, like Dante, did it so well that their work became original. Originality has nothing to do with your material, your literary prowess, your worldbuilding, or your thematic resonance. Originality comes when you, having danced at the intersection of the classics and your civilization, emerge “knowing thyself.” What’s original is not the content. What’s original is the person presenting that content to the world — sorry, but human beings have not changed in our entire existence as a species. Still we betray. Still we love. Still we murder and sow new life. The only originality is that of the unique soul. Digesting the old books so that you can learn to speak them in your own heart tongue? This too is finding your voice.
There’s this weird idea floating around the internet that the ancient books should be read only by those who hold PhDs in the subject and that hacks like you and me should stick to modern books. You’ll see people online who want to learn about Platonism, for instance, and the last place they go is to a translation of Plato on the shelf of their local independent bookstore. They look for summaries on sparknotes and tidbits on Wikipedia or, what’s worse, the ramblings of some hack textbook writer to teach them about Plato. You see the problem? People would rather choose to read some dull tome forty times the length of Plato, filled with “isms” and bibliographies that will maybe spend one paragraph in thirty actually quoting Plato. The modern reader fears facing one of the great philosophers or one of the great novelists. He feels incompetent as a reader and, what’s worse, that he won’t understand.
He’s wrong.
The Great Author, because he’s great, makes much more sense than the modern commentator, summarizer, or Wikipedia curator. Even the dumbest student can understand a large swath of Plato, but virtually no one understands the current books on Platonism. You need to know that first-hand knowledge is not only worth more than second-hand knowledge — it’s also typically easier to digest and more fun to read.
Those who know their old books will know I’ve been plagiarizing for the last three paragraphs. Everything I said for the last two-hundred words comes straight out of a forward to the text of St. Athanasius written by the literary critic C.S. Lewis. Dirty trick, I know, but it proves my point twice over, doesn’t it? You should read that whole article, by the way.
But let’s get out of schematics and into engineering something practical.
Romance writers: If you haven’t read Austen, Tristan and Isolde, Lancelot (I’m biased, I know), Herrick’s poems, the original text of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, and others — you probably don’t know your genre very well.
Mystery writers: If you haven’t read Doyle, O’Henry, Frederick Irving Anderson, Poe, Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, Chesterton’s Father Brown stories, Dickens’ Edwin Drood, and others — you probably don’t know mystery.
Scifi Writers: If you haven’t read Dante (yes, Dante was Scifi in his day), Da Vinci’s notebook, Jules Verne, any of the “New World” novels before America was colonized, and so forth — you probably are anemic in your own discipline.
We could go on in every category, but I’m running out of room, so I’ll close with a quote from Terry Pratchet that recently resurfaced through Patrick Rothfuss’ blog:
Without a shadow of a doubt, the first fiction ever recounted was fantasy. Guys sitting around the campfire telling each other stories about the gods who made lightning, and stuff like that. They did not tell one another literary stories. They did not complain about difficulties of male menopause while being a junior lecturer on some midwestern college campus. Fantasy is without a shadow of a doubt the ur-literature, the spring from which all other literature has flown.
Up to a few hundred years ago no one would have disagreed with this, because most stories were, in some sense, fantasy. Back in the middle ages, people wouldn’t have thought twice about bringing in Death as a character who would have a role to play in the story. Echoes of this can be seen in Pilgrim’s Progress, for example, which hark back to a much earlier type of storytelling. The epic of Gilgamesh is one of the earliest works of literature, and by the standard we would apply now— a big muscular guy with swords and certain godlike connections— that’s fantasy. The national literature of Finland, the Kalevala. Beowulf in England. I cannot pronounce Bahaghvad-Gita but the Indian one, you know what I mean. The national literature, the one that underpins everything else, is by the standards that we apply now, a work of fantasy.
Now I don’t know what you’d consider the national literature of America, but if the words Moby Dick are inching their way towards this conversation, whatever else it was, it was also a work of fantasy. Fantasy is kind of a plasma in which other things can be carried. I don’t think this is a ghetto. This is, fantasy is, almost a sea in which other genres swim. Now it may be that there has developed in the last couple of hundred years a subset of fantasy which merely uses a different icongraphy, and that is, if you like, the serious literature, the Booker Prize contender. Fantasy can be serious literature. Fantasy has often been serious literature. You have to be fairly dense to think that Gulliver’s Travels is only a story about a guy having a real fun time among big people and little people and horses and stuff like that. What the book was about was something else. Fantasy can carry quite a serious burden, and so can humor. So what you’re saying is, strip away the trolls and the dwarves and things and put everyone into modern dress, get them to agonize a bit, mention Virginia Woolf a few times, and there! Hey! I’ve got a serious novel.
But you don’t actually have to do that.
The fantasy list is mandatory reading for all writers. As Terry said, peace be upon him: fiction is simply a subcategory of “fantasy.” Homer, Beowulf, The Bahagavad Gita, The Edda, The Panchatantra, The Arabian Nights, Bel and the Dragon, Lebor n hUidre, Arthur, the Cherokee Myths — these are the foundational imaginative works of major civilizations. All of them fantastic. All of them fiction. Even Chesterton argued this in The Everlasting Man. Many of them, ironically, were written for children as I pointed out in my response to Ms. Graham’s Against YA.
All of that to say, you should at least be reading one old book for every three new ones, but I would push for an every-other ratio until your have-reads in the classics catch up to your have-reads in the moderns. Classically speaking, ours is — per capita — one of the most illiterate cultures in history. Ironically tragic when you consider that we have more access to more texts and more humans who can read and write than any society in history.
I end with Twain:
“The man who has the capacity to read great books and does not has no advantage over the man who cannot.”
What’s your ratio of old to new books? Defining old as at least “public domain,” what old books are mandatory reading for your genre? Why?
