If a lost folio of some forgotten contemporary of Shakespeare were discovered, a collection of plays which were more entertaining, moving, and inspiring than the works of Shakespeare, plays which more convincingly depicted the range and depth of the human experience, which were more surprising and delightful and sobering, which were by some objective measure "better" plays than Shakespeare's, then I still think that Shakespeare's plays would probably be "greater" and more worthy of study and consumption
A big, big part of what makes Shakespeare's plays and sonnets "great" is that they've been the foremost works of English literature for hundreds of years. They're known to everyone who attended school in an English speaking country, they've shaped and influenced our language, culture, and every work of literature which followed.
Being familiar with the works of Shakespeare is necessary context for a thousand phrases and references that you'll encounter every day. And the "value" which a reader or watcher can extract from the works of Shakespeare can be enhanced by the hundreds of years of critics and audience who have already written about and engaged with his works.
This reminds me of the theory that the King James is the best English translation of The Bible because it has heavily influenced the English language. So we intuitively understand the true meaning of KJV phrases better than we do those in a more literally faithful translation.
Just passing along a fun idea and not looking for a debate.
Related to many prior translations, which are the foundation of anglicised, not latinised bible translations which tiptoed on the precipice of heresy, lacking the kings imprimatur.
Finding ur-texts and arguing their role meant combining Aramaic, hebrew, Greek and Latin, all the while watching over your shoulder for the sharp blade.
And then, there's the mistranscriptions of the breeches bible, the murder bible, the consequences of a literate non priestly class who could (and did) debate religion as informed opinion not received wisdom...
While I realize that you're overstating both cases for rhetorical purposes, (that these undiscovered works are "better", and that Shakespeare is still "greater") I think that you're short-changing "discovery". We might find that Shakespeare's works were, not just influenced by these unknown works, but outright homages, or that these undiscovered works somehow offer greater context and insight into some previously known author's works. In a similar vein, the linked article spends to much time fearing what's lost and not enough thinking about what we may yet find.
>We might find that Shakespeare's works were, not just influenced by these unknown works, but outright homages
Shakespeare's works are already known to be homages and heavily influenced by existing works to the point that the stories are pretty much considered English stage adaptations of existing literature, much of which was not originally written in English.
Hamlet is based on the Legend of Amleth, Macbeth and King Lear are both adaptations of Holinshed's Chronicles, Romeo and Juliet is based on Mariotto and Ganozza.
Shakespeare was not the only one who made stage adaptations of classic literature, there are dozens of playwrites who each have their own version of the above listed stories adapted to their specific audiences, language and cultural customs.
Ok, ok...ok. Hear me out. What about a prequel to Macbeth. Macduff and Macbeth origin stories. Hollywood is where the real money is so we'll skip the stage and go straight to film. Not film. Films. We'll split it into 3 (yes, three!) films since there is so much to be told. But since there isn't that much to be told, we'll import a few characters from other Shakespearian plays ...especially those that don't fit the timeline....Tybalt the thane of East Fife, anyone?
Shakespeare already did all of that. Prequel: Henry VI part 1 was written after the success of Part 2 and 3 (which wasn't originally called Part 2 and 3 of course). Spin-off: The Merry Wiwes of Windsor was written because of the popularity of the Falstaff character from Henry IV. It is debated whether it takes place in an alternative continuity. Then Falstaff was killed off-stage in Henry V, presumably because Shakespeare got annoyed by the actor.
This take seems a bit pessimistic about the longevity of society to me. If we still have tens or hundreds of thousands of years to go, just going with whatever was best by 2020 seems a bit ad hoc. Not that I know the future.
If I had a time machine, I’d travel to the year 2300 to read undergrad essays how the Hamlet’s deliberations intersect with the ever-enclosing wall of Fortnite’s storm.
What do you mean by “just going with whatever was best by 2020”? I don’t think this theory implies that anyone’s ‘greatest’ status is final and permanent. Just that the mechanism by which such status is attained generally involves remaining culturally relevant for long enough to develop a kind of incumbent power. I don’t see any need for pessimism over this.
The issue is that, while writing skill is rare and somewhat objective, writing performance is intensely subjective. The experiment's been done where people take award-winning novels and throw them at the submission process... and don't even get past the query stage, 9 times out of 10. This is exacerbated by a climate wherein the "book buzz" that drives quick sales is generated by people who, while narrowly specialized in their professions and therefore deservingly relevant on specific topics, haven't read for pleasure since they were in high school.
Relevance can be measured. On the other hand, aesthetic quality is not only subjective, but highly relevant writing (such as Shakespeare's) changes the aesthetics on which it, as well as everything else, is judged.
Of course, most writers secretly long to still be read 100 years after they die, but not only will they never know this (except perhaps in an afterlife) for sure, but it's highly uncorrelated to performance while alive. If you had asked people in the 1920s which books of the time would be remembered in 2022, you'd be read a litany of works almost none of us have heard of... while Great Gatsby, which probably objectively is the great (as in, most relevant) American novel, would not have made the top 20.
> A big, big part of what makes Shakespeare's plays and sonnets "great" is that they've been the foremost works of English literature for hundreds of years. They're known to everyone who attended school in an English speaking country
This is far from true, except in the sense that such people know the name "Shakespeare". The percentage of people having ever attended school in an English speaking country who can recite one sonnet by Shakespeare is going to be... low.
> they've shaped and influenced our language [and] culture
Sure, that's true.
> Being familiar with the works of Shakespeare is necessary context for a thousand phrases and references that you'll encounter every day.
But that isn't. Most Anglophones, as noted above, already aren't familiar with the works of Shakespeare. But they don't have problems understanding phrases and references that may ultimately trace back to him. You can learn words without learning how the words came to be, and in fact that's the only way you can learn words.
