Popular Fiction – An Historical Perspective
(The following lecture was presented remotely to students and faculty at the National University of Modern Languages, Islamabad, Pakistan, on February 12, 2025. It was at the invitation of and organized by Ms. Ambrina Qayyum, Dr. Amina Ghazanfar, and Ms. Farihatulaen Rizvi; with student organizers Moazzam Ali and Minha Iman.)
I begin with a quotation:
“Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.” – the “Notice” that appears on the title page of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain (1884), considered by many the quintessential American novel. As you may know, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is a picaresque novel narrated by the title character, Huck, who is about 13 years old. Huck and the escaped slave Jim travel down the Mississippi River on a raft, having a series of adventures along the way. I feel like beginning with this quotation is appropriate to our purposes here because the Notice seems to be the author’s warning to the reader not to take the book too seriously. Its purpose is entertainment, and thinking about loftier things, like the novel’s meaning, will not be tolerated. Mark Twain, whose real name was Samuel Clemens, was a master storyteller and satirist. So how serious was Clemens in his Notice? Did he truly not want readers to search for motive, moral, and plot in his book? If there was some sincerity to his Notice, it may have been because he anticipated that Huckleberry Finn would be a highly controversial book.
Sincere or not, his Notice was disregarded, and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn has been one of the most studied and discussed novels in American (and world) literature. And in spite of the seriousness that readers have found in the text, it became a fabulously popular novel and contributed to Mark Twain (aka, Samuel Clemens) becoming the most popular author in the U.S. by the end of the nineteenth century.
Let me leave Samuel Clemens and Huckleberry Finn for now.
I’ve been asked to speak on “popular fiction,” and I agreed even though at the time I realized the term was malleable in my mind. That is, I wasn’t completely sure what the term even meant. In the last month or so I’ve been looking into the topic – browsing the internet, reading articles, giving it some quasi-serious thought – and I can say with confidence that I’m still not sure what it means. I have, however, stumbled across a lot of interesting ideas associated with the concept of “popular fiction,” so I’ll share them with you (in the hope that you’ll find them interesting too). What is more, largely due to my roles as a writer and publisher, but also as a teacher of writing, I’ve been interested in the history of the publishing industry (in the West, and in particular the United States), and I’ve presented some conference papers on the topic. I will draw from these as well.
Let me begin with some assumptions and/or questions that first came to mind when considering this topic:
What do we mean by popular?
What is the measuring stick for determining popularity?
That is, how popular does a novel have to be to be considered “popular fiction”?
Can a novel be “popular fiction” without actually being popular?
Is popular code, or a kind of euphemism, for bad?
Is the previous question elitist?
How do we determine good versus bad fiction?
For that matter, who determines it?
If popular does mean bad fiction, what is the term for good fiction?
Again, how do we judge?
Again, who judges?
And if the fiction is so darn good, why isn’t it popular?
When did the idea of a book being a “bestseller” begin?
How is bestselling determined?
Ok, I’ll stop there for now. Let’s begin to consider these questions.
From one perspective, popular fiction is fiction (probably in the form of novels) that is read by a lot of people in a given culture. A book gains the label “popular fiction” by attracting a significant number of readers. From this perspective, books are not published as “popular fiction,” but they may become popular over time. Nowadays we call such books “bestsellers,” but that itself is a nebulous term. Quite honestly, until I started researching for this talk I didn’t know much about how a book (or an author) earns the epithet “bestselling.” For the last quarter century I’ve also worked as a librarian, and every week we add new titles to our shelves that are said to be bestsellers or by bestselling authors—books and authors, oftentimes, I’ve never heard of, which suggests that the standard for determining bestselling is fairly low. Low, of course, is relative, but my research has determined that the standard is both nonstandard and mysterious. What I mean by nonstandard is that different organizations will disseminate “bestseller” lists, and each will use its own criteria. In the U.S., we tend to think of The New York Times newspaper and its The New York Times Book Review as the arbiter of bestseller status, but, really, there are many bestsellers lists: Publishers Weekly, USA Today and Indiebound are among the more common publications that provide lists of bestsellers. Moreover, booksellers, like Amazon and Barnes and Noble, will put out their own lists of bestsellers. Complicating things further is the fact that each will put out multiple lists, based on categories of books and types of book (hardback versus paperback versus ebook).
