As someone who is really into history, “epic fantasy” is an annoying category and also impossible to write
A typical characteristic of “epic” fantasy is that the story of the world and the story of the character(s) fall into step to some extent; the characters are involved in world-shaping events and as those events reach a “climax,” so does the characters’ story.
It’s to the extent that writing advice on fantasy often completely failsto separate the “character’s personal journey” plot thread from “world scale rising and falling of empires” plot thread
“epic” fantasy often gives its protagonists a god’s-eye view of the world that people living through actual historical events virtually never have. Such heroes are actively involved in world events while understanding the impact of the events and the significance of their actions, and their role is recognized and remembered by others. Even just the fact that they get to influence “world” events at more than one specific point feels weird.
heroes of “epic fantasy” are often given the power to view events from the point of view of a foot soldier, a common person, a political leader, and a military analyst, all as those events happen. The more I read historical documents where people describe their experiences of world events, the more jarringly inauthentic this becomes
In high school, writing an epic fantasy story, I had the simple realization that “soldier fighting in a war” and “leader of a nation during that war” were two completely different perspectives that are hard to capture in the same story, let alone the same character,and none of the fantasy writingadvice I’d encountered acknowledged this at all.
I also realized that “soldier in war” and “political leader” and other roles epic fantasy heroes often vaguely filled weren’t just generic roles I could plug any character into, and instead would almost completely define the type of story and character I was writing.
imho, books that pull this off well are the ones that don’t even try giving the reader the full, “historical” understanding of the events. the Lord of the Rings actually is a good example bc the hobbits are kind of just There, and there’s a lot going on that they aren’t involved with and don’t understand, and that we as the readers don’t understand.
another good example is Steven Erikson’s Malazan series, which I think is a difficult read partly because there are huge world events happening but they’re told through a bunch of perspectives of various characters, and it’s difficult to piece together a coherent picture of what exactly is happening in the Big Scale and what it means because none of the characters fully understand it.
I can’t even describe how much it would have helped me to hear “the major events happening in your fantasy world don’t have to fall into step with your character’s personal development” as a baby writer. So now I am saying it. the “climax” of the war or whatever and the “climax” of the story don’t necessarily have to line up and in fact probably won’t. You can kill a major political leader mid-story instead of making sure it happens at the end. the ends of wars and regimes don’t necessarily align with people’s personal conflicts
It seems like the random soldier’s climax would be killing, say, the officer who ordered the burning of his village. Killing the leader would be almost irrelevant, because the leader might not even know his village ever existed.
I’m historically ignorant, but if you go back to, what, the 15th century or earlier aren’t most kings and princes also battlefield commanders?
They are but their fighting experience is still very different - many wouldn’t fight at all, others ‘fight’ but with an entourage around them protecting them, and even then they are fighting on horseback, with the best armor and all. Some commanders definitely had the full experience - the “Black Prince” Edward of Woodstock during the 100 Years War would be an example, but I think it would be a minority.
And this is also an exceptional time - Roman commanders did not fight at all, for example. I do agree that the idea “rulers didn’t fight on the front lines” has many caveats, but I think its true for the majority of cases of non-tribal warfare.
I think it’s pretty easy to put both a leader and an ordinary soldier in the same story; just make them friends or relatives, or the friends and relatives of the same third character!
Like, it is absolutely possible to eg. write a story about WW2 featuring “a foot soldier, a common person, a political leader, and a military analyst, all as those events happen“ by having like, the political leader, his BFF from school the military analyst, their common person assistant, the assistant’s brother the common soldier. It’s just, you’d need to do that super intentionally, and it would define your entire story that you were swapping between these perspectives and tying them together and interweaving them.
At that point you’re just, like, not writing fantasy. You’re writing a modernist novel in the style of the 20th century, that perhaps happens to take place in a fantasy world
I mean, maybe? Cryptonomicon is almost exactly the book I just described, and is notable for being a half historical, half contemporary novel by an author previously known for science fiction that was widely read by science fiction and fantasy fans.
