The 'Social Novel' and Propaganda

[anthony]

Prompted to make this post after coming through the Thread Ideas pile. A good start and some background already in that thread.

One thread idea I've had would be about the "social novel" and propaganda. As it is defined today by the Encyclopædia Britannica, the phrase "social novel" would be a novel where "a prevailing social problem, such as gender, race, or class prejudice is dramatized through its effect on the characters of a novel". Certain examples of this would be Uncle Tom's Cabin, The Jungle by Upton Sinclair, and Jews Without Money by Mike Gold. However, similar novels on the right are considered to be thoughtless propaganda — Uncle Tom's Cabin, said by Orwell to be a "ludicrous book full of preposterous melodramatic incidents", still persists, but the once-popular Reconstruction Trilogy by Thomas Dixon is something intentionally obscured. Margaret Mitchell's Gone With The Wind appears to have transcended the status of a social novel and escaped the fate of Dixon (for now), but many other writers considered right-wing are left in a permanent limbo. 
If anyone is interested in such a thread being made, let me know. Some of the threads that are unexplored in this post is the factor of literary reception and the evolution of the term "propaganda". I could eventually compare some passages between the accepted social novel and samizdat counterexample, but as it would take time for me to familiarize myself with some of the material, I thought to post the idea here first.

There's a lot to cover here, many potential angles. Have scrapped a couple of attempts and will try to be broad and general and contribute a couple of my own thoughts and examples, then open this to discussion so we can let direction emerge following interest.

My understanding is that 'Social Novel' refers to a tradition of novels which served as a kind of social cross-section meant to shine lights on important issues of their times and encourage improvements or galvanise revolutionary spirit. This really took off in industrial England and these things had their heyday when europe was modernising and industrialising and both rich with social problems and a sense that things could change. The history doesn't grab me too much, someone else can run that way if they'd care to.

A comment that interests me above is that Gone With the Wind "transcended the status of the social novel". I have to ask. Does Dickens too? Or is he not a social novelist? You may see where I'm going, that I believe there is a political and social element to all fiction, art, media, and that Social Novel is perhaps only meaningful as a designation of authorial intent. To primarily enlighten as opposed to merely entertaining or exercising artistic faculty. Which is to say, I don't think it means a lot. We're talking about artists who have things to say.

But the prompt for this thread was The Social Novel and Propaganda. The propaganda described in our prompt seems to be a retroactive force. Which memes become accepted and iterated upon and which don't. Which is to say that I believe the novels of the time selected matter more for this discussion as they were looked back upon later, during our kind of modern canon-formation years which I might tentatively place in the middle of the 20th century.

Now, I have relatively little to say about these novels. I don't know too much or care too much, I'd just be wasting your time summarising wikipedia if I were to write further. Where I do know and care is in what this stuff evolved into. I want to talk about what I see as the culture-forming period of our time.

How it looks to me is that things get interesting once the obvious problems are solved. Everyone in England can eat and go about clothed and justifications for revolutionary zeal are just about gone.  Then there are some big wars, and by the time the dust has settled, the answers to our remaining social problems are taboo and illegal. Where does the art of issues go from here? I believe we enter our canon forming period here.

My thinking on this subject is that our art and media, like our politics and the general direction of our societies, were hit by a revolution of a radically progressive (so basically communist) nature. And, in line with the thinking of Moldbug, I believe that because these things are more native to our culture than the orientals the word 'Communism' is generally associated with, we were able to have them implemented far more smoothly with far less chaos and violence.

As with our politics, once the practical issues were more or less sorted, it was time to get impractical and think beyond. The 19th century Social Novel was about wanting shoes for poor children in London. The 19th century Progressive mostly seemed concerned with that kind of thing too. Then in the 20th century the children mostly seem to have shoes and thinks are looking up. Then what? Well things aren't perfect, maybe we need to rebuild man. The old man of the old times can be pretty satisfied now, but a new man will know perfect existence. He just needs some tuning...

Enter Civil Rights... Enter the Heavy Drama...


Heavy Drama is a stupid term coined by a very unimpressive but successful artist named Stanley Kramer. His wikipedia intro reads a bit like a joke if you know a little.