Each entity and each list generated will have its own criteria for determining bestseller status. They’re all based on sales, kind of, but on data that comes from a wide variety of sources. I say “kind of” because the sales data can be rather fluid and open to interpretation, so that, in some lists more than others, the accolade of “bestseller” may be as much subjective impression as empirical conclusion. (Indiebound, for example, tends to rely more on booksellers’ hunches than actual hard sales figures.) Another nonstandard element is sales period. One list may be based on a week’s worth of sales, Monday to Sunday, say, (reported from here versus there), while another list considers data drawn from a different period of time, longer or shorter, or simply a different bracketing of time.
Even though numbers have nebulous meanings, for a frame of reference let’s look at The New York Times bestseller list. To make the list in a given week, a novel must sell between 1,000 and 10,000 copies. However, such sales do not guarantee inclusion on the list because it also depends on other factors, like the total number of books that achieve those sales figures for a single week. Earlier I said the standards were both nonstandard and mysterious; here is where the mystery comes in. The New York Times won’t reveal precisely how they determine the bestseller lists. Sales are an important factor, but there are others that are closely held secrets. Allegedly even the editors of The NYT Book Review aren’t privy to the exact methodology. Their secrecy, they say, is partly in an effort to prevent people from manipulating the system. Nevertheless, people (like authors, agents and publishers) do try to manipulate the system, and if the NYT suspects such manipulation they’ll mark a title on the list as suspicious, printing a dagger symbol next to it.
Another aspect of popularity is the number of weeks that a book remains on the bestseller list. About a quarter of novels make the NYT list for a single week. Incidentally, it seems the idea of a bestsellers list, as we think of it, began in 1895 with the New York-based journal The Bookman. The New York Times began publishing its list in 1936 (based only on New York City sales). The list, resembling its current form, became established by the 1950s.
I said that people will try to manipulate the bestseller lists, and the reason for that is that appearing on a bestseller list can be a major boon for sales, especially for “new” and little-known authors. So, appearing on a bestseller list reflects some level of popularity, and it further promotes popularity. Said differently, bestsellers sales are self-perpetuating. [In addition to Wikipedia entries, information for these last few paragraphs was taken from “The Convoluted World of Best-Seller Lists, Explained” by Constance Grady.]
In recent years another route to popularity has emerged, namely social media. I would like to speak to this phenomenon, but I find such a discussion will have to wait for another occasion.
For now, let’s shift our perspective on the term “popular fiction,” away from a status based (obliquely) on sales, to a term we use to describe a kind of fiction. One can find many definitions of popular fiction as a kind of writing. I like Britannica.com’s definition:
“[S]ome common attributes of popular literature have been defined. First, it is crafted primarily to entertain the reader, as entertainment is a quality that attracts and appeals to a wide audience. To promote a pleasurable reading experience, works of popular fiction are usually written in a simple and straightforward style. They are largely plot-driven, rather than character-driven, and adhere to conventional narrative structures. As such, they are intended less to provoke deep reflection or aesthetic appreciation than to be read casually and quickly. Books that are successful at this aim, especially through their employment of techniques that stimulate readers’ interest and compel them to continue reading, are praised as ‘page-turners.’”
Popular fiction tends toward escapism rather than self-reflection. That is, readers of popular fiction often want to be distracted from their cares and concerns, not prompted to think deeply about them. As a consequence, popular fiction frequently falls into various genre categories: romance, Western, science fiction, mysteries, so-called “chic lit.” All in all, popular fiction is written to be accessible to the average reader. Literary fiction, meanwhile, (sometimes just called “literature” among other synonyms) tends to require more of the reader: more careful attention, more time, more cognitive effort, a broader working vocabulary.
