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No matter what they may claim, even the most transgressive of writers don’t want to work in a total vacuum; they simply want to control the composition of their audience.
The fact that we know that Kafka’s brilliance was not recognized during his time on earth magnifies his existential despair in a way that words alone never could.
the only way to understand the deeper truth about anything complicated was through “shadow histories”: those underreported, countercultural chronicles that had been hidden by the conformist monoculture and emerge only in retrospect.
Over time, these shadow ideas—or at least the ones that proved factually irrefutable—slowly became the mainstream view. Howard Zinn’s 1980 depiction of how America was built in A People’s History of the United States is no longer a counterbalance to a conventional high school history text; in many cases, it is the text.
The reason shadow histories remained in the shadows lay in the centralization of information:
That era is now over. There is no centralized information, so every idea has the same potential for distribution and acceptance.
Competing modes of discourse no longer “compete.” They coexist. And the same thing is happening in the arts. The diverse literary canon Díaz imagines is not something that will be reengineered retroactively.
Contemporary Kafka will need to be a person so profoundly marginalized that almost no one currently views his or her marginalization as a viable talking point.
The uncomfortable, omnipresent reality within any conversation about representation is that the most underrepresented subcultures are the ones that don’t even enter into the conversation.
They are groups who are not seen as needing protection or support, which makes them vulnerable to ridicule and attack.
Imagine a certain kind of person or a political faction or a religious sect or a sexual orientation or a social group you have no ethical problem disliking,
Whatever you imagined is the potential identity of the Contemporary Kafka.
a single line in Kurt Vonnegut’s A Man Without a Country: “I think that novels that leave out technology misrepresent life as badly as Victorians misrepresented life by leaving out sex.”
There is a misguided belief—often promoted by creative writing programs—that producing fiction excessively tied to technology or popular culture cheapens the work and detracts from its value over time.
it’s impossible to generate deep verisimilitude without specificity.
if you hide the temporary world and the work somehow does beat the odds and become timeless, the temporary world you hid will become the only thing anyone cares about.
Jane Austen (as timeless a writer as there will ever be) wrote about courtship and matrimony in an essentially sexless universe. As a result, the unspoken sexual undercurrents are the main gravitational pull for modern readers.
Reading Pride and Prejudice requires the reader to unpack the sex—and if you love Austen, the unpacking process is a big part of what you love. A book becomes popular because of its text, but it’s the subtext that makes it live forever.
Take Beowulf: While there is a limited discussion to have about Grendel and his mother, there’s a limitless discussion to be had about ninth-century England, the nature and origin of storytelling, and how early Christians viewed heroism and damnation.
We must concede that important writing finds a way to accurately represent life, and that the writing that does so will consciously intermingle with the meaningful culture of the time (impermanent though it may be).
It can’t just be well written or smartly plotted; a well-written, smartly plotted book can absolutely be “great,” but—within the context of this debate—“great” is not enough.
It has to offer a window into a world that can no longer be accessed, insulated by a sense that this particular work is the best way to do so.
The aforementioned “unpacking” of literature isn’t just something people enjoy. It’s an essential part of canonization (and not just in literature, but in every form of art).
Historically awesome art always means something different from what it superficially appears to suggest—and
When any novel is rediscovered and culturally elevated, part of the process is creative: The adoptive generation needs to be able to decide for themselves what the deeper theme is, and it needs to be something that wasn’t widely recognized by the preceding generation.
So this, it seems, is the key for authors who want to live forever: You need to write about important things without actually writing about them.
The reason so many well-considered ideas appear laughable in retrospect is that people involuntarily assume that whatever we believe and prioritize now will continue to be believed and prioritized later, even though that almost never happens. It’s a mistake that never stops being made.
There is a finite threshold to how much you can debate the possibility that we don’t know who somebody is, but there’s unlimited bandwidth for speculation over which nondescript contemporary artist is more important than we realize.
I’ve been a paid critic for enough years to know my profession regularly overrates many, many things by automatically classifying them as potentially underrated.
Even the lesser books from these writers are historically important, because—once you’re defined as great13—failures become biographically instructive.
Unrated books are a neutral charge. The weight of history is not there. They have the ability to embody whatever people want, without the complication of reinvention.
This acceleration is real, and it will be harder and harder for future generations to relate to “old” books in the way they were originally intended.
Instead of fitting the present (past) into the future, we will jam the present (future) into the present (past).18 And it won’t be the first time this has been done.
History is a creative process (or as Napoleon Bonaparte once said, “a set of lies agreed upon”). The world happens as it happens, but we construct what we remember and what we forget. And people will eventually do that to us, too.
The critic Richard Meltzer allegedly claimed that rock was already dead in 1968. And he was wrong to the same degree that he was right.
But rock can (and will) recede, almost to the level of nihility. And for the purposes of this book, that’s the same as dying.
The symbolic value of rock is conflict-based. It emerged as a by-product of the post–World War II invention of the teenager.
There was virtually no way a man born in 1920 would (or could) share the same musical taste as his son born in 1955, even if they had identical personalities. That inherent dissonance gave rock music a distinctive, non-musical importance for a very long time. But that period is over.
“Rock” can now signify anything, so it really signifies nothing; it’s more present, but less essential.
By now, it’s almost impossible to create a new rock song that doesn’t vaguely resemble an old rock song.
So what we have is a youth-oriented musical genre that (a) isn’t symbolically important, (b) lacks creative potentiality, and (c) has no specific tie to young people.
As the timeline moves forward, tangential artists in any genre fade from the collective radar, until only one person remains; the significance of that individual is then exaggerated, until the genre and the person become interchangeable.
Right now, rock music still projects the illusion of a universe containing multitudes. But it won’t seem that way in three hundred years, because nothing in the culture ever does. It will eventually be explained by one artist.
The end result is a broad definition of rock music that everyone roughly agrees upon and a working definition of rock music that is almost entirely individualized.
Since rock, pop, and rap are so closely tied to youth culture, there’s an undying belief that young people are the only ones who can really know what’s good.
“Carey’s point was that there is no such thing as absolute, timeless, eternal artistic values that will inevitably rise and endure.
Quite often, rock music is used in conjunction with something else that’s better suited to stand the test of time, inadvertently elevating a song that would have been otherwise lost.
“Don’t Stop Believin’” will exist as long as The Sopranos is considered significant.
Adams is asserting that the things people like about rock are less predictable than the things people like about classical music, and that this divergence increases the possibility that rock will matter for non-musical reasons.
This, curiously, is a big part of what makes rock music compelling: There’s no consistent criterion for what is (or isn’t) good.