(On a side note, this is exactly the problem with the "classic" TNG episode Darmok. The universal translator can translate any language without any prior knowledge being necessary. So it can understand that the sounds the aliens are making mean "Shaka, when the walls fell". It just doesn't know what "Shaka, when the walls fell" means.
But that's not how language works. The episode itself makes it very explicit that the aliens speak a language in which Shakawhenthewallsfell is a single word meaning "doom, defeat, and despair". You don't need to know the story of Shaka to know the meaning of the word.)
It does for us. It's not the abstract value that matters.
A few years in my country, a critic caused some minor furore by suggesting that a beloved (and recently dead) author wasn't all that good. She had been a radio personality and children's literature writer for a generation, and her stories were a kind of sweet, homely social realism, about growing up in an apartment building and playing the violin, for instance.
Now the critic suggested that she had gotten chances others hadn't, because of her politics and identity. The public broadcaster at the time definitively saw shaping the country towards the labour party's social democratic vision as their job, and the author certainly fit nicely into that.
Now the point is, even if the critic is right and this author wasn't all that great, she can't just be swapped out for me. I grew up with those books, not anyone else's. So did a generation.
And so it is with all literature. Should we try to find the authors that got less attention at the time, but maybe would have deserved it? Maybe imagine what could have been? By all means. But what happened, happened. And it's even more important to understand those things.
It’s not just fame, there is a multi-generational cultural inheritance from Shakespeare because so many people have been thinking and writing and talking about it for so long.
Any cultural work subjected to that much thought and criticism becomes a mirror, or a lens, through which other subjects can be explored. Essays about Shakespeare written 100 years ago not only enrich our appreciation of Shakespeare, they reveal how people thought about things 100 years ago. The text of Shakespeare doesn’t change, so by observing changes in analysis of Shakespeare over time, we can reveal changes in our own culture over time.
You can’t do that with a new piece of writing, even if it were “new to us” despite being written contemporaneously with Shakespeare. It would be analyzed first in the context of Shakespeare, not by itself, because that is a context we all already share.
It's also worth noting that Shakespeare's cultural significance, as with a few other cultural relics (say, the Mona Lisa), is in certain regards fairly modern.
After Shakespeare's life, his works faded from prevalence, at least as represented in the printed record, until the mid-19th century. I'm uncertain of the specific dynamics, but suspect that growing cities and want of lowr-cost and popular known entertainment resulted in a revival of his plays (out of copyright, and hence free to produce).
Similarly, the Mona Lisa ascended to popular awareness and fame after it was stolen in the early 20th century, at a time when cheap mass-market newspapers existed, and photgraphic reproductions could be printed.
Search instead for "Giaconda". Yeats include some of the following in The Oxford Book of Modern Verse:
"""
La Gioconda is, in the truest sense, Leonardo's masterpiece, the revealing instance of his mode of thought and work. In suggestiveness, only the Melancholia of Duerer is comparable to it; and no crude symbolism disturbs the effect of its subdued and graceful mystery. We all know the face and hands of the figure, set in its marble chair, in that cirque of fantastic rocks, as in some faint light under sea. Perhaps of all ancient pictures time has chilled it least.* As often happens with works in which invention seems to reach its limits, there is an element in it given to, not invented by, the master. In that inestimable folio of drawings, once in the possession of Vasari, were certain designs by Verrocchio, faces of such impressive beauty that Leonardo in his boyhood copied them many times. It is hard not to connect with these designs of the elder, by-past master, as with its germinal principle, the unfathomable smile, always with a touch of something sinister in it, which plays over all Leonardo's work. Besides, the picture is a portrait. From childhood we see this image defining itself on the fabric of his dreams; and but for express historical testimony, we might fancy that this was but his ideal lady, embodied and beheld at last. What was the relationship of a living Florentine to this creature of his thought? By means of what strange affinities had the person and the dream grown up thus apart, and yet so closely together? Present from the first incorporeally in Leonardo's thought, dimly traced in the designs of Verrocchio, she is found present at last in Il Giocondo's house. That there is much of mere portraiture in the picture is attested by the legend that by artificial means, the presence of mimes and flute-players, that subtle expression was protracted on the face. Again, was it in four years and by renewed labour never really completed, or in four months and as by stroke of magic, that the image was projected?
*Yet for Vasari there was some further magic of crimson in the lips and cheeks, lost for us.
The presence that thus rose so strangely beside the waters, is expressive of what in the ways of a thousand years men had come to desire. Hers is the head upon which all "the ends of the world are come," and the eyelids are a little weary. It is a beauty wrought out from within upon the flesh, the deposit, little cell by cell, of strange thoughts and fantastic reveries and exquisite passions. Set it for a moment beside one of those white Greek goddesses or beautiful women of antiquity, and how would they be troubled by this beauty, into which the soul with all its maladies has passed! All the thoughts and experience of the world have etched and moulded there, in that which they have of power to refine and make expressive the outward form, the animalism of Greece, the lust of Rome, the reverie of the middle age with its spiritual ambition and imaginative loves, the return of the Pagan world, the sins of the Borgias. She is older than the rocks among which she sits; like the vampire, she has been dead many times, and learned the secrets of the grave; and has been a diver in deep seas, and keeps their fallen day about her; and trafficked for strange webs with Eastern merchants: and, as Leda, was the mother of Helen of Troy, and, as Saint Anne, the mother of Mary; and all this has been to her but as the sound of lyres and flutes, and lives only in the delicacy with which it has moulded the changing lineaments, and tinged the eyelids and the hands. The fancy of a perpetual life, sweeping together ten thousand experiences, is an old one; and modern thought has conceived the idea of humanity as wrought upon by, and summing up in itself, all modes of thought and life. Certainly Lady Lisa might stand as the embodiment of the old fancy, the symbol of the modern idea.
