517 – Modern vs Classic Stories

The Mythcreant Podcast

It’s easy to assume that the classics must be better than whatever drek is being published today. Isn’t that why we call them classics? However, such an assumption is wrong. That’s both because older stories aren’t always good, but also because new stories aren’t always bad. This week, we’re comparing the two and also discussing how spec fic stories have changed over time. Plus, what if college professors were the only ones writing fiction?

Show Notes

• The Expanse
• A Song of Ice and Fire
• Lord of the Rings
• A Wizard of Earthsea
• Sword of Shannara
• The Great Gatsby
• The Grapes of Wrath
• The Catcher in the Rye
• Cinderella
• Vampire’s Kiss
• Swamplandia!
• Save the Cat
• Hero With a Thousand Faces
• The Hero’s Journey
• Piranesi
• Great Expectations
• Professor Challenger
• Middlemarch
• Gloucester
• Ran
• The Bayeux Tapestry
• Understanding Comics
• How to Be Pretentious
• Freytag’s Pyramid
• The Odyssey
• The Tempest
• Romeo and Juliet

Transcript

Generously transcribed by Maddie. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.

Chris:  You’re listening to the Mythcreant Podcast, with your hosts, Oren Ashkenazi, Chris Winkle, and Bunny. [Intro Music]

Chris: This is the Mythcreant Podcast. I’m Chris, and with me is…

Oren: Oren.

Chris: And…

Bunny: Bunny.

Chris: Now we’ve been going for over a decade. So we’re older than most other podcasts. What do you think that says about us?

Oren: Hmm. It’s a classic question.

Bunny: I think we’re very wise, even though you’re the ones who have been around that long. [Chuckles]

Chris: Well, obviously our podcast must be really deep and profound because it’s so old. How can something that’s lasted a decade be bad? It stood the test of time.

Oren: [Chuckles] It’s been around for a while. As we know, all podcasts are timeless.

Bunny: And it can be reinterpreted for each generation. Of which there has been one, but theoretically, future generations.

Oren: What did the hosts mean when they said, “Don’t use oppressed mages?” Is it possible they meant use oppressed mages?

Bunny, Chris: [Chuckle]

Bunny: We’ll never know. [Chuckles]

Chris: This time we’re doing modern versus classic stories. Because we like making people mad, I guess.

Oren: We record several of these at once and the last one always has to be the spiciest ’cause it’s getting late and we need to stay awake.

Bunny, Chris, Oren: [Chuckle]

Bunny: Last episode we were talking about hunger being an emotion and I haven’t eaten yet, so…

Bunny, Chris, Oren: [Chuckle]

Bunny: It’s getting pretty emotional over here.

Chris: Get ready for hanger.

Bunny: Oh yeah.

Oren: Speaking of hunger, we must again begin with sandwich discourse because, what is a classic?

Chris: What I say it is, that’s what I’ve decided.

Oren: Yeah. [Laughs]

Chris: Chris says. [Chuckles]

Bunny: [Chuckles]

Oren: It does seem like a classic story is one that is old and one that we laud for whatever reason.

Bunny: That seems like the only consistent definition.

Chris: I wanna say a classic is a backlist book that sells well.

Chris, Bunny: [Chuckle]

Bunny: That’s a cynical answer.

Oren: [Chuckles] We’re getting to the point where The Expanse isn’t a classic yet. But it could be one eventually, and we’re getting to the point where Game of Thrones, the book, is a classic almost. I would say it’s probably not quite there yet. I don’t think it’s gonna be too much longer. Lord of the Rings is obviously a classic, people call it that. The Earthsea books are classics. Sword of Shannara is probably not, even though it’s old enough, it’s not lauded enough to be considered a classic.

Bunny: Mm, maybe.

Chris: Definitely there is a fame and cultural influence factor. The people still think about it even though it’s older, which is why it still sells, but also the cultural influence a book has. I do think, it maybe isn’t necessary, but what is a big factor, because that makes people want to go back to the original to see that kind of line of influence.

