It just occurred to me that it's something of a historical accident that the mystery developed as late as it did. There's something very Enlightenment about the classic whodunit, and something Romantic about the hardboiled style. (And note to Seawasp: the Chinese did it first.)
I think it's a tie between romance and science fiction. Neither genre's business model is particularly good at eternal verities.
I was going to select "Romance," but I went for the "explain in comments (serious)" option instead. A lot of what makes so many older romance novels... er... "unsuitable" is because of changing social and cultural values, and thank god for it.
What constitutes a sympathetic protagonist has changed quite a bit. I'm not sure that's inherent in the genre, though, so much as the culture.
That said, while I have read romance novels, I haven't read a lot of them; it wouldn't be hard to find someone with a more informed opinion.
I would say it's a combination of science fiction and humor, honestly. Science fiction is usually set in a future that is extremely mutable, while words in books aren't. And humor is so often very topical, very set to a particular timeframe.
Austen and the Brontes are readable for pretty much exactly the same reasons Shogun was a hit. They are visages into deeply alien societies, Science fiction for the masses with the respectability of being considered classics added on top. As romances, they are not so hot.
Yep. Jim Lileks (before I stopped reading him) used to spend considerable time dissecting the older Warner Bros cartoons and pointing out the cultural references that made them funny 'back in the day', but which are of null value today. Personally, I think that's why they are so often seen as nothing but mindless violence today, because we have no connection or context for virtually everything else in the cartoon.
I strongly disagree, though perhaps would agree with a certain type of science fiction. Travelogues describing the way the planets were or the way the future was, yes. Hard science fiction, YES.
But Sheckley? "Mindswap", "Dimension of Miracles", not to mention any number of his short stories? Or Dick, or Delaney, or Kornbluth, etc. Those authors, and others like them, have produced classic after classic in the English lit sense of the word(possibly because some of them modelled their output on various classics, c.f. "The Count of Monte Christo" or "The Magic Mountain".)
People seem to be fixing on sf, maybe because the future catches up with "predictions", but I can't really buy that. People went on reading stuff like Wells and early Heinlein (or Shelly, for that matter) long after it was clear that their future was not our future.
My choice is comedy, because comedy depends on social cues that will read very differently across the generations, and because the comic response is fairly limited in its nature. A drama may be emotionally powerful for a number of reasons, but something is either funny or it's not.
(I presume you mean Stephen King, not a much-less-famous Steven.)
I'm not exactly sure what you mean by "specialized in fleeting ... references." He's still writing, for one thing. He writes (or wrote, when I still read him regularly) books that are very of their time, rather than being set in some generic Present Day, which actually makes them age a lot more gracefully, because you can treat them as recent historical fiction rather than wait-that's-not-right. He also writes plenty of out-and-out fantasy, eg Eye of the Dragon, Wizard and Glass, etc.
Just about all of the problems that plague other genres can also crop up in science fiction, which has its own problems. Romances may be overtaken by developments in gender politics, but the science fiction of the 1950s was not notable for being advanced; when I read Asimov stories from that period I'm as likely to be struck by the antiquated gender roles as by the antiquated ideas about computers.
I'd argue that *on average* comedy tends to deal with topical themes that stop being funny once they are no longer alive in the society.
Great satire remains funny even after everybody's forgotten the source (see: COLD COMFORT FARM). Just good satire fades with the thing being satirized.
Yeah. I just recently finished watching Have I Got News For You, which is some of the most topical comedy you can find (since it's about the last week).
Plenty of it is still hilarious even 19 years out of date. (And plenty of it falls flat, but it probably wasn't that funny in the first place)
Several years ago, I remember seeing some Thirties WB cartoon that was basically nothing but a big party attended by caricatures of then-current celebrities, who said their trademark catchphrases. I could only identify about a third of them. I remember thinking that that whole style of cartoon was extinct and then realizing that a lot of "Animaniacs" segments from the 1990s were really in about the same vein.
To me, Shakespeare's comedies are only mildly funny (if at all) today, but the tragedies are still extremely powerful. I don't know if Shakespeare was just better at tragedy, or if it's because comedy ages worse over 400 years.
Also Law & Order CI (at least the ones that don't throw out a red herring in the teaser).
Also the episode of Criminal Minds which opened with Jason Alexander's serial killer introducing himself and confessing to a kidnapping/impending mass murder.
Well, there is a lot of the dirty humor and snarky contemporary commentary which doesn't translate well. But the humor can come through with a little tweaking of of acting and setting.