"""
To add, the Bible is seen by many scholars as one of the greatest works of literature (and is on the St. John's College curriculum) not because the scholars are religious, but in large part due to its influence on other great works of literature (e.g. Milton's Paradise Lost, Dante's Inferno, much of Dostoevsky's work) and shaping human history.
It's not even about such works as Dante's Inferno, which are directly thematically related to Bible. As with Shakespeare it's all about hundreds of small things, expressions, metaphors. Without Bible words and phrases such as "forbidden fruit", "good Samaritan", "eye for an eye", "Armageddon", "wayward son" lose context, or meaning.
Like old laws that have been interpreted by the courts in many unantipicated situations - presented as obvious generalization; arguably, judicial legislation.
\taunt Arguably, the most influential work of English literature is the King James Version of the Bible.
> There’s yet another problem: the sheer volume of texts. When it comes to Indian and Buddhist traditions, for example, the number of ancient manuscripts that have survived but are yet to be studied has been estimated at around 10m, though Friedrich says he has seen estimates as high as 30m. There simply aren’t enough scholars with the right expertise, including the necessary language skills, to do the work.
I was worried a lot about this during my PhD. Well-cited papers were just the "tip of the iceberg". I did some fairly thorough searches and came across quite a few papers in my field that were important in my view and unfortunately overlooked.
The problem doesn't seem intractable to me. More researchers should spend some time searching the literature where they think no one else did. If a certain percentage of people did this, then I think it would benefit everyone including those who don't do particularly deep searches.
First off i don't understand how this 10-30k number is physically or culturally possible. ( i admit my tired brain thought million first - confusing british/roman systems! )
Also having read sporadically through various dzogchen texts on "dream yoga" which is an older mapping and superset of what we today call lucid dreaming i'm positive that there could be an incredible amount of "useful knowledge" of various "weirder" aspects and concepts of consciousness and dreams waiting for us in some of those texts.
Note that it's the number of manuscripts, not the number of distinct works. Many of the manuscripts would be copies of the same popular works (people preserve whatever's most useful), but there is a long tail of works each preserved in very few manuscripts.
The 30-million estimate has been arrived at independently by several people AFAIK, but one of them is David Pingree, and look at e.g. https://www.google.com/search?q=pingree+estimate+million+man... for several sources. In particular, this paper by M. D. Srinivas [1] gives several independent estimates of the number of manuscripts, all in millions. There have been 4.2 million manuscripts actually documented already (as of 2019 when the paper was written), and this paper's estimate is that "10 million is indeed a reasonable estimate for the number of Indian manuscripts that are extant […] the number of manuscripts in Sanskrit can be expected to be of the order of 8 million."
And although this post is about literature, that paper is about Indian astronomy&mathematics, which is perhaps representative:
> We find that of the estimated 9,000 source-works of Indian Astronomy and Mathematics (which are preserved in around 30,000 manuscripts), only about 150 texts were edited, and just 30 texts translated during 1800-1947. During 1948-2019, there has been significant progress and another about 300 texts have been edited and 66 texts translated, many of them with detailed explanatory notes. Thus, only about 450 (or 5% of the estimated 9000 source-texts available) have been edited and published so far; even among the published works, only 96 texts have been seriously studied via translations and explanations with a view to bring out their technical (mathematical-astronomical) content.
Do you have any sense of how long these works are?
It would be challenging for a single human to read 10,000 books in a lifetime, say, of 85 years, beginning at age 5. That would be 125 books per year, or nearly 2.5 per week. Every week, every year, for life.
If these were shorter works --- the equivalent of pamphlets or essays (or more likely: epic poems), of a few pages each, that might be more viable.
That said, 10 million works might represent a cultural accumulation, but would be difficult to describe as a cultural tradition, simply on the basis that at any one time, any person could know at best a small fraction of the works.
The linked paper quotes "2.96 lakhs manuscripts (2.61 Crore Pages)" which works out to an average of about 88 pages per manuscript. I imagine one "page" (folio) of a (usually) palm-leaf manuscript is probably about half a printed page's worth of material, so maybe each manuscript on average is the equivalent of a 50-page printed book.
(Again, note that 10 or 30 million manuscripts is probably fewer works: the quoted 30000 manuscripts <-> 9000 works relationship for astronomy/mathematics may not hold across the entire manuscript corpus. Also, for comparison, both the Library of Congress and the British Library seem to have on the order of tens of millions of books, and Harvard's massive Widener Library has 3.5 million books.)
I'm not sure I understand the remark about "a cultural tradition": surely it's just as much the case for "Western culture", or even say "French culture", that a given person could have read only a small fraction of the works. It does not mean there isn't a French tradition or whatever. The intended meaning is just that from the (pre-modern) Indian "world" or "sphere" or whatever, there are those many manuscripts, many of them uncatalogued, let alone studied/digitized/edited/published/translated.
By "cultural tradition", I'm talking of a literature which would be generally familiar to a population, or perhaps to its literate class.
Books and stories contribute not only knowledge or entertainment, but a shared knowledge and common metaphorical or conceptual language. And these need not be written traditions. I could reference, say, Psy's "Gangnam Style", Harry Potter, the Marvel Cinematic Universe, the Black/Blue / Yellow/White dress, Michelangelo's David, or Pikachu's face, and ... at least a large portion of readers would share that understanding.
If I were to reference instead, say, Sutro's "Affected", Hamilton Holt's "Commercialism and Journalism", Dersu Uzala, my uni flatmate's bronze torso, or the Vuck I'd spotted on a roadtrip some years back, there'd be a far smaller awareness of each.
There's a difference between information that's preserved, and information that remains culturally significant. Moreover, if the knowledge is considered to have both an explicit (book-transmissible) and tacit (experiential) component (think the difference between your chem book & lecture, and the lab section), what happens when the experiential knowledge dies?