Lancelot Schaubert has sold his written work to markets like The New Haven Review, McSweeney’s, The Poet’s Market, Writer’s Digest (books and magazine), Poker Pro, Encounter, The Misty Review and many other similar markets. He reinvented the photonovel through Cold Brewed and was commissioned by the Missouri Tourism Board to create a second photonovel — The Joplin Undercurrent — that both fictionalizes and enchants the history and culture of Joplin, Missouri.
So marvelous, I feel very much validated by this post! Just to know someone else feels the same way (though could never have said it so well).
I go one further- I RE-read classics, many times, maybe a kind of echo chamber that lets the ideas soak into my dull brain in a way not based on words or logic. I hope it improves my writing.
Certainly epic and heroic fantasy are not where a reader goes to hear a new philosophy or some breakthrough about human existence. It’s a celebration of good versus evil (hopefully good over evil), of how you try and try again, and of how different a being can be and still touch you as “human”. Your best point in my opinion- surely, you could strip away the weapons and the stylish clothes and have a work of “literary” or “high” fiction. But why would you want to?
Thanks so much for this post.
Happy to validate you, Will.
As for re-reading classics, I get you. That’s most common, in my experience, both with fans of Austen and Dostoevsky — they’re the most obsessive fans I’ve met and, frankly, those books hold up to multiple, multiple readings. I’m sure it does improve your writing, for the closer you get to memorization, the closer you get to true oral storytelling and a fuller ownership of the forms. Have a piece potentially coming out on this site about how the narrative mind — not our keyboard or pen — is my tool as a writer, so I don’t want to spoil the fun there. Suffice to say, you’re onto something.
I would actually disagree concerning epic and heroic fantasy. Anyone who has read Sanderson or Rothfuss or Ursula Le Guin knows that new ideas show up in great, new voices all of the time. Indeed the mythologies of the world disagreed — certainly the “civilized” Romans considered the Norsemen barbaric, pointing to Thor and others.
I would point you to George MacDonald’s “The Fantastic Imagination” which, like and prior to Tolkien’s “On Fairy Tales,” guides the rules around the fantastic genre. In general, I think you’re getting at his main point: in a fantasy, you may change all manner of rules, laws, anthropology, sociology, physics and so on. But the moment you call an evil man “good,” or the moment you treat a rape as a reward, the audience rejects you outright.
Thanks for the compliment, but that point goes to Sir Terry and not to me.
Lance, I love your ratio suggestion. Many years ago a writing professor suggested a similar idea to me. “Read a classic short story by a different author every week in your genre and beyond your genre. In one year you’ll have read over 50 stories and authors. Make that your foundation.” I thought, good idea, but didn’t do it. Not until I got older did I appreciate this wisdom and began my once-a-week-short-story reading adventure. I turned it into a weekly blog, offering free public domain stories by the dead master writers. My question for you, Lance … do you have a favorite classic fiction that you re-read?
I have several. My goodness. Some of them — like Tolkien, Milton — I tend to listen to the academics like Corey Olson and Tom Shippey talk about the books.
I reread Aristotle and Plato often. Been rereading á Kempis, Emerson.
Dostoevsky probably takes the cake though, even though he’s pretty young on the “ancient lit” scale. He has a sort of iconoclastic-yet-faithful disposition that mirrors my own.
Other than that, it’s Tennyson, Keats, Shelly — the romantics, in other words — and their predecessors, the neoplatonists and the epic poets.
What a meaty Monday morning post. Thank you. I’ll have to have my children read this, who chafe at reading the classics (they are teenagers). Over the past five years, my own reading has shifted more to the classics from about 1/5 to about 1/2. I’ve gone from reading some of the Church Fathers and Doctors to the more recent. I credit Joseph Pearce for this explosion of interest with his book: Literary Converts. It’s a delight, not only for exposing me to writers like Hugh Benson, but because I get some insight into the hearts and minds of some of my favorites like CS Lewis, GK Chesterton, TS Eliot and more.
Right now, I’m reading Helena (historical fiction) by Evelyn Waugh.
Oh me too, Vijaya. Actually, for me it’s therapy. You get the feeling with a lot of these guys that at many times they felt alone in the world, but the more they developed their own voice and discovered the depth of their own souls, the more they found solace in the great geniuses who went before them.
I take courage in that because when I feel lonely, I can tap into the telepathic link of old books and spend time in the mind of someone who feels as I feel and yet added to the conversation that is history.
Who was your favorite among The Fathers?
And who is Joseph Pierce?
My son often teases me that I have more dead friends than alive ones but they are such good companions! My favorite is St. Augustine because I identify with him. St. Aquinas is a close second, his poetry bringing me to tears.
Joseph Pearce is our contemporary and the author of Literary Converts. He teaches at Aquinas College in Nashville, TN.
It’s easy to identify with a man who wrote a novel-length work confessing everything that’s wrong with him. Talk about sympathetic characters…
Huh. New to me. I’ll check him out.
Lance, well said! Mandatory reading for me is anything to do with the Irish Cycle tales, which were originally passed on by word of mouth. I read them wherever I can find them, and in whatever form. My stories have to do with the nature of Myth, and at present I’m reading T.H. White’s ‘The Godstone and the Blackymor’. He has just finished stalking a legendary ‘minor deity’ up and down the islands off the west coast and arrived at the conclusion that “something real always seemed to turn up under the legend.” This line made me smile. There are treasures to be unearthed by reading the words of the great minds that came before us. How could any of us not want to look through a window into another time and place? Looking back helps me make sense of the here and now, and hopefully deepens the meaning of my stories.
That is a good line. It reminds me of Chronicler from The Name of the Wind. Hope to do a post on that soon on my own site. Some people think that fantasy is childish, but (as my link to my response to Ms. Graham shows) it’s anything but childish.
As for oral storytelling, again I don’t want to spoil an upcoming post, but I’m fascinated at how stand offish most modern readers are to things that originated in oral traditions. Oral traditions, in many ways, were *much* more reliable than our own revision and footnote system.
