“What has been my prettiest contribution to the culture?” asked Kurt Vonnegut in his autobiography Palm Sunday. His answer? His master’s thesis in anthropology for the University of Chicago, “which was rejected because it was so simple and looked like too much fun.” The elegant simplicity and playfulness of Vonnegut’s idea is exactly its enduring appeal. The idea is so simple, in fact, that Vonnegut sums the whole thing up in one elegant sentence: “The fundamental idea is that stories have shapes which can be drawn on graph paper, and that the shape of a given society’s stories is at least as interesting as the shape of its pots or spearheads.” In 2011, we featured the video below of Vonnegut explaining his theory, “The Shapes of Stories.” We can add to the dry wit of his lesson the picto-infographic by graphic designer Maya Eilam above, which strikingly illustrates, with examples, the various story shapes Vonnegut described in his thesis. (Read a condensed version here.)
The presenter who introduces Vonnegut’s short lecture tells us that “his singular view of the world applies not just to his stories and characters but to some of his theories as well.” This I would affirm. When it comes to puzzling out the import of a story I’ve just read, the last person I usually turn to is the author. But when it comes to what fiction is and does in general, I want to hear it from writers of fiction. Some of the most enduring literary figures are expert writers on writing. Vonnegut, a master communicator, ranks very highly among them. Does it do him a disservice to condense his ideas into what look like high-res, low-readability workplace safety graphics? On the contrary, I think.
Though the design may be a little slick for Vonnegut’s unapologetically industrial approach, he’d have appreciated the slightly corny, slightly macabre boilerplate iconography. His work turns a suspicious eye on overcomplicated posturing and champions unsentimental, Midwestern directness. Vonnegut’s short, trade publication essay, “How to Write With Style,” is as succinct and practical a statement on the subject in existence. One will encounter no more ruthlessly efficient list than his “Eight Rules for Writing Fiction.” But it’s in his “Shapes of Stories” theory that I find the most insight into what fiction does, in brilliantly simple and funny ways that anyone can appreciate.
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2014.
Renaissance Europe admired ancient Rome, ancient Rome admired ancient Greece, and ancient Greece admired ancient Egypt. But the admiration could actually go both ways in that last case, since the two civilizations’ periods of existence overlapped. The Greeks made no secret of their regard for Egypt as a far deeper well of knowledge and wisdom (indeed, much of what we know about ancient Egypt today comes from Greek records), but archaeological evidence shows that the Egyptians, in turn, were hardly dismissive of Greek accomplishment. Many Hellenic texts have been discovered in Egyptian burial sites, but only recently has a Greek literary work turned up packaged with a mummy — and not just any literary work, but pages from Homer’s Iliad.
Unearthed from a 1,600-year-old Roman-era tomb in the Egyptian town of Al Bahnasa, the fragment contains lines from Book 2’s epic “catalogue of ships,” which lists all the vessels the Achaean army sends off to Troy. It dates from an era in ancient Egypt, centuries after the reign of the Greek-descended Cleopatra, when “Greek literary papyri may have functioned as a crucial cultural passport,” as the New York Times’ Franz Lidz writes.
“Being Hellenic connoted an exclusive social status and financial privilege — and had to be meticulously documented through genealogies going back across several centuries.” It’s possible that pages of the Iliad were assumed to act as a kind of Greek passport that would let the deceased bypass the trials of the underworld described in the Egyptian Book of the Dead.
So venerated was Homer’s work at this stage of ancient Egyptian history, in fact, that physicians also credited it with curative properties. “For a bed-bound patient shivering with malaria, the prescription was simple: Brace your head against a papyrus scroll of Book 4 to break the fever.” Whatever the effectiveness of the Iliad against infectious disease, or even to assure safe passage into the world beyond, its continued study around the world more than a millennium and a half after it was getting slipped into Egyptian tombs — and the better part of three millennia after its composition — suggests a kind of historical and cultural power not possessed by ordinary literature. If Christopher Nolan’s coming adaptation of the Odyssey happens to do well enough to get Hollywood back on its feet, perhaps we’ll have to give it to the ancient Egyptians and admit that Homer really does offer salvation after all.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletterBooks on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro.Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
When J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings books appeared in the mid-1950s, they were met with very mixed reviews, an unsurprising reception given that nothing like them had been written for adult readers since Edmund Spenser’s epic 16th century English poem The Faerie Queene, perhaps. At least, this was the contention of reviewer Richard Hughes, who went on to write that “for width of imagination,” The Lord of the Rings “almost beggars parallel.”
