Dear readers, the blog will once again continue on the philosophical track; I got some good answers to my last post, so I'm hoping to hear some more on this note.
As my forewarning: as many of you probably know, I'm a pretty big reader. I always have been since I was young. I was that kid staying up late reading with a flashlight under covers, the one who took a book with him where ever he went, the one who belongs to the probably minority of our generation whose parents actually had to tell him to stop reading so much. I'm one of those people who rarely think a movie/tv adaptation is better than the source book, one of those who doesn't have "lol i h8 books" written on my "About me" section of Facebook. Thus I feel I have a pretty balanced perspective on the following discussion.
As all of you are sure I'm aware, The Hunger Games has been making a big splash as being the current hit book for children/young adults. This follows on the trail of the Twilight and Harry Potter series, the latter of which is often referred to as the series that "got a whole generation of children reading again."
I find this an interesting claim, because it highlights an underlying theme in modern American society. That is, specifically, that children aren't reading anymore, and this is a Bad Thing. Authors like Collins and Rowling are doing important work in getting children engaged in reading again.
This is a line of thought I sort of bought absentmindedly. Of course people should be reading, I thought, it's something I enjoy. It's always painted as a slightly more intellectual and satisfying past-time than, say, watching TV.
However, on thinking on this claim, I thought about a key difference in how Twilight is portrayed compared to these other two recent best-sellers. Namely, Twilight is as heavily criticized as it is publicized. I obviously don't have numbers or anything, but Twilight is heavily maligned as being poorly written, trashy, etc.; in essence, something that shouldn't be read because it's so bad.
This raises the obvious question: if we want children to read, shouldn't it not matter what gets to read, as long as the end result is children reading? The general feeling I seem to get based off the Internets is that no, the more important thing is that people are reading "good" literature.
The goal then kind of morphs from "we want literate children" into "we want children who engage in intellectual stimulating and quality material." These two are quite different claims, but I don't feel it's that far-fetched to state that while the literal message is the former, the true wish is the latter.
And here I reach my key point, and that is that the basis of the idea that we want children reading good literature is the old idea that books are inherently a superior medium for conveying ideas. After all, we take classes every year up through high school where we read and analyze books, presumably because they are rife with things to be analyzed, thought through, and discussed; in essence, the "superior medium."
I don't think this is true anymore.
I suspect that for our parent's generation, and more importantly for those who taught our parent's generation, this was absolutely true. If you wanted a deep story with complex patterns, the written word, from my understanding, was almost the sole source of such material.
But recent media seems to be proving that books do not have this solitary hold that our elders might believe. Shows like Boardwalk Empire and Generation Kill offer, in my mind, stories with just as many complex themes and moments worthy of discussion as any books. Movies like Citizen Kane and 2001: A Space Odyssey are often discussed in academic circles even today, and many movies released in the past 20 years probably have the potential to reach that kind of acclaim. Some movies, such as the Godfather, even trump their source story in terms of richness and complexity. Even videogames seem to be approaching that point, if they haven't already, as more and more titles become lauded for their artistic merit, in addition to any other quality we normally examine.
I think the problem is it's easy to forget, at our age, that film and television are very much a young medium compared to traditional prose. TV was even thought stagnant, but recent series (Game of Thrones, Boardwalk Empire again) are proving what a rich medium television can potentially be, making it rival and sometimes surpass its big-screen counterpart. The problem is, with literature, we focus on the positives, outstanding examples and ignore the very large amount of what is essentially trash literature. In contrast, every time someone argues for the quality of television, people are quick to bring up Jersey Shore or the Simpsons; for every Braid that is mentioned, someone brings up Grand Theft Auto. Of course if you focus so differently, you'll come to different conclusions.
I do think the change is slowly occurring in academia: film classes or classes with a film component are growing far more common, and I don't think we're that far from the same happening with television series, although videogames may still be much farther off (although I read recently about a class where the teacher required Portal). I do think also, though, that the change occurring in the general population is still very far off, as reflected in the large cognitive dissonance between the "children should read!" mentality and "Twilight bad!" thought process. I think instead of teaching out children "learn to enjoy reading," we should be instead be encouraging to seek out quality material that will challenge them, encourage them to think, and hopefully lead to deeper thought that lasts beyond the last page of the book, or last minute of the show. It's a subtle distinction, but in our age of mass media where the amount of television and games watched is constantly decried, it's an important one that needs to be considered.