As historian N.T. Wright puts it:
“The powerful resonances of the parable with the context of peasant society provide the basis for a hypothesis of a different sort, to do with the nature of story-telling within peasant communities. Part of the thrust of the parable within peasant society comes from the fact that the whole village would know what the [character in this particular story] had done, and would have told the awful and shocking story of his behaviour over and over again. When he returned, it would not be to a modern-style middle-class suburb where everybody (in theory at least) minded their own business, but to a peasant village which thrived on narrative. Not mere gossip, either: the community would order its life and thought by telling and retelling important events which had made them who they were. This provides a window on a world of which… is the world of informal but controlled oral tradition.”
He goes own to reveal four categories of oral tradition:
1. Informal and uncontrolled (gossip and urban legends)
2. Formal and uncontrolled (propoganda)
3. Informal and controlled (parables, mythos)
4. Formal and controlled (memorized oral history of important events such as genealogies, wars, and laws)
…and each of these would be entrusted to a progressively smaller group of people.
We’ve lost that because of living in a “pics or it didn’t happen” culture.
Which is hilarious considering it’s much easier to photoshop a lie these days than it is to change the oral history of a tribe’s geneology as evidenced in the movie Roots.
All of that to say, there’s a whole swath of storytelling rules and insights we ignore simply because, through fear, we only follow the old texts and not the old oral traditions. So glad you’re focusing on the Irish tales — Sean Walsh would be proud.
Thanks for your informative response, Lance. You echo Lisa Cron here when you conjure the image of a village using story in such basic and powerful ways. You also remind me why the Bard was so revered in early Irish society. The death-price for a bard was equal to that of King, which speaks to the importance of the keepers of oral histories. You also remind me why we are still enthralled by Fairytales, with their deep veins of human wisdom. Great conversation today!!
Tell me more about this death-price. I’m unfamiliar…
Happy to help!
Back in the day, according to Brehon (Irish ) law, if you murdered someone, you were required to compensate his or her family, according to the victims stature. A peasant wouldn’t cost you as much as a prince, but a Bard or a King commanded the highest prices. There’s a beautiful, if strange, kind of symmetry to these laws. You should see the ones on marriage. Very progressive!
My word, that’s fascinating. That may be the key to the Kingkiller chronicles…
I have to admit that my ratio has plummeted as I’ve grown older. When I was in my teens, I was reading classics like Beowulf and Ovid, even Jane Austen. Not just academically, but because they rang true with me. Time to start reading the classics that I’ve recently added to my library – The Mabinogion + The Prince – as well as some classic detective stories, like Sherlock Holmes. The oldest book that I read recently was an Ellis Peter’s mystery, but even that is modern. Time to re-read Wilkie Collins’ The Moonstone perhaps?
What’s The Mabinogion?
The Welsh stories from their Celtic golden-age of story-telling in the 11th century and earlier. Some of the stories are the earliest ones that refer to King Arthur. They were preserved in two Welsh manuscript collections, the White Book of Rhyyderch (written down 1300-25), and the Red Book of Hergest (1375-1425). I have a translation by Gwyn Jones and Thomas Jones, but used to own an illustrated translation that sadly my brother acquired when my mother died.
Now that I live in Wales, and I’m writing a novel set in Snowdonia, I have the urge to read this classic. My knowledge of King Arthur comes from later Arthurian ‘romances’. One of the stories relates to Branwen, Daughter of Llŷr who originally came from Harlech, where we live.
OOOOOHHH. I just finished the first draft of a screenplay set in Missouri whose plot is based on the many renditions of Arthur that exist. This sounds fascinating — thanks for the new read!
Boy, oh boy, did I enjoy this post. Revelatory. My reading list just got knocked into a cocked hat. Thanks, I needed that.
Thanks Alex. Glad you found yourself motivated — remember: a good translation is just as important as sitting down to read an old book. If you’re reading a 1700’s translation of Plato, you’re making it harder on yourself. Seamus’ Beowulf, for instance, is a modern greatwork — the translation itself is gold.
Sadly, many schools are moving away from teaching the classics as they are considered no longer “relevant.” And then these students grow up never having read Homer, Virgil, Dickens, Austen, Bronte, Thoreau, and so on. If they do read these authors, their experience will be in bite-sized chunks.
I loved this post, especially the Emerson passage! Sometimes I have a fancy that my story waits out there in the world for me to discover it. When I get stuck, I can read something from a great mind for inspiration. Thanks also for the suggestion of alternating between reading old and new.
Exactly! Define “relevant” ? Modern mathematics depends on, for instance, Pythagorean theorem. Who better than Pythagorus to teach you? No one says it plainer than he. Most of the great modern mathematicians cite reading Euclid as their personal breakthrough. Et all infinitum.
I’m the same way. I’m no tabla rasa thinker when it comes to education and imagination — the mind is a chest to unlock, not a rock to chisel.
Lancelito:
I currently have the good fortune of needing to research Thucydides, Herodotus, Livy, and Cicero, since one of my characters would have studied and internalized these authors (he lived in an era when students memorized sections of these authors’ works). They are, indeed, a gas to read (excuse the rhyme).
I do not, however, share your uncompromising scorn for summaries or commentaries if they are well considered. There’s this fella named Machiavelli, for example, who wrote Discourses on Livy. Not bad.
And Bertrand Russell’s History of Western Philosophy, though apparently a bit idiosyncratic (i.e., wrong) in places, is an engaging introduction to many great thinkers whose own works aren’t quite as much fun to read (Aristotle, e.g., who is perhaps one of the wisest men ever to live, but who was by no means a prose stylist).
As for my apparent ignorance of my genre since I haven’t read Poe since adolescence (a good time to read him, I believe), never bothered with Edwin Drood, and haven’t a clue who Frederick Irving Anderson is — not to mention those alluring “others” you refer to but feel no need to name — I guess I’ll just have to abide in the darkness.
I think your call to the ramparts is wise and welcome. The scolding diatribe, not so much, especially on a cold gray Monday.