And while there are criticism to be made for K. J. Parker’s Engineer trilogy, another example of a published work extremely close to the description, this one about a non-supernatural alternative world, it’s fantasy, and stands or falls as fantasy.
Like, fantasy is a setting and tropes, not a particular writing style, as much as soon literary approaches have been more common than others in the genre.
robin hobb’s books kind of do this? the first trilogy focuses on a royal bastard who is trained as an assassin/ spy, being a bastard allows him to grow up feeling out of place dealing with the upper class and so he makes friends with lower class people and servants, him being a spy lets him mingle with common folk when under cover but also look at some birdseye view stuff. his uncle is the crown prince and directly doing heroic stuff but the protagonist still has reason to follow a lot of it.
then the second trilogy switches viewpoint character to a different country and a commoner who stumbles on some world changing stuff, and i think a bunch of different viewpoint characters, before coming back in the third trilogy to the first viewpoint character who then starts to learn the consequences.
don’t know if it counts as epic fantasy though.
oh yeah and theres a song of ice and fire of course which just has a ton of viewpoint characters switching every chapter.
‘Fantasy’ is more or less just a category of settings, but arguably ‘epic fantasy’ is the story structure that embodies the fantasy of an individual’s arc and that of their whole world actually falling into step with each other like that. Although yeah it also gets used for things that just have big scale plots.
At any rate whether or not something is categorisable as anything is orthogonal to ‘is it good?’
Yeah, like, it is totally possible to write large-scale stories set in fantasy worlds in ways that are grounded and “historically” plausible. And for the most part those aren’t epic fantasy, because epic fantasy is largely defined by, well, “the story of the world and the story of the characters falling into step”.
A lot of the responses in this thread are about how you can do large-scale fantasy without making it epic fantasy. And that’s very legitimate. But you can’t do epic fantasy without making it into epic fantasy; and epic fantasy is kind of intrinsically personalized and historically implausible.
And that’s why I read epic fantasy and not realistic historical fiction, you know? I’m always slightly disappointed by a story in which no protagonist ever achieves any sort of near-divine apotheosis. The moment of exulting in transcendent power is part of what I’m reading for.
And I appreciate OPs realization that they don’t have to write epic fantasy, but I object to the characterization as “annoying and also impossible to write”. It’s very possible as long as you don’t value the same things that OP values, which I don’t. If a book is plausibly and historically grounded with characters who only have the sort of reasonable experiences they could have, and only a limited influence on the course of history, I will put it down because it’s not what I want to read.
I think this article is relevant to a lot of the very stupid, wanky debate that I keep seeing going around my dash about TEENS SELF-DIAGNOSING WITH DID. It is a funny quirky article written by a literary fiction author about how one of her characters got into her head during the pandemic and started dispensing Wry Life Advice, disappearing as soon as the stressful situation ended.
there’s this bit that I think@pervocracy wrote, about how if your culture only had two words for ‘fear’, and one of them was “mild nervousness about passing a test” and the other was “the bone-chilling horror of being chased by zombies in a graveyard”, that keeps you from talking about a whole range of human experiences. if you have crippling social anxiety, or you have an uncommon phobia, or anykind of fear that isn’t 'mild nerves’ or 'IMPENDING PHYSICAL DOOM’? you’re stuck choosing between two words that do not suit your experience to describe what’s going on.
I think “the experience of having an entity in your head that is Not You” is actually remarkablycommon-waymore than 1%- especially among writers/artists/actors/fandom folks, and especially among anyone who’s going through a severe physical or mental stress. an entity like this can exist in varying degrees of independence-from-you and interest-in-the-outside-world. Sometimes this entity is a comforting presence, other times it’s a malevolent one. some disappear as quickly as they appear, and others stick with you for your whole life.
A lot of historical cultures had a framework to explain this kind of thing. “This is your daemon.” “This is your guardian angel.” “You’re hearing spirits; you’re possessed.” Mainstream Western culture rejected these explanations, and in some cases, rightfully fucking so. But we don’t really have a framework to replacethem.