Scottish writer Naomi Mitchison did find a comparison: to Sir Thomas Malory, author of the 15th century Le Morte d’Arthur — hardly misplaced, given Tolkien’s day job as an Oxford don of English literature, but not the sort of thing that passed for contemporary writing in the 1950s, notwithstanding the serious appreciation of writers like W.H. Auden for Tolkien’s trilogy. “No previous writer,” the poet remarked in a New York Times review, “has, to my knowledge, created an imaginary world and a feigned history in such detail.”
Auden did find fault with Tolkien’s poetry, a fact upon which critic Edmund Wilson seized in his scathing 1956 Lord of the Rings review. “Mr. Auden is apparently quite insensitive — through lack of interest in the other department,” wrote Wilson, “to the fact that Tolkien’s prose is just as bad. Prose and verse are on the same level of professorial amateurishness.” Five years later, the Nobel prize jury would make the same judgement when they excluded Tolkien’s books from consideration. Tolkien’s prose, wrote jury member Anders Österling, “has not in any way measured up to storytelling of the highest quality.”
The note was discovered recently by Swedish journalist Andreas Ekström, who delved into the Nobel archive for 1961 and found that “the jury passed over names including Lawrence Durrell, Robert Frost, Graham Greene, E.M. Forster, and Tolkien to come up with their eventual winner, Yugoslavian writer Ivo Andrić,” as Alison Flood reports at The Guardian. (The Nobel archives are sealed until 50 years after the year the award is given.) Ekström has been reading through the archives “for the past five years or so,” he says, “and this was the first time I have seen Tolkien’s name among the suggested candidates.” His name appeared on the list chiefly through the machinations of his closest friend and chief supporter, C.S. Lewis.
Lewis, “also of Oxford,” Wilson sneered, “is able to top them all” in praise of Tolkien’s books. From the first appearance of his Middle Earth fantasy in The Hobbit, Lewis promised to “do all in my power to secure for Tolkien’s great book the recognition it deserves,” as he wrote in a 1953 letter to British publisher Stanley Unwin. In what might be considered an unethical promotion of his friend’s work today, Lewis responded tirelessly to critics of the trilogy, going so far, after the publication of The Two Towers, to pen an essay on the subject titled “The Dethronement of Power.” Here, Lewis explains the prolix quality of Tolkien’s prose — that which critics called “tedious” — as a narrative necessity: “I do not think he could have done it any other way.”
Tolkien’s biggest fan also urged readers to spend more time with the books and promised that the rewards would be great. In defense of the second work of the trilogy, he concluded, “the book is too original and too opulent for any final judgment on a first reading. But we know at once that it has done things to us. We are not quite the same men. And though we must ration ourselves in our rereadings, I have little doubt that the book will soon take its place among the indispensables.” And so has all of Tolkien’s work, becoming the literary standard by which high fantasy is measured, with or without a Nobel prize.
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2021.
The Simpsons has mocked or referenced literature over its many seasons, usually through a book Lisa was reading, or with guest appearances (e.g., Michael Chabon & Jonathan Franzen, Maya Angelou and Amy Tan). And it has referenced Edgar Allan Poe in both title (“The Tell-Tale Head” from the first season) and in passing (in “Lisa’s Rival” from 1994, the title character builds a diorama based on the same Poe tale.)
But on the first ever “Treehouse of Horror” from 1990—the Simpsons’ recurring Halloween episode—they adapted Poe’s “The Raven” more faithfully than any bit of lit found in any other episode. The poem, read by James Earl Jones, remains intact, more or less, but with Dan Castellaneta’s Homer Simpson providing the unnamed narrator’s voice. Marge makes an appearance as the long departed Lenore, with hair so tall it needs an extra canvas to contain it in portrait. Maggie and Lisa are the censer-swinging seraphim, and Bart is the annoying raven that drives Homer insane.
Castellaneta does a great job delivering Poe’s verse with conviction and humor, while keeping the character true to both Homer and Poe. It’s a balancing act harder than it sounds.
Suffice it to say that this foray into Poe was good enough for several teachers’ guides (including this one from The New York Times) to suggest using the video in class. (We’d love to hear about this if you were a teacher or student who experienced this.) And it’s the first and only time that Poe got co-writing credit on a Simpsons episode.
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2016.
Just days ago, Haruki Murakami’s Japanese publisher announced that his sixteenth novel will come out this summer. A brief section of The Tale of KAHO, translated into English by Philip Gabriel, appeared in the New Yorker in 2024. The full book will run to 352 pages, making it a fairly hefty work for a 77-year-old novelist who’s been at it for almost half a century now. Murakami’s unflagging productivity must owe something to his famously rigorous construction of his life around the twin poles of writing and running, two activities that demand long-term endurance. In this video, the YouTuber MariWriting attempts it herself: waking up every morning at 4:00 a.m., working on a single project for five to six hours, then running ten kilometers — or, in her case, at least getting out and walking for a while.
