Why Has ‘My Struggle’ Been Anointed a Literary Masterpiece?
April 23, 2015 8:46 PM   Subscribe

William Deriesiwicz takes a contrarian point of view on Knausgaard's critically lauded series of novels: The term “hyperrealism” derives from the visual arts, where it refers to paintings that are designed to look like photographs. To call writing like Knausgaard’s hyperrealistic, to enthrone it as the apotheosis of realism, is to cede reality to the camera. It is to surrender everything that makes literature distinct from the photographic and the televisual: its ability to tell us what things look like, not to the eye, but to the mind, to the heart...How sad it is to imagine that some of our most prominent novelists look at My Struggle and think, That’s the book I wish I could have written. How depressing to suppose that just as modernism culminated in Joyce, Proust and Woolf, the literature of our own time has been leading up to… Knausgaard.
posted by shivohum (43 comments total) 5 users marked this as a favorite
 
Deresiewicz once wrote:

"As for the slackers of the late ’80s and early ’90s (Generation X, grunge music, the fiction of David Foster Wallace), their affect ran to apathy and angst, a sense of aimlessness and pointlessness. Whatever. That they had no social vision was precisely what their social vision was: a defensive withdrawal from all commitment as inherently phony."

If that's his idea of what David Foster Wallace is about, I'm not inclined to give a lot of credence to his idea of what Knausgaard is about.
posted by escabeche at 9:00 PM on April 23, 2015 [11 favorites]


Holy shit. I normally try not to literally judge books by their covers, but what sort of asshole names their autobiography after Mein Kampf?

Is there some sort of artistic statement in the content of the novel that justifies the title?
posted by schmod at 9:22 PM on April 23, 2015 [3 favorites]


Holy shit. I normally try not to literally judge books by their covers, but what sort of asshole names their autobiography after Mein Kampf?

Well, about that ...
posted by kafziel at 9:28 PM on April 23, 2015 [5 favorites]


"As for the slackers of the late ’80s and early ’90s (Generation X, grunge music, the fiction of David Foster Wallace), their affect ran to apathy and angst, a sense of aimlessness and pointlessness. Whatever. That they had no social vision was precisely what their social vision was: a defensive withdrawal from all commitment as inherently phony."

If one had taken the time to read through that article to the end it would have become clear he wrote this paragraph not as a means to disparage Wallace.
posted by polymodus at 9:30 PM on April 23, 2015 [1 favorite]


There is a flatness and a prolixity to the prose; the long sentences have about them an almost careless avant-gardism, with their conversational additions and splayed run-ons. The writer seems not to be selecting or shaping anything, or even pausing to draw breath. Cliché is not spurned—time is falling through Knausgaard’s hands “like sand”; elsewhere in the book, the author tells us that falling in love was like being struck by lightning, that he was head over heels in love, that he was as hungry as a wolf.

That's from James Wood's positive review of the first volume. The writing is really flat and dull, and the while I was reading, I couldn't help thinking about how if a woman had written a lengthy and shapeless memoir about motherhood and writing, it would never have been published and it definitely would not be a literary sensation.
posted by betweenthebars at 9:31 PM on April 23, 2015 [17 favorites]


If one had taken the time to read through that article to the end it would have become clear he wrote this paragraph not as a means to disparage Wallace.

I did read it through to the end, and I don't think he's disparaging Wallace -- just describing his fiction in terms almost totally foreign to what was actually going on in his fiction, which makes me feel Deresiewicz is a careless reader.
posted by escabeche at 9:37 PM on April 23, 2015 [4 favorites]


what sort of asshole names their autobiography after Mein Kampf?

Knausgaardwin's Law is turning out to be pretty much ironclad, even four volumes in.
posted by RogerB at 9:42 PM on April 23, 2015 [8 favorites]


I have been hearing all the hype about this book, so I finally picked it up (literally picked it up off the shelf) when I was in the bookstore and opened it to a page at random. The scene was the author, in a supermarket after a run, seeing a hot women and ruminating about how he wants to fuck her and yet how he must resist but wants to, and she goes in and out of his line of sight (his gaze, if you will).