So if you areexperiencing this phenomenon, because of how our society has decided to handle it, you really only have two words for it- “imaginary friend”, or “DID alter”. in the vast majority of cases neither of these words are appropriate, in the same way that severe social anxiety isn’t Test Jitters or IMMINENT FEAR OF YOUR LIFE.*
there is a widerange of human experiences here being collapsed into 2 points. but people who are having that experience are going to need the words to describe it. if you’re a published litfic author and the experience is over, you can write an article about it and just come off as a Little Quirky. if you’re a teenager on TikTok, the experience is ongoing, and the only word you’re being offered is DID? you’re gonna take that word.
we need more words for this range of experiences. we need more people to be able to talk about this range of experiences- including DID, which is a very differentexperience from Brain Octopus up there- without getting tarred as Bad Psycho Crazy. we need to stop arguing whether or not you can onlyhave this state of being from Severe Enough Trauma; we need to be able to accept it as a natural part of how humans are without judgement or shame.
*(Notsaying that having alters is the same thing as ZOMBIES IN A GRAVEYARD; it’s the Wide Range Of Intensity And Experiences that I’m comparing.)
This seems like an amazingly fertile ground for the whole Typical Mind Fallacy thing. I still cannot bring myself to alieve that anyone has ever actually experienced the sort of thing described in that article.
Or, like, I know writers talk about their characters having opinions, or being stubborn, or telling them what they’re going to do, but that’s obviously just a metaphor, right? You can’t figure out how to justify something in the plot and you describe that as your character having opinions.
I think it had never occurred to me before ten minutes ago that people, like, actually meant that.
(For me, thinking about how other people are going to feel about things, or interpret things, is pretty much always an active effort. It’s done via abstract reasoning and so almost always exists at, like, a formal remove. And that probably contributes.)
Wait, wait wait wait.
When people have intrusive thoughts, do you hear these as actual, like, verbal suggestions or interjections? Is that what you’re talking about?
I’d always assumed “intrusive thoughts” were like “I have an urge to do this thing I know is dumb”. Do people hear them as words? Do you hear them as words as if they were said by someone else?
I think this article is relevant to a lot of the very stupid, wanky debate that I keep seeing going around my dash about TEENS SELF-DIAGNOSING WITH DID. It is a funny quirky article written by a literary fiction author about how one of her characters got into her head during the pandemic and started dispensing Wry Life Advice, disappearing as soon as the stressful situation ended.
there’s this bit that I think@pervocracy wrote, about how if your culture only had two words for ‘fear’, and one of them was “mild nervousness about passing a test” and the other was “the bone-chilling horror of being chased by zombies in a graveyard”, that keeps you from talking about a whole range of human experiences. if you have crippling social anxiety, or you have an uncommon phobia, or anykind of fear that isn’t 'mild nerves’ or 'IMPENDING PHYSICAL DOOM’? you’re stuck choosing between two words that do not suit your experience to describe what’s going on.
I think “the experience of having an entity in your head that is Not You” is actually remarkablycommon-waymore than 1%- especially among writers/artists/actors/fandom folks, and especially among anyone who’s going through a severe physical or mental stress. an entity like this can exist in varying degrees of independence-from-you and interest-in-the-outside-world. Sometimes this entity is a comforting presence, other times it’s a malevolent one. some disappear as quickly as they appear, and others stick with you for your whole life.
A lot of historical cultures had a framework to explain this kind of thing. “This is your daemon.” “This is your guardian angel.” “You’re hearing spirits; you’re possessed.” Mainstream Western culture rejected these explanations, and in some cases, rightfully fucking so. But we don’t really have a framework to replacethem.