Your energy, though, is inspiring. Now, back to Thucydides.
Unfortunately, the problem with a 1,200 word limit is that it is, in fact, a limit. I did not have time to compliment summaries and outlines—their virtues as a means to this end. And, frankly, it seems rather uncharitable to assume my scorn is “uncompromising” since in this very article I cited two summaries (Lewis on Athanasius and Emerson on Shakespeare) as well as an outline — Chesterton’s “Everlasting Man,” which was, historically, a response both to your Russell and to HG Wells’ outline of history.
But of course one would have to dig a bit deeper to understand the inference there.
That aside, I will formally state my position here:
I do not scorn sparknotes. In fact, had I my way every reader would have an outline in hand as they read through a major work. But the point is northern outline. The point is the major work. I don’t take issue with outlines as an entity—indeed it’s rather impossible to memorize a narrative (above) without one.
What I scorn is the substitution of the great work for it’s outline. Indeed, a summary of Aritotle may misinterpret his poetics and ethics—certainly his politics if the American circus is any indication.
And an outline of history can never substitute a direct affair with history herself.
(apologies “northern” should read “not the” and there’s the it’s/its error — typing on a phone and autocorrect isn’t kind).
As for crime novels, I would think that it’s pretty obvious the idea of an unsolved murder has been around for centuries: I named more recent examples (Dostoevsky is still very recent). Hamlet makes the list. Madea. Oedipus.
Lance –
Thanks for a post that was both thought-provoking and, well, just plain provoking.
You raise some great points, but as my partner in hairlessness, David Corbett, observed, the scolding tone does get a bit offputting. More than that: every time in my artistic careers (both musical and literary) that I’ve heard somebody say something along the lines of, “If you haven’t done XXX, you’re not a real YYY,” countless exceptions have emerged to prove that claim wrong.
Bottom line, there’s more than one way to do this stuff – or any stuff, for that matter. So telling somebody they don’t know their genre – knowing that some of the folks in your audience will likely be published novelists within those genres – is a rather extreme stance to take.
That said, you’ve given us lots of good stuff to think about, and delivered said stuff most eloquently and passionately. I love it when a post makes me think, and yours has done so in spades. Thanks again.
Well I wasn’t going for scolding, for sure, I respect everyone here so the piece probably suffered from that if that’s how it comes across. I’ll need to reread it — it was written awhile back.
But I think I stand by the core message of what I said: it’s not the specific books I’m looking at, but the idea itself. If you don’t know your sources, you don’t know your raw materia or form — don’t take my word for it, there are plenty of well-respected writers who say so as well. Mastery of the craft is the only thing that matters and can only happen by tapping into the source of those who have gone before us. Most modern writers think because they’ve published well, had high sell-through, or made the NYT bestseller list that they’ve “made it.” Certainly they’ve “made it” farther than me, but do I use this metric for myself?
No, I’m not that guy.
I will judge my work as a success if my great-great-great grandchildren go to school with peers who are familiar with my work. I will judge it based on the standard of those who have gone before me and every time it falls short, I will return to the great compost heap of literature to learn how to make it anew and try again.
Will I enjoy writing? Will I do it regardless? Do I have a compulsion to write? Will I always be behind my superiors — older, better, more prolific, more profound, more highly compensated colleagues?
Of course. You’re absolutely right.
But let’s not be naïve and pretend as if the movement in pop art is some great bulwark that will stand the test of time. We Americans are quite arrogant to think we’ve contributed much at all to the great compost heap of classic literature in the last thirty years or so. We will be surprised at what lingers (certainly Dickens’ contemporaries would have been as surprised as Dickinson’s) and we will be surprised at what vanishes (both Dickens’ and Dickinson’s contemporaries).
As I told Porter once, most pop music will fade but when the last crow calls over the ruin of the west, Mozart may still be heard.
Thanks for the thoughtful reply. I was thinking about Dickens, and was pleased you brought him up. Would you disagree that he was, in many ways, the Stephen King of his era? Or perhaps even the James Patterson? Bottom line, he was a pop star of his time, not a Salman Rushdie nor a Virginia Woolf.
My point is this: deciding which literature is “great” is a highly arbitrary action, and our view of this action can get distorted over time. At the music conservatory where I was trained, Bach was considered the pinnacle of musical achievement. But during his lifetime, Telemann was MUCH more highly regarded, and Bach was considered overly pedantic and fussy.
That’s why I take what I’m told is “great art” with ample helpings of salt. I love “Apocalypse Now,” but have never managed to make it through Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness,” the novel that inspired it. And it’s a TINY novel, and I’m a speed reader. Nope. Couldn’t do it. Despite how “great” it’s supposed to be, the purpleness of the prose kept staining my fingers, and I ultimately had to give the book flying lessons.
Anyway, I think we’re destined to agree to disagree on many of your points. After all, I’m the author of this post, which is likely to make your much-hairier-than-mine head explode:
https://staging-writerunboxed.kinsta.cloud/2014/04/08/how-to-make-somebody-hate-reading/
But here’s where you really lose me: “We Americans are quite arrogant to think we’ve contributed much at all to the great compost heap of classic literature in the last thirty years or so.” This kind of “if it’s new, it’s crap” thinking is a kind of prejudice/snobbery I find impossible to stomach. WHEN a book was written simply cannot be its defining characteristic – at least, not to me. Your mileage may vary.
Oh that’s absolutely true! Absolutely! Dickens was the pop fiction writer. That’s exactly my point — the same point you’re making — we can never know what fiction will last and what fiction will remain. The only clue we have is, by definition, that fiction which has already lasted the test of time. That point is made clearer in the comment below in which I quote much more of the aforementioned Lewis piece.
Jospeh Conrad’s a pain in the ass — don’t blame you there — though his Lord Jim did teach me that the forms of perspective are never set in stone. I would say the same thing of James Joyce. As Rothfuss said recently, nobody says, “I just read Ulysses for fun.” However, my point of derivation remains: it’s still better than Apocalypse Now because it was the origin. Without the Conrad piece, Apocalypse Now cannot exist.