What's the minimum requirement for knowledge to be considered live, in the sense that there's a community of practice which can sustain itself generationally?
I'm fairly familiar with counts of books and other types of records:
- US Library of Congress: ~40 million books (includes 15.5 m unclassified), 131 million unclassified records. Records > 400k new copyrights/year. Of these, there were > 800k research requests from Congress and other agencies, and ~360,000 items were circulated. Note that that last is > 0.1% of the total books, and 0.2% of the total holdings of the library. Data from 2020: https://loc.gov/about/general-information/#year-at-a-glance
- University of California Library System has a total of 40.8 million print volumes across 100+ libraries system-wide.
- Bowker, the US ISBN registrar, was issuing about 300k "traditional" and on the order of 1 million self-published ISBNs annually through most of the 2000--2020 period best I can tell. (These data used to be more readily available.)
- Data on sales by specific title are ... hard to obtain. But I'd suspect that the top-10 title account for a large fraction, and the top-100 probably a majority of total sales. (Anyone inside Amazon know numbers?)
- Of copies of individual books ever printed, The Bible appears to be first, with an estimated 5 billion copies. It's trailed by the Quran (~800m) and Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung (estimates vary widely from 800m -- 6.5 billion. It's interesting to note that all three of these are literally propaganda, two in the original religious sense, the third in the more modern ideological one. Six novels are thought to have sold over 100 million copies: A Tale of Two Cities, The Little Prince, Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, And Then There Were None, Dream of the Red Chamber, and The Hobbit. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_books
A friend who'd dropped out of a maths PhD programme once described the culture as "studying some specialised field in which there might be five or six other people in the world who could understand what you were doing." And finding this somewhat less than satisfying.
And I've had the exerience myself of studying lesser-known works and topics, or even some well-known ones, and finding that, variously, there was considerable insight to be found, or that what was widely "known" about a work ... didn't adhere closely to the work itself. To what extent then can the cultural awareness be said to be accurate.
Not sure if this makes my meaning clearer, but again, with an archive of millions to tens of millions of works, or even multiple copies of some smaller count, and much smaller pre-industrial populations of whom a small fraction were literate ... the living knowledge of those works must have been much smaller. At 7.5 books per year, an adult might read some 450 books in a lifetime. If half of those are popular, then the popular common canon is on the order of 200 works. What this figure might have been in ancient India I don't know, though for some cultures (Greece and Rome, and even 19th century Britain), knowlege of the Illiad and Odessey might have sufficed to be considered literate. Two books from a much larger accumulation.
>Do you have any sense of how long these works are?
While I have no clue on these specific works, I tend to use things like books of the Bible as a benchmark. Other works have similar length "books," like Caesar's "Gallic War" is split into 8 books of 5000 to 15000 words each or Aristotle wrote 400 books of about a thousand lines each.
Maybe some are significantly longer, but I'd assume the majority are that length. Keeping longer works in one piece for centuries is incredibly challenging.
Are you sure it's thousand? "m" is the common British abbreviation for million, while "M" would be the Roman abbreviation for a thousand. Plus, frankly only 10,000 Indian manuscripts seems way too low. India is huge, and has been literate for thousands of years.
There's a lot that I would say is troubling about this number.
Psychotherapists have been prescribing mindfulness-based interventions at increasing rates in the past few decades. You can't escape mindfulness, you'll hear about it everywhere you go. Yet, most of the literature about mindfulness or meditation and its impact on health is written in Sanskrit. Some of it is translated, and some of the translations make their way into English-language papers in psychotherapy or psychology journals, but it's such a small amount.
Rather that dig through Buddhist texts, we have created our own, new set of practices called "mindfulness meditation", prescribing it left and right, going on vipassana retreats, reading books on transcendental meditation, etc.
Mindfulness meditation is a western invention assembled out of pieces, taken out of context, of Buddhist and other traditions. Transcendental meditation was invented by a yogi in the 1950s. To be clear, I'm not talking about how recent these are in order to imply that older traditions are better--but older practices are better studied and we don't read about the older practices.
You can find a ton of studies in western medical journals about the benefits of various MBIs, but these studies, taken as a whole, are somewhat troubling. One troubling aspect is that many of the benefits are based on data which is self-reported, and the nature of questions in a self-reported study is limited. This is normal and expected in these kinds of studies, but it gives us a very narrow selection of observations about the effects of MBIs, and these questions / observations are often selected in order to prove positive effects--researchers, of course, want to prove positive effects of MBIs.
Meanwhile, there's two millenia of scholarly work, including descriptions of negative outcomes from meditation--what those negative outcomes were and how to structure the practice of meditation to prevent those negative outcomes--but these scholarly works are, again, not written in English and you hardly ever see literature reviews of these works in western medical journals.
Anyway. As a metaphor, it seems like we're exploring a continent, and there are people already living here, but we're ignoring them because they speak Sanskrit, and some of us are getting hurt. It's not even really the ancient texts, but modern texts, even modern texts with English translations.
I'm not sure how much scientific value can be found in texts written before the scientific method was developed. Aristotle's writings on biology and cosmology are almost entirely nonsense, for example.
MBIs are based on pre-scientific practices to begin with. Wouldn't it be a bit weird to say that MBIs are effective, but then say that all of the associated literature from 3,000 years is probably nonsense and not worth investigating?
We like to talk about how smart the ancient Greeks are. Greeks invented geometry, Greeks theorized that the Earth is round and measured its diameter, Greeks theorized that matter was made of atoms. Dalton gets credit for proving atomism experimentally, but he started out by gathering information from previous thinkers and experimenters.