So if you areexperiencing this phenomenon, because of how our society has decided to handle it, you really only have two words for it- “imaginary friend”, or “DID alter”. in the vast majority of cases neither of these words are appropriate, in the same way that severe social anxiety isn’t Test Jitters or IMMINENT FEAR OF YOUR LIFE.*
there is a widerange of human experiences here being collapsed into 2 points. but people who are having that experience are going to need the words to describe it. if you’re a published litfic author and the experience is over, you can write an article about it and just come off as a Little Quirky. if you’re a teenager on TikTok, the experience is ongoing, and the only word you’re being offered is DID? you’re gonna take that word.
we need more words for this range of experiences. we need more people to be able to talk about this range of experiences- including DID, which is a very differentexperience from Brain Octopus up there- without getting tarred as Bad Psycho Crazy. we need to stop arguing whether or not you can onlyhave this state of being from Severe Enough Trauma; we need to be able to accept it as a natural part of how humans are without judgement or shame.
*(Notsaying that having alters is the same thing as ZOMBIES IN A GRAVEYARD; it’s the Wide Range Of Intensity And Experiences that I’m comparing.)
This seems like an amazingly fertile ground for the whole Typical Mind Fallacy thing. I still cannot bring myself to alieve that anyone has ever actually experienced the sort of thing described in that article.
Or, like, I know writers talk about their characters having opinions, or being stubborn, or telling them what they’re going to do, but that’s obviously just a metaphor, right? You can’t figure out how to justify something in the plot and you describe that as your character having opinions.
I think it had never occurred to me before ten minutes ago that people, like, actually meant that.
(For me, thinking about how other people are going to feel about things, or interpret things, is pretty much always an active effort. It’s done via abstract reasoning and so almost always exists at, like, a formal remove. And that probably contributes.)
Questionable Content is my go-to example of creative digital entropy. JJ at some point got tired of making a romance-inflected slice of life comic about hipsters, and wanted to make a zany queer rainbow robot porny hijinks comic. Both of those are fine enough genres, of course. These are, however, not the same comic! But QC, as one of the first webcomics to succeed on the market, has a locked in audience + revenue stream. Starting a new comic would have been risky, would have jeopardized that readership, especially due to how digital distribution works with link-habits reigning over all - a bit differently from print distribution, where you have to make the choice to buy each book sequel or no. So JJ just transformed QC into a robot hijinks comic, without admitting that is what happened. Which means its stuffed with all these at-this-point irrelevant characters (simply delete Martin from the story, as neither a queer nor a robot he has nothing to do) and canonical detritus that conflict with its current stated goal, and its a very awkward fit.
Maybe a better author could have done it, but no reason to make things harder on yourself.
I don’t agree with this at all… yeah Marten has become irrelevant, but Faye has become the center of the story. The whole thing still kind of makes sense as a continuous story about Faye moving to a new state, getting over her trauma, and getting back into sculpture which she had dropped after college. Angus tries to gether to move to NYC to pursue sculpture, but she says she’s fine at the cafe, she just imagnes that life continuing, but then she’s borken out of that pattern by getting fired. Forced to actually think about her future, she considers drawing on the welding skills from her sculpture, and finds an unusual use for them. And thus the setting shifts from Coffee of Doom to Union Robotics, and instead of banter at a cafe we now have a robot medical procedural, where the action starts with someone walking in asking for a new butt or something.
Like, it’s definitely a shift… sort of a spinoff sequel. Like Angel relative to Buffy, when he starts his own office in LA. But it makes perfect sense as a development of her character, if anything too perfect, tying up of the loose ends of her life more neatly than real people can hope for.
Maybe it would have made sense if he did just openly and completely drop Marten, Coffee of Doom, and maybe even the anthroPC’s rather than scaling them up. But having it feature Faye and have roots in the previous setting IMO makes perfect sense. Faye is a great character in this setting. Clinton obv is a robot-setting character, but Faye IMO is the kind of person that has to be there, sort of as an opposite to everything shitty about Clinton, she has a lot less to say about robots and a lot more to actually provide for them, she’s a type of human you’d want to explore in the gay robot world
also as i said before this old guest strip turned out to be weirdly appropriate
Totally fair if it works for some people! This is media takes so its all subjective, I am absolutely on board that train and have neither the interest or ability to tell someone they shouldn’t enjoy it. I would also agree some of Faye’s arcs have been the most coherent of the direction shift, its not a total clusterfuck or anything.