Nowadays, we tend to think of a wide schism between popular fiction and literary fiction. Writers must be either fish or fowl. Indeed, many earlier texts—let’s say, pre-twentieth century—are studied today because of their seriousness; that is, their author’s attention to significant issues, and the book’s facilitation of meaningful analysis and discourse. Whether it’s Mary Shelley’s meditations on society and the individual, Jane Austen’s examination of unequal inheritance laws, Charles Dickens’s depiction of the mechanisms of poverty, Charlotte Brontë’s proto-feminism, or Joseph Conrad’s indictment of colonialism—the writers and their works were unquestionably popular. That is, they sold well, were widely reviewed, and frequently discussed across social strata.
These writers, of course, benefited from the popularity of reading in general. Authors competed with playwrights (who often adapted authors’ works to the stage, without necessarily paying for the privilege), but reading for pleasure was a major pastime for both men and women, across socioeconomic lines. Periodicals were hugely popular. These were newspapers and magazines that printed stories and excerpts from novels and sold them quite inexpensively. It was common practice for a novel to appear in a periodical serially, and then later be brought together for book publication. Serialization didn’t seem to negatively impact eventual book sales. One can find examples of authors or publishers shying away from periodical publication to begin with for fear of it diminishing the sales potential of the book version. Nevertheless, serialization was an effective way for the reading public to become familiar with an author and their work.
Charles Dickens’s The Pickwick Papers (1836) is often cited as the work that popularized the approach of serialization, first, followed by the book publication. Throughout the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth, magazine publication (either of serial installments of a longer work, or stand-alone stories) was the vehicle that brought mass popularity to authors. Popularity gained through magazine publication was not limited to England, where authors like Wilkie Collins, Elizabeth Gaskell, William Thackeray, Anthony Trollope, and Arthur Conan Doyle thrived. In France, a notable example is Alexander Dumas, whose The Three Muskateers (1844) and The Count of Monte Cristo (1844-1846) were widely read serials. Another would be Gustave Flaubert and his serial publication of Madame Bovary (1856). In Russia, both Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoevsky found readers via the serialization of Anna Karenina (1875-1877), and The Brothers Karamazov (1879-1880), respectively. In the U.S., publishers were quick to follow Dickens’s example, and many writers found popularity via magazine publication and serialization, among them Harriet Beecher Stowe, Henry James, and Herman Melville. Across Europe and into Asia and Australia, having their work appear in magazines was vital for authors achieving popularity.
Obviously not everything published in this time period combined popularity with serious literary merit. For that matter, it’s difficult to know how serious authors were when writing the books that became popular. Their literary quality—and their ability to generate in-depth study and discourse—may be in part due to our projections. That is, we recognize the significance of their work when they, perhaps, did not. They were merely trying to tell an entertaining tale, but because of the milieu in which they were writing, and their own inherent insightfulness, they wove into the telling significant issues. I think, for example, of a writer like Jane Austen and her series of drawing-room romances, like Sense and Sensibility (1811), and Pride and Prejudice (1813), where the plots mainly center on the marriageability of young women without financial means. They are in some ways extensions of Samuel Richardson’s rather vapid Pamela (1740) and Clarissa (1748). Yet Austen also examines the unequal roles of men and women in marriage, the unfairness of English law when it came to inheritance and gender, the hypocrisy of the Church, and myriad other significant issues, including family dynamics and the interrelationships of siblings.
From almost precisely the same period, an antithetical example would be Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818). On the one hand, it is a fantastical Gothic tale about a creature who has been constructed from body parts, both human and animal, brought to life, then left to fend for himself in a harsh and unsympathetic world. From the start of its composition, however, the teenage author saw the potential for her novel to be so much more than a sensational page-turner. Throughout she alludes to numerous books—which she had thoroughly digested, often in their original language and not in translation—regarding science, history, geography, philosophy, religion, and ethics. Like all authors I suppose, Mary Shelley hoped that her book would be popular, but she did not expect it. She and her husband, Percy Shelley, and their children left for the Continent before Frankenstein was published, and Mary was quite surprised several months later when she heard, while in Italy, that her strange book was the talk of London. It has never been out of print.