[Stanley really doesn't want you looking up pictures of his face taken from angles other than this one]

Stanley Earl Kramer (September 29, 1913 – February 19, 2001) was an American film director and producer, responsible for making many of Hollywood's most famous "message films" (he called his movies heavy dramas) and a liberal movie icon.[sup][1][/sup] As an independent producer and director, he brought attention to topical social issues that most studios avoided. Among the subjects covered in his films were racism (in The Defiant Ones and Guess Who's Coming to Dinner), nuclear war (in On the Beach), greed (in It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World), creationism vs. evolution (in Inherit the Wind), and the causes and effects of fascism (in Judgment at Nuremberg). His other films included High Noon (1952, as producer), The Caine Mutiny (1954, as producer), and Ship of Fools (1965).

Say what you will about socialists like Upton Sinclair. His concerns were at least largely practical. The Jungle is about people being worked like dogs and a grisly lack of standards in important industry that touches everyone. Problems are clear. Answers are relatively clear.

Now, in 1967, Stanley Kramer is ready to let you know all about... racism... "Your country is about to be torn apart by violent riots, elements of your government are plotting to ethnically cleanse you from your cities... but imagine if your daughter was going to marry a nigger who was smarter than you. Wouldn't it be weird and pathological if you had a problem with that? Think about it... really, you're stupid if you care about race. I am an artist. An artist of... issues..."

I basically wrote what could be drafts of several other threads beneath here but kept feeling like I was wasting time pulling in too many different directions. Where I'll leave this is how the issues raised by the starting prompt look to me.

The general prestige of the 'Social Novel' and like media, and which ones carried this prestige, all stem from a post WW2 American effort to restructure popular culture towards progressive ends. Nothing too shocking in that, of course. It seems natural to me to share the 'Heavy Drama' connection because it seems like the reputations of these 'Social Novels' were being fixed around the same time these were being made. All the same project. Forging a canon from the past and building onto it (these works are 'canon' before it's seen if anybody actually likes them) at the same time. The left have never had a monopoly on art, or art about politics. But when it comes to politics they're very shrill, and they can speak a lot of power to truth to force alien memes onto a not really compatible culture.

Last thought I'll leave here but not develop is that I believe that American (and to a less extent anglosphere and western) culture has been crippled by this soft year zero and forced canon phenomena because so much status and prestige was forced upon such unworthy works, leaving many feeling lost and alienated because the works they could have cared about were buried and forgotten. The internet of course saved us from this, on one hand allowing us to dig up superior works from the past, and on the other showing us Japan, a culture which dodged this experience. Youths with access to the entirety of recorded human culture are speaking every day. They don't want 12 Angry Men. They want Arno Breker statues and Brian De Palma.

[JohnTrent]

I found my initial thread idea to be lacking in certain respects so I'm glad someone else was able to develop it in a more thorough way. I think, as you said, Sinclair is a more practical writer than someone like Mike Gold (who is engaging in semi-autobiographical jewish neurosis). I will actually begin with something more unrelated that caught my attention a few months after posting the thread idea, but I'll try and tie it together by the end of this post. This involves some forgotten utopian novels around fin de siècle America.

What's interesting about the forgotten novels, the ones that managed to escape the canon-formation but retained success in their own time, is that they  tended to have a socialist or utopian bent. The most popular example was Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward. Here's a short excerpt of dialogue from it.

"It has been an era of unexampled intellectual splendor. Probably humanity never before passed through a moral and material evolution, at once so vast in its scope and brief in its time of accomplishment, as that from the old order to the new in the early part of this century. When men came to realize the greatness of the felicity which had befallen them, and that the change through which they had passed was not merely an improvement in details of their condition, but the rise of the race to a new plane of existence with an illimitable vista of progress, their minds were affected in all their faculties with a stimulus, of which the outburst of the mediaeval renaissance offers a suggestion but faint indeed. There ensued an era of mechanical invention, scientific discovery, art, musical and literary productiveness to which no previous age of the world offers anything comparable."

In the American context, there are various causes for why these works would be produced. You could tie it to the Unitarian or Transcendentalist types who had become popular in the middle of the 19th century, or loosely to the technical feats of the railroad. It was around the time of the latter where you had figures like Timothy Walker who would begin his Defense of Mechanical Philosophy (1831) with these lines:

On the whole, as this wondrous planet Earth is journeying with its fellows through infinite Space, so are the wondrous destinies embarked on it journeying through infinite Time, under a higher guidance than ours.

[...]