But I think I disagree that Faye is anywhere near the comic’s focus - like okay, I am sorry to do this to you, but Faye opened up Union Robotics…in 2017. It was almost five years ago. Since then I would say that Faye has had very little arc progression - not zero, but not much - and I don’t think she appears in even close to 25% of the strips (at least as a “focus” character). If you forced me to choose a main character for QC right now I would say its Roko (it obviously does not have a main character, but I think she eeks out the most focus-strips) and she is a character extremely disconnected from the old cast.
Apropos of nothing, this the current print merch being advertised on the front page of the comic:
I actually agree with the Buffy/Angel take - Faye as Angel moving to Cyber-LA to start up a robotics fixer joint would have been a pretty good way to spin off a new comic! its essentially what he did…without actually doing it.
But also I will be more straightforward about another angle, since I get that it might be a bit harsh but its dishonest for me to not say it. Beyond the awkward transitions is the awkward implications of a comic that, previously, had queer & straight people, but has proceeded to declare all straight people to be boring and strip them of relevance. A comic that began as a Cast Of Queers is absolutely fine, and you would never question it - but QC did not begin that way! So reading it is to see through this uneasy haze at an author, probably unwittingly, declaring a certain kind of person too dull to matter. A sequel would have gone very far to alleviate this issue.
(Also lol I HAVE to assume the author of that guest comic knew JJ well, the coincidence is too great for it not to based on existing interests)
Can you give a definition of the concept of “creative digital entropy“?
But QC, as one of the first webcomics to succeed on the market, has a locked in audience + revenue stream.
I think this severely understates the problem: QC is not the first webcomic to succeed, but one of the first of the second wave, and one of the last ones before the medium professionalised. These days you’d have to have much higher production values or bet on virality of individual strips. QC still used the old model of a web site with an archive with banner ads, unlike webcomicname or PDL or shencomix, and the price of banner ads has dropped massively, so the advertising market has pulled up the ladder after QC.
I think this post is missing an important data point: Alice Grove.
In September 2014, Jeph Jacques launched a dramatic transhumanist science fiction webcomic called Alice Grove. Around that time, Angus was looking at moving to New York, it seemed like Faye might go with him, and a bunch of other character arcs were heading towards climaxes or conclusions. At the time, it looked to me very much like Jacques was trying to wrap up QC and move to a new project.
And then…that didn’t work. QC has a robust audience; I loved Alice Grove but I don’t think it got anywhere near the attention. So Jacques did in fact finish the Alice Grove story, but as far as I know he hasn’t done any more work in that universe, or anything else like that.
The Faye/Angus story took an abrupt turn away from “conclusion” into the alcoholism/Union Robotics thing. The other characters mostly got their character arc climaxes he’d been building towards, and he began introducing entirely new casts of characters, who were mostly robots or robot-adjacent, on the SF end of the QC universe.
So I think what happened is that Jacques wanted to wrap up his original story, and start a new story focused on SF themes. But he found that commercially he couldn’t make a living by wrapping up his old comic and starting a new comic. Instead he just pivoted his old comic to his new interest.
A term I’ve been using to describe a certain type of climactic fight sequence, the type where it’s entirely mediated by force powers, or a wand-to-want beam, or a close grapple, or, is “pooping contest”.
There are either one or two things that tell you how well someone is Winning. The definite one is “who is grimacing hardest at the other” as indicator of effort. And sometimes you get the other one: how far from one side to the other is the progress bar special effect.
Some examples (spoilers follow):
See the final fight between Harry and Voldemort (same for Dumbledore and Grindlewald in the stupid Fantastic Beasts movie) (Timestamp 1:15):
Now, here’s how it happens in the book:
A red-glow burst suddenly across the enchanted sky above them as an edge of dazzling sun appeared over the sill of the nearest window. The light hit both of their faces at the same time, so that Voldemort’s was suddenly a flaming blur. Harry heard the high voice shriek as he too yelled his best hope to the heavens, pointing Draco’s wand:
“Avada Kedavra!”