Read the whole post, head still intact. It’s very good — and I agree with you entirely. I do think that children should be pushed to love great books, but if we are to start, we either need (1) the reading level to match their current reading level or (2) to read it to them as fathers did to families when Dickens came out. Forcing them to read something boring and then forcing analysis is pointless. Sure, teach them to reflect, but there’s a big difference between reflection that leads to imitation (more fiction writing and reading) and reflection that leads to the death of the imagination (a professional career in criticism or worse: an abandonment of reading). I do disagree that scholarly interp is “masturbatory in nature,” for two simple reasons: (1) a highschool teacher’s interpretation of Steinbeck is not “scholarly,” unless said teacher has both a PhD and a thesis published in a respected scholastic journal on the interp in question and (2) because many of the writers you’ve listed started with a critical understanding of symbol systems, extracting author’s intent, treating the work as a unified whole, and moving on to imitation with their own work.
But we can set that aside if you still disagree.
As for avoiding books, Stephen King talks about this in Secret Windows, Secret Doors — about how it’s a shame that we start hating books early, but there’s no rhyme or reason. I love A Tale of Two Cities, but was forced to read Great Expectations and probably never will finish it because of that. I’ve never read The Scarlett Letter because it was assigned in high school, but I’ve also never read To Kill A Mockingbird or Of Mice and Men since highschool and both books made me fall in love with reading. Surely someone will prefer others to my own — but at this point we’re talking of personal preference, not the principle in question: that the craft of writing is learned from what history has ruled to be the best of writers.
You ended with this:
“Teach Harry Potter in schools rather than The Grapes of Wrath or One Hundred Years of Solitude, and I submit you’ll end up with more people coming out of that school who enjoy reading. And later on, many of those same readers may turn to Steinbeck or Marquez, but they’d be doing it because they want to, not because they were forced to.”
And that brings us back to my opening line — that Harry Potter is based on a great many classic works: Aeschylus, Dante, the Alchemical Great Works like Burkhardt and Lindy, Coleridge, Scripture, and so on. Yes, get them to read Harry Potter. And, once they’re addicted to read them, ask them about the quotes at the beginning of book seven — Aeschylus and William Penn. Those are keys to unlocking the meaning of the books (in which Harry dies or goes underground once in each book and figuratively resurrects in the presence of a medieval symbol of Christ, doing the same thing seven times in book seven until he actually dies and resurrects. It’s a beautiful image system she wields and I recommend reading the Granger book I mentioned).
But I need to respond fully to your last comment:
“But here’s where you really lose me: ‘We Americans are quite arrogant to think we’ve contributed much at all to the great compost heap of classic literature in the last thirty years or so.’ This kind of “if it’s new, it’s crap” thinking is a kind of prejudice/snobbery I find impossible to stomach. WHEN a book was written simply cannot be its defining characteristic – at least, not to me. Your mileage may vary.”
The key word here is “much,” contributed “much” to the great compost heap of literature. Thirty years is nothing on the span of history — certainly not on the span of cosmic history at all. The Greeks were quite prolific but we’ve lost entire libraries full of documents. Other books in the seventies during the paperback revolution were *very* popular and have now faded from memory while others were *very* obscure and are now quite well-known, and vice versa of course. Your point above is quite right.
I don’t think “if it’s new, it’s crap.” I’ll point once more to the Lewis piece and ask, please, that you take my assumptions in context. If it’s new, it’s simply untested. That’s my point. We have no clue what will make it into the classic canon. No clue. You’re right — we agree on that. Because we have no clue, we are better off — as authors — yielding our craft to the things that have already made it in. Of course, had we a time machine it would also be nice to have all of the books that will make it into the canon in the future, but we don’t and can’t even thought that’s a fantastic plot point of the new musical Something Rotten.
And to prove my sincerity on this for both you and Mr. Corbett, a word of self-disclosure:
I grew up poor. Very poor. I lived in a trailer park at one point and we often used food stamps. I did not go to an Ivy League school, hated literature in high school for the reasons you listed in your post, and was seldom read to during some of the crucial years. I could not afford public university — for me that would have been University of Illinois, Carbondale, and so forth — and was only able to go to a very specific private college by way of a scholarship of a small organization in my community. This college gave a very specific degree that’s equivocal to the kind of community college trade schools you see in very small, rural communities across the country. The degrees at this college were ranked by Business Insider as one of the “lowest returns on investment” in the country. To illustrate: I had no classes in english literature. I was assigned zero fiction — certainly none of the titles we’ve talked about — and had only one writing class: writing and research.
Fortunately for me, the school’s focus is on autodidacticism — teaching yourself. And by drilling logic, rhetoric, and grammar into my mind, I found that what interested me in college was what I hated in highschool. So I got a local library card and began reading whatever interested me or was recommended. All because one teacher gave me the Lewis article and pushed me to read the books that scared me. I don’t know what I would have done with my life had I never come across Dostoevsky.
All of that to say, I have been called many things in my life but never a snob. I am, in many respects, about as far from privileged and elitist as it gets when it comes to classic literature save but for the color of my skin — I could have grown up in Centrailia, Illinois rather than Salem, so I had a tiny leg up on the poor black community in my county.
If after reading the Lewis piece you still don’t agree, sure I can agree to disagree. But please don’t take my word for his argument — my point is to redirect people to him.
Because I think after reading him, you might find yourself as inspired as that poor boy in that crappy college all of those years ago.
Yes, upon rereading, I believe the word “probably” covers over a multitude of sins. I don’t mean the post to sound belittling — certainly most of the people here have read more classics than I have and, as an autodidact without any degree requiring any of the above books, I’m desperately trying to catch up to the rest of you. That said, it’s quite possible that someone could master their craft the long way around, sifting for the best snippets of modern books that are unquestionably untested by time, by why would that ever be preferable to the short cut — going straight to the gold that history has sifted for us?