Leisure gave rise to thought, reflection, investigation; and these, in turn, produced new inventions and facilities. Mechanism grew by exercise. Machines became more numerous and more complete. The result was a still greater abridgment of labor. One could now do the work of ten. ... It is needless to follow the deduction farther.

We may also turn to Daniel Webster, who practices a similar kind of rhetoric about the advancements of the age:

It is an extraordinary era in which we live. It is altogether new. The world has seen nothing like it before. I will not pretend, no one can pretend, to discern the end; but every body knows that the age is remarkable for scientific research into the heavens, the earth, and what is beneath the earth; and perhaps more remarkable still for the application of this scientific research to the pursuits of life. The ancients saw nothing like it. The moderns have seen nothing like it till the present generation. . . . We see the ocean navigated and the solid land traversed by steam power, and intelligence communicated by electricity. Truly this is almost a miraculous era. What is before us no one can say, what is upon us no one can hardly realize. The progress of the age has almost outstripped human belief; the future is known only to Omniscience.

What you find in these passages is an unerring belief in the progress of American society, dominated by scientific miracle and the speed of invention. I find the beginning lines of Walker provided here to be the best precursor to what would eventually become the utopian science fiction novel. Already, at this point, those with the most progressive outlook were fixated on Earth and a potential journey to infinite space. As usual, it is a difficult affair to arrange together the progressive characters of the 19th and 20th century and make categorical claims about them. Carlsbad already did the work of pointing out how some eugenicists like Caleb Saleeby argued "women's suffrage will be eugenic" and so on, which is essentially a similar argument to what was said in Bellamy's Looking Backward. Perhaps we could say about this subject is that, when these social novels took precedence over the half-to-fully educated minds of the West, it was relatively uncontrolled. It was not quite as organized as a Sidney-Lumet-Dictatorship. The technical advents of this era were noticed by all, and it became clear that some groundbreaking transformation had to occur, demanding the involvement of many individuals. Quick aside: the spirit of this American era might have caused people like Upton Sinclair to spearhead what he thought to be innovative research in Mental Radio: Does It Work and How?. This was a work detailing telepathy experiments between him and his wife:

I say to scientific men, that such work deserves to be noticed. There is new knowledge here, close to the threshold, waiting for us; and we should not let ourselves be repelled by the seeming triviality of the phenomena, for it is well known that some of the greatest discoveries have come from the following up of just such trivial clews.

What did Benjamin Franklin have to go on when he brought the lightning down from the clouds on the string of a kite? Just a few hints, picked up in the course of the previous hundred years; a few traces of electricity noted by accident. The fact that you got a spark if you stroked a cat’s fur; the fact that you got the same kind of a spark by rubbing amber, and a bigger one by storing the energy in a glass jar lined with tinfoil—that was all men had as promise of the miracles of our time, dynamos and superpower, telegraph and telephone, x-ray surgery, radio, wireless, television, and new miracles just outside our door. If now it be a fact that there is a reality behind the notions of telepathy and clairvoyance, to which so many investigators are bearing testimony all over the world, who can set limits to what it may mean to the future? What new powers of the human mind, what ability to explore the past and future, the farthest deeps of space, and those deeps of our own minds, no less vast and marvelous?

Where I would begin to see the faults in a "social novel" has a lot to do with the forced meme aspect. The 20th century "Jewish literary mafia" was mentioned by Truman Capote in his time, and certainly the abolitionists in the 19th century were forerunners of that later development. Thinking about the middle of the 20th century is a good way to comprehend the matter since, after all, works like Thomas Dixon's Reconstruction Trilogy were popular roughly around the same time as Bellamy's utopian novel. Arguably, the obsession with canonicity is almost exclusively American, vaguely similar to the concern of producing "Great Novels". After the death of HP Lovecraft, the literary critic Edmund Wilson wrote an negative article about his life's work. The inspiration for this article, as he gladly mentions, is that he had become too popular. He likens the posthumous praise of Lovecraft to a cult. It is undoubtedly a problem of the canon and the permanence of an author's works, which is why he sought to combat Lovecraft with the charge of infantile writing. I don't have to dwell on this next point for too long, as we all have a general understanding of this to begin with, but such is true for someone like Ayn Rand as well. Her works had become too popular, undeservedly so in the eyes of literary critics, and the result is now a populous group thinking her prose is "exceptionally awful"; this is quite hard to avoid if you ever mention her name around """people with taste""". 