“Expelliarmus!”
The bang was like a cannon blast, and the golden flames that erupted between them, at the dead center of the circle they had been treading, marked the point where the spells collided. Harry saw Voldemort’s green jet meet his own spell, saw the Elder Wand fly high, dark against the sunrise, spinning across the enchanted ceiling like the head of Nagini, spinning through the air toward the master it would not kill, who had come to take full possession of it at last. And Harry, with the unerring skill of the Seeker, caught the wand in his free hand as Voldemort fell backward, arms splayed, the slit pupils of the scarlet eyes rolling upward. Tom Riddle hit the floor with a mundane finality, his body feeble and shrunken, the white hands empty, the snakelike face vacant and unknowing. Voldemort was dead, killed by his own rebounding curse, and Harry stood with two wands in his hand, staring down at his enemy’s shell.
The final confrontation was (a) in front of everyone [note 1], and (b) over in a single moment. This was not a contest of wills. The fight was already over, and Voldemort just didn’t know it yet.
…
For a slightly less silly version, there’s the final final confrontation between Aang and Ozai (Timestamp 11:05). The only way you know who’s winning is by the progression of the colors. And the music.
…
Or every time you have the final part of the dagger with the two fighters facing each other forcing the dagger slowly back and forth making faces.
…
Sometimes you get it in books as well, like the final fight between Egwene and Mesaana in TAR. Literally nothing happens “on screen” except that Egwene convinces herself that she is stronger, she is better, and then she wins. This would probably be captured in a movie with some sort of energy beam going between them, because otherwise nothing happens but Concentratin’ Hard.
…
I think this trend is terrible, lazy visual filmmaking. There is basically no tension left in these confrontations - you know who’s going to win. There is no sign of skill or cleverness, only one of raw, invisible strength. It robs you of the chance to see a wizard duel, or one party to truly triumph through anything other than the invisible strength. And it robs the actors of much of their chance to showcase anything other than a strained expression on their face.
This ties into the problem of a lot of Aerial Battles as the climactic final scene. A bunch of people fly around punching each other into buildings, with no grounding (heh) and no sense of skill or strength, and then one gets knocked to the ground, and then they fight it out there (and also, usually, have a strength-based pooping contest).
There are plenty of examples of this being done well. I won’t show clips for all of them, but a completely non-exhaustive lists follows:
All the major confrontations in the Princess Bride. Westley vs Inigo ends in a battle of skill where Westley comes out on top. “End it quickly” “I would sooner destroy a stained glass window as an artist like yourself”. Westley vs Humperdinck isn’t even a fight. And Inigo vs the Six Fingered Man ends with dialogue, a quick strike, and a fantastic sendoff: “I want my father back, you son of a bitch.” Even the most obvious “test of strength” of Westley vs Fezzik isn’t really that. It’s Westley outsmarting and out DEXing Fezzik and simply holding on.
Gunfights in old Westerns. Swordfights in old Samurai films. There is a lot of tension, little movements, focus, camera work. And then it just ends with a single strike. This one comes closest, but there is no expression of Raw Strength, just focus and skill. And you can absolutely see who wins and why.
The Matrix Revolutions has a sky fight, and then a brief amount of pooping contest, but it gets subverted when Neo surrenders and lets go.
Such as Dumbledore vs Voldemort whichdoesn’t end in one of those fights, and is easily the best fight in the movie series.
But all of these are way harder than showing a fight with a manly intensity-based progress bar.
It’s mentioned in the Youtube “wizard duels” bit, even though it violates one of his three rules; but your list makes me think of the Merlin/Madam Mim duel in The Sword in The Stone. (Mim sets the rules: transform into animals, no vegetables or minerals; no make-believe things like pink dragons; no disappearing.)