The same is true of other cultures besides the Greeks and other theories besides atomism. It's easy to pick on Aristotle. He said some really stupid things; he said that men have more teeth than women. We can find plenty of quacks from the 20th century like Freud and Jung, plenty of barbarism like when Egas Moniz who cut up people's brains to change their behavior. Meanwhile, we keep discovering practices performed by various "primitive" peoples that are effective, and with investigation, we can understand the reason why it is effective. You don't need to read a 2,000-year-old Sanskrit text and take it at face value, but if you are studying the effects of meditation, it seems completely natural that you might want to do a literature review!
This sounds like a fascinating unexplored area. Are there any English texts (books/journals/theses) exploring this? I’d love to look into what limited analysis of this large reserve of literature does exist in English.
It's a weird area. There's a continuum between research in Buddhism and research in psychology & psychotherapy, and in the middle you get journals like Psychology of Religion and Spirituality or Mental Health, Religion, and Culture. Interdisciplinary research, for various reasons, just seems so difficult, journals that cover interdisciplinary topics are not as prestigious, and most researchers are loathe to give up their specialty even though they agree that interdisciplinary research is important.
I've seen some articles in these interdisciplinary journals that talk about MBIs and have citations that point towards western clinical practices as well as citations that point towards Buddhist texts... and I find it difficult to follow the citations in both directions.
It reminds me a bit of the divides between machine learning and statistics, or biostatistics and clinical research, etc. Someone who does clinical research will say, "Yes, biostatistics is very important," and then turn around and run another clinical study without talking to their colleagues at the same university in the biostatistics department.
"... But the entirety of extant literature in Greek and Latin through to, say, the Late Empire is probably enough to fill a single small bookstore. It's a lot, sure. But a single person could probably read all of it. Even if you added to that all the personal correspondences unearthed in papyri and on wax tablets, and all the inscriptional material I doubt that it is impossible for a human to read all of it. I certainly wouldn't want to. I can't think of anyone who would want to, really. How many grave inscriptions would they have to read? How many tabulae in which a soldier in Britain sends for underwear or something? Still, it would be doable. Once you push the threshold of "ancient Romans" through into the very ass-end of Late Antiquity, though, it is quite plainly impossible for a single human to read it all.
In fact, "Ancient Latin" represents less than one percent of all that has been written in the language. We pigeonhole this language as "ancient" because 19th century ideas about what "real" Latin is have — in a highly warped form — delimited the general sense of what Latin is, and can be, how it can be learned, and how it can be read."
This is an idea that fascinates me and it goes beyond literature. it certainly includes history.
One of my favorite examples is cuneiform tablets. Less than 10% of the 500k to 1m tablets recovered have ever been translated. These are particularly interesting because they're some of the earliest examples of surviving written records we have.
The Hittite capital Hattusa (IIRC) was lost for millenia. When it was found it was a veritable treasure trove including personal correspondence between the Hittie king and the Egyptian pharoah Ramses II.
Nineveh was sacked at one point. A massive fire destroyed the library but baked the clay tablets preserving them.
In the early days of Rome, Rome (the city) was sacked by Gauls. This destroyed a lot of the early works of Rome. This affected Rome's expansion (eg Caesar's conquest of Gaul has been argued to be affected by the cultural significance of this sacking). I's one reason why the origins of Rome are somewhat steeped in myth and legend rather than fact such as the apocryphal tale of Romulus and Reemus.
Another example are the histories of Alexander the Great. Alexander died under mysterious circumstances at the height of his power (in his early 30s). Several primary sources were written by his inner circle. None have survived. We know this because a Roman named Arrion some 2 centuries later wrote about the campaigns of Alexander citing 3 such sources (all lost) comparing what they agreed on and what they didn't.
A lot was lost in the Arab sacking of the Libary of Alexandria.
I somewhat agree with some other commenters in that literary significance is more... relative. Put another way: part of their cultural significance comes from them being known, studied, performed and repaeted over centuries.
I'm convinced there are some savant-level writers out there who have written the worlds greatest novels, and we will never get to read them. I'm thinking of the person who is so enlightened that they feel no need to share it (for monetary or social gain). Or the person who has such imposter syndrome that they never bothered to share. Or the person who finished the novel and burnt it down.
I bet there are also bodies of work by posters on internet forums, social media etc. that would constitute great works if properly compiled, edited, and promoted.
Sometimes these posters are locally famous in their online communities, but in other cases they are overlooked even on their home turf. Perhaps in hundreds of years some of this stuff will be dug up and celebrated, either by humans or AI.
The same thing definitely happens with software too. There are some masterpieces of engineering out there with 15 stars on Github.
I would say that 3Blue1Brown's educational videos on mathematics will likely be seen as "great works" in the future.
The visualizations and explanations are genuinely highly valuable for people studying mathematics (e.g. his "Essence of Linear Algebra" series [0]). The barrier to creating similar work is also high, due to the amount of time and expertise to create each video.
They also have an artistic quality and a sense of polish that gives the impression that the videos will stand the test of time.
> I bet there are also bodies of work by posters on internet forums, social media etc. that would constitute great works if properly compiled, edited, and promoted.
I'd be careful. People get banned for merely mentioning that guy.
I suspect there are many more who never had the opportunity: As a start, I guess that most humans in history have been illiterate. More did not have access to publishers. First, before the printing press (~1475 in England), publishing more than your personal hand-written volume was very expensive - each copy hand-written. Also in most of the world, usually only those who were considered male, of a certain socio-economic class, and whose writing fit norms (not controversial in content, style, etc.), had access to publishing.
"usually only those who were considered male" If digital media manages to survive, archaeologists of the future will have a blast sifting through our ruins. Like we are still trying to puzzle out why Mayans played a ball game for a chance to be sacrificed and then just abandoned their cities. In case my writing is excavated - dear distant decedent, we basically just forgot how to breed and were succeeded by a civilization that could still manage that task.
