Some books were considered "bad literature" when they first came out but are now often described as the best books ever written. What are your favourite examples of this and why do you think the views and opinions of the book(s) shifted to become what they are today?
Posted Apr 24, 2017, 10:15 PM UTC
When something is ahead of its time, it won't be recognized as quality until the time is right.
90% of everything is crap. Most things are initially read with this in mind, especially if they haven't passed through someone else's filter that you trust to recommend good things, be that a friend, critic of just the publisher.
People whose job it is to act as the first or even second line of review are liable to be much less charitable with their time and will expect more things that they pick up to be crap. Why spend time mulling over a work or looking for subtleties that better than 90% of the time simply aren't there if you don't noticed them on your first pass?
So it's very easy for a work with depth to get overlooked early on and dismissed as having little or no artistic merit simply because it didn't get into the hands of someone who would appreciate whatever it was trying to do in that initial round.
There are two ways that a work gets over that hurdle. Either someone who does appreciate it eventually stumbles upon it later on and "rediscovers" it. Or else it winds up being really popular with the masses and gets analyzed and re-analyzed by fans until eventually people grow up with it being a highly studied work of high literature instead of a piece of pop culture.
For an example of the former, see Moby Dick. For the latter, obviously, see Shakespeare.
I think 'bad books' are not exactly a 'bad' book, as much as they're rather 'bad' like 'bard words'. Many of the classics you know about today were banned because of racism. Since we have another way of thinking about topics like these today, we got mire liberal on what books to ban.
"Bad" literature never becomes good, sometimes it becomes popular, but it's never good. As for the high comment here on Gaddis - sometimes artists are more sensitive to observing the aspects and changes on society. It can take many years afterwards for society to look upon itself and realize how well they actually resonate with the works of art.
I think that sometimes when new books come out they challenge the current beliefs and main genres which can take time before they are fully appreciated. Change always brings resistance, just like novelty.
Human brains seem to be programmed this way for survival reasons, at least in a certain sense. Past = good (because we survived this far), but novelty = danger (because you never know how it will play out). But with that being said, most novel research and discoveries are embraced by people once they see how useful they are.
Societies change, values and norms change, and what was once considered poor becomes "great." It amazes me how "good literature is objective" people fail to see this.
The Recognitions, by William Gaddis is a good example of this. So much so, that there is an entire book on the subject. My theory is that critics at the time of this (and a lot of other) book's release were rushed to get reviews out, and missed a lot of it due to that. The types of books this happens to (Under the Volcano is another good one) tend to be the longer, more complex literary pieces, the kind where you really need to take your time reading them. Critics rushed through them, disregarded them, and everyone listened to them. And then, inevitably, someone who's opinion is trusted will finally read it the way it was meant to be read and write a glowing review, and then the popularity will skyrocket. It's a strange phenomena. Against the Day, by Thomas Pynchon got similar treatment. Every critic wanted to be the first to review it, and then tried to read it in a week or so, and most complained about it being too complex and hard to follow (of course), which I didn't find to be true at all, because I let each sentence soak in, and read the book on its terms.
Hope that makes sense.
One of the few copies of Recognitions' first edition sold was bought by someone known as Jack Green, who figured that "even a bad Joyce was worth reading". Anyway, it so resonated that he quit his job, became a freelance copyeditor (later presenting Gaddis w/ a list of corrections, as tribute), and ran 5 issues of a self published magazine called Fire the Bastards, about how the reviewers of The Recognitions were bastards, and should be fired. Later in life he threatened to kill Gaddis annotator Steven Moore for dedicating a book of criticism to him, he believed sarcastically.
Gaddis' style is masterful but I wouldn't necessarily say that it's illegitimate criticism to note that The Recognitions can sometimes be too hard to follow. Not everyone values nested complexity and fractured, reference-laden narratives higher than more straightforward, linear writing. So, in my eyes the criticism that a book like that is too hard to follow, doesn't become less true over the years. Writing this dense and unconventional just automatically leads to a very narrow and specific audience - it's not something like Impressionism, where images that most people find to be of immediate beauty today were seen as ugly merely because they deviated from cultural and artistic norms. And it's not really surprising if this is reflected in the critical response to it. I sometimes actually find it more surprising how a book like Gravity's Rainbow found pretty immediate success