What all of these pre-twentieth-century books—the merely popular and the popular while also being serious—have in common is accessibility. That is, they are highly readable regardless of one’s educational background. Frankenstein, for all the complex issues that it raises, remains a novel that can be read and understood by practically anyone who is functionally literate. Whether they recognize the complex issues in the book and whether they consider them deeply, those are other matters.
It is worth noting that there were authors in the nineteenth century who became canonized in academic circles, but they were not especially accessible in their day. Nor, then, were they popular. Two well-known examples are Nathaniel Hawthorne and his friend and neighbor Herman Melville. Both are considered giants of the nineteenth century, and for much of the twentieth century they were staples on high school and college syllabi in the U.S. Hawthorne—famous now for such novels as The Scarlet Letter and The House of the Seven Gables—was frustrated and perplexed by his slow book sales. Meanwhile, authors whom he considered inferior enjoyed wide popularity. He was especially annoyed by the status enjoyed by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, someone he knew in their younger days as a fellow student at Bowdoin College. To compare, 10,000 copies of The Scarlet Letter were printed, and during Hawthorne’s lifetime only 7,800 copies were sold. Meanwhile, Longfellow’s poem The Song of Hiawatha sold 50,000 copies in its first year, 1857. It was just one of Longfellow’s highly popular publications. It’s estimated that during his lifetime, Longfellow wrote more than 20,000 letters in response to the fan mail that he received. (One close friend speculated that Longfellow’s dedication to responding to his fans led to exhaustion and a too-early grave.) [For this section, I relied on various Wikipedia entries as well as the article by Lauren Gatti “Seriously Popular: Rethinking 19th-Century American Literature through the Teaching of Popular Fiction,” published in The English Journal, vol. 100, no. 5, 2011, pp. 47–53, available via JSTOR.]
Hawthorne’s friend and neighbor, Melville, is another interesting case when discussing authorial popularity. Melville’s first novels were page-turning sea adventures, based on his real-life adventures as a seaman. However, he longed to write something more complex, more artistic, even though he knew such a book wouldn’t be popular. In a famous letter to Hawthorne (May 1851), Melville spelled out his dilemma: “Dollars damn me … What I feel most moved to write [Moby Dick], that is banned,—it will not pay. Yet, altogether, write the other way I cannot. So the product is a hash, and all my books are botches.” In other words, writing simple sea adventures was profitable but they bored him; instead, he wanted to write a book that was much more complex and artistically challenging, even though it likely wouldn’t sell. In the end, he chose artistic satisfaction over popularity. There were 3,000 copies of Moby Dick printed, and copies were left unsold forty years later at Melville’s death. Both Hawthorne and Melville had to support their families by taking low-paying government jobs.
In retrospect, we can see that writers like Hawthorne and (especially) Melville were ahead of their time. A novel like Moby Dick has much more in common with the modernist experimental books produced seventy years later by James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, and D.H. Lawrence. In fact, Moby Dick was essentially rediscovered in the 1920s (thirty years after its author’s death), which led to its becoming a classic and a staple on college syllabi by the 1950s. Hawthorne and his works were also canonized in the twentieth century, while Longfellow and other popular writers of the nineteenth century became marginalized in the academy.
So, if depth of thought and the poetic quality of the language do not lead to popularity, what is the key? I’ve already used the word several times: accessibility. In essence, a book has to be easily comprehensible for it to be widely read and have the potential to become a bestseller. In other words, to become “popular fiction” a book must be written in the style of “popular fiction.” To cement this idea, let me repeat Britannica’s definition: “First, it is crafted primarily to entertain the reader, as entertainment is a quality that attracts and appeals to a wide audience. To promote a pleasurable reading experience, works of popular fiction are usually written in a simple and straightforward style. They are largely plot-driven, rather than character-driven, and adhere to conventional narrative structures. As such, they are intended less to provoke deep reflection or aesthetic appreciation than to be read casually and quickly. Books that are successful at this aim, especially through their employment of techniques that stimulate readers’ interest and compel them to continue reading, are praised as ‘page-turners.’”