Many years ago now I saw a Stratford production of The Taming of the Shrew. Bianca was played as a blonde bimbo, complete with Marilyn Monroe white dress and hairstyle, and the funniest scene had her tied to a chair while Kate started pulling the legs off her favourite teddy bear, each limb removal accompanied by a dismayed shriek from Bianca.
I believe I've seen that one Bogey - Peter Lorre, etc? I remember (or I remember that I remember) getting all of the personalities; which is sad because the only way to do that is to be familiar with the old movies. And if the only way to do that is to specifically order them through netflix or some other service . . .
Of course, most people today can't decipher the iconography of religously-themed paintings from hundreds of years ago. I'd wager that few feel that lack. Any more than my daughter feels the lack of not knowing the details of really great bands like Talking Heads :-)
By 1923 they had developed a functioning steam-powered Robert Benchley, and had a prototype electric S J Perelman capable of working for nearly 80 minutes between radio tubes burning out.
The original Flintstones cartoons are like that as well. Hum Along With Herman, Stony Curtis, "Bug Music," J. Bondrock spy movies amd on and on. Some is more subtle, like a couple of episodes that have more general parodies of hard boiled private detectives and so on.
R. Austin Freeman (of Dr. Thorndyke fame) wrote a number of these "inverted detective stories."
I suppose the original one is Oedipus' investigation into the murder of Roger Ackroyd Laius. (Or maybe Cain's murder of Abel, where God is the detective.)
I'm going to dissent. The difference between ancient and modern comedy is mainly one of cultural translation, not historical change. You can read jokes in the Philogelos whose form wouldn't be out of place in the Borscht Belt. The big difference is, they have slightly different comic types. The skolastikos, for instance, is usually translated as an "egghead" or an "intellectual". But from context, it often seems to mean "absurdly literal-minded", in that computer programmer social cognitive deficit sort of way.
Theophrastus, in addition to his botany, wrote some great little character type sketches. Some of the types are immediately recognizable. Others, you can see all the elements, but the culture is different enough that you don't know why together they form a whole. Commedia dell'arte is the same way. It's not the difference in time that makes them opaque, but the difference in culture.
I don't see how you can completely separate time and culture, so I'm going to mildly dissent with you. However, you do bring up a good point and I thank you.
but the Noir literary genre could pretty much be defined as "hardboiled fiction from the point of view of the criminal, after he's done the deed, yet not before he kills a few more hookers", and even the Marlowe stories tended to start from the "we know who did it, the matter is understanding what has actually been done and gathering evidence to prove it" position.
Yakko packs away the snacks, while the Clinton plays the sax, it's Animaniacs!
Dot: [referring to David Geffen, Jeffrey Katzenberg, and Steven Spielberg] Who are those guys? Yakko: The stuff that DreamWorks are made of!
Dot: I found Prince! [She is carrying Prince, the pop musician] Yakko: No, no, no. Fingerprints! Dot: [Considers a moment] I don't think so. [She throws Prince out of the window]
I have trouble with the "on average" part, sorry. I want to go into the conditions that make each genre age well or not, and compare and contrast them, and come up with a complicated algorithm that predicts for each genre what elements, in what combinations, will make the story age well or badly.
But when I go to think which genre has more essential elements that make the stories vulnerable to bad aging, I get antsy and want to change the subject.
And there you have the reason why I haven't been so vocal lately. This always happens to me nowadays.
I think lots of women dig Austen as romance. I know that I think Persuasion is much more romantic than any contemporary romance novel.
And I don't really see the problem, either: the Austen heroes love the heroines for their spunkiness, independent thought, and wish to help others, not for their giant breasts or whatever.
The crime fiction of the 1950s, for instance, does produce a lot of "the criminal's POV" story, but if noir includes writers like Hammett and Chandler, I'd have to disagree with your generalization. Sometimes Marlowe knows who committed the murder (or other crime) because he witneses it; otherwise he has to figure it out, and sometimes he doesn't. Chandler famously remarked that even he didn't know who killed the chauffeur in The Big Sleep. Hammett (in The Thin Man) does make a big deal about the difference between knowing someone committed the crime and proving it, but that's at the end of the book, not the beginning.
And Ray Bradbury once explicitely said: "I actually write about my contemporaries, just dress them in galactic clothes."
But to me that is the definition of MEDIOCRE (at best) science fiction -- I much prefer exploration of deeply alien societies (as in, human or human derived, but very different from us), and better yet, sensible exploration of how technological change changes society.
Like the one or two 1940's books which (fairly accurately) predicted how widespread reliable contraceptives would change gender roles. And they were written when not only very little research was going on in that field, but ALL contraceptives were actually illegal in several states.
I've mentioned this before but Harrison Brown's non-fiction book The Challenge of Man's Future does a fair job of sussing out how oral contraceptives would have to work, using sources mainly prior to 1950. I was surprised to find that bit when I reread it.