Oren: We are talking about in terms of speculative fiction. Whereas when you talk about classic books, most of the ones that show up are not gonna be spec fic.They’re gonna be significantly older than what we’re talking about in a lot of cases. They’re gonna be the stuff you probably had to read in high school, or maybe not anymore. Apparently that’s less common now. But if you’re our age, The Grapes of Wrath and The Great Gatsby and Catcher in the Rye for some reason, stuff like that.

Bunny: [Chuckles] Supposedly being good is a prerequisite to being a classic, but I’m not sold.

Oren: I said lauded, not good.

Bunny, Chris: [Chuckle]

Chris: When we’re talking about classic stories, we don’t have to be just talking about novels here. So Cinderella, for instance, it’s a fairytale that’s maybe 2000 years old. That has a hugely long, classic, Disney… It is classic before Disney.

Bunny: It was classic before Disney. I guess what I’m getting at, is there are classics and then there are classics of things, which suggests a classic is also meant to be representative of a genre. So if I say, “Vampire’s Kiss is classic Nick Cage,” I don’t mean Vampire’s Kiss is like The Great Gatsby, but I am saying it’s classic Nick Cage as in representative of Nick Cage.

Oren: I’ll say Vampire’s Kiss is like The Great Gatsby. I’ll be brave enough to make that stand.

Bunny, Chris, Oren: [Laugh]

Bunny: I might even say it’s better. [Chuckles] I think we should laud it more.

Chris: Whereas, when I say modern, we could also use very different definitions of modern. I would say the type of book currently being published today.

Bunny: And then there are many things called “modern” classics, which I have read a couple of, that don’t seem to have anything to do with each other.

Chris: Is that just an advertising blurb phrase?

Bunny: Yeah.

Chris: That’s what I thought. [Laughs]

Bunny: It’s the sort of thing you’ll read on the quotes.

Chris: “They” say. Generic “they”. Somebody says this is a modern classic. Does it happen to be the publisher of that book, who says it’s a modern classic?

Bunny: They might also say something specific. I think Swamplandia!, a book I read recently was a “modern Floridian classic” or something like that.

Chris: Oh wow. We’re getting really niche with our classics.

Bunny: Maybe it was the “great Floridian novel,” I forget, but it was something like that.

Chris: The “great Floridian novel.” “Florida Man” classic novel.

Bunny: Classic Florida Man.

Chris: I think there’s some interesting discussion to be had looking at kind of the older stories we still read today and we still discuss today, versus the books we’re publishing now. Mostly because in storytelling, in literary circles, there’s this big myth that stories are unchanging, that sometimes we have to tackle when we’re talking about stuff.

I recently had an article on Freytag’s pyramid, which if you don’t recognize what that term is, if you’ve seen the little triangle graph where it has rising action and climax and falling action, that’s Freytag’s pyramid, and it’s about 200 years old. And in my article, I was like, “Okay, so this actually did not originally mean something we’re thinking it means today. It means something entirely different and it’s outdated.” And I had a commenter who just couldn’t wrap their mind around the idea of a story structure being out of date, because this notion of like, “Oh, but stories are eternal. And, what do you mean?”

Bunny: Definitely monomyth-esque.

Chris: The hero’s journey is definitely one of those things like, “Oh, don’t you know all of our mythologies have the same points in them, and all stories are the same?”

Bunny: It was great when Gilgamesh saved the cat.

Chris: [Laughs] Which again goes back to the whole discussion about pseudo-structures and how the hero’s journey sometimes definitely does this weird thing where in one hand they’re like, “All stories automatically have the hero’s journey.” But also you are supposed to make your story like the hero’s journey, so it’ll be good. It can either be prescriptive or it can be descriptive. It can’t be both.

Bunny, Chris: [Chuckle]

Chris: And I do think a lot of times in academic fields when they’re studying folklore or stories in general, they take a very descriptive approach, which kind of assumes all stories are of equal quality and our job is to just look and see what they’re doing. Whereas a storyteller is trying to master a craft. You kind of have to take a prescriptive approach. You can’t become better unless you acknowledge some things are better than other things.

Oren: That’s sort of a requirement, but also, I don’t want any of the things that are better to be the things I didn’t wanna do. Let me know when you get that one solved, okay?