I began this talk with a reference to Mark Twain and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, published in 1884, a novel that has the patina of a simple tale of adventure, perhaps even one for younger readers, but in fact is packed with serious and controversial ideas, especially regarding the institution of slavery (which had been abolished two decades before, but its aftermath was still very much a part of American society … as, sadly, it is today). It is a gross overgeneralization, but we could think of Huckleberry Finn as a kind of temporal marker: a delineation between a time when authors could be both serious and popular, and a time when authors had to choose between the two. Herman Melville’s conundrum of the 1850s (to write Moby Dick and forfeit his growing popularity, or not) foreshadowed the dilemma that increasing numbers of writers would face in the twentieth century and beyond: To be either a writer of popular fiction (read by the masses) or to be a writer of serious fiction (read mainly in academic circles)?
The so-called modernist writers who began publishing after the First World War—Pound, Eliot, Stein, Woolf, Joyce, Forster, Lawrence, et al.—were rejecting accessibility for deeper (especially psychological) meaning. They were grappling with the horrors of the War and developing styles of narration and poetics that responded to both personal and cultural trauma. While the modernists may not have been bestselling authors, they were known and therefore influential. Some of their less challenging work (especially stories and individual poems) appeared in popular magazines (while their more challenging work came out in literary journals, including via serialization—all three of James Joyce’s high-modernist novels, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses, and Finnegans Wake, were first published serially). But even if people weren’t reading Joyce, Stein, Woolf, etc., they knew who they were and what kind of writing they were doing because the popular press closely covered the modernist movement. As an example, when Gertrude Stein, one of the least comprehensible modernists, returned to the United States after a self-imposed thirty-year exile in France, she was met by a group of reporters at the New York City docks, and lights in Times Square announced “Gertrude Stein Has Arrived.” Next to no one in the U.S. had actually read Stein’s highly experimental work (and even fewer understood it), yet she had gained celebrity status among the general public. Stein was, in a word, popular. I must acknowledge that the previous year, 1933, Stein had published The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, which was by far her most readable book, and its accessibility and popularity contributed to her surprisingly warm welcome home.
During this period, while writers like Stein, Joyce and Eliot prided themselves on the difficulty of their texts, there were many writers who sought both kinds of attention. They thought of themselves as serious literary artists, but they also wanted to be widely read (and well paid). There could be many examples, of course, but two that come to mind are Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Though they had very different personalities, they took similar approaches to achieving both popularity and respect from the high-literary establishment. Again, I oversimplify, but Hemingway saw his short fiction and his novels as products of his highest literary aspirations; while his nonfiction, especially his journalism and newspaper reporting, helped to fund his adventurous lifestyle. Similarly, Fitzgerald devoted great time and energy to his novels, wanting them to be as complex and as literary as possible, but at the same time he churned out one lackluster short story after another to sell to magazines and support his dizzyingly wild lifestyle (his and his wife Zelda’s).
Writers like Hemingway and Fitzgerald were able to aim for both kinds of writing—popular and serious—because the periodical industry was still thriving in the U.S. and elsewhere. Allow me to share a quote from Theodore Peterson’s Magazines in the Twentieth Century (University of Illinois Press, 1956):
“Despite pessimistic forecasts from time to time … magazines had a tremendous growth between 1900 and 1955. The number of magazine readers increased remarkably. When Frank Munsey brought out his Mimsey’s Magazine in 1893, he later estimated, there were about 250,000 magazine purchasers in the United States. By 1899, the ten-cent magazine, he further estimated, had increased the number to 750,000. In 1947, in its nationwide audience study, the Magazine Advertising Bureau found 32,300,000 magazine reading families—those in which members could identify specific items from recent issues. The number of individual magazines also increased; there were well over a thousand more magazines in the United States in 1955 than in 1900. The aggregate circulation of all magazines in the United States mounted steadily, and the sales of individual publications soared from thousands to millions. In 1900 there seems to have been no magazine with a circulation of a million; in 1955 there were at least forty-six general and farm magazines with circulations of one million or more, and one of them had a circulation of more than ten million for its domestic edition alone.”