> we basically just forgot how to breed and were succeeded by a civilization that could still manage that task
I'm a little lost about what that has to do with discrimination by publishers against writers by perceived gender? Does that somehow disrupt 'breeding'?
IME great literature has to connect at an emotional level. Dostoevsky is a great writer because he understands what it is to be human at a level that no one else can match. I wonder if a savant-level writer could write in a way that resonates in the way other great literature does.
People who are often misunderstood by the masses have some of the deepest outlooks and reflections upon human life and emotions, as well as things outside the bubble of humanity.
> IME great literature has to connect at an emotional level.
No. It's has to be more than that. Otherwise, every formulaic romance novel would qualify as great literature. Great literature has to have it all, but most importantly, it has to advance language/thought/culture. It's what separates the bible, shakespeare's works, etc from dostoevksy. Dostoevksy's works are entertaining. But they certainly aren't great.
> > IME great literature has to connect at an emotional level.
> No. It's has to be more than that
But, it’s not. Great literature, great music, and great art connects at an emotional level, which doesn’t involve logic, reason, or thought. Most of what we consider great art has this quality and it does it effortlessly and without trying.
A formulaic romance novel isn’t great because it’s gratuitous, sentimental, cliche, and panders to our emotional wants and needs; great art meets us where we are now in life, and doesn’t try to pressure or influence us towards one side or another. That’s the difference.
It’s like being surprised or frightened. You have no control over your reaction because it’s hitting you at the fundamental core of your humanity. It’s a feeling, an experience, and ultimately an emotional response on a very primitive level of cognition.
For me, it’s like Picard pulling out his flute and playing the song of his people at the end of "The Inner Light". This isn’t an exercise in thinking, it’s all about feeling. And that’s why that episode is widely considered the greatest.
> The comment you're replying to is not discrediting that. They are just saying that it needs to be more than just creating an emotional connection.
Specifically, the OP is saying that great art "has to advance language/thought/culture" in addition to having an emotional connection. The problem is that this is very much a rear-view mirror perspective.
Great art doesn’t have to do much of anything except connect the audience with the human experience and condition. And that’s fundamentally an emotional connection.
Advancing language, art, and culture is a meta-perspective about the significance of an artwork that comes much later. It is not a requirement of great art.
Great art is timeless because it connects us emotionally to the human condition—an unchanging experience through the centuries that reaches out beyond time and place.
And yet, while it is certainly true that some great art does "advance" aspects of our culture—Shakespeare is widely known to have contributed an enormous amount to the English language, for example—the greatness of Shakespeare doesn’t rest on this laurel, but rather its unchanging, persistent, emotional connection to the human condition across time.
In other words, great art taps into the timeless, eternal space of our shared lives that is always true, and that reaches out and touches upon everyone, everywhere, in every time. It is this universal appeal that makes it great.
The fact is, the human experience hasn’t really changed that much in the last 10,000 years, and great art taps into this unchanging set of idealized forms.
> The problem is that this is very much a rear-view mirror perspective.
But analyzing art is a rear-view mirror perspective. History judges what is great art. Not the present audience.
You ramble about the same thing over and over again - human condition. Sure. That's a part of it. Silly pop music, formulaic romance novels, etc all have that. But what separates actual great art from entertaining art is it's affect on language/culture/thought/etc.
Whether marvel movies will be considered great art has nothing to do with "human condition" or how it emotionally affected the audience today. It'll be judged in time by its affect on language/culture/thought/etc. Any silly drone can create art that touches on the human condition. That's the easy part.
Shakespeare's hamlet, romeo and juliet, etc aren't considered great art because it "moves" you.
> and great art taps into this unchanging set of idealized forms.
> Dostoevksy's works are entertaining. But they certainly aren't great.
Enough HN for today. It’s just insufferable nonsense far too often these days. I resisted responding to the other guy in this thread that called Freud and Jung quacks but wants to read 10 million 2000 year old Sanskrit meditation texts for insights.
> the person who is so enlightened that they feel no need to share it (for monetary or social gain).
Isn't part of enlightenment a sense of the imperative to share? How can you be enlightened without compassion, and thus the motivation to enlighten others?
To the latter, famously, the works we most remember Kafka by are works he entrusted to Max Brod for Brod to burn after his death, but which Brod instead edited and published.
Emily Dickinson was almost one of those people, until her sister discovered her cache of poems (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emily_Dickinson). Maybe not a good example of lost works, but a good example of how easily it could happen.
You don’t have to drop out of society to be an unknown genius. You just have to direct your genius at something non-public. I know a number of incredible people just quietly getting on with being excellent at something super-niche and never seeking publicity.
I’d go even further and say that in most cases these days, even true genius is likely to be overlooked unless it coincides with a gift for self-promotion.
Only the absolute rarest of masterpieces can rise above the noise just based on the brilliance of the work itself. And even then, there’s a pretty good chance someone better at marketing will just copy it and receive all the credit.
Shakespeare could have been just as brilliant a writer, but if he hadn't run a theater (and therefore had the power to put on his own plays), we might not have heard nearly as much about him.
> in general, there may (actually, must) be geniuses who have dropped out of society.
I know quite a few. One was a chess prodigy who never advanced past the fourth grade. He taught himself several trades, became an accomplished musician, but lives completely off the grid and avoids any kind of contact with official entities for various reasons. Although he’s generally considered uneducated, there’s this strange spark of wisdom behind his eyes when you talk with him. Makes you wonder how many people there are like this, toiling away as nobodies, barely visible in society.
A somewhat-recent example of a great novel that was recently discovered was "Stoner" by John Williams, which is about an English professor named William Stoner who stoically lived a seemingly unremarkable life that still evokes sympathy and empathy.