I very much welcome any thoughts you had, as well as any critique in regards to the structure/clarity of the message: I wrote it in one go at 3:30am, so I have no idea how clear it actually is.
-HTMC
I think you make some good points in here. A few things come to mind.
ReplyDeleteThe first is that people, especially the cultural/academic/literary "powers that be" (so much as such individuals or collective constructs actually even exist), are highly and often thoughtlessly skeptical of media forms that add new elements that reduce the "purity" of the narrative form.
The idea is that books (works consisting entirely or almost entirely of text - not to be confused with the form of the codex, the bound book with pages we all know and some of us love) are the "purest" expression of the narrative. It's a tempting argument - after all, language is incalculably powerful and versatile. We often metaphorize writers as other artists - a skilled writer can "paint a scene" or "sculpt a figure" with his words. We're a species reliant on words, and we want to ascribe a sort of magic to them (and often do, in fantasy and science fiction). Further, we belong to a culture obsessed with the written word (which is how we conveniently ignore the fact that visual text is only one way to convey narrative - the overlooked behemoth of course being actual speech). And, there is some truth to this - literacy is key to success in our society. Text allows us to communicate with people from across space and time in a way that speech could not until very recent technological developments. Reading is powerful, and so is the act of writing - think of the weight we put on the hand-written signature, long into the era of digital text.
I'm getting slightly off-topic from my original point. For one example of the way that non-textual elements are cast aside or ignored in narrative media, look at comics. Comics are a highly derided form of media, because they have the gall to add *pictures* that pollute the "pure" narrative form of the novel. This is of course ridiculous, but it is essentially the thrust of the argument leveled against comics - images are for children, words are for adults. Images are simple, and cannot tell complex stories, words are sophisticated and communicate on a "higher" level. It's total crap, but it's highly pervasive crap.
Another example of this is Ebert's often-criticized claim that video games could never be art (to his credit, he quickly retracted this claim, reasonably admitting that he simply did not have the personal expertise to discuss this form of media meaningfully). His argument, though, was essentially the same as that leveled at television, film, and comics - a new element (in video games, player interaction / "choice") interferes with the "purity" of narrative form of older forms of media. The argument does not hold any real water, but, on the flip side, if you have little experience with a new form of media, I can see why it is easy to dismiss it on the grounds that any new features it possesses are merely "distractions" from the core narrative.
I would argue that these "distractions" are actually powerful artistic flourishes, and, what's more, they are present in text as well - they are just harder to see, because we are so indoctrinated to the idea that text is "pure" storytelling. But, really, how many "great" books (putting aside all questions of the subjectivity, objectivity, or quality of the literary canon) simply tell a story without adding their own flourishes. Powerful rhetoric, stirring metaphor, unexpected violations of the laws of spelling and grammar - these are the same sort of "distractions" as images, but, really, they're not distractions at all - they're an important part of what makes books great!
So yeah, I rambled a bit. It's a very interesting topic, though.
In b4 Twilight bashing thread derailment.
To further derail the topic: I find it interesting to note that the archetypal artful use of English is found in Shakespeare, which is intended to be performed on stage (a.k.a. movies before cameras). One of the aspects of a work that seems to make it "artistic" is that it is in some ways inscrutable, and in some ways definitely saying something more than what is there at face value. Interpreting the written word by performing it can be seen as tying it down and cutting out certain avenues of analysis (observing the particle's position, but missing out on its speed, so to speak). At the same time, translating the work from the written to the spoken word adds different layers of possible artistic quality: the interplay between sounds and visuals, how sound relates to what is being said (as in opera) etc. I would argue that while something in its "pure" form can certainly be artistic, adding bells and whistles to it (literal or otherwise) can open up myriad new possibilities for expression.
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