I’ve also seen pooping contest fights in novels, where they’re even less interesting than in movies. You have to describe the progress bar. (At least the Wheel of Time one involves introspection and a character moment; the one in the Deryni Chronicles it just turns out that the protagonist is stronger than the antagonist and so his progress bar beats hers.)
wrt. hating books bc you had to read them in school: I don’t think I have had the specific experience of “I was obligated to read this so I hate it” but I did have a certain frustration with not ever receiving a good answer for why the canon of “great literature” is what it is
like, a skepticism that the pieces we were reading actually held any qualities that made them more suited for study/analysis than the things I happened to be reading/watching for fun at the time
I think that the “canon” and “books suited for study/analysis” are often two different sets of books and that they work at cross-purposes to each other. I enjoyed The Great Gatsby but based on the title alone I probably never would have read it on my own. But I also think it’s weird when people call it a “classic” novel? It’s a good book to teach for high school because it hits you over the head with the symbolism - it’s not very subtle! Two characters quite literally explain the T.J. Eckleburg billboard metaphor at one point. Not that subtlety is a requirement for greatness, but Gatsbyjust seems kinda kitschy?
But something that’s actually a “timeless classic” like Shakespeare or Ancient Greek Tragedy is usually much harder to analyze and not great for teaching high schoolers. The more transparent aesthetic value of those don’t translate well to a curriculum though.
this is really interesting! shakespeare’s body of work was exactly what I had in mind when I was thinking of things where it’s not obvious to me why they have the cultural status they do
like, my experience of shakepeare (having admittedly read more of his writing than watched, but not being completely foreign to performances of it either) is overwhelmingly “this is nice - even moving at parts - but I have no sense of why he is considered like, notably great or timeless compared to a bunch of other literature that I find considerably more affecting and that is not generally considered to have the same literary status”
(and I think it’s that exact experience: the dialogue of “this is transparently great” -> “…actually, I don’t see why it’s so great” that kind of stokes my skepticism toward the whole canon)
I do think that skepticism is warranted here actually - I think with Shakespeare it’s still not so obvious that anyone who reads it will necessarily see what it’s about - there is something that needs to be taught about how to appreciate a great work of literature but I’m skeptical that it translates well to a classroom setting. But that’s not to say that it’s impossible or that you won’t get it if you didn’t understand it the first time! I certainly didn’t get it until I read more of Shakespeare on my own.
I think one of the distinct reasons for Shakespeare’s “greatness” is the way he writes his characters - compared to others of the time and even long afterward, he writes much deeper, more multi-dimensional characters and goes much more into detail on their motivations - they act and think more like real people do rather than as archetypes - Hamlet or Caesar or even Richard III are hard to reduce to a single “type of guy” that wasn’t based off of them to begin with.
But also Shakespeare’s work isn’t confined to his time and place as easily as other authors - Gatsbywas far more recent and even set in America, but I needed far more cultural background and footnotes to understand that book than I did any of Shakespeare’s plays. The fact that something written five hundred years ago can be moving at all to people today is also fairly remarkable in itself - most work that is that old is not easy to empathize with!
There’s also a tension between empathy and aesthetic value though - if the metaphors are too ham-fisted, or we can identify too strongly with the characters, then the appreciation of the work for how humanizing it is can turn into a dry moral lesson about “sympathizing with others” and ruin the whole point of why it was worth reading in the first place. Shakespeare sits at a weird spot I think where the aesthetic value is just obscured enough that you still need to know how to look for it - I think most people who find it on their own only “get it” by reading on their own and finding a character they were already predisposed to empathize with. But it is a sort of gnosticism where you have to have already seen it for yourself to fully understand it I think.
There’s also a tension between empathy and aesthetic value though - if the metaphors are too ham-fisted, or we can identify too strongly with the characters, then the appreciation of the work for how humanizing it is can turn into a dry moral lesson about “sympathizing with others”
Very much so! I think I am bothered by people trying to give a final justification for art, particularly literature, in terms of “well, it gives you practice being empathetic.” Certainly this is something which bother me about what Carroll has said (though he does admittedly artworks have a whole bunch of purposes) though I generally think he’s one of the great aestheticians of the 21st Century. But there is something quite dull about that when it’s deployed for any particular artwork.
