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I'm having an interesting sort of roundtable discussion via email with my sister and one of my brothers, about reading and literature and the state thereof and where it's going. This made me look up my previous post about narrative and the increasing complexity of literature, where I noticed that ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
syphilis_jane made an observation I didn't catch the first time around about how Homer's epics were shaped by their medium, which was originally oral.
She's right, of course... I was approaching the subject primarily from the viewpoint of how increasingly sophisticated art begets a more sophisticated audience which allows for even more sophistication in art, but it's important not to neglect the technical side.
I think it's important to stop and clarify that there are two or three distinct "Homers" involved here. If we're discussing the works that we know and have today, then the "Homer" we're talking about is the person who set them down, whatever his name was. There is also the legendary Homer of muse-like stature, who may or may not have existed, and there's the poet who popularized the tellings that were eventually written down, whose name may or may not have been "Homer".
She was talking about the last one. This ancient poet did not create the characters or the stories... in fact, The Iliad in particular is very obviously only part of what would have been a stock story familiar to then-contemporary. It contains a lot of what really amount to "Now, As You Know..."-type references. Assyphilis_jane pointed out, the narrative structure is simplistic in part because it was an oral art form. In order for it to be effectively transmitted from person to person, it had to be memorable and memorizable.
Thus it consists largely of short, punchy hooks that are easy to remember and allow for improvisation. Actual tellings probably varied considerably in complexity... a gifted teller would be able to "zoom in" when he sensed his audience was interested and skip ahead when he feared he was losing them. I wouldn't be at all surprised if some of the figures who made it into the version we have today were originally ad-libbed in to a specific performance where they were locally-revered heroes.
But the underlying structure of the story was simple because it had to be in order to last. Writing changed that... its proliferation as an artistic medium changed that. The written versions of Homer's epics are identified as belonging to a specific person where "the story of the fall of Troy" or "the story of Odysseus's voyage" weren't because it contains a number of personal embellishments and unique touches that were never part of stock stories when they were a purely oral form.
There is dialogue in Homer's Iliad, but it's not exactly conversation... it's more just a bunch of speechifying. Achilles says a speech and then Agamemnon makes a speech in answer. It's all very parliamentary. Why is this? Because the lines were written for an orator and because changes in which character is speaking had to be clearly identified in the text. When poets became dramatists and started writing lines for multiple speakers they moved away from this... there's still a lot of speechifying in Greek drama, but there's also more give and take, something more like an actual conversation among real people. This was a huge leap forward in terms of the art form. You won't find characters like those of Sophocles among the works of Homer because Homer had less room for characterization.
These sorts of advances aren't limited to the interconnected world of literature and drama. Music has undergone a similar evolution... much of what we know of vocal music, in fact, grew out of the need for orators to be able to project their voices in a pleasing fashion. That the word "music" refers to the Muses demonstrates how little divide there once was between what we now regard as the separate worlds of drama, literature, and music.
Have you ever bought sheet music? Or looked up guitar tablatures online? Chances are if you did, it was because there was a song you liked that you wanted to know how to play. Once upon a time, though, this was how music was recorded and how it was broadcast. It was the MP3 player. It was the compact disk. It was the radio. In its absence, musical arrangements still had managed to travel far and wide and to last for ages, but musical notation simplified and codified a means for this to happen and thus helped bring about innovation and increasing complexity.
In 19th century America, people would buy the latest and most popular tunes from traveling salesmen who would demonstrate the pieces (some carrying miniature pianos for it), or they'd order it and the first time they heard it would be when they successfully played it. This, of course, meant that simple tunes that a person of modest talent could pick out on a piano could travel faster and further than complex arrangements for multiple instruments... and the only way to hear a band play (for any value and size of "band") was still to go see a band.
The advent of audio recording and playback meant that the only place where complexity was a barrier was at the production end... once a song was recorded, it could travel anywhere that there was a suitable mechanism for playback. New tools are lowering the barriers at the production end of things all the time, too.
Now, there is certainly something to be said for live theater and live music. There is also something enjoyable about getting together and making music with a group of people if you all have the talent for it (or if none of you do... your mileage may vary considerably in a mixed group). An interesting side note in all of this is how none of the newer forms have ever really supplanted the older ones. But innovations in an art form lead to new art forms, which lead to further innovations... such is progress.
Aside from sophistication begetting sophistication and innovation begetting innovation, there's a third element at work wherever those two are in play, and that's democratization. Innovation involves breaking with convention, which means it requires people who are willing to Do It Wrong. Insiders can innovate, and they might find less resistance to their innovations than outsiders will, but innovation is often the result of a horde of barbarians successfully knocking down the gates of culture and taking it for themselves. Anything that throws the gates open wide is going to lead to further innovation.
It's fashionable to focus on how much "unfiltered crap" will also be produced by such openings, but the cultural trends that allowed Shakespeare to produce his plays weren't unique to him. We can assume that 90% of everything played upon Elizabethan stages was crap, too.
Innovations in technology lead to innovations in form, which leads to further sophistication in art. Sophistication in art leads to sophistication in audience. Both technological innovations and audience sophistication lead to democratization of art, which leads to further innovation and sophistication.
Progress, progress, progress.
