This article reminds me of a few thoughts I’m still fleshing out. More and more, I suspect that a precondition for recovering a “center” is recovering a sense of place. A few months ago, I made the decision to put all “write-to-market” efforts on hold and start coming up with fun stories I could share with my kids. Along the way, I ‘m also making them available to readers of my Substack. My approach is based on the classic “fairy tale” as I understand it. I’m starting to suspect that this is, in fact, the most organic form of storytelling. The first such tales would have been stories that rural villagers would create and pass on to both their neighbors and children, with consistent motifs and details emerging through successive detail and adjustment. The very act of doing so served as a communal glue that bound communities together.
I would also say the experience of telling a story to children, in particular, is invaluable. You discover firsthand what works and what doesn’t. A child’s mind may draw different boundaries than an adult’s, but within those boundaries, it rejects the nonsensical and artificial. You quickly discover which types of stories work and which ones never will. Ultimately, over generations, this provides the material for more complex and systematized narratives—ultimately, High Art is built on a foundation of Folk Art.
I think you may be right about fairy tales being the most organic form of story. We tend to think of them as a kind of fantasy today, but I suspect that that is to apply a far too rationalist/materialist frame to them. They developed in a world that seemed far more animated by spirits than we see it as today. The fairies of fairy tales were a way of giving faces to the unseen world, and thus a way of telling stories about all the unseen aspects of life.
When I won second place at the 1981 Florida NHS convention for short story, I was very much in that literary corner. But times change, tastes change, authors change. I don't live there anymore, although its roots will always be visible to those who look. And like you say, every corner and every taste is valid. An author should write what's in their heart, what they would enjoy reading rather than trying to impress or imitate or guess at the tastes of others, then go find readers who feel the same way. And if your corner is small, large, or not a corner at all, that's secondary. Writing is a calling but publishing is a business.
I agree that writing is a calling, and publishing is a business. Too many writers seem to believe that publishing is or should be run by a cabal of blind philanthropists. It's not.
I'm more in the middle on the write your heart vs write to market issue. And I wouldn't say that every taste is valid. There is such a thing as poor taste, and the cynical cultivation of poor taste is one of the business tactics of modern publishing. I think it is fair to say that taste can vary, but that it should be a response to the true properties of true things. There are many true things, and one may certainly develop a particular taste for one true thing in particular. But there are also many false things, and a taste for false things is poor taste.
Which is where I think the writer's responsibility comes in. A writer has an obligation to the reader to show them true things and to show them the falsity of false things. Since poor taste abounds, writing to market can mean writing false things. But writing your heart may mean writing false things also, if you don't examine your own taste rigorously. And the obligation to show the reader true things means that there is an obligation to communicate those true things to the reader in a way that they can receive them. Thus the writer should always have the reader firmly in mind as they work, but they should never pander to them or indulge their defects of taste or their taste for false things.
Wonderful post. I wonder what you think of historical cases of marginal groups writing for themselves becoming successful in the mainstream? I'm thinking in particular of the modernist poets that all published each other during T.S. Eliot's time and, of course, the Inklings. What can we take from their examples if we are interested in re-invigorating a common literature culture, do you think?
Hmmm. Can we consider the modernist poets mainstream? Can we consider poetry itself mainstream anymore? I would suggest that mainstream verse is all in the hands of the songwriters now. (My father, who taught university-level Shakespeare courses, once remarked that the lyrics to The Streets of Laredo were one of the finest American poems.)
I would say that the last truly mainstream poets, in the sense of poetry being a mainstream artform, were probably Tennyson and Kipling, though there may well be later examples I haven't thought of.
Personally, I think the reason that poetry ceased to be a mainstream art was that poets stopped telling stories. At least, that distinction defines the boundaries of my interest in poetry. Yeats "The Stolen Child," Browning's "Soliloquy in a Spanish Cloister" and Keats' "St. Agnes Eve" are among my favorites.
Tolkien is an interesting case. As I have said before, I regard LOTR as unique in the sense that it created a genre it does not belong to. LOTR is not a fantasy, but an fairytale, as are the Chronicles of Narnia. In that sense, they were both mainstream works in their day. Growing up in the 60s in England, my siblings and I certainly didn't think the Narnia books were anything different from the other books we were reading. It was America that made them into something strange.
On that subject it is worth noting that having grown up in the particular time and place that I did, and read all the books we read then, I immediately recognized Harry Potter as a mashup of the previous hundred years of English Children's literature. I know that JK Rowling must have read all the same books that I and my sisters read as kids. The boarding school story was a staple in those days. It is to the English imagination what the one room school house is to the American imagination. I read all the Jennings and Derbyshire books. My sister read the Chalet School series. And we both read E. Nesbit and Peter Pan. So to us, Narnia, and Harry Potter, were as mainstream as they come.
I agree that poetry is not mainstream now. But I think you could argue that it was in the 20-40’s. And yes, your point about Rowling is well made. It’s also a function of us being in a post-modernist mode. Creativity by definition (in such a mode) is pastiche. Not originality. I hope we grow out of that stage soon. Maybe then the mainstream culture can start coming back.
Yes, I would not claim to be able to chart the decline of poetry as a popular artform with any accuracy. Such boundaries are usually very fuzzy in any case.