Significant Male Writers, why oh why do you have to be such stereotypes?
posted by easter queen at 9:47 PM on April 23, 2015 [8 favorites]


I want to like you more than you want me to like you.
posted by easter queen at 9:49 PM on April 23, 2015


But it’s not surprising that there isn’t any meaning, if you can’t be bothered to look for it.

This is one of the least self-reflexive, most obviously "physician, heal thyself" lines I've ever seen in a published piece of literary criticism. That whole paragraph about "meaninglessness" is almost impossible to imagine coming from someone who'd actually read even the first book of My Struggle — it takes a remarkable amount of work to be this obtuse.
posted by RogerB at 9:51 PM on April 23, 2015 [1 favorite]


I wound my scarf around my neck and buttoned up the reefer jacket I had bought on sale last spring at Paul Smith in Stockholm, put on the hat I bought at the same place, bent down over the pile of shoes by the wall, found mine, a pair of black Wrangler shoes with yellow laces I’d bought in Copenhagen when I was at the book fair, and which I had never liked, not even when I bought them, and which furthermore were now tainted by the thought of the catastrophe that had befallen me there, as I had been incapable of answering sensibly a single question the enthusiastic and insightful interviewer had asked me on the stage.

Wait, didn't we already do a Bulwer-Lytton thread this week?
posted by Guernsey Halleck at 9:54 PM on April 23, 2015 [9 favorites]


I think Knausgaard's popularity is not least due to the fact the prevailing writing forms we interact with are curtailed, formed and/or shaped in exactly the ways that Deresiewicz requires. In a sense the ability to form the visual picture without having to hunt for detail because the brushstrokes are already there make it refreshing.

Or maybe I like living someone else's boring life and walking the path they walked and getting as close to that "character" as possible.
posted by 27kjmm at 10:19 PM on April 23, 2015 [1 favorite]


I don't know, man. Every passage from this book that I read online is... really really terrible. I mean, you can tell me that he's accomplished some incredible feat of capturing the reality of a banal life, but... I mean the writing is god awful. Why is reading something boring that's written badly a good thing?
posted by shmegegge at 10:22 PM on April 23, 2015


In theory I'm amused that something like this is a hit, but man, the excerpts online are super goddamned dull (see Bulwer-Lytton above).

And I totally agree: " while I was reading, I couldn't help thinking about how if a woman had written a lengthy and shapeless memoir about motherhood and writing, it would never have been published and it definitely would not be a literary sensation."

Yeah, and she'd be castigated, doxxed, sent rape threats and driven out of her home and probably straight into Witness Protection if she tried. This seems pretty much like a White Man Privilege-type thing that this is a hit and anyone who wasn't a white dude would get a lot more crap for being this boring/navel-gazey.
posted by jenfullmoon at 10:32 PM on April 23, 2015 [1 favorite]


Well, here on the cusp of Vol. 4 it looks like we've definitely hit the point in the hype cycle where people who have read between zero and five pages of the book are looking for sour-grapes validation, so I guess kudos are in order to Deresiewicz and The Nation for impeccable timing. May the clicks be of use to them.
posted by RogerB at 10:34 PM on April 23, 2015 [12 favorites]


I've only read the first volume, but the scene where he and his brother are cleaning his late father's home (and everything that lead to it) left a strong impression, and for me invalidates most of what William Deriewisicz wrote. It's difficult to believe the remaining books have no such moments.

It's unfair to put this in the White Male Writer drawer. I don't think American and Norwegian realities are superposable (I guess talking about the non-chirality of the two societies would resonate better with this kind of article) plus Knausgård is strong on self-criticism. And although I agree there are no gods, the fact that someone like Zadie Smith didn't see that kind of content should mean something.
posted by khonostrov at 2:34 AM on April 24, 2015 [1 favorite]


FWIW, Private Eye recently parodied/reviewed Vol. 4 and was similarly dismissive. So there's a Knausgaard backlash underway.
posted by chavenet at 2:43 AM on April 24, 2015


From what I've heard from people in Norway, there is quite a bit of diminishing returns involved in reading the whole thing, though there is a big feeling of readerly accomplishment when you finish. Also, I've heard that the first volume is the best by far, and also the one that Knausgaard labored over the most.
posted by Kattullus at 4:35 AM on April 24, 2015


RogerB: it takes a remarkable amount of work to be this obtuse.