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I think it's a tie between romance and science fiction. Neither genre's business model is particularly good at eternal verities.
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What constitutes a sympathetic protagonist has changed quite a bit. I'm not sure that's inherent in the genre, though, so much as the culture.
That said, while I have read romance novels, I haven't read a lot of them; it wouldn't be hard to find someone with a more informed opinion.
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(Anonymous) 2009-11-21 05:37 pm (UTC)(link)no subject
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(Anonymous) 2009-11-21 06:08 pm (UTC)(link)But Sheckley? "Mindswap", "Dimension of Miracles", not to mention any number of his short stories? Or Dick, or Delaney, or Kornbluth, etc. Those authors, and others like them, have produced classic after classic in the English lit sense of the word(possibly because some of them modelled their output on various classics, c.f. "The Count of Monte Christo" or "The Magic Mountain".)
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My choice is comedy, because comedy depends on social cues that will read very differently across the generations, and because the comic response is fairly limited in its nature. A drama may be emotionally powerful for a number of reasons, but something is either funny or it's not.
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I'm not exactly sure what you mean by "specialized in fleeting ... references." He's still writing, for one thing. He writes (or wrote, when I still read him regularly) books that are very of their time, rather than being set in some generic Present Day, which actually makes them age a lot more gracefully, because you can treat them as recent historical fiction rather than wait-that's-not-right. He also writes plenty of out-and-out fantasy, eg Eye of the Dragon, Wizard and Glass, etc.
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* see preface of 'Celebrated Cases of Judge Dee', Dover 1976 edition.
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Great satire remains funny even after everybody's forgotten the source (see: COLD COMFORT FARM). Just good satire fades with the thing being satirized.
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(Anonymous) 2009-11-21 08:13 pm (UTC)(link)I think Jacques Barzun argued that Zadig (http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/18972) was the original (western) proto-detective story.
Cosma
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Plenty of it is still hilarious even 19 years out of date. (And plenty of it falls flat, but it probably wasn't that funny in the first place)
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He wasn't the only one of course; rereading "The Vault of the Beast" today and it's clearly "1940 but with space travel".
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Sorry, I just wanted to get there first. Also, caffeine.
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Also the episode of Criminal Minds which opened with Jason Alexander's serial killer introducing himself and confessing to a kidnapping/impending mass murder.
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Many years ago now I saw a Stratford production of The Taming of the Shrew. Bianca was played as a blonde bimbo, complete with Marilyn Monroe white dress and hairstyle, and the funniest scene had her tied to a chair while Kate started pulling the legs off her favourite teddy bear, each limb removal accompanied by a dismayed shriek from Bianca.
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Of course, most people today can't decipher the iconography of religously-themed paintings from hundreds of years ago. I'd wager that few feel that lack. Any more than my daughter feels the lack of not knowing the details of really great bands like Talking Heads :-)
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By 1923 they had developed a functioning steam-powered Robert Benchley, and had a prototype electric S J Perelman capable of working for nearly 80 minutes between radio tubes burning out.
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I suppose the original one is Oedipus' investigation into the murder of
Roger AckroydLaius. (Or maybe Cain's murder of Abel, where God is the detective.)no subject
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Theophrastus, in addition to his botany, wrote some great little character type sketches. Some of the types are immediately recognizable. Others, you can see all the elements, but the culture is different enough that you don't know why together they form a whole. Commedia dell'arte is the same way. It's not the difference in time that makes them opaque, but the difference in culture.
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Dot: [referring to David Geffen, Jeffrey Katzenberg, and Steven Spielberg] Who are those guys?
Yakko: The stuff that DreamWorks are made of!
Dot: I found Prince! [She is carrying Prince, the pop musician]
Yakko: No, no, no. Fingerprints!
Dot: [Considers a moment] I don't think so. [She throws Prince out of the window]
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But when I go to think which genre has more essential elements that make the stories vulnerable to bad aging, I get antsy and want to change the subject.
And there you have the reason why I haven't been so vocal lately. This always happens to me nowadays.
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And I don't really see the problem, either: the Austen heroes love the heroines for their spunkiness, independent thought, and wish to help others, not for their giant breasts or whatever.
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But to me that is the definition of MEDIOCRE (at best) science fiction -- I much prefer exploration of deeply alien societies (as in, human or human derived, but very different from us), and better yet, sensible exploration of how technological change changes society.
Like the one or two 1940's books which (fairly accurately) predicted how widespread reliable contraceptives would change gender roles. And they were written when not only very little research was going on in that field, but ALL contraceptives were actually illegal in several states.
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