With the question of canonicity we are forced to consider what consensus emerged throughout the 20th century, how it was manufactured through school systems and the literary presses, and how it runs awry in the eyes of a younger audience today. The concern is how a school system or mass culture can be a vehicle for transmission, which boils down to the ulterior political motives of those involved — in pedagogy, criticism, and the literary establishment. I've already covered the influence of American schooling on the production of writers in the Hysterical Realist thread and I do not have much to add on that note. Other than the already apparent issue that such a system cannot inculcate a creative drive in its participants, a larger issue more pertinent to the discussion here is the syllabi. What do these aspiring writers read, what lasting impression does it create, and how has it been involved in the decline or death of literature proper? 

My understanding at this time is that the grand project has failed due to its obsession with a "appropriate canon" — clearly, one can imagine that it involves a revived interest in "excluded or marginal" authors, and a focus on contemporary authors propped up by the aforementioned Jewish literary mafia. This is a far different issue than something like T.S. Eliot's minor poets ("What I am concerned to dispel is any derogatory association connected with the term ‘minor poetry’, together with the suggestion that minor poetry is easier to read, or less worth while to read, than ‘major poetry’"). Eliot's concern when writing the essay "What is Minor Poetry?" was that critics played an outsized role in determining what poet had a major or minor role, and worried that a growing reading public would have its tastes decided through established reputations. We find the opposite here: with this American project in the 20th century, it is decidedly the critic and the status of reputation that forms a new syllabus (and, in the eyes of the students, a canon of sorts). I think that when we discuss propaganda/propagation, it is at this point where we find the most approximate cause for literary decline. The history of literature is host to disorganized and chaotic phenomena that cannot easily be assembled into a comprehensive whole. For a more alien influence to take control of literary history highlights how a canon or syllabus can be easily controlled, simply out of political ambition. The results, of course, are very obvious: what literature is praised is often a homage to specific political crises (the establishing of the Civil Rights Regime), and what authors find success are often tied to the institutional scheme. The decline of literature might involve other factors, but this I consider to be one of the strongest influences.

[anthony]

Thank you for the thoughtful reply. There's so much to say on this matter. I was considering bringing up the "utopian" development too. Interesting if viewed as the practical English approach to Social Fiction getting ready to look beyond the old problems. But of course the practical matters of our own time weren't as solved as they looked, and talking about them honestly is all bound up in taboo. Some other points I wanted to raise now.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precious_(film)

First, a reminder that Precious exists. This movie is remarkable for being an apparently earnest attempt at showing what human misery looks like in the 21st century. But its intention is no longer to galvanise direct action. It's more like a weird Obama era slacktivism piece where you tell yourself that you're stunning AND brave having seen the plight, and then you go on confident that social services will deal with all of this if the rethugliKKKan quintillionaires can just be taxed a bit more.

Our media is full of "Social" style political concern. But almost nothing comes out which could be called a cross section, or a shining of a light on anything which is actually a real problem. Hey speaking of shining lights.


[do NOT look up how Liev Schrieber is raising his children]

I share this poster in particular because the "Gripping thriller" part grabbed me. If any of you have seen this movie you might also find this funny. The faces on the poster might make you think people get shot at or something in this movie. But it's not. It's a movie about a bunch of Jews pretending to be left speechless at ordinary institutional corruption (which they only look for among people they hate and wish to destroy of course, which is true of both the journalists and the people who considered this worth a reiteration via the film) and then assembling a newspaper article in a rather dull and functional way.

It's got to be one of the least gripping films ever made. It's more like a wikipedia page perfunctorily adapted for film than anything cinematic. The film isn't explicitly lying as far as this all happened (it is solely concerned with reiterating a political win for additional impact), it is shining a light as the title suggests. But a spotlight suggests focus. We live in a big world. And they're homing in on this one thing. Is everything fine but the catholic church in America? Or is there perhaps an agenda here?

Spotlight and Precious were both acclaimed during their time in the Obama era. Spotlight won Best Picture right around the tail-end of when anybody could remotely care about the Academy Awards. But they both were left behind. On one hand by the Trump era spurring an internal libtard revolution in which they decided they could no longer act like they were just rational social scientists and humanitarians frustrated by pigheaded backwardness. Somehow or other the signal went through that it was time to swing into revolutionary hysteria and pretty much everyone seemed to get with the program pretty readily.