If someone disagrees with you about the quality of a work of literature, it does not follow that they are intellectually inferior to you, merely that they have different taste.
posted by Kattullus at 4:39 AM on April 24, 2015 [5 favorites]


Is this the dude that wrote about coming to America to look at the earliest Viking settlement and then went on and on about clogging the toilet in his hotel room? And how all Americans are fat?
posted by um at 4:46 AM on April 24, 2015


Well, here on the cusp of Vol. 4 it looks like we've definitely hit the point in the hype cycle where people who have read between zero and five pages of the book are looking for sour-grapes validation, so I guess kudos are in order to Deresiewicz and The Nation for impeccable timing. May the clicks be of use to them.

Fine, then: what's the positive case for the book, and what are these partial readers getting wrong specifically? Why is the prose style valuable and effective? What do some of these excerpted passages do in the context of the larger work that demonstrates their value?

Now that everyone who dislikes what little they have read has been declared a moronic, sniping philistine, is there perhaps room for someone to make a cogent, supportable case for the work's literary value? Or are the memoir's defenders as prone to the sort of low-content, poorly informed sniping they attribute to its detractors?
posted by kewb at 5:30 AM on April 24, 2015 [5 favorites]


The natural human tendency to pattern match, and to over-pattern-match, is encouraged in lit crit circles, and I'm not totally opposed to it, because it can lead to insights. But I've noticed that once someone gets seduced by certain nooks of the Humanities and spends years or decades inhabiting it, he or she tends to see all novels, stories, movies, plays, and TV shows as symbols--either of some sort of thematic concern or of the direction literature or culture is heading.

Three movies about, say, comets hitting the Earth will come out, and the New York Times will print, "Why Are We So Obsessed With Armageddon?" We? A movie came out, did well at the box office, and so two other studios copied it. Why is that necessarily indicative of an obsession we have? (Three seems to be the magic number when pattern matching switches on. The son of a overbearing, blonde mother gets dumped by his girlfriend, a blonde, and cuckolded by his wife, also a blonde. He decides, "All blondes are bitches." Never mind the fact his sample-size is thee women out of 3.5 billion. I do this, too, though I hope not in a sexist way. We didn't evolve to sample Big Data. We evolved to sample the sorts of small data one naturally encounters in hunter-gatherer tribes, where the three (or 50) women you know might as well be all the women in the world.)

A novel gets published in which there are four main characters--three men and one women. The men are all assholes. The woman is nice. "What is the novelist saying about men?"

Maybe nothing. Maybe he's saying something about Bill, Fred, and Andy, the characters in his book. There's nothing wrong with thinking of them as symbols for men in general, and some readers probably can't help doing so, but that doesn't mean they are symbols in some objective sense. And if I think of them as three specific guys, with no special relationship to guys-in-general, I'm not wrong either.

The symbolic reading is championed in literary circles, partly because it's powerful to some people and partly because it allows critics and students to write lofty papers, essays, and reviews. "I'm not just talking about this book; I'm talking about the course literature is taking, and I'm commenting on our entire culture!"

Okay, but this is not the only way. It's not my way, and I often feel drowned out, almost non-existent, in discussion of literature. I am devoted to it. I love stories of all kinds. But I often have nothing to talk to other fans about. Casual readers tend to be into books that bore me. (My tastes are fairly literary.) Highbrows are usually into symbolic reading.

To me, David Copperfield is David Copperfield and Lilly Bart is Lilly Bart. That's what I love about them. I would be bored if I though of them as everymans or everywomans. I don't want to be married to an everywoman or have an everyman for a friend, and I feel the same way with my relationships with literary characters as I do with flesh-and-blood ones.

Maybe some folks can engage in a kind of doublethink: they can think of Lilly Bar as a striking individual and, simultaneously (or at some later time of contemplation) as Woman. I can't. To me, that sucks the life out of her. None of my female friends are Woman. If I'm going to have a sympathetic relationship with Lilly, I can't think of her that way, either.