Bunny, Chris: [Chuckle]

Chris: I definitely don’t wanna hear that my multiple points of view might be detrimental in some way.

Oren: You leave my multiple points of view alone.

Bunny: [Chuckles]

Chris: You can take away my extra viewpoints over my dead body.

Bunny: [Chuckles]

Oren: Hands off my characters with way too much backstory. That’s a real problem I have. I write characters with way too much backstory. Stop telling me I can’t do that, Chris. [Chuckles]

Bunny: Rude.

Chris: Part of the culture is this huge myth that our stories have not advanced, when they absolutely have. My favorite anecdote about stories advancing is from ancient Egyptian literature, when they didn’t have first person the way we do today.

As far as I could tell, they didn’t have any professional storytellers. What they had is lots and lots of scholars who could write, and so these people would all write fiction as a hobby, but they didn’t seem to even have a court jester or storyteller. They didn’t seem to have plays. They didn’t have any professional storytellers, but they had tons of hobbyists in their scholar class.

Oren: So it’s like if all novels were written by college professors? Ugh, I don’t love, I’m not, mm-mm. No, no, no, no. No thank you.

Bunny, Chris: [Laugh]

Oren: I’ve changed my mind on who built the Great Pyramids.

Bunny, Chris: [Chuckle]

Chris: But back then they didn’t have first person directly. So all the stories that used first person, they specifically have a framing device where they start in third person and a character shows up and then is like, “Hey, let me tell you what happened to me.” And then the rest is them talking, which is where we get that kind of first person retelling narrative premise where it’s a future version of the character telling their past.

That idea had to be introduced. And then now when we talk about first person, we have not just a first person retelling, but we may have more kind of immersive forms and we get right into it and start with “I”. But that’s not a thing we had a couple thousand years ago.

Oren: My hottest take as it were, is stories have generally gotten better over time. I said it, I said what I meant and I meant what I said.

Bunny: That’s interesting.

Chris: Oh, Oren, how could you?

Oren: [Chuckles] And people who don’t think that, people who look at modern stories and are like, “Eh, Booktok, eh, Romantasy, eh, LitRPG.” It’s like, sure. I say, “Eh, LitRPG all the time.” But I am aware the past also had many really bad stories, just atrociously bad. I have read some of them. So if you think stories were better in the past, it is a symptom of you not being well read enough.

Bunny: I would agree with this. [Chuckles] That’s hotter than the desert outside Egypt.

Chris: And our classics are also, of course, cherry picked. Not that all of our classics are good, but I’m pretty sure the average classic from a period is gonna be better than the average story from that period.

Oren: And even then, if we look, best stories that are coming out now compared to the ones that have been preserved because they were good enough that people cared about them and wanted to keep talking about them. I put Piranesi against any of the classics I had to read in high school. From any perspective, it’s a better book, and I think you would have a much better time reading it than you would The Grapes of Wrath.

Bunny: I think people do forget the quote unquote “classics” are just the ones that have been preserved. There were tons of crappy stories in Edwardian England or whatever, but of course they haven’t been preserved. For every Great Expectations there is an Ironay Itleslay.

Oren: Or they have been, but no one reads them. Everyone’s read Sherlock Holmes, which has its ups and downs, but it’s miles better than a lot of Doyle’s other work. Like his, I can’t even remember the name now. Professor something, Professor Champion or whatever.

Bunny: Challenger I think, which is a tryhard name if I’ve ever heard one.

Oren: That’s what it is. Oh God. Challenger stories are abysmal and there’s a reason Doyle is known for his Sherlock stories and not his Challenger stories. Even though the Challenger stories still exist, you can read them. It’s just no one wants to.

Bunny: Nobody’s making you. I’m trying to read Middlemarch right now. Well, trying. Basically I’m reading Middlemarch as I wait for other books to arrive at the library, and now that they have, I can put it aside. And because Middlemarch is one of those things that’s often called a classic, I looked online to be like, “Okay, what do people say about Middlemarch?”