One could say that on account of this Spotlight didn't really mean anything or do much damage. I think it can be read as a kind of last gasp of American Jewry's canon-terror campaign against taste and sanity.

As I've said in a hundred different places but never definitively (and I won't here either), I believe that the greatest harm in these films was not making any particular idea stick (they only could so hard anyway, they're dying now. Nobody remembers Spotlight.), but rather, it was the subversion of taste. The introduction of a perceived chasm between what we like, what strikes us as right, and what is good. Good as art, good for us, etc. According to the New York Jew, master of art and taste according to postwar American culture, experiencing art and culture should make you feel like a kid staring down a plate of vegetables. The more unpleasant it feels the more good it is. The less sense it makes the smarter it is.

Being told that something like 'Spotlight" is both good cinema, and morally upright, is a form of violence. Its diagnosis of social ills is wilfully dishonest and hostile to its intended audience. And as a piece of cinematic art it is pathetically simple and feeble. Of no interest to an aesthete or enthusiast of the form. It is film reduced to a vehicle for propaganda. And this is held up as the film of its year. In isolation this is bad enough, but again, this was the last gasp after decades of this treatment. There were generations that grew up knowing that this is what good art looks like. Status was successfully linked to hostile cultural terror.

A tradition of honest, rational attempts at shining lights on social ills was hijacked and turned into a weapon. An commissar-interrogator's heat lamp shone right in the face of civil society. Turned to the paranoid hunt for pathology, dishonesty, unfairness. The state of our media is obvious now, but this isn't a new phenomena. We are experiencing a degeneration of what was once a relatively fine process. The process has orientalised and become cruder. Again I think the cultural situation parallels the political one. America went crypto-communist with the new deal, I don't think it's a stretch to say this here. A more elegant progressivism bolstered by the amount of intact and uncorrupted white infrastructure it could parasite itself upon. But once that starts running dry we get situations that start looking like a trend towards Zimbabwe or South Africa. Competency collapses, extreme corruption, blunt exercise of power in the face of truth.  I don't need to repeat myself any further.

What I did want to bring up at some point in this thread is this.



This is an intelligent film. Far more intelligent and thoughtful than its reputation would suggest. It aims to be insightful rather than well intentioned.

Read the wikipedia "Reception" section under Guess Who's Coming to Dinner and then take a look at Death Wish.

On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds an approval rating of 71% based on 38 reviews, with an average rating of 6.6/10. The website's critics consensus reads, "More well-intentioned than insightful in its approach to interracial marriage, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner succeeds thanks to the fizzy chemistry of its star-studded ensemble."[sup][41][/sup]

Many critics were displeased with the film, considering it an "immoral threat to society" and an encouragement of antisocial behavior. Vincent Canby of The New York Times was one of the most outspoken writers, condemning Death Wish in two extensive articles.[sup][15][/sup][sup][16][/sup][sup][17][/sup] Roger Ebert awarded three stars out of four and praised the "cool precision" of Winner's direction but did not agree with the film's philosophy.[sup][18][/sup] Gene Siskel gave the film two stars out of four and wrote that its setup "makes no attempt at credibility; its goal is to present a syllogism that argues for vengeance, and to present it so swiftly that one doesn't have time to consider its absurdity."[sup][19][/sup] Charles Champlin of the Los Angeles Times called it "a despicable motion picture... It is nasty and demagogic stuff, an appeal to brute emotions and against reason."[sup][20][/sup] Gary Arnold of The Washington Post described the film as "simplistic to the point of stasis. Scarcely a single sensible insight into urban violence occurs; the killings just plod [along] one after another as Bronson stalks New York's crime-ridden streets."[sup][21][/sup] Clyde Jeavons of The Monthly Film Bulletin wrote, "Superficially, it's not all that far removed from a Budd Boetticher revenge Western ... The difference, of course, is that Michael Winner has none of Boetticher's indigenous sense of allegory or his instinct for what constitutes a good folk-mythology, let alone his relish for three-dimensional villains."[sup][22][/sup]

Breaking with reality in obvious ways is actually good when it's to serve a MESSAGE which is GOOD FOR YOU. And then we say it's good using meaningless needledrop american terminology like "fizzy chemistry" to paper over how vapid it all is. But Death Wish, which also "allegedly" has problems with credibility, is bad. Should not exist. Full credit of course to Roger Ebert for getting this right and saying that the movie is badass and cool even if he doesn't agree with Mike "our kike" Winner.

