Is Literature Dead?

Maybe that's not so bad: in the past you were either famous or not. Now I think we get these common interest communities that all read the same blogs / follow the same people on twitter and great art proliferates in those niches. Maybe it doesn't enter the total public consciousness; maybe it doesn't have to.

Do authors explicitly write subtext? As the author says, I don't think so. I think authors use writing and editing as a way to organize their thoughts over time such that all the subtext comes out naturally. For most, I think, this is a subconscious thing. That's why you can't teach it.

Milton (the real one, anyway) was part of a lineage, a conversation, in which books—indeed, print itself— made a difference in the world

This may be the most important point of all. As a society with lots of different interests, literature has allowed the "subconscious of man" to have a multi-generational conversation about what's important. You write a book, you pick up that conversation. The public at large reads the book, they begin participating in it.

I'm not saying people sit around and study books to determine deep understanding of universe, but that's what happens. It's just not evident. You spend many years dedicating large portions of your time to climb inside the minds of great people throughout history, eventually you get a gut feel for what it means to be human -- no matter what your circumstances. You begin to see the same dramas and questions arise. You see the mosaic of life itself.

Of course, you see all of that other ways too. You can probably go to YouTube right now and watch a video on any kind of deep topic you'd like. But the key point was this shared subconscious journey, created by dedicated time in a book where your concentration and imagination were required to follow along with the story. Doing that, you live inside the heads of great thinkers in ways the click-and-move on crowd never will.

That's not for everybody to do. Some folks gravitate towards that kind of thing. Some don't. But it has to be for somebody. And it has to be for enough somebodys that the conversation continues.

I'm not sure that's the case anymore.

Well yes, since books or print in general aren't the culutally defining medium any more. Anyway, I think some people will get bored with TV & movies and will learn to find new interesting things you can do in literature. Movies are much too complex to create in order to be truly innovative. Too much money is involved. So, I don't think literature is dead, but there will be fewer readers, it will be more difficult for authors to make a living from writing literature alone and the number of professional critics will probably decline. On the other hand, literature as a mass media for everyone was, in a historical perspective, a rather young intervention anyway.

I will assume that they were not.

Do authors explicitly write subtext? Sure. In the same way that you can purposefully decide what your subconscious will focus on. But it wanders here and there. Over time, authors coalesce around a narrative to the universe that feels pleasing to them.

So there is only one subtext to a text? Not at all. Stephen King used to say that there was no subtext to any of his work. Of course there was -- but it was nothing he ever recognized, organized, or struggled with mentally (I assume).

If a subtext was intended by the author and never discovered by any reader, is it still a subtext? Sure. It very well can be. Authors that begin organizing their subconscious around a topic may purposefully add subtext. Nobody may ever catch it.

If a reader constructs a subtext that contradicts the intentions of the author, is it a subtext or a vision? It is a process of subconscious transferal. It's not a math problem. There's no correct subtext.

How do you define subtext? I don't think you can, at least in way people want it defined. I read somewhere once that fiction was actually more true than nonfiction. This, of course, sounded like idiocy to me as a programmer. But then I got it. It's true because we're sharing impressions of life in a way that can't be explicitly said. It's one thing to say "Local man escapes execution". It's another to read "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge"

To clarify, if the questions were rhetorical, we're agreeing. That's because those are exactly the questions to ask as you begin to absorb the author's world. Is this the way they feel about the world in general, is it only in this situation? Is what I'm experiencing intentional? Do others experience these same insights? Does the author have a way of looking at things that nobody else does (or can see)? And so on..

There's no one answer to your questions for any one book/reader combination. Making the questions universal just makes it into nonsense.