Shakespeare sits at a weird spot I think where the aesthetic value is just obscured enough that you still need to know how to look for it
I actually don’t think I agree that the aesthetic value of Shakespeare is so obscured. He’s a beautiful writer. His verse is playful, lyrical and charming. The metrical schemes are very satisfying.The subject matter is defamiliarized by unusual descriptions which call attention both to the reconsidered subject matter and to the textual choices themselves, which is especially complementary to such a formal style.
Remorse from power. And, to speak truth of Caesar, I have not known when his affections swayed More than his reason. But ’tis a common proof That lowliness is young ambition’s ladder, Whereto the climber-upward turns his face; But, when he once attains the upmost round, He then unto the ladder turns his back, Looks in the clouds, scorning the base degrees By which he did ascend. So Caesar may. Then, lest he may, prevent. And since the quarrel Will bear no color for the thing he is, Fashion it thus: that what he is, augmented, Would run to these and these extremities. And therefore think him as a serpent’s egg, Which, hatched, would, as his kind, grow mischievous, And kill him in the shell.
Like this is wonderful writing!
I actually don’t think I agree that the aesthetic value of Shakespeare is so obscured.
given that my original point was, “having read shakespeare, I don’t find its aesthetic value very transparent,” I think this is a weak counterpoint!
like, pointing out the lyricism, the unusual descriptions of things, the confluence of the unusual descriptions with the unusual prosody - I those are really good answer to the question of “how to look for the aesthetic value” in his works
but that doesn’t make the question itself superfluous!
Look you’re not meant to read Shakespeare
In high school I didn’t really dislike Shakespeare, but I never really cared for it.
Then I saw Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Globe.
I tend to think classics are classics because they were influential and help you draw a line of progression in a given genre or medium or school of thought. They’re not necessarily the best or most affecting, but they’re also usually extremely influential for a reason. Even were Shakespeare not as good as he is, nearly every piece of English literature after him would still be in dialogue with him in some way. And, obviously, it’s important context for understanding what comes after Shakespeare.
Yeah.
There are three good reasons to read (or watch) Shakespeare. The first is that Shakespeare is good and enjoyable and I like watching good things.
The second is that lots of other people have seen Shakespeare. And there’s a bad form of this which is just empty signaling, “you have to know Shakespeare to be educated because everyone educated knows Shakespeare”.
But less ouroborotically, other people are going to reference Shakespeare, and expect you to get those references. This is basically your point. If you don’t know who Romeo and Juliet are, and haven’t heard the “To Be or Not To Be” speech, you will go around being confused by a bunch of other stuff. And other references are less totally fucking central to understanding Western literature first.
And third, a lot of people have argued about Shakespeare in the past. This is related to the second point, but not quite the same. If you want to do a deep dive into some piece of literature, Shakespeare will hold up to that just because there’s a tremendous amount of discourse (both scholarly and casual) based on it. Familiarity with Shakespeare lets you participate in this four-century-long discourse, which is sometimes pretty damn interesting in its own right.
It’s like how it’s nice to watch the same TV show everyone else is watching, except over a much longer time scale.
83% of what I read in Proust (now ⅓ of way through second of six volumes) is extraordinary, luminous, brilliant beyond belief. The other 17% makes me want to scream. (Related: God help anyone who tries to read these after me. Unless they’re down with either slogging through or trying to ignore almost an entire book’s worth of marginalia—variously snarky and amazed—on top of the original six.) I mean, yeah. A product of his times and all—and as well, obliquely reflecting the role, real enough, of #classprivilege in early women’s writing—but still. EFFF YOU TOO, BUDDY. #proust #marcelproust #writers #writing “#hobbies” #womenwriters #feminism #literarycriticism #litcrit #amreading #readersofinstagram https://www.instagram.com/p/BucOzOMnMF7/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=i717yn2i2lk6