And speaking of Mike, I should tell you what his deal is. He's a Jew. But our one. NOT from New York. A British Jew with a smarmy British accent who hates crime and undermen.

In a 2009 interview with The Daily Telegraph, Winner bemoaned political correctness, and said that if he was Prime Minister, he would be "to the right of Hitler".[sup][57][/sup]

Not welcome in the canon-club. But welcome in our hearts and minds. Look how many enthusiastic boomer comments you can find under clips of these movies. It got a warehousecore remake in 2018 (in which bruce willis shoots white people). This goes back to your initial prompt. That fiction and media with social concerns was not a leftist thing. They would have us believe they were the only ones who ever cared about art or treating the world's ills. But if you actually look back, you'll find that their art sucks and that their altruism is a lie and they're always the ones dodging and subverting real answers to serve the interests of power and partisanship.

More essential point I believe, that the art sucks. Every leftist social novel and equivalent piece of media suffers beyond a certain point in time from being out of touch with reality. Which makes it quite difficult to reach hearts and minds in the way a rightist work can. Social Novels are perhaps built to expire due to their originally practical aims. But that's different to a work which is concerned with an ideal or desired reality, rather than a temporal one. Which is what we got.

A canon of Mike Winner's is what we could have gotten. A canon of Mike Winner's wouldn't have left a gaping wound in our culture where we were meant to have continuity. This gaping wound is how we got Hysterical Realism. It's why our literary traditions died. It's why our youth flock to the last first world culture which dodged basically all of this and was able to build pleasure upon pleasure and quality upon quality for decades without subversion. A canon of Mike Winner's looks like Japan.

There are still people who will try to suggest that there's something embarrassing in finding Yukio Mishima impressive. Like Lovecraft he's a bit too popular. A bit too easy to read. But Japanese friends assure me that over there he's the safe pick if you're asked who is the greatest modern writer. Like saying The Godfather is the best movie.

We could have had that kind of relationship with good media made in our own countries, but instead we got culture-terror. We got shamed into acting like 'Klute' is a real movie so hard that we forgot the possibility of "good" media that actually feels good.

Edit: I fucking hate this thread I have yet to write anything in it that I didn't want to delete.

[JohnTrent]

Thank you for the thoughtful reply. There's so much to say on this matter. I was considering bringing up the "utopian" development too. Interesting if viewed as the practical English approach to Social Fiction getting ready to look beyond the old problems. But of course the practical matters of our own time weren't as solved as they looked, and talking about them honestly is all bound up in taboo. Some other points I wanted to raise now.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precious_(film)

First, a reminder that Precious exists. This movie is remarkable for being an apparently earnest attempt at showing what human misery looks like in the 21st century. But its intention is no longer to galvanise direct action. It's more like a weird Obama era slacktivism piece where you tell yourself that you're stunning AND brave having seen the plight, and then you go on confident that social services will deal with all of this if the rethugliKKKan quintillionaires can just be taxed a bit more.

I had no clue Precious existed so I laughed heartily. The life of the novelist who inspired (even using the word "inspired" here is making me laugh more) this movie has a set of bizarre life circumstances that might be worth mentioning. Ramona Lofton is the name but she apparently just uses the name "Sapphire". The brief Wikipedia account of her life is odd since she manages to fall into the right places: first she drops out of high school and obtains a GED, enters then drops out of a community college to become a "hippie" (?), then abruptly ends up attending both CCNY and Brooklyn College. To make this absurd jumpstart into academic success even stranger, once she even shows her novel to literary agents, they enter a bidding war up to $500,000. I know this is a basic recounting of Wikipedia details but every detail of this biography is highly implausible yet true. This is a person who became an adult around the end of the civil rights movement. She was a part of that age and, by the time she was 45 and started the novel bidding war, she could reap the benefits of it.

It is a fortunate stroke of fate that works like these only achieve an impermanent status. Anything else would be a nightmare.

  Edit: I fucking hate this thread I have yet to write anything in it that I didn't want to delete.

I'm enjoying what you've written here. Even though it's a very broad subject, I find that your posts capture the essence of the problem. I will attempt to add more to the thread soon.

[capgras]

Social novels are an open goal for any of /ourguys/ who are interested in writing fiction.