Is photo-realism really the way Literature is headed? Really? All literature? I know "My Struggle" has been lauded, but when Deriesiwicz revved up his pattern-matching engine, how many samples did he take? How many novelists have actually proclaimed that "My Struggle" is the novel they wish they'd written? What percentage of all novelists (even just the literary ones) are we talking about? And of that amount, how many of them will say the same thing about the next novel they love, even if it's not photo-realistic? Many novelists simply don't and can't write that way. What are they going to do? Quit? Are novels suddenly going to become homogenized? Is this, for some reason, the end of variety? And even if photo-realism does become a trend, what trend lasts forever. The moment it becomes popular, there will be, as always, a reaction against it. If Deriesiwicz really hates it, he should promote it. Once it's on top, its days will be numbered.

The symbolic thinkers are going to continue their symbolic thinking, and they have the entire academic industry to cheer them on. And maybe I take them too literally. Maybe this is just a way we--or they--hash out ideas. Still, I wish they wouldn't all talk as if everything they say is objectively true. I don't mean their individual takes on works or the course of literature. I mean the (religious?) beliefs that novels "mean" something, that character "are" representatives, that a popular book "is" indicative of the course of literature. This is a way of thinking and engaging with fiction. It's not the only way.
posted by grumblebee at 5:47 AM on April 24, 2015 [7 favorites]


Is this the dude ...

Yes. I thought those two NYT pieces were quite interesting.
posted by despues at 5:48 AM on April 24, 2015 [2 favorites]


grumblebee,

I get what you're saying, but art doesn't happen in a vacuum. These aren't just books or movies in a void. Why were disaster movies popular in the mid 90s? Why were zombie movies/books so popular in the 2000s? Why is Knausgaard and his style popular now? Why are different styles popular at different times when at different times they were derided? There really are movements and styles in literature that rise and fall in popularity. Why is this? What causes people to start embracing them, what causes people to drift away? Why does the culture then move on to X new style, and not Y or Z?

It's true people can go too far with this, but these are interesting questions to ask. Art does interact with the culture it's in, and there may indeed be something going on that causes certain things to come to the cultural forefront and others to recede. That's worth examining.

I've often seen comments like yours come from people in STEM fields, who go on about the evils of symbolism and "the curtain is fucking blue"! I don't think it's wrong to read this way, but it is wrong to dismiss the idea of symholism or larger cultural significance. You call it "doublethink", but that's how everything is: both a singular item that exists within its own bounds and a piece that exists within the larger context of the culture. Any individual book is both its own book and part of the larger world.
posted by Sangermaine at 6:45 AM on April 24, 2015 [2 favorites]


This vaguely reminds me of the descriptions of that hated long-boring draft novel kicking around in the film version of 'The Wonder Boys'. And at that time, I thought "Well, it could be a cult hit if it was just marketed the right way!"
posted by ovvl at 7:46 AM on April 24, 2015


it does not follow that they are intellectually inferior to you, merely that they have different taste

Framing aesthetic disagreement as if the only choices were "inferiority" pissing-contest or shrugging de-gustibus relativism is a completely silly thing to do. He's plain wrong about some of the most obvious things about the book despite being a smart guy who presumably read it; that makes him obtuse. "Different taste" would be recognizing the book's strengths and judging it still to be a mess or a failure or a symptom of a culture gone awry or whatever, but that's miles from Deresiewicz's seemingly wilfully contrarian take.

Fine, then: what's the positive case for the book, and what are these partial readers getting wrong specifically?

Lots of things, but most obviously they are missing the central stance and tone, which is bare-all confessional embarrassment — it's designed to make Knausgaard himself look as bad as possible in every situation possible, so that the reader winces sometimes in sympathy and sometimes in disgust reading about his travails — and the characteristic style, which is deliberately accumulated banality punctured by occasional raptures.

Why is the prose style valuable and effective?

It's not that Knausgaard is a master craftsman of sentences — he's not, or his misses are as frequent as his successes, at least judging by the English translation (and what I've heard from Norwegian readers). But the flatness of the style is much more deliberate than people seem to notice, of a piece with the fixation on the drabbest parts of everyday life, and helps a lot with the book's artifice of unconstructedness. And he has stylistic strengths: he's really good at scene-setting description, at copia, at sneaky associative transitions, at buried thematic stuff that recurs hundreds of pages later.