However indispensable Murakami may consider running to his writing life, he’s also employed other idiosyncratic and seemingly effective techniques of which others can make use. Take, for example, the way he got over the block stopping him from making progress on his first novel by writing its opening chapter in English, then translating it back into his native Japanese.
He also adheres to an editing process consisting of four spaced-out phases, each one focused on a different element of the manuscript. Things work a bit differently for Stephen King, who’s less than two years older than Murakami, but has published 67 novels, twelve story collections, and five books of nonfiction, among many other projects. Yet, as underscored in MariWriting’s video here, King, no less than Murakami, writes in a wholly routinized way that constitutes “self-hypnosis.”
Virginia Woolf probably got herself into a similar state now and again, but given that she worked on a weekly deadline as a book critic for some three decades, she no doubt had many occasions when she just had to put pen to paper no matter what the state of her mind. And put pen to paper she literally did: as MariWriting explains in this final video, Woolf wrote first in longhand (sometimes in ink of her favorite color, purple), then retyped the morning’s work after lunch. In addition to her fiction and literary journalism, she also made a post-tea daily habit of writing more freely in her diary, which let her work out her thinking about her “real” projects. We might compare the importance of Woolf’s diary to that of David Sedaris’ diary, the foundation of everything he’s published. But whether man or woman, Easterner or Westerner, novelist or otherwise, we writers can all take from Woolf’s example the necessity of a dedicated space: a room, that is, of one’s own.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletterBooks on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro.Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
We’ve lived but a few years so far into the age when artificial intelligence can produce convincing stories, songs, essays, poems, novels, and even films. For many of us, these recently implemented functions have already come to feel necessary in our daily life, but it may surprise us to consider how many people had long assumed that computers could already perform them. That belief surely owes in part to the roles played by effectively sentient machines in popular fictions since at least the early decades of the twentieth century. Revisiting George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, we even find a device very much like today’s large language models in use at the Ministry of Truth, the employer of protagonist Winston Smith.
Within the Ministry is “a whole chain of separate departments dealing with proletarian literature, music, drama, and entertainment generally. Here were produced rubbishy newspapers containing almost nothing except sport, crime and astrology, sensational five-cent novelettes, films oozing with sex, and sentimental songs which were composed entirely by mechanical means on a special kind of kaleidoscope known as a versificator.” Much later in the novel, Smith overhears a hit song composed on that very kaleidoscope, “without any human intervention whatever,” sung by a woman of this dystopian England’s lowest class, whose very baseness liberates it from the watchful eye that Big Brother’s vast surveillance system keeps on his ostensibly privileged Party members.
All the “proles” really require, in the view of the state, is the freedom to satisfy their vices and a steady stream of pacifying media. The extrusions of the versificator may now bring to mind the ever-increasing quantities of “AI slop,” often created with vanishingly small amounts of human intervention, whose potential to flood the internet has lately become a matter of public concern. What’s more chilling to consider is that such low-effort, high-volume content wouldn’t have attained such a presence if it weren’t genuinely popular. Much like the junk culture pumped out by the Ministry of Truth, AI slop reflects less the ill intent of (or at least neglect by) the powers that be than the undemanding nature of the public.
Perhaps we can provisionally chalk this one up in the “Orwell was right” column. It’s possible that, in light of real technological developments, even Isaac Asimov could be convinced to give it to him. Here on Open Culture, we recently featured Asimov’s critique of Nineteen Eighty-Four as a poor prophecy of the future, not least from a technological standpoint. That piece was written in 1980 at the very end of an “AI winter,” one of the fallow periods in artificial intelligence research. A boom was soon to come, but the truly astonishing developments wouldn’t happen until the twenty-twenties, about thirty years after Asimov’s death. When describing the versificator, Orwell was presumably extrapolating from the distracting, disposable entertainments of nineteen-forties England. Even if his readers couldn’t believe the idea of that sort of thing being created automatically, more than a few probably agreed with his diagnosis of its quality. Now, collective human intelligence may face its most formidable challenger, but individual human discernment has never been more valuable.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletterBooks on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro.Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
After his radical conversion to Christian anarchism, Leo Tolstoy adopted a deeply contrarian attitude. The vehemence of his attacks on the class and traditions that produced him were so vigorous that certain critics, now mostly obsolete, might call his struggle Oedipal. Tolstoy thoroughly opposed the patriarchal institutions he saw oppressing working people and constraining the spiritual life he embraced. He championed revolution, “a change of a people’s relation towards Power,” as he wrote in a 1907 pamphlet, “The Meaning of the Russian Revolution”: “Such a change is now taking place in Russia, and we, the whole Russian people, are accomplishing it.”