Why travel across the country to buy bottled water in bulk when there’s a limitless freshwater spring in your backyard?
If I am to write a novel based on things I have learned from other novels — and there is no other way to grow as an author — I would much rather slog through one classic than try to patch together snippets of modern bestsellers. Authorial careers built from the latter often result in the kind of tropes that develop as genres rise and fall in popularity, the very ones that end up on literary agent suggestion paragraphs: “does not accept stories involving _____.” Authorial careers built from the former, when they emerge now and again, cut through our culture’s noise like a clarion call or a siren’s song.
Or a dinner bell summoning us home.
Beowulf in its original Old English was a torment. So too was Pilgrim’s Progress. I completely understand the value of the masters and have turned to Shakespeare twice in plotting my novels. Dickens was my first love. But really!! There is huge value in new voices standing on the shoulders of the giants and we need to read those too.
Oh certainly, get a translation for heaven’s sake. As Lewis said, “the last place they go is to a translation of Plato on the shelf of their local independent bookstore.”
He goes further in that piece:
“Naturally, since I myself am a writer, I do not wish the ordinary reader to read no modern books. But if he must read only the new or only the old, I would advise him to read the old. And would give him this advice precisely because he is an amateur and therefore much less protected than the expert against the dangers of an exclusive contemporary diet. A new book is still on its trial and the amateur is not in a position to judge it. It has to be tested against the great body of thought down the ages, and all its hidden implications (often unsuspected by the author himself) have to be brought to light. Often it cannot be fully understood without the knowledge of a good many other modern books. If you join at eleven o’clock a conversation which began at eight you will often not see the real bearing of what is said. emarks which seem to you very ordinary will produce laughter or irritation and you will not see why—the reason, of course, being that the earlier stages of the conversation have given them a special point. n the same way sentences in a modern book which look quite ordinary may be directed at some other book; in this way you may be led to accept what you would have indignantly rejected if you knew its real significance. he only safety is to have a standard of plain, central thought which puts the controversies of the moment in their proper perspective. Such a standard can be acquired only from the old books. It is a good rule, after reading a new book, never to allow yourself another new one till you have read an old one in between. If that is too much for you, you should at least read one old one to every three new ones.
“Every age has its own outlook. It is specially good at seeing certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes. We all, therefore, need the books that will correct the characteristic mistakes of our own period. nd that means the old books. All contemporary writers share to some extent the contemporary outlook—even those, like myself, who seem most opposed to it. Nothing strikes me more when read the controversies of past ages than the fact that both sides were usually assuming without question a good deal which we should now absolutely deny. They thought that they were as completely opposed as two sides could be, but in fact they were all the time secretly united—united with each other and against earlier and later ages—by a great mass of common assumptions. We may be sure that the characteristic blindness of the twentieth century—the blindness about which posterity will ask, “But how could they have thought that?”—lies where we have never suspected it, and concerns something about which there is untroubled agreement between itler and resident oosevelt or between Mr. H.G . Wells and Karl Barth. one of us can fully escape this blindness, but we shall certainly increase it, and weaken our guard against it, if we read only modern books. Where they are true they will give us truths which we half knew already. Where they are false they will aggravate the error with which we are already dangerously ill. The only palliative is to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds, and this can be done only by reading old books. Not, of course, that there is any magic about the past. eople were no cleverer then than they are now; they made as many mistakes as we. ut not the same mistakes. They will not flatter us in the errors we are already committing; and their own errors, being now open and palpable, will not endanger us. Two heads are better than one, not because either is infallible, but because they are unlikely to go wrong in the same direction. To be sure, the books of the future would be just as good a corrective as the books of the past, but unfortunately we cannot get at them.”
That should help give context. I’m rather envious of Lewis — he had much more space than me and the argument needs space because of the immediate kickback people give when you tell them to read old stuff.
But yeah, Barbara, you’re right — there should be a ratio of new-to-old. An exclusive diet of either is quite unhelpful.
Wonderful post! …and I found myself remembering 7th grade (12 years old) bringing a book with me to read at school. It had a nifty cover with a depiction of ancient Greeks. The hero was fleeing a wrecked city and heading to a new home. The natives of that place were divided on the question of whether they wanted him and his people or not. There was a beautiful lady, a lady who loved warfare, a mighty antagonist who was as great a fighter as the hero, there were supernatural beings who were for or against the various parties, revenge, memories and lots of fighting and speeches. It was wonderful! I was entranced.
My mother saw me reading it and told me to cut it out. I was just showing off. (I love her, actually, but sometimes she misses the mark.) Showing off? Reading this book? It was a page-turner!
You see, I’d never heard of THE AENEID. I had enjoyed THE ILIAD, and this was an unlooked-for sequel. I hadn’t know that it was snooty to read the Iliad, either…
And now I read books for children.
Thanks for the great post!
Thanks so much, Diana. Super encouraged by your story: I used to be terribly jealous of book-smart girls and I thought it was because they’d get the attention of the teachers.
Wasn’t until I was older that I learned it’s because I didn’t feel free to read in public as a boy until Harry Potter came along.
Sorry mom shamed you. Glad you pushed through anyways and came out the other side.
A friend’s mom book shamed me once. I was in junior high, and decided to read “The Scarlet Letter.” She took the book from my hands, read the first sentence, and informed me that there was no way I could possibly understand that book, because she couldn’t even understand it. I was too afraid of her to respond by telling her that I’d begun reading Shakespeare in the fifth grade, and so I was pretty sure I’d be able to grasp Hawthorne. Instead, I put the book back on my bookshelf and didn’t pick it up again until grad school. I’ve never forgiven myself for allowing her hurtful words to influence my reading choices.