While not all of these magazines published short fiction, I will risk saying that the majority did. Many, in fact, specialized in publishing fiction in the form of short stories and serialized novels. Moreover, they paid writers well. Let me quote from my introduction to Delta of Cassiopeia (which is available online at Twelve Winters Miscellany):
“There had been a Golden Age of magazine publication for much of the twentieth century, when fiction writers could make a good living selling stories to magazines. In the 1920s, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Zelda lived their legendary high life almost solely from Fitz’s short stories, which could fetch as much as $4,000 each (nearly $60,000 in 2023 money). It’s estimated that during the 1920s and 30s Fitzgerald made almost a quarter of a million dollars from 164 magazine stories (more than $3.25 million today). A generation later, in the 1950s, Kurt Vonnegut Jr. sold four stories to magazines in the course of about eighteen months, allowing him to quit his job in the marketing department at General Electric and devote himself fully to writing. At the time, Vonnegut was supporting a wife [who didn’t work] and six children.”
I continue from my introduction:
“By the 1960s, however, television had begun turning the Golden Age into lead. And by the time I started to write effectively enough to publish, the Golden Age was a rapidly receding memory. In sum, television had superseded book reading as a popular pastime, and nationally distributed magazines had either severely cut back or eliminated space for short stories altogether, thus closing a crucial avenue for new writers to build an audience—let alone make a living.”
From then on it’s been a succession of inventions and developments that have made reading books a lower and lower priority for mass culture: the microcomputer (1980s); the internet and World Wide Web (1990s-2000s); social media and streaming services (2000s-present). Concurrent with these technological arrivals, the publishing industry was consolidated into a handful of multinational entertainment conglomerates. Here I’ll draw from my paper “The Loss of the Literary Voice and Its Consequences” (available at tedmorrissey.blog):
“[T]he corporate takeover of the publishing industry … was largely undocumented when André Schiffrin wrote The Business of Books (2000). ‘In Europe and in America,’ writes Schiffrin, ‘publishing has a long tradition as an intellectually and politically engaged profession. Publishers have always prided themselves on their ability to balance the imperative of making money with that of issuing worthwhile books.’ However, in the turbulent sixties, large conglomerates began acquiring publishing houses. Schiffrin continues, ‘It is now increasingly the case that the owner’s only interest is in making money and as much as possible’ (emphasis in original). Schiffrin’s study is wide-ranging and thorough, but he focuses particular attention on the demise of Pantheon, where he’d been managing director for a number of years when it was acquired by Random House, which in turn was purchased by media mogul S. I. Newhouse, who inevitably insisted on changes to try to increase profits, unreasonably and unrealistically so, according to Schiffrin: ‘As one publishing house after another has been taken over by conglomerates, the owners insist that their new book arm bring in the kind of revenue their newspapers, cable television networks, and films do. … New targets have therefore been set in the range of 12-15 percent, three to four times what publishing houses have made in the past.’”
The only way for these remaining commercial publishers to achieve the sort of profits that are expected by their parent companies (and the companies’ shareholders) is to only publish fiction that has the potential to become popular. In other words, it must be easily accessible to the small percentage of the public that continues to read fiction. The internet is full of statistics that highlight the rapid decline of reading (and therefore in people’s ability to read well). One reliable source in the U.S. is the National Endowment for the Arts. NEA’s report from October 2024 said that in its most-recent surveyed year, 2022, just over a third of American adults reported reading a novel or a short story in the previous year. Let me emphasize: a novel or a short story, singular. And practically every survey from practically every organization confirms a downward trend over several decades. Test Prep Insight published a less thorough but even more recent report (January 2025) that confirms this same kind of decline in reading. The report cites several factors:
- The fast pace of the modern world: With the demands of work, family, and social obligations, many people feel they simply don’t have time to read.