In that “we,” Tolstoy aligns himself with the Russian peasantry, as he does in other pamphlets like the 1909-10 journal, “Three Days in the Village.” These essays and others of the period rough out a political philosophy and cultural criticism, often aimed at affirming the ruddy moral health of the peasantry and pointing up the decadence of the aristocracy and its institutions. In keeping with the theme, one of Tolstoy’s pamphlets, a 1906 essay on Shakespeare, takes on that most hallowed of literary forefathers and expresses “my own long-established opinion about the works of Shakespeare, in direct opposition, as it is, to that established in all the whole European world.”
After a lengthy analysis of King Lear, Tolstoy concludes that the English playwright’s “works do not satisfy the demands of all art, and, besides this, their tendency is of the lowest and most immoral.” But how had all of the Western world been led to universally admire Shakespeare, a writer who “might have been whatever you like, but he was not an artist”? Through what Tolstoy calls an “epidemic suggestion” spread primarily by German professors in the late 18th century. In 21st-century parlance, we might say the Shakespeare-as-genius meme went viral.
Tolstoy also characterizes Shakespeare-veneration as a harmful cultural vaccination administered to everyone without their consent: “free-minded individuals, not inoculated with Shakespeare-worship, are no longer to be found in our Christian society,” he writes, “Every man of our society and time, from the first period of his conscious life, has been inoculated with the idea that Shakespeare is a genius, a poet, and a dramatist, and that all his writings are the height of perfection.”
In truth, Tolstoy proclaims, the venerated Bard is “an insignificant, inartistic writer…. The sooner people free themselves from the false glorification of Shakespeare, the better it will be.”
I have felt with… firm, indubitable conviction that the unquestionable glory of a great genius which Shakespeare enjoys, and which compels writers of our time to imitate him and readers and spectators to discover in him non-existent merits — thereby distorting their aesthetic and ethical understanding — is a great evil, as is every untruth.
What could have possessed the writer of such celebrated classics as War and Peace and Anna Karenina to so forcefully repudiate the author of King Lear? Forty years later, George Orwell responded to Tolstoy’s attack in an essay titled “Lear, Tolstoy and the Fool” (1947). His answer? Tolstoy’s objections “to the raggedness of Shakespeare’s plays, the irrelevancies, the incredible plots, the exaggerated language,” are at bottom an objection to Shakespeare’s earthy humanism, his “exuberance,” or—to use another psychoanalytic term—his jouissance. “Tolstoy,” writes Orwell, “is not simply trying to rob others of a pleasure he does not share. He is doing that, but his quarrel with Shakespeare goes further. It is the quarrel between the religious and the humanist attitudes towards life.”
Orwell grants that “much rubbish has been written about Shakespeare as a philosopher, as a psychologist, as a ‘great moral teacher’, and what-not.” In reality, he says, the playwright, was not “a systematic thinker,” nor do we even know “how much of the work attributed to him was actually written by him.” Nonetheless, he goes on to show the ways in which Tolstoy’s critical summary of Lear relies on highly biased language and misleading methods. Furthermore, Tolstoy “hardly deals with Shakespeare as a poet.”
But why, Orwell asks, does Tolstoy pick on Lear, specifically? Because of the character’s strong resemblance to Tolstoy himself. “Lear renounces his throne,” he writes, “but expects everyone to continue treating him as a king.”
But is it not also curiously similar to the history of Tolstoy himself? There is a general resemblance which one can hardly avoid seeing, because the most impressive event in Tolstoy’s life, as in Lear’s, was a huge and gratuitous act of renunciation. In his old age, he renounced his estate, his title and his copyrights, and made an attempt — a sincere attempt, though it was not successful — to escape from his privileged position and live the life of a peasant. But the deeper resemblance lies in the fact that Tolstoy, like Lear, acted on mistaken motives and failed to get the results he had hoped for. According to Tolstoy, the aim of every human being is happiness, and happiness can only be attained by doing the will of God. But doing the will of God means casting off all earthly pleasures and ambitions, and living only for others. Ultimately, therefore, Tolstoy renounced the world under the expectation that this would make him happier. But if there is one thing certain about his later years, it is that he was NOT happy.
