[HN Gopher] Could the greatest works of literature be undiscovered?
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Could the greatest works of literature be undiscovered?
Author : diodorus
Score : 55 points
Date : 2022-06-01 17:33 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.theguardian.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.theguardian.com)
| sammalloy wrote:
| 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?
| syndacks wrote:
| 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.
| insightcheck wrote:
| 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.
|
| Coverage about the book's resurgence was published in The New
| Yorker (paywalled at https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-
| turner/the-greatest-ame...) and The Guardian (no paywall, via
| https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/dec/13/stoner-john-
| wi...).
| danenania wrote:
| 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.
| insightcheck wrote:
| 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.
|
| [0] https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLZHQObOWTQDPD3Mizz
| M2x...
| honkler wrote:
| in general, there may (actually, must) be geniuses who have
| dropped out of society.
| jl6 wrote:
| 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.
| danenania wrote:
| 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.
| giantg2 wrote:
| Eg Ted Kaczinski
| wolverine876 wrote:
| 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.
| nineplay wrote:
| 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.
| ed-209 wrote:
| This seems self evident and im sure literature is the least
| valuable of the treasures lost to time.
| lr4444lr wrote:
| Absolutely. Catullus' poems, a mainstay in the modern Latin
| canon, was rescued from one surviving manuscript found in the
| bottom of a wine cask IIRC.
|
| It's always very exciting when we find some accidentally well
| preserved archeological site for the chance that we might come
| across new scrolls.
| lurquer wrote:
| Great literature, for the most part, is Great only because a
| selector group of taste-makers has said it's Great.
| delaaxe wrote:
| There is a tremendous amount of literature on the very early
| mythology of the human race still being discovered today in the
| Sumerian tablets
| metadaemon wrote:
| Do you have any recent examples of this? I'm extremely
| interested in this time period!
| [deleted]
| christkv wrote:
| If you've not seen it you might enjoy
| https://youtu.be/d2lJUOv0hLA
| karaterobot wrote:
| > 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.
| Jun8 wrote:
| The paper that this article is based on:
| https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abl7655.
|
| On a tangential note: Corpus of Classical Texts that we have is
| _really_ small, e.g.
| (http://blogicarian.blogspot.com/2019/03/argumentum-ad-
| ignora...):
|
| "... 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."
|
| See also this answer in Latin SE:
| https://latin.stackexchange.com/questions/16669/is-this-the-....
| HidyBush wrote:
| 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
| sharkjacobs wrote:
| 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.
| scotty79 wrote:
| So fame creates value?
| distrill wrote:
| in this instance it creates influence, which is probably very
| valuable yes.
| coastflow wrote:
| 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.
| 988747 wrote:
| 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.
| avrionov wrote:
| The value created fame, which increased the value.
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