- The rise of digital media: In our constantly connected world, it’s easy to get your news and entertainment from sources other than books.
- The cost of books: Books can be expensive, especially if you’re buying them new. Used books are a cheaper option, but many people simply don’t have the time to hunt for them.
- The declining popularity of reading: As fewer people read, it becomes less socially acceptable to do so. This can create a vicious cycle that leads to even fewer people reading.
So what does all this mean in terms of our topic, “popular fiction”? For one thing, in the West at least, there are fewer and fewer authors who can achieve popularity. Also, for those writers who desire mass appeal, they must make sure their books are easily accessible (that is, as easy to read and comprehend as possible).
There are many interesting issues associated with the idea of fiction’s popularity, like the following:
How has social media, especially TikTok, impacted popular fiction?
How do contemporary authors navigate writing for popularity versus writing for artistic satisfaction?
Why, in the U.S., are we seeing an explosion in creative writing programs at universities (and an explosion in the number of creative writers) during the same period that we see a steady decrease in the number of readers?
How do factors like the age and gender of readers affect what books are being published by the few remaining commercial publishers?
I will have to leave these and other questions unanswered for now.
Psychoanalytic Criticism and the Creative Writer
The following is the principal lecture of a seminar on psychoanalytic criticism delivered remotely to students at the National University of Modern Languages, Islamabad, Pakistan. It was hosted by the Department of English and arranged by Dr. Amina Ghazanfar. The seminar was held November 19, 2024.
My plan is to speak to you about psychoanalytic criticism along four axes: one set stretching from the past to the future; and the other set running from reader to writer. Even though these two sets exist on different planes of thought, their data points will no doubt cross paths and even bump into one another at times. Mixed in with all the theorizing, I hope to impart some actual useful information now and again. And let us start with that (just in case there is no more to be had).
When asked to discuss psychoanalytic criticism, the immediate response is to focus on the adjective, psychoanalytic, and to regard the noun as a given. But let’s not. Criticism and especially its related word critic tend to have bad connotations, especially in everyday English. One definition of criticism, in fact the most prominent one, means to offer an unfavorable opinion about someone or something. A fed-up spouse may say to their partner (or child to their parent, employee to their employer), “I’m tired of your constant criticism!” Or the person who finds themselves surrounded by people who feel free to judge them may say, “Sure, everyone’s a critic!”
These negative connotations associated with criticism and with the critic have drifted over to the words as they’re used in the arts, meaning to evaluate a work of art, and the one doing the evaluation. In fact, there seems to be a natural antagonistic, even adversarial, relationship between the artist and the critic, perhaps because so much of an artist’s reputation (and possibly, in turn, their livelihood) depends on the critic’s opinion. A good or bad review, in a prominent place, could make or break an artist’s standing.
In the academy, criticism has managed to avoid the most negative associations and survives more on par with the neutral critique, which is less about passing judgment and more about asking interesting questions and stimulating interesting discussion. Criticism is about opening up possibilities regarding a work of art; it’s about multiplying potential interpretations. It’s not about identifying truths regarding the art; it’s not about solving the art, as a mathematician may solve a complicated equation.
This may be the first important thing I’ve said: Budding critics must guard against the sense that they’ve said something definitive about the work under consideration. Everything is speculative, and they should manage their rhetoric to make that clear. When writing criticism, there should be a lot of hedging. Not “Shakespeare clearly had a troubled relationship with his mother”; rather, “Shakespeare may have had a troubled relationship with his mother.” In the sciences, they strive for declarative statements. In the humanities, we almost always avoid them. We happily traffic in ambiguity.