What do some of these excerpted passages do in the context of the larger work that demonstrates their value?

The bit about getting dressed is actually a pretty great example of the kind of banal everydayness that Knausgaard is best at — it's a sentence I distinctly remember noticing pleasedly while reading the book. Basically everything that the Knausgaard skeptics are taking as unreflective "bad" writing is a totally deliberate stylistic choice to sound like a guy who's lost in his own head, obsessing over his shoelaces because he's so panicked about the rest of life. There's a lot more complicated, rich, and not-at-all-sympathetic psychology to the Knausgaard-character than people seem to notice upon random skim, and the narration is always doing that work even when it doesn't say "he thought" at the end.
posted by RogerB at 8:30 AM on April 24, 2015 [10 favorites]


So, a less funny Nicholson Baker?
posted by Enemy of Joy at 9:02 AM on April 24, 2015


He's way funnier than Baker IMO (and I like Baker), at least if you like the Norwegian flavor of comedy of embarrassment and awkwardness.
posted by RogerB at 9:06 AM on April 24, 2015


I have just started volume 3 and I do get the sense that there are diminishing returns. I also don't think one can judge his prose style based on excerpts, there is a cumulative effect that can only be experienced through reading an entire volume. I think Roger B captures this style very well when he refers to it as "deliberately accumulated banality punctured by occasional rapture."

"The writing is really flat and dull, and the while I was reading, I couldn't help thinking about how if a woman had written a lengthy and shapeless memoir about motherhood and writing, it would never have been published and it definitely would not be a literary sensation."

While you are likely right about its reception, I would be very interested in reading the hypothetical work you are describing. As a new father, I wonder how my wife's experience differs from mine, how my experience of fatherhood differs from her experience of motherhood. We obviously can talk about it, but I can't get into her head the way I feel I can get into Knausgaard's head. In fact, does anyone have any recommendations of works by women from an explicitly female point of view in a Knausgaardian style?
posted by Falconetti at 9:36 AM on April 24, 2015 [2 favorites]


I've gone from reading this straight to the Sally Mann thread, and while this isn't a direct answer to your question, I think society FEARS the scrutiny of women, as we are often engaged with the people around us at times when they, as well as ourselves, are crucially vulnerable. These events, often body-centred, may figure in the narrative of female lives as integral to selfhood, so there's no ignoring them when articulating self-actualisation. A clear-sighted, non-sentimental female gaze is alarming to many and is often reacted to with exaggerated defensiveness - a defensiveness that often takes the form of accusing the gazer of simply being Wrong and Bad on multiple levels. Bad woman, bad mother, ball-breaker, indecorous, shrill, obscene; petty-minded, trivial, dull; derivative; unattractive; not sexy at all therefore irrelevant; too sexy therefore evil.

I know more about artits than writers and it wouldn't take me long to come up with a woman artist to illustrate every item on that list, where a breakthrough or new direction or new way of seeing has plenty of apologists to point out why it's actually just mediocre, or derivative, or shallow sensationalism.
posted by glasseyes at 10:44 AM on April 24, 2015 [3 favorites]


Artits! CURSES
posted by glasseyes at 11:24 AM on April 24, 2015 [1 favorite]


I really enjoyed Volume III, which I just finished a couple of weeks ago, though I can see arguing that it's slighter than Vol I or maybe even Vol II. But like 27kjmm I enjoy the meandering pace and the minutiae, and there's a definite pleasure in this tale of a strange childhood in a far off place, even if nothing of particular significance happens. But however fast Knausgaard wrote it—because who the hell cares how hurried something was if it doesn't ruin the finished product?—it had a lot of emotional impact for me, to the point that I sometimes had to put it down, because I found his relationship with his father almost physically stressful, and have never read anything where that level of emotional abuse was so consistently and realistically evoked. So when Deriesiwicz says that Knausgaard is telling not showing—
Knausgaard certainly feels a lot of things: shame, contempt, self-hatred, frustration, now and then a bit of joy. I know, because he’s constantly telling us. But invocation isn’t evocation. You know that you’re in trouble when a writer resorts to interjections, the verbal equivalent of emoticons.
—it's like we weren't even reading the same book. And the same goes for the other two volumes, which I found both gripping and emotionally engaging—it's true Karl Ove natters on, but for me it was no problem to follow him.