[anthony]

It does surprise me anthony, that you uncritically accept The Godfather as a candidate for "best movie". I thought you a fellow hater of seriousness.

I think it might have done you some good to marathon my post a second time before writing this reply.

[BillyONare]

Klute is similar to Vertigo in being another example of popular entertainment foolishly (as in fools before a court) being called art by movie critics.

You are attacking middle-brow movie reviewers, watchers and critics with another set of middle-brow opinions.

What movies do you like?

[capgras]

Klute is similar to Vertigo in being another example of popular entertainment foolishly (as in fools before a court) being called art by movie critics.

You are attacking middle-brow movie reviewers, watchers and critics with another set of middle-brow opinions.

Any definition of art must be categorical.

[Guest]

Any definition of art must be categorical.

Would you place the smears on canvas sold along the sidewalk in the same category as an Andrew Wyeth?

Both of them are shit, so yes.

[Guest]

Would you place the smears on canvas sold along the sidewalk in the same category as an Andrew Wyeth?

Both of them are shit, so yes.

You fell into my trap.

Andrew Wyeth was not a great artist; but that he was an artist, is indisputable. Canvases for tourists and The Godfather are not.

Indeed, film can only be art through forced techniques. Film being a presentation, offers no place in itself for the artistic, which is to be found in the "aboutness" of representation, in the fit of the representation to the represented. The point is not essential to the arguments I have been making however.

My feeling is that video games have more artistic potential than film; though, no video game has come as close to being art as many films have. Perhaps it is very difficult to make such a video game?

I think Bioshock the best attempt yet.

"What on earth does this have to do with the Social Novel and Propaganda?"

[capgras]

Any definition of art must be categorical.

Would you place the smears on canvas sold along the sidewalk in the same category as an Andrew Wyeth?

Yes, they're both art.

[Guest]

I think it might have done you some good to marathon my post a second time before writing this reply.

Let's have the full context then:

But Japanese friends assure me that over there he's the safe pick if you're asked who is the greatest modern writer. Like saying The Godfather is the best movie.

The implication here is that Yukio Mishima can be safely said to be "the greatest modern writer" in Japan; as in the USA, The Godfather can be said to be "the best movie". The statement is written as a defense of Mishima's standing. It is therefore necessary that you consider The Godfather to be a reasonable candidate for "the best movie", though your own choice may be different.

My argument is that both are quintessentially middle-brow.

Anthony is very obviously using ''safe'' to refer to social acceptability rather than quality.

[Guest]

Andrew Wyeth was not a great artist; but that he was an artist, is indisputable. Canvases for tourists and The Godfather are not.

I enjoy The Godfather more than I enjoy any Wyeth painting, and I like canvases for tourists about the same as I like his work. If art can be worse than things that aren’t art, why bother making differentiation?

[Unformed Golem]

Reflecting on this thread and the history of the Social Novel (later play and film), the demos has probably gotten too stupid and tasteless for this to be an effective means of propaganda. There was always an implicit appeal to empathy and compassion -- look at how bad off these poor people are, don't you feel bad for them? What if it was happening to you? However the Current Year zoghive isn't capable of entertaining such hypotheticals, and besides it can't tolerate seeing client groups placed at an unresolved disadvantage.

[JohnTrent]

Reflecting on this thread and the history of the Social Novel (later play and film), the demos has probably gotten too stupid and tasteless for this to be an effective means of propaganda.  There was always an implicit appeal to empathy and compassion -- look at how bad off these poor people are, don't you feel bad for them?  What if it was happening to you?  However the Current Year zoghive isn't capable of entertaining such hypotheticals, and besides it can't tolerate seeing client groups placed at an unresolved disadvantage.

This is certainly the case, though the lifespan of the "social novel" form was near to its own (temporary) death in the first place. Once you turn to the timeline after the end of WW2 and the enactment of the Civil Rights Regime, the only usable social problems have everything to do with racism and fascism lurking in the shadows.