The book was first published in 1965, but failed to gain popularity. It took until 2013 to gain wide popularity, and is a contender as one of the greatest American novels.
Williams was not an unknown: his epistolatory novel Augustus won a National Book Award. I read Stoner in the late 1970s, before it went out of print for some time.
> The numbers they published in Science magazine earlier this year don’t make for happy reading, but they corroborate figures arrived at by other methods. The researchers concluded that a humbling 90% of medieval manuscripts preserving chivalric and heroic narratives – those relating to King Arthur, for example, or Sigurd (also known as Siegfried) – have gone. Of the stories themselves, about a third have been lost completely, meaning that no manuscript preserving them remains.
It's impossible to say whether the greatest works of literature are undiscovered, or even lost. That's the tragedy of it, that we'll never know. We do know that we've lost a lot, not only from the medieval era, but even in our own lifetimes. Despite digitization and home recording, a ton of media (not just literature) was has been lost in warehouse fires, or even by having the only copies taped over. Or, never even committed to physical media at all. Even today, when we secretly believe everything we do is tracked by somebody, a bad backup system or a decision to cut costs on storage can wipe out years of data. The work of archivists is to save what they can, not to save everything. It's a losing battle.
I used to hang out with musicians and play music with them and jam into the late hours of the early morning. Sometimes we would record our jams, but most of the time we would not.
Listening to these old recordings, you would occasionally find magic and "endless wonder" (see Warehouse 13 episode "Resonance"), and that got me thinking: how much incredible music has been lost to time, music that wasn’t written down and composed and was never recorded?
Rick Beato claims that there are thousands of unreleased albums where the artist couldn't afford distribution. Or, the artist couldn't afford to pay the engineer or producer and the master is held hostage, waiting for a payment that will never happen. (The engineer/producer doesn't own the copyright so they can't release it on their own.)
How wildly serendipitous. Are you aware that you just described the exact details of the major subplot to the Warehouse 13 episode I mentioned up above? In the event that you are not, please, go watch it. It basically describes what you wrote. It’s season one, episode two.
Maybe not the same but in the modern era, with film, maybe: acting. In my region live theater is pretty well-developed, and there are amazing actors and actresses who never achieve the fame of film actors and actresses largely because their work isn't in a recorded medium.
I won’t go into too much detail, but the magic and endless wonder I’m describing was caught on tape. Where it starts to get strange, and this is difficult to describe, is that in the course of playing live music, it turns out, the /music created its own music/. This could only be caught live. You could conceivably attribute this to stochastic sound waves bouncing around and interacting with each other, overtones, distortion, echoes, etc. And what I’m describing isn’t all that unknown. But it was caught on tape. And the music we were hearing wasn’t created by any one of us in an intentional manner. It had taken on a life of its own and became a living entity of some kind. Again, it’s hard to explain, but anyone who goes to concerts or is familiar with a live aural environment knows that shit happens and it’s often weird and unexplained.
A similar phenomenon has been reported by writers, known as writer’s trance. Often times an author will claim that they didn’t actually write the book, it wrote itself. On one level, there’s the question of where ideas come from, but on another, there’s a way these ideas are expressed and manifested that becomes more than just the person creating them. In the example of the music, it felt like the music had taken on a life of its own when the different parts all came into contact with each other. One wonders if the same thing happens after a writer creates the characters and starts having them interact in the story. On the one hand, these ideas only exist in the mind of the writer, but once on the page, they begin to enter other minds, including the minds of the characters themselves. It’s often been said in this regard that fictional literature is the original form of simulation modeling.
Thank you for sharing that experience with us. It makes me think also of static arts like (minimalism, IIRC), where the creation - or the viewer thinking about the creation - is part of what's expressed.
My thinking in the GP was that every time that happened before recorded music, it was lost - writing it down, even if possible, doesn't capture it.
> It’s often been said in this regard that fictional literature is the original form of simulation modeling.
I've read about the other parts, but not this implication of it. Do you know who said that? I'd like to read more about it.
> > It’s often been said in this regard that fictional literature is the original form of simulation modeling.
> Do you know who said that? I'd like to read more about it.
It’s an old idea that lurks on the fringes of academia but resurfaces every now and then to rear its fuzzy head. I think I first heard it in the late 1980s, saw it come back in the 1990s, and then disappear until the mid-2000s when people started talking about it again. Google scholar notes that Raymond A. Mar (York University) and Keith Oatley (University of Toronto) were writing about it in cognitive psychology at least twenty years ago, but I suspect it’s a topic in computational narratology in some way.
> One wonders if the same thing happens after a writer creates the characters and starts having them interact in the story.
I've definitely heard writers say characters become almost independent persons with their own perceptions, ideas, decisions, etc., and interact with each other and the story.
We almost didn’t have Confederacy of Dunces. The fact that it was published is a miracle. Toole’s mom was persistent enough and managed to get the manuscript in front of someone with just enough patience to give it a look.
Such a good book. One of I think 3 books I’ve read cover to cover in a day. Which, sure, also says something about the particular days I decided to read those books, but still–it’s fantastic.
I haven’t had one of those kinds of days in so long. I miss the freedom and relaxation!
Tomas Moore's account of the events covered in The Vertical Plane have never been found (1 copy, handwritten in latin, hidden for safekeeping).
Where is Tomas’s own account, his book that was finished
at Oxford and left somewhere in manuscript? We never
forget that ‘2109’ said it would be found, and we can only
hope that this will happen in our lifetime.
It’s pretty much guaranteed that in most of areas of life there are/were some undiscovered geniuses. If you grew up in Germany during my youth there would have been a good chance you wouldn’t have been discovered if you were the best basketball player of all time. Or it’s very possible that some band write the perfect rock song but never published it. Or that somebody wrote a great book but didn’t bother to get it published.