I don't, however, think he is singlehandedly reviving literature or that the books are all perfect iterations of a novel or anything like that. I think that's where some of the hostility comes from. If you approach it as just a sprawling realist novel that maybe you borrowed from a coworker and then got hooked on, it's pretty easy to enjoy; it's not, however, going to reinvent the novel. If modernism and postmodernism made it hard for you to like this sort of thing, this is probably not the set of works to change your mind.

In conclusion, this.
posted by felix grundy at 11:38 AM on April 24, 2015 [4 favorites]


Does this guy know what his book title translates into in German? Or is it just a weird coincidence.
posted by theorique at 1:44 PM on April 24, 2015


I really enjoyed reading Volume One. It's difficult to explain why. The best I can come up with, is that he has a certain touch that allowed me to instantly be "there", not just in his world but in his head. That's very, very hard to do and it's difficult to think of another book that has had that precise effect on me.

That said, I don't seem to have a desire to read volume two! I don't know why that is.
posted by cell divide at 2:12 PM on April 24, 2015 [1 favorite]


Theorique, he is likely well aware, especially given that the title in Norwegian is "Min Kamp".
posted by aldurtregi at 3:28 PM on April 24, 2015


Falconetti!
To answer your question, I would highly recommend the new book by Heidi Julavits, The Folded Clock. While she might take fair umbrage at being compared to Knausgaard, and her book is more problematic from a class point of view, if a person wanted to quibble, I thought it was an amazing and intensely self-scrutinizing work about her life over the course of a couple years.

It was the first book of hers I've read and I am going to read more, if not all. I definitely recommend it, and as she is a parent there are scenes that come close to what you are talking about in your comment.
posted by wyndham at 4:12 PM on April 24, 2015 [2 favorites]


In fact, does anyone have any recommendations of works by women from an explicitly female point of view in a Knausgaardian style?

I can tell you what the anti-Knausgaard might be. Jenny Offill's Dept. of Speculation covers some of the same subjects from a woman's perspective: intimacy, parenthood, the upper-middle class writerly life. However, the prose is clear and precise, and it takes less than an hour to read.
posted by betweenthebars at 4:26 PM on April 24, 2015 [1 favorite]


I found this illuminating, on how much some high profile yet regionally niche lit novels sell outside their core regions.
posted by meehawl at 6:58 PM on April 24, 2015 [1 favorite]


I'm amazed Knausgaard sold 32,000 copies in the US. That's a huge number for literary fiction.
posted by escabeche at 5:02 AM on April 25, 2015


RogerB: Framing aesthetic disagreement as if the only choices were "inferiority" pissing-contest or shrugging de-gustibus relativism is a completely silly thing to do.

Yes, I agree.

He's plain wrong about some of the most obvious things about the book despite being a smart guy who presumably read it; that makes him obtuse.

While I agree that not all readings are equally plausible, "plain wrong" is a very strong claim. To me, "plain wrong" is along the lines of not understanding that Achilles values Patroclus in other ways than just as a comrade-in-arms. To me a disagreement about what constitutes a search for meaning is a difference of interpretation, not fact.

"Different taste" would be recognizing the book's strengths and judging it still to be a mess or a failure or a symptom of a culture gone awry or whatever, but that's miles from Deresiewicz's seemingly wilfully contrarian take.

My reading of Deresiewicz was that Knausgaard's gifts as a novelist were lost on him. The strengths do not appeal to his tastes. He seemed genuinely baffled by the praise that's been heaped on My Struggle. I can empathize with that sort of reaction. I've certainly been heavily disappointed by widely praised books. Sometimes I've understood their allure, sometimes I've been perplexed how the faults which seemed so glaring to me have been overlooked. I think Deresiewicz does a pretty good job of both laying out his criticism while also telling his readers that others disagree with his assessment. I like criticism that comes out of a strong emotional reaction, and that's how Deresiewicz' piece struck me.
posted by Kattullus at 10:20 AM on April 25, 2015


Any individual book is both its own book and part of the larger world.