And there are so many haughty takes and I feel like we can’t talk about classics without talking about some of the elitism that also keeps them aloft. There was an especially bad New Statesman article and a quote from it published 150 years ago. Oh, this is the tagline of it: “George Elliot’s epic humanist novel is the antidote to our witless online world.” That’s boring. Middlemarch is pretty boring.

Oren: Wait, hang on. That statement wasn’t from 150 years ago.

Bunny: Virginia Woolf apparently called it “one of the few English novels written for grownup people,” which has a similar vibe. But the New Statesman article was recent. Calling something a classic kind of sets up this environment where the story is uncriticizable, and if you say it’s boring, you’re not a real grownup. You’re a child who doesn’t understand the genius of Dorothea and whatever her guy friend is.

Chris: Ohh no.

Oren: I got in so much trouble in college when we were doing Shakespeare for saying the Gloucester character in King Lear is unnecessary because he’s a duplicate. He has the same arc as King Lear, and it goes exactly the same way and there’s no reason to have this other character here.

And then we watched Ran, which is Akira Kurosawa’s version of King Lear. It’s very good. And notably, it has simply deleted the Gloucester character. Everything else is almost a shot for shot remake, but not Gloucester. He’s not there, and you wouldn’t even notice if you weren’t looking for it. Thanks, Kurosawa. It’s rare that I get such a beautiful demonstration of my point like that. I’ve never seen anyone make a movie to prove me right before.

Chris: [Laughs]

Bunny: Wow. How about that? Who’da thunk?

Chris: I do think this again, comes along with the myth that old equals good. Which maybe in a time before we had science or advanced understanding of how things worked, something lasting might have been a halfway decent sign. Be like, “Okay, well that’s still around, so maybe it works, since we don’t really know.” Now, it’s very silly. But I’ve seen lots of very serious people try to argue things are better or profound because they’re old. In fact, Bunny. Do you remember that ridiculous romantic literary book about comics you lent me that one time or showed me?

Bunny: Oh, was it Understanding Comics?

Chris: So your comics class, that turned out to be about narrative nonfiction comics?

Bunny: It ended up being about journalistic comics. I don’t know, we weren’t allowed to do fiction in that, so I snuck in fiction by writing about Mystery Science Theater. But, I think it must have been Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud.

Chris: So I looked at one of their textbooks in that class, which was in comic form and it was very into validating comics and why comics are serious and why you should respect them. And doing that by being like, “Oh, and we define comics as a series of images. Then therefore, ancient,” was one of the arguments that was made in there.

Bunny: Don’t get me wrong, McCloud has some useful stuff about understanding how time moves in comics and how it’s different than other mediums, but then he definitely has a “comics are good if you define them this way. You can see, actually the Bayeaux Tapestry is a comic and so is the scroll.” Or something like that. Which, I don’t know if you need to justify comics by doing that. Whether or not you think his definition actually holds water, comics can be recent and also good.

Chris: He was one of the people I was making fun of in my satirical, How to Be Pretentious article because of these ridiculous arguments. The other thing he did that really annoyed me is his effort to distance himself from superhero stories. It’s like, we gotta make comics look better by saying comics aren’t always about superheroes and superhero stories are ridiculous, but we’re deeper than that. Comics can be better than that, and it’s like, we didn’t have to throw superhero stories under the bus. That was not a necessary part of this.

Bunny: Modern comics owe a lot to superhero stories.

Oren: As a very armchair anthropology enthusiast, I desperately want the modern obsession with things being older, being better to be a result of the fall of the Western Roman Empire, after which there was a period in which big public works and that sort of thing got a lot less common because there was less central authority, and what there was was a lot weaker. But I know that’s not true because the Romans also thought older things were better.

Bunny, Chris: [Laugh]

Oren: So it doesn’t matter. It seems to be a universal idea that older stuff is better than newer stuff. That’s just, I don’t know. I don’t know what to tell you.

Bunny: It goes hand in hand with the “kids these days.”

Oren: Yeah. [Chuckles]

Chris: I think it is interesting to look at what are the differences between stories today and older stories, what are we seeing? Personally, one thing I feel I noticed between older, newer stories is the emphasis on immersion in prose works I definitely feel is a very modern thing.