This is a very stupid book and I don't expect anyone here to have read it. I opened it up out of curiosity years ago and stopped shortly after. My purpose for mentioning this novel is because it was released in 2004. Had it been released in the 50s or 60s, you might have seen it alongside like Sinclair Lewis's It Can't Happen Here in a Top 100 American Novels list. It is intrinsically foreign to its time: the 2000s have no relation whatsoever to Lindbergh, and the thought of Bush-era constituents becoming antisemites overnight is laughable. To think of the reasons why this novel was made will not lead you to any rational answer; it requires a diagnosis of paranoia on the author's part. This is a key distinction from the brief historical overview seen earlier in the thread, because the early social novels had some pointed focus on the present and futurity, whereas social novels like The Plot Against America almost seem procedurally generated to accommodate a fear of the past. It resembles campfire ghost stories for Jews and well-off minorities. Is it any surprise that Obama's favorite scriptwriter David Simon had a role in the adaptation?

Simon had read the novel in 2004, but thought it politically irrelevant; though approached by Tom Rothman in 2013 to adapt it for television, he declined. He decided to take on the project in the aftermath of the 2016 US election, in which Donald Trump was elected US President, saying that Roth's novel had proven "perversely...allegorical," and approaching his longtime collaborator Ed Burns, with whom he had worked on The Wire and Generation Kill, to co-write. Events such as the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville influenced the adaptation.

Haha.

The concerns of a social novel/play/film in recent memory will have nothing to do with present conditions beyond some tenuous comparisons. The audience that would have read about a future utopia no longer watches or reads these works because they no longer exist; the basic premise has been revoked. The audiences that continue to watch these shows do not constitute a very populous group. Continuing from the examples in the Elf Media thread, it's a interesting thought exercise to imagine who went to see Armageddon Time in theaters. The average viewership for Simon's show was 400,000. How many of these viewers were public school teachers or university professors, I wonder?

The audiences have become stupid, and such is true for the writers as well.

[FlyWithYou]

As I've said in a hundred different places but never definitively (and I won't here either), I believe that the greatest harm in these films was not making any particular idea stick (they only could so hard anyway, they're dying now. Nobody remembers Spotlight.), but rather, it was the subversion of taste. The introduction of a perceived chasm between what we like, what strikes us as right, and what is good. Good as art, good for us, etc. According to the New York Jew, master of art and taste according to postwar American culture, experiencing art and culture should make you feel like a kid staring down a plate of vegetables. The more unpleasant it feels the more good it is. The less sense it makes the smarter it is.

I think you're onto something here. By representation, good art makes you see things, things that really exist. You get hit by a sense of visceral power when you see a good work of art because, even though it's "just" a representation, it's so true that it lets you see straight through to the real form of the thing. That should feel very good, in a real way. Like sex or weightlifting. You're actually looking at something when you look at a good work of art, you're making deep heavy contact with it. When you look at a bad work of art, you aren't looking at anything at all, because the connection to real life through representation isn't being made. So your natural hunger to see and do things isn't being satisfied. You're starving, your soul is atrophying. Getting someone to think that it's right and proper and good to stare into nothingness (instead than participating in reality through good art or anything else) and that this nothingness-posing-as-substantiality is real and substantial and that it's what proper art is; this is, on a smaller scale, a bit like tricking someone into killing himself.

[calico]

If the "social novel" ever existed it certainly doesn't today. The only books that can be said to have been widely read enough to create a conversation in circa 2024 (outside of fetish pornography for women) are nearly universally non-fiction works. Malcolm Gladwell, Kendi, etc. Once in a while someone claims to have read some allegedly-nonfiction work about Donald Trump or by Michelle Obama or some such thing.

100 years ago I don't doubt more people read novels. But the idea that "Sinclair aimed for the American heart but hit its stomach" is just something high school Honors American Literature teachers dreamed up. I guarantee you Americans didn't care about some dumb Pollack-Lithuanian family working in the Chicago cattlepens anymore than they care Guatemalans with dubious work visas tearing apart chickens for ten dollars an hour in Kansas today.

Ideas don't exist because they're true but because they have value to those who hold them. Academics like the idea that literature changes the minds of the common man, if only they could be reached! Therefore the job isn't useless.

But the truth is more mundane. Oxycontin got in trouble because Perdue set themselves up for a juicy class-action settlement and continuously walked right into largely due to hiring early-20s consultants whose only qualifications were Ivy League degrees and who had no reason to prioritize long term gains over "making 150k a year at 22 years old." In a few decades they'll find some TV show or book which "brought this to light." The thoughts of the man on the street had nothing to do with it. It was just attorneys working in their own self-interest and a pharmaceutical company skirting the law in a particularly egregious way.