To you. And I respect that. I more than respect it. You'd be a fool to force yourself to read in a way that doesn't interest you. Seeing books as part of the larger world interests you. Great. But it's not the only way to read.
posted by grumblebee at 5:58 AM on April 26, 2015


Why were disaster movies popular in the mid 90s? Why were zombie movies/books so popular in the 2000s? Why is Knausgaard and his style popular now? Why are different styles popular at different times when at different times they were derided? There really are movements and styles in literature that rise and fall in popularity. Why is this? What causes people to start embracing them, what causes people to drift away? Why does the culture then move on to X new style, and not Y or Z?


I can't give a verifiable answer, and I'm sure each trend has it's own specific causes (probably ones that are so chaotic, they're impossible as impossible to explain as thr weather and the stock market), but almost no one seems to consider random snowball effects. My hypothesis is that they are responsible (or partly responsible) for most trends. I am skeptical that there's an ingredient in our culture now that makes us more receptive to zombie films than were people 20 years ago.

An individual work, or a couple of similar works, become popular, probably intrinsic reasons, such as good writing, good acting, or a good advertising campaign. Popular people start championing it, and that makes others interested in it. Those other people tell their friends about it, and they tell their friends. Since the works in question happen to be zombie movies, people watch them and think, "I liked both of them! I must like zombie movies! I want to see more!" Producers capitalize on the trend, churn out more zombie movies, and the quality of them starts to diminish. Meanwhile, people get bored with the same thing over and over, even if the quality stays high, and a new trend gets championed by the popular and influential folks.

I believe this arbitrary snowball effect causes most trends and fashions: trends in dining, trends in clothing, trends in music, trends in books, trends in movies, and so on. I do not believe it's the only cause, and I agree that, in some cases, an item or genre may have special appeal due to some sort of current zeitgeist.

But people almost never consider randomness. I don't remember it every being mentioned in school, even as a possibility. People leap immediately to "We are obsessed with zombies because they are symbols of blah blah blah, which we're all concerned with because foo foo foo."

In fact, people have always been obsessed with horror stories about dead people returning (as ghosts, zombies, etc) and also with stories about disasters. It's pretty easy for a random force to tip that continual interest into a trend. And all trends die when they become boring or when new trends dazzle us with their shininess.

Randomness rarely gets its due, because it's not interesting to talk about. What can you say? It's more interesting to talk about specific causes, even if they're not real. And I'm sure those speculations are worthwhile for many people, whether they're accurate or not. For some, they spark interesting lines of thought.

Randomness seems insulting: you're saying our interest is arbitrary, and if the snowball has rolled some other direction, we'd all be watching spy movies instead of zombie movies? Randomness tends to upset people. It scares them or confuses them. They want order. They want to feel as if their interests mean something. Academic discussions in particular tend to be obsessed with ordering and classifying. They do this relentlessly, whether it makes sense or not. And when we look back at past academic trends, we're often struck by what seems to us now as odd forms of classification. We replace them with our own forms, which don't seem odd to us.
posted by grumblebee at 6:19 AM on April 26, 2015 [2 favorites]


An individual work, or a couple of similar works, become popular, probably intrinsic reasons, such as good writing, good acting, or a good advertising campaign. Popular people start championing it, and that makes others interested in it. Those other people tell their friends about it, and they tell their friends.

Grumblebee, have you ever read "Bellwether" by Connie Willis? It's a really funny (to me) novel based on the almost-believable premise that certain otherwise ordinary people are somehow by nature especially influential on the culture at large (without knowing it, and without any of the rest of us knowing it) and tend to start trends entirely by accident. By that theory zombies would have become popular because some guy who happened to be a "bellwether" that the rest of us sheep are naturally inclined to follow got really into zombies a couple of years ago, and everybody he knows then found themselves really interested in zombies at the same time, and naturally talked about it to the people they know... There's a lot of entertaining fluff about randomness and chaos theory in the book to make it sound more plausible, and a hilarious survey of the ridiculous fads of the 20th and early 21st century (and before) and their possible origins. It's great.

Anyway, I think of that book all the time when I read ridiculous "trend" pieces, and your comment reminded me of it. You might enjoy it.
posted by OnceUponATime at 2:27 PM on April 27, 2015 [1 favorite]


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