Though Orwell doubts the Russian novelist was aware of it—or would have admitted it had anyone said so—his essay on Shakespeare seems to take the lessons of Lear quite personally. “Tolstoy was not a saint,” Orwell writes, “but he tried very hard to make himself into a saint, and the standards he applied to literature were other-worldly ones.” Thus, he could not stomach Shakespeare’s “considerable streak of worldliness” and “ordinary, belly-to-earth selfishness,” in part because he could not stomach these qualities in himself. It’s a common, sweeping, charge, that a critic’s judgment reflects much of their personal preoccupations and little of the work itself. Such psychologizing of a writer’s motives is often uncalled-for. But in this case, Orwell seems to have laid bare a genuinely personal psychological struggle in Tolstoy’s essay on Shakespeare, and perhaps put his finger on a source of Tolstoy’s violent reaction to King Lear in particular, which “points out the results of practicing self-denial for selfish reasons.”
Orwell draws an even larger point from the philosophical differences Tolstoy has with Shakespeare: “Ultimately it is the Christian attitude which is self-interested and hedonistic,” he writes, “since the aim is always to get away from the painful struggle of earthly life and find eternal peace in some kind of Heaven or Nirvana…. Often there is a seeming truce between the humanist and the religious believer, but in fact their attitudes cannot be reconciled: one must choose between this world and the next.” On this last point, no doubt, Tolstoy and Orwell would agree. In Orwell’s analysis, Tolstoy’s polemic against Shakespeare’s humanism further “sharpens the contradictions,” we might say, between the two attitudes, and between his own former humanism and the fervent, if unhappy, religiosity of his later years.
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2016.
Here in the twenty-twenties, a young reader first hearing of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four would hardly imagine it to be a work of science fiction. That wouldn’t have been the case in 1949, when the novel was first published, and when the eponymous year would have sounded like the distant future. Even as the actual nineteen-eighties came around, it still evoked visions of a techno-totalitarian dystopia ahead. “So thoroughly has 1984-ophobia penetrated the consciousness of many who have not read the book and have no notion of what it contains, that one wonders what will happen to us after 31 December 1984,” wrote Isaac Asimov in 1980. “When New Year’s Day of 1985 arrives and the United States is still in existence and facing very much the problems it faces today, how will we express our fears of whatever aspect of life fills us with apprehension?”
The occasion was one of a series of syndicated newspaper columns that Asimov seems to have published each new year. At the dawn of Nineteen Eighty-Four’s decade, the syndicate asked him to revisit Orwell’s novel, which had already been a common cultural reference for decades. As a work of science fiction (the genre for which his own name had practically come to stand), he finds it lacking, to say the least. “The London in which the story is placed is not so much moved thirty-five years forward in time, from 1949 to 1984, as it is moved a thousand miles east in space to Moscow,” he writes. Far from attempting to imagine the future, in Asimov’s view, Orwell simply converted the England he knew into a dreary Stalinist-type state. Apart from certain implausible surveillance systems, the setting is “incredibly old-fashioned when compared with the real world of the 1980s.”
Orwell doesn’t even bother to imagine any new vices: “His characters are all gin hounds and tobacco addicts,” Asimov writes, “and part of the horror of his picture of 1984 is his eloquent description of the low quality of the gin and tobacco.” That telling detail hints at one of Orwell’s major sources of inspiration: the British Ministry of Information, his wife’s employer during World War II, and the source of the material he broadcast to India while working at the BBC around the same time. The Ministry’s canteen, according to his letters, was not of the highest standard. What’s more, the 850-word “Basic English” that it insisted on using in its broadcasts bears more than a passing resemblance to Nineteen Eight-Four’s Newspeak, the pared-down language developed and mandated by the government in order to limit its citizens’ range of thought.
Asimov doesn’t buy that either. “There is no sign that such compressions of the language have ever weakened it as a mode of expression,” he writes. “As a matter of fact, political obfuscation has tended to use many words rather than few, long words rather than short, to extend rather than to reduce.” (This, of course, was something Orwell knew.) Whatever Nineteen Eighty-Four’s shortcomings as prophecy, sci-fi, or indeed literature, Asimov does credit Orwell with a certain geopolitical savvy. Its world-ruling trio of Oceania, Eurasia, and Eastasia “fits in, very roughly, with the three actual superpowers of the 1980s: the United States, the Soviet Union, and China.” Orwell knew, as many didn’t, that the latter two would not join forces, perhaps thanks to his own frustrating experience fighting for factionalism-prone left causes. But not even as future-oriented a mind as Asimov’s would have guessed that, just a few years later, the USSR would be out of the game — and a few decades later, the word Orwellian would be applied most often to China.
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletterBooks on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro.Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
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