Even today, my family errs on the side of mocking me for my reading choices, rather than praising me for reading books that challenge me. It is hurtful, but I’ve learned to see it for what it truly is, that people often mock what they cannot understand. It’s easier. It helps that I married someone who also likes to read some of the more challenging classics.
So, bravo to you, for reading such a challenging work at a young age. I’ve still never worked up the courage to attempt “The Iliad.” Perhaps this will serve as my inspiration to do so!
Good night that’s awful that she said that to you. I am so sorry. Seriously, that’s terrible.
I’m glad you moved forward and have decided to choose your reading choices based on what will fill you up rather than whom you’ll let down.
this was a really thought provoking piece – I really enjoyed it – thanks
Thanks so much, Imogen — so glad you stopped in!
‘“New World” novels before America was colonized?’ Are you serious? You’ve either been reading too much neo-Nazi propaganda or watching “Fox News.” And you have the nerve to criticize writers who don’t know their material.
Hey Alejandro — thanks for the comment. Honestly, to be called both an elitist liberal and a conservative neo-Nazi in the same post either means (1) I wrote a good piece or (2) I’m the scum of the earth — some sort of Hitler/Anarchist crossover.
Either are, honestly, a compliment considering my humble beginnings (mentioned above). Though I would of course prefer to be seen as contributing to the general welfare of humanity through my work. I suppose that remains to be seen…
But in my experience, people never respond in passion as you have unless they’re quite sincere, so I’ll take your sincerity at face value and respond directly to your apparent assumptions.
Your critique seems to be founded upon three ideas. The first is that I agree with every idea in every book I listed and the second is that an idea — even a holistically evil idea — must be censored and the third is that I listed these books solely for their ideas. Let’s deal with those assumptions accordingly:
Do I agree with every idea in every book I listed above? For one, if I did I would be self-contradictory since Dante and Plato’s ideas of the afterlife differ with one another, since several of those mythologies represent contradictory geneses, and since the philosophies represented by nearly all of them are at odds at one point or another. Even Chesterton disagrees with Lewis and Chesterton was responsible for Lewis’ conversion. In addition, the lists are quite incomplete as indicated both by the question and by Mr. Corbett’s pushback — I’m less interested in the precise books on the list and more interested in the principle: old books inform authors in a clearer way than new books precisely because they are old and their contemporaries have been sifted by history’s ruthless filter. No, I do not agree with every idea above, but I also do not agree with every idea in our current age. To quote from that same Lewis article (which, again, everyone should read):
“Every age has its own outlook. It is specially good at seeing certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes. We all, therefore, need the books that will correct the characteristic mistakes of our own period. And that means the old books. All contemporary writers share to some extent the contemporary outlook—even those, like myself, who seem most opposed to it. Nothing strikes me more when I read the controversies of past ages than the fact that both sides were usually assuming without question a good deal which we should now absolutely deny. They thought that they were as completely opposed as two sides could be, but in fact they were all the time secretly united—united with each other and against earlier and later ages—by a great mass of common assumptions. We may be sure that the characteristic blindness of the twentieth century—the blindness about which posterity will ask, “But how how could they have thought that?”—lies where we have never suspected it, and concerns something about which there is untroubled agreement between Hitler and President Roosevelt or between Mr. H.G. Wells and Karl Barth. None of us can fully escape this blindness, but we shall certainly increase it, and weaken our guard against it, if we read only modern books. Where they are true they will give us truths which we half knew already. Where they are false they will aggravate the error with which we are already dangerously ill. The only palliative is to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds, and this can be done only by reading old books.”
It’s easy to see the wrongness of the kind of fascism that plagued humanity a century ago. But can you brave the waters of fascism to see what they had right? For instance, are you a fascist every time you drive over the interstate? Because we have Hitler to thank for the interstate and a Nazi named Kittle for the greatest Dictionary of Greek in existence — a ten-volume work that is still rebuking our assumptions as people who are quite efficient at destroying both the commons and the environment, for instance. As Vonnegut said, “Future generations: we apologize — we were drunk on petroleum.”
Which brings us to the second idea — that every bad idea must be censored. And this is not a liberate idea at all. It certainly isn’t freedom of the press, speech, or anything you might find in Milton’s Areopagitica. It is, in fact, in league with book burning. To burn Hitler’s Mein Kampf, for instance, would be a refusal to study the past and therefore a self-condemnation to repeat it. I read Nazis not because I like Nazis — indeed I hate all forms of eugenics and genocide that plagued all empires at that time in history. I read Nazis precisely because I don’t want to become one and because I know, deep down, that I could if left to my own devices. That includes a refusal to demonize even *all* of Nazi Germany and to realize that quite helpful human inventions — such as the interstate — came from them. I am quite in favor of free speech.
Which leads us to the the third assumption: that I listed these books solely for their ideas. My point is not the specific ideas but the general assumptions of a genre. In the case of The New World books — that is PRECISELY what science fiction is. In fact, they used things called “ships” to discover things called “new worlds.” It was the Star Trek of the 1500s and 1600s and I get that observation not from myself, but rather from the last line of Emily St. John Mandell’s book Station Eleven, which, if nothing else, is a ruthless and beautiful apologetic for science fiction based on a survey of classic literature.
In short and to illustrate, I am quite offended that Chesterton uses racial slurs in some of his work, but I find myself frequently rebuked by his critique of capitalism, particularly in Utopia of Usurers and specifically because I’m a former ad man whose art was commissioned not by a pope, nor by a fascist, nor even by a king, but rather by corporations like Coke. In his words — the words of the bigoted racist — “it’s not that there will be no good art. It’s that there will be no art that is not simultaneously advertisement, which is considerably worse.”
An idea cannot be true or false simply because of the man articulating it — that’s called ad hominem.
And every I look around New York and browse around any site on the internet, I still hear the words of that bigot rebuking our age:
“No art that is not advertisement.”
Take him or leave him, he isn’t wrong. That’s why we read the old books: because the reformer is always right about what’s wrong, but often wrong about what’s right.