Years ago in high school I observed that there appeared to be no great works of literature that were not in the public domain - because the school book publishers don’t want to pay royalties to anyone, and to a lesser degree nobody wants to do literary analysis of a living author who can dispute their interpretation! Admittedly a little cynical but I think there is a lot of truth to both.
I was also annoyed at all the “yoda speak” translations of ancient literature we had to read whereas any student would be graded down for not putting their parts of speech in the English order.
Then you have things like Candide that would be considered super offensive in the US - where a friend of mine once had a summer job airbrushing away cow udders from a school textbook because the state of Texas (which buys the most text books) felt they were too suggestive. (A few decades ago but Texas still decides what goes in most school text books by virtue of being the largest consumer)
I don't think there's that much truth to your observation.
"The Great Gatsby" only entered the public domain last year, while its Wikipedia entry says it "was part of the assigned curricula in the near majority of U.S. high schools".
"'The Grapes of Wrath' is frequently read in American high school and college literature classes due to its historical context and enduring legacy" says its Wikipedia page, and it's still in copyright.
In 1981, "Catcher in the Rye", according to its Wikipedia entry "was both the most censored book and the second most taught book in public schools in the United States." Salinger didn't die until 2010.
I think it's important to note that that contemporary language death at the hands of the major lingua francas (you know who you are) is wiping out great and possibly very old works of oral 'literature'. Quite a few of our surviving great epics, sagas, and lyric(s) originated as oral works. With the death of collapse of these languages, from the Amazon to Siberia to Africa to Europe, these works (not to mention the loads of historical and cultural revealed in them) have or will shortly go entirely extinct.
I mean, go and look who were the most famous authors 200 years ago and you will not recognize one name. The amount of legendary writers we have lost to time and moldy paper is huge
In 1822, Byron, Coleridge, and Wordsworth were alive and writing. In Germany, Goethe was alive and still writing. In France, Chateaubriand was publishing.
We know some of them just from pure output (think Charles Dickens) - but think of all the contemporaries of Cervantes we don’t know - the very people he was making fun of with Don Quixote.
Off topic, but phrases like "it is said that the books took six months to burn. We can’t know if this is true." bother me. Of course we can know if that is true. This is like saying "it is said the books, upon burning, all turned into unicorns, sang silly songs, and flew to the moon. We can't know if this is true."
The physics of combustion hasn't changed in the last 2000 years.
Nah? The really greatest works were copied many times and committed to memory to be preserved even during multi-generation subjugation. At least greatest in meeting practical, emotional and spiritual needs of contemporaries, our historical interest today is not the most important thing in the world.
This is extremely similar to the field of music for me.
As a vinyl DJ, hip hop producer, and turntablist, one of the greatest joys is finding one of those rare LPs that just never was heard, and - even better - that juicy sample in it.
Obviously there’s gotta be unknown literature out there that’s brilliant. :)
This sounds like a problem for AI to solve. The AI can be trained with literature labeled at different level of greatest and then build a model to scan all the literature. Then one day the AI will come out of the cave: I just read a million books, so you don't have to!
Nearly all books published in the last two hundred years are unobtainable.
Millions of books have gotten far enough to earn the backing of a publisher.
They have a small print run of say 100 - 500 copies.
If sales are dismal usually the books go on "regular" sale and if that does not work, then once a year the (Norwegian) bookstore dumps them out for $1 a piece.
If they still have not sold, they get dumped into a recycler and will never be read or seen ever again.
I love going to the yearly sale and buying books for $1 per book.
I do feel sad when I look at the bin.
All the blood, sweat and tears an author has invested into it.
Writing it, sending them out, getting rejected from publishers
but finally finding one that will publish it.
That must be a proud moment.
Becoming a "real" author with a published book.
Maybe getting recognized?
Instead, it becomes a sad tale of loss.
Seeing your book out there for $1 and still not getting picked up.
I have discovered a few books I got for $1 that I thought were great.
I note them in my blog and try to harass friends into reading it.
I have been scanning and putting out my grandfather's books.
Technically the publisher owns all rights, but I doubt they care anymore.
I am not saying he was a great author or that his books will be "discovered"
but at least they are available for free should someone want to read one.
It is my dream that a system can be made globally so that all books
published are made available for free online once some period time has passed.
For books that ended up in the recycler the publisher could let them be
published sooner.
The national library would put it out on their website and someone
can enjoy a few of them later on.
The cost of storing en ebook is cheap.
Granted storing millions is not that cheap but worth it to preserve
more of the culture and perspectives from the past.
The national library in Norway has copies of most books published after
some date. They are also allowed to, perhaps supposed to publish books online
(yay) once they enter the public domain. (yay).
The national library does not have the resources to follow up on it.
I talked to a couple of the librarians.
Someone needs to keep track of when a book enters the public domain.
It appears the rules surrounding that in Norway are a bit complex.
It would be helpful for them if the publisher sent them a signal when
a work enters the public domain, but they have no interest in doing that.
If someone such as I write a letter to request a book and someone finds
it worth their time to go check on it, they have to contact the publisher
and try to figure out what the story is.
A majority of books available digitally at the national library are
"streamable". They have a picture of each page. Often not a good photo.
A lot harder to read than an eBook.
They can in most cases if the publisher agrees to publish an eBook of it
but again, it is a question of having enough manpower to manage all of it.
A big, big part of what makes Shakespeare's plays and sonnets "great" is that they've been the foremost works of English literature for hundreds of years. They're known to everyone who attended school in an English speaking country, they've shaped and influenced our language, culture, and every work of literature which followed.
Being familiar with the works of Shakespeare is necessary context for a thousand phrases and references that you'll encounter every day. And the "value" which a reader or watcher can extract from the works of Shakespeare can be enhanced by the hundreds of years of critics and audience who have already written about and engaged with his works.