To be fair, fairytales are all told in summary, but they also were oral stories. And I suppose maybe if the Brothers Grimm were working today and collecting these oral tales, maybe they would’ve written them down in more detail and elaborated on them a lot more than they did, for instance.

But we wouldn’t usually read a book of stories that are completely told in summary, even though, again, if we’re talking about the limits of somebody’s memory, for oral tales that does make a certain level of sense. But I think there’s gonna be a lot more summary and exposition in older works and also the prose style, more omniscient narration, whereas we’ve been moving more towards close perspective and first person and emphasizing vivid detail.

Bunny: I think oral stories too, probably had their own kind of immersion that isn’t totally captured by writing it down, because even if it is summary, there’s a theatricality to it. So oral stories that are kind of blandly summarized in written work probably didn’t feel that way at all when they were being told aloud. And now we figured out how to get that immersion back in a prose medium.

Oren: A somewhat direct comparison I can make, ’cause it’s hard to say the differences between modern stories and any classic, because that’s a huge time period. But if I’m looking at the differences between modern speculative fiction and stuff that is pre-Lord of the Rings. I would say now there is a bigger emphasis on trying to make the world make sense, and I think some of that definitely comes from Lord of the Rings, even though I’m not saying Lord of the Rings’ world makes perfect sense. But Tolkien definitely influenced people to work harder on their setting to the chagrin of weird essayists everywhere.

Bunny: [Fake cough] paid by the word.

Oren: But then there’s also, and this is definitely not Lord of the Rings, there’s something else. Where there is more respect for the reader’s time. Older stories tend to spend a lot more time messing around.

Chris: Or don’t you think it’s because we all have super short attention spans and we’re all going downhill?

Bunny: [Chuckles] It’s this witless, social media age.

Oren: I’m sure that’s what it is, but if that’s what it takes to stop having stories that have a bunch of prologues and then we fart around for a while in nowhere-ville. It’s like, “Please get me to the part that matters.”

Chris: This is an interesting one because I’m not sure a shorter attention span is always bad ’cause it means you value your time more. I don’t know, maybe back in the day, several hundred years ago, a book that was much slower paced would’ve been considered more engaging, either because there were less books to compare it to, and so there was a novelty in reading a book, or maybe it was because other forms of entertainment were less entertaining, so we had less competition for entertaining media. Their standards are lower.

Or maybe it was the kind of thing where people like me wouldn’t have read books several hundred years ago ’cause they would’ve all been too boring to keep my attention. And that makes books more attractive to more people. It’s kind of hard to say exactly what’s going there, but it is pretty apparent stories today are more engaging, they are spending the time more efficiently and getting right into the story in comparison to older stories.

Oren: It might be worth pointing out even older stories often did this. At this point, kind of well known that Shakespeare plays, they don’t necessarily seem this way to us, but went out of their way to include jokes and stuff that would keep the audience’s interest in the middle of the 15th mistaken identity scene.

Bunny: [Chuckles] Oh boy, it’s another banquet.

Oren: And the same thing with the sudden bursts of violence and the murders and stuff. And that doesn’t translate super well to a modern audience. But as far as Elizabethan theatergoers, that stuff was definitely written to hold people’s attention and help stop ’em from getting bored. So that’s been going on for a while. Maybe the Elizabethan Englishmen didn’t have any attention span. Maybe they couldn’t handle it.

Chris: And another thing we’ve talked about before, one of the things that is reason why I said Freytag’s pyramid is outdated, is the emphasis on tragedy that happened during that period of plays, not just older stories. There was a specific period of time in which tragic plays were normal. And that was during Freytag’s pyramid time. So the falling action in that structure assumes the hero is going to experience a downfall and then die. [Chuckles]

Bunny: [Chuckles] And also that you two will bash, what was it, the Poles? Does he really hate the Poles?

Chris: He was very racist against the Polish. Gosh, the Polish. We went through some European history videos recently, and man, the Polish had a real tough time for several hundred years there.