Lance,
I found neither scorn nor scolding in any of the words written here. In fact, as a reader and writer, I was so moved by this post that I haven’t been able to think of much else since I read it yesterday. I am considering printing a copy to carry with me as a reminder of what I should be as a reader, what I can be as a writer, and what is possible for both.
I was also inspired by your list of “must reads” for genres. I, too, believe that in order to write a genre, you must study every bit of it that you can. Since the three genres you listed are the exact three I hope to write (a combination of them, in fact), I am inspired to seek out those authors and their brothers and sisters in writing.
In pursuit of my degree, I was tasked with reading many of the classics, and, to my shame, many times I took the easy road and relied on class discussions and summations to get me through. I regret that more than anything. My desire to read is often overshadowed by the ease of television. I am a product of my society, and have traded my great passion, words, for the instant gratification of happy endings. My English teachers would cringe to know that I’ve allowed the substitution.
All of the above is to say thank you for reminding me of the wonder of literary discovery, and for encouraging me to return to the classics that first drew me into this great world of literature.
On a somewhat unrelated note, I am from the Joplin area and am interested in your upcoming photo-novel. Is there a place I can sign up to receive a notification when it is available?
Well thank you so much, Nicole. So glad to have you here and so happy to have inspired you in this way.
I would add that my list is by no means exhaustive. It’s meant, rather, to prompt you towards exploring the origins of your genre and really plunge the depth of what is essential in order that the rest may be revised.
Glad you’ll keep at it. Do that for sure.
Feel free to message me on your social medium of choice — @lanceschaubert or /lanceschaubert — or to use the contact form at lanceschaubert.org. It’ll be out in January, but if you want a sneak peek — since you’re from Joplin and you reached out like this, I’ll give you an invite to beta read on the site.
Now that you guys have responded in your various ways, I’ll share some of my own favorites and the lessons they taught me:
Brothers Karamazov taught me what Shakespeare should have taught me: how to use dialogue to infer character action and setting without wasting description. It also taught me how to talk about metaphysics in tangible, concrete ways the reader cares about.
Oedipus taught me that not even Oedipus had an Oedipus complex, so sometimes critics miss what average readers understand.
Poetics taught me the real meaning behind “fatal flaw,” that most people misuse.
Sun Also Rises taught me subtext in dialog.
The Man Who Was Thursday taught me thematic resonance through the dramatic equivalent of recall jokes.
Allegory of Love taught me that most people are wrong about the origins of romance and epics.
Greek, Roman, Norse mythology about the origins of characters from Gandalf to Pete in Oh Brother Where Art Thou—and that the point is not externals, but character decisions and superlatives like love and hate and so on.
Jewish Apocrypha taught me the value of a ridiculous fantasy to prove a point without saying what that point is — some of their parables downright dwarf the absurdism of the twentieth century.
Burns and Lee taught me to relish my native dialect rather than hide from it.
A Critical History of Children’s Literature taught me, by giving me a lay of the land, that children’s lit is the building block of all lit an to insult children’s lit is to insult all lit.
The Cat in the Hat taught me troiachic meter.
Tennyson, Keats, Shelly, Spencer, Coleridge, Wordsworth all taught me how to make the fantastic common an the common fantastic in order to give an inkling of something beyond the physical, a sense of “other.”
Hugo taught me the role of providence in a narrative.
Dante taught me how to reinvent my own language and how to think alchemically, and how to work with the worst possible scenario — literally nine levels of hell — to bring about change in the main character: himself.
Milton taught me how to make an expected antagonist a protagonist in order to critique the reader’s overly-positive assessment of their own assumptions.
Conrad taught me you can break the rules of perspective if you (1) frame it well and (2) be consistent.
The Allegories of the Middle Ages taught me that the critique of a story being “allegorical” is nonsense unless there are characters named Death and Grace and Justice and Long-Suffering. Which makes me lighten up worrying about that and makes me also value true allegories for what they really are.
Dickens taught me that there is no such thing as a throwaway character.
Austen taught me how to force fallacious assumptions in the reader through letting them believe the perspective gives them all of the info—this by way of Rowling.
Perelandra taught me that there are more ways than one to talk about space.
There are more, but that’s good for now.
I’m a book blogger which means I review the latest novels so that it can encourage, or maybe not so, other people to buy them. Personally, I do think old novels have a certain magic to them. I love reading my classics and seeing the traditional kind of scifi, or horror with Frakenstein, or even romance with Jane Austen like anyone else. But I also think that the new books have a certain quality of magic to them too. You can, however, see the links between the original books and the not so original ones, and how many of the ideas are repeated. I still think new books can be just as wonderful as well, though!
Hey Olivia! Thanks for the comment.
Yeah, as I said elsewhere in the post — obviously since I’m writing new books, I don’t wish that no new books be read. Otherwise I and everyone here would be out of a job!
The “certain magic” of old books isn’t their oldness as in some sort of nostalgia or simply a reverse agism against new books. It’s that we have no idea what new books will last and which ones will not. By and large, many of the books that were published around the time of what we consider classics has not lasted. Thousands of paperbacks are forgotten from memory, same with hardbacks, papyri, etc. What we remember, as a culture, are those which have been sifted by time.
Think of it like wine. The farther back you go in the vintage of a bordeaux, the less likely it is you’ll have a good wine. Most have been consumed. Some bottles have been broken. Some have been lost forever. Others taste worse as they get older or were made in bad years.
But the ones that linger, the ones that sommeliers call “a good year,” are those which have stood the test of time. They’re good not simply because they’re old, but because the age has thinned out the herd of competition and only the best things linger that long.
So too with books. Since I quoted it twice in comments above, I won’t quote it again, but the quote that wouldn’t fit into this piece argues that we should read those books which history has filtered for us in order to discern how to both write and read our new books and sift them until we discover the gold among them.
It is, in every way, a very new-book-affirming post in the end. The hope is that through the old books we might make new classics.
Does that make sense?