This article reminds me of a few thoughts I’m still fleshing out. More and more, I suspect that a precondition for recovering a “center” is recovering a sense of place. A few months ago, I made the decision to put all “write-to-market” efforts on hold and start coming up with fun stories I could share with my kids. Along the way, I ‘m also making them available to readers of my Substack. My approach is based on the classic “fairy tale” as I understand it. I’m starting to suspect that this is, in fact, the most organic form of storytelling. The first such tales would have been stories that rural villagers would create and pass on to both their neighbors and children, with consistent motifs and details emerging through successive detail and adjustment. The very act of doing so served as a communal glue that bound communities together.
I would also say the experience of telling a story to children, in particular, is invaluable. You discover firsthand what works and what doesn’t. A child’s mind may draw different boundaries than an adult’s, but within those boundaries, it rejects the nonsensical and artificial. You quickly discover which types of stories work and which ones never will. Ultimately, over generations, this provides the material for more complex and systematized narratives—ultimately, High Art is built on a foundation of Folk Art.
I think you may be right about fairy tales being the most organic form of story. We tend to think of them as a kind of fantasy today, but I suspect that that is to apply a far too rationalist/materialist frame to them. They developed in a world that seemed far more animated by spirits than we see it as today. The fairies of fairy tales were a way of giving faces to the unseen world, and thus a way of telling stories about all the unseen aspects of life.
When I won second place at the 1981 Florida NHS convention for short story, I was very much in that literary corner. But times change, tastes change, authors change. I don't live there anymore, although its roots will always be visible to those who look. And like you say, every corner and every taste is valid. An author should write what's in their heart, what they would enjoy reading rather than trying to impress or imitate or guess at the tastes of others, then go find readers who feel the same way. And if your corner is small, large, or not a corner at all, that's secondary. Writing is a calling but publishing is a business.
I agree that writing is a calling, and publishing is a business. Too many writers seem to believe that publishing is or should be run by a cabal of blind philanthropists. It's not.
I'm more in the middle on the write your heart vs write to market issue. And I wouldn't say that every taste is valid. There is such a thing as poor taste, and the cynical cultivation of poor taste is one of the business tactics of modern publishing. I think it is fair to say that taste can vary, but that it should be a response to the true properties of true things. There are many true things, and one may certainly develop a particular taste for one true thing in particular. But there are also many false things, and a taste for false things is poor taste.
Which is where I think the writer's responsibility comes in. A writer has an obligation to the reader to show them true things and to show them the falsity of false things. Since poor taste abounds, writing to market can mean writing false things. But writing your heart may mean writing false things also, if you don't examine your own taste rigorously. And the obligation to show the reader true things means that there is an obligation to communicate those true things to the reader in a way that they can receive them. Thus the writer should always have the reader firmly in mind as they work, but they should never pander to them or indulge their defects of taste or their taste for false things.
Very insightful thoughts about the trope-ification of modern literature!
Wonderful post. I wonder what you think of historical cases of marginal groups writing for themselves becoming successful in the mainstream? I'm thinking in particular of the modernist poets that all published each other during T.S. Eliot's time and, of course, the Inklings. What can we take from their examples if we are interested in re-invigorating a common literature culture, do you think?
Hmmm. Can we consider the modernist poets mainstream? Can we consider poetry itself mainstream anymore? I would suggest that mainstream verse is all in the hands of the songwriters now. (My father, who taught university-level Shakespeare courses, once remarked that the lyrics to The Streets of Laredo were one of the finest American poems.)
I would say that the last truly mainstream poets, in the sense of poetry being a mainstream artform, were probably Tennyson and Kipling, though there may well be later examples I haven't thought of.
Personally, I think the reason that poetry ceased to be a mainstream art was that poets stopped telling stories. At least, that distinction defines the boundaries of my interest in poetry. Yeats "The Stolen Child," Browning's "Soliloquy in a Spanish Cloister" and Keats' "St. Agnes Eve" are among my favorites.
Tolkien is an interesting case. As I have said before, I regard LOTR as unique in the sense that it created a genre it does not belong to. LOTR is not a fantasy, but an fairytale, as are the Chronicles of Narnia. In that sense, they were both mainstream works in their day. Growing up in the 60s in England, my siblings and I certainly didn't think the Narnia books were anything different from the other books we were reading. It was America that made them into something strange.
On that subject it is worth noting that having grown up in the particular time and place that I did, and read all the books we read then, I immediately recognized Harry Potter as a mashup of the previous hundred years of English Children's literature. I know that JK Rowling must have read all the same books that I and my sisters read as kids. The boarding school story was a staple in those days. It is to the English imagination what the one room school house is to the American imagination. I read all the Jennings and Derbyshire books. My sister read the Chalet School series. And we both read E. Nesbit and Peter Pan. So to us, Narnia, and Harry Potter, were as mainstream as they come.
I agree that poetry is not mainstream now. But I think you could argue that it was in the 20-40’s. And yes, your point about Rowling is well made. It’s also a function of us being in a post-modernist mode. Creativity by definition (in such a mode) is pastiche. Not originality. I hope we grow out of that stage soon. Maybe then the mainstream culture can start coming back.
Yes, I would not claim to be able to chart the decline of poetry as a popular artform with any accuracy. Such boundaries are usually very fuzzy in any case.