Oren: It was not great. One thing I always wonder, and I’m not well read enough to say this with certainty, but based on what I have read of older, European specifically and near Eastern story tradition, I do kind of wonder if the emphasis on tragedy comes from the fact that any stories that had happy endings were not good.

If you look at stories that have happy endings, especially the older ones, there’s a reason the term “deus ex machina” caught on, like that was a real thing. It’s like, “Well, we don’t know how to end this story, so the gods will show up and set everything right.”

That happens at the end of the Odyssey. The Odyssey has such a weird ending. Where it looks like Odysseus is gonna have to kill everyone on his island because he showed up and did a bunch of murders on these guys who were trying to seduce his wife. And now everyone’s mad at him.

Bunny: And all the serving maids.

Oren: Kills a lot of people. It’s pretty brutal. And then Athena is like, “Nope! Everyone stop, back to your corners.” And then they all lived happily ever after, the end.

Bunny, Chris: [Chuckle]

Oren: It’s the weirdest way to end that story, especially after reading the Iliad and even in Shakespeare, other than comedies, the Shakespeare story that could be considered to not be a comedy and also have a happy ending is The Tempest. Which basically has the deus ex machina again, although only this time, it’s also Shakespeare’s self-insert OC uwu. Do not steal.

Bunny: [Chuckles]

Chris: So nobody had invented the turning point yet, basically. It’s too hard to figure out how heroes can solve problems. So what if the hero just dies instead?

Oren: Did we not have enough stories that have a satisfying, triumphant ending and so everyone assumed they must be bad? I don’t know. I can’t say that with certainty, but it feels like that when I look at older stories.

Chris: It does make you wonder because the ones that had a happy ending were generally called comedies. Which speaks to the idea that you didn’t feel you could have a story that was serious and deeply emotional and also have a happy ending. Those two things were considered in conflict.

Bunny: The tragedies, Shakespeare’s tragedies were often also comedic. They had comedic elements, notably the beginning of Romeo and Juliet has a lot of antics with Mercutio mostly. There’s that scene where he is, I think right before he dies, where he is teasing Romeo about Queen Mab and stuff like that. A scene in which I think some of the playfulness of that scene has held up. And that’s an interesting thing worth analyzing, whereas some of the dick jokes don’t so much.

Chris: I do think it almost takes more confidence and perhaps more skill as a storyteller, to feel that I don’t need to make dick jokes and I can still hold the audience’s attention.

Bunny, Chris: [Chuckle]

Bunny: Let’s say that. All my stories don’t contain dick jokes because I am very confident.

Oren: So I guess this leaves us with a final question since we’re running outta time here. Is, should you read classics? My answer is if you want to, yes. If you like classics, read what you like. Otherwise, I don’t think you should make yourself do it. I think there are modern stories that are just as good, if not better than any classic you might be recommended.

Chris: If you are fascinated by stories, which you might be since you were listening to this podcast, then reading classics gives you the opportunity to see the origin of many story tropes. Which I find rewarding when I can manage to pay attention to them ’cause they are so boring.

Bunny, Chris: [Laugh]

Bunny: They’re also interesting historical snapshots, not because they’re necessarily representative of the time, but because they’re representative of what sorts of stories were being told about the time.

Chris: They can be a rewarding experience to see, and of course sometimes people like being tuned into the cultural conversation since they heard stories that are often referenced and discussed. And it’s nice to feel like you’re in the know when somebody references a classic. So there’s plenty of reasons to read them, but I don’t think anybody should feel they’re not cultured if they don’t read them or they’re obligated to read them. I think it’s fine to find modern stories that you enjoy.

Oren: With that, I think we can go ahead and call this episode to a close.

Bunny: With that hot take.

Chris: Well, if we didn’t make you mad or if we did make you mad, you can still support us on Patreon. Go to patreon.com/mythcreants.

Oren: And before we go, I want to thank a couple of our existing patrons. First, there’s Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel, and there’s Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek. We will talk to you next week. [Outro Music]

Outro: This has been the Mythcreant Podcast. Opening, closing theme, The Princess Who Saved Herself by Jonathan Coulton.