Related: I haven't had the spoons to keep up with my own work, mush less someone else's, but as I recover myself I'm looking around the net more again.yuki_onna has written some interesting things about her experiences self-publishing. I've got a bunch of long blog posts half-written on various topics but I'll probably have more to say about this in the next week or so. There's a lot I agree with in it, but also places where we're looking at the same set of facts and have different conclusions... one thing that was interesting to me is that in reading her point of view, I realize some interesting things about my own. More on that later.
syphilis_jane made an observation I didn't catch the first time around about how Homer's epics were shaped by their medium, which was originally oral.She's right, of course... I was approaching the subject primarily from the viewpoint of how increasingly sophisticated art begets a more sophisticated audience which allows for even more sophistication in art, but it's important not to neglect the technical side.
I think it's important to stop and clarify that there are two or three distinct "Homers" involved here. If we're discussing the works that we know and have today, then the "Homer" we're talking about is the person who set them down, whatever his name was. There is also the legendary Homer of muse-like stature, who may or may not have existed, and there's the poet who popularized the tellings that were eventually written down, whose name may or may not have been "Homer".
She was talking about the last one. This ancient poet did not create the characters or the stories... in fact, The Iliad in particular is very obviously only part of what would have been a stock story familiar to then-contemporary. It contains a lot of what really amount to "Now, As You Know..."-type references. As
syphilis_jane pointed out, the narrative structure is simplistic in part because it was an oral art form. In order for it to be effectively transmitted from person to person, it had to be memorable and memorizable. Thus it consists largely of short, punchy hooks that are easy to remember and allow for improvisation. Actual tellings probably varied considerably in complexity... a gifted teller would be able to "zoom in" when he sensed his audience was interested and skip ahead when he feared he was losing them. I wouldn't be at all surprised if some of the figures who made it into the version we have today were originally ad-libbed in to a specific performance where they were locally-revered heroes.
But the underlying structure of the story was simple because it had to be in order to last. Writing changed that... its proliferation as an artistic medium changed that. The written versions of Homer's epics are identified as belonging to a specific person where "the story of the fall of Troy" or "the story of Odysseus's voyage" weren't because it contains a number of personal embellishments and unique touches that were never part of stock stories when they were a purely oral form.
There is dialogue in Homer's Iliad, but it's not exactly conversation... it's more just a bunch of speechifying. Achilles says a speech and then Agamemnon makes a speech in answer. It's all very parliamentary. Why is this? Because the lines were written for an orator and because changes in which character is speaking had to be clearly identified in the text. When poets became dramatists and started writing lines for multiple speakers they moved away from this... there's still a lot of speechifying in Greek drama, but there's also more give and take, something more like an actual conversation among real people. This was a huge leap forward in terms of the art form. You won't find characters like those of Sophocles among the works of Homer because Homer had less room for characterization.
These sorts of advances aren't limited to the interconnected world of literature and drama. Music has undergone a similar evolution... much of what we know of vocal music, in fact, grew out of the need for orators to be able to project their voices in a pleasing fashion. That the word "music" refers to the Muses demonstrates how little divide there once was between what we now regard as the separate worlds of drama, literature, and music.
Have you ever bought sheet music? Or looked up guitar tablatures online? Chances are if you did, it was because there was a song you liked that you wanted to know how to play. Once upon a time, though, this was how music was recorded and how it was broadcast. It was the MP3 player. It was the compact disk. It was the radio. In its absence, musical arrangements still had managed to travel far and wide and to last for ages, but musical notation simplified and codified a means for this to happen and thus helped bring about innovation and increasing complexity.
In 19th century America, people would buy the latest and most popular tunes from traveling salesmen who would demonstrate the pieces (some carrying miniature pianos for it), or they'd order it and the first time they heard it would be when they successfully played it. This, of course, meant that simple tunes that a person of modest talent could pick out on a piano could travel faster and further than complex arrangements for multiple instruments... and the only way to hear a band play (for any value and size of "band") was still to go see a band.
The advent of audio recording and playback meant that the only place where complexity was a barrier was at the production end... once a song was recorded, it could travel anywhere that there was a suitable mechanism for playback. New tools are lowering the barriers at the production end of things all the time, too.
Now, there is certainly something to be said for live theater and live music. There is also something enjoyable about getting together and making music with a group of people if you all have the talent for it (or if none of you do... your mileage may vary considerably in a mixed group). An interesting side note in all of this is how none of the newer forms have ever really supplanted the older ones. But innovations in an art form lead to new art forms, which lead to further innovations... such is progress.
Aside from sophistication begetting sophistication and innovation begetting innovation, there's a third element at work wherever those two are in play, and that's democratization. Innovation involves breaking with convention, which means it requires people who are willing to Do It Wrong. Insiders can innovate, and they might find less resistance to their innovations than outsiders will, but innovation is often the result of a horde of barbarians successfully knocking down the gates of culture and taking it for themselves. Anything that throws the gates open wide is going to lead to further innovation.
It's fashionable to focus on how much "unfiltered crap" will also be produced by such openings, but the cultural trends that allowed Shakespeare to produce his plays weren't unique to him. We can assume that 90% of everything played upon Elizabethan stages was crap, too.
Innovations in technology lead to innovations in form, which leads to further sophistication in art. Sophistication in art leads to sophistication in audience. Both technological innovations and audience sophistication lead to democratization of art, which leads to further innovation and sophistication.
Progress, progress, progress.
Related: I haven't had the spoons to keep up with my own work, mush less someone else's, but as I recover myself I'm looking around the net more again.
yuki_onna has written some interesting things about her experiences self-publishing. I've got a bunch of long blog posts half-written on various topics but I'll probably have more to say about this in the next week or so. There's a lot I agree with in it, but also places where we're looking at the same set of facts and have different conclusions... one thing that was interesting to me is that in reading her point of view, I realize some interesting things about my own. More on that later.