All of this brings me round (finally) to the adjective, psychoanalytic, which is an especially intriguing critical approach because it is a kind of hybrid school of criticism, marrying science with humanism (although it may be an unhappy or at least unequal marriage). The term of course means that we, psychoanalytic critics, are about analyzing (examining, testing, dissecting) the psyche. That seems straightforward enough. But since we love ambiguity, let’s ask “What do we mean by the psyche?” Are we examining the mind? The soul? The personality? The spirit? These are all synonyms for psyche. If this were a question on a multiple-choice exam, and we could only choose one answer, nearly all of us would probably choose A) The mind. But I think each of the choices is potentially correct, depending on factors like the work being critiqued and the working thesis of the critic. For example, my first monograph—The “Beowulf” Poet and His Real Monsters—was, yes, an examination of the poet’s mind, but also (equally) an examination of the poet’s culture and community, its zeitgeist, which comes closer to psyche as “spirit,” as geist is German for “ghost” or “spirit.” (Zeit, if you’re curious, means “time.”)
So, upon a closer look, psychoanalytic has a broader sense than just an examination of the mind. “Whose mind?” we of course need to ask—and we will.
Before going there, though, let’s spend some time on the origins of psychoanalysis itself. Note the plural: origins. Returning to that simplistic multiple-choice exam, if there were a question about the origin of psychoanalysis, being brilliant students, we would look for “Sigmund Freud.” But in truth it’s not that simple. I do want to talk about Freud—because he was a crucial theorist, a foundational theorist—but he wasn’t the first human being to notice that people have a lot of complicated things happening under the hood. Ancient storytellers had a sense of multi-faceted personalities, of “good” versus “evil,” of twins (Romulus and Remus, for example), of trios forged into a single entity (the Fates); in more contemporary times, of doppelgangers, of Jekyll-and-Hyde personas.
Freud’s masterstroke was to take the sense of an unconscious part of the mind to a much further point, theorizing that people’s behavior is chiefly due to their unconscious. They may believe, consciously, that their decisions and their subsequent actions are due to a, b and c. But in reality their actions are, unconsciously, due to x, y and z. Nearly all of the time, said Freud, people are unaware—oblivious even—to their own true motivations, their own true reasoning. Moreover, Freud said the dominance of the unconscious mind is completely natural. Finally, in his theorizing (and in his prolific publishing) Freud provided a vocabulary for discussing the workings of the unconscious mind: terms like Id, Ego and Superego, as well as processes drawn from literature like Oedipal complex, Electra complex, and narcissism.
In essence, Freud theorized that the unconscious drivers of human behavior are our unexpressed fears and our unacknowledged wishes. Our fears and wishes find expression in four ways: neurotic behaviors (like anger, anxiety, depression, paranoia); dreams and nightmares; accidental vocalization and diction (so-called “Freudian slips”); and the creative arts. It is of course this last kind of expression that is our main interest. In other words, when artists create (when writers write, painters paint, music composers compose, dance choreographers choreograph), they are accessing their hidden fears and wishes, usually unwittingly.
I don’t want to be overly technical, but Freud used the concepts of condensation and displacement to describe the processes by which the mind obfuscates its fears and wishes. With condensation, the writer, let’s say, brings together several ideas or personas into a single representation. With displacement, a fear or wish may be moved from its true origin to become associated with someone or something else. It must be underscored that the mind conceals its fears and wishes because it would be unbecoming or downright taboo to discuss them openly, that is, consciously.
Just as Freud did not develop his theories in isolation, other psychologists, psychiatrists and psychoanalysts either accepted them, modified them, or rejected them in favor of competing theories, during Freud’s lifetime (he died in 1939) and up to the present. It is a cast of thousands, and even the most significant are too numerous to mention even in the briefest summary. Nevertheless, I want to mention one psychoanalyst who, for our purposes, provided the most useful clarifications and extensions of Freud: Frenchman Jacques Lacan.
Like Freud, with whom he was somewhat of a contemporary (Lacan, 1901-1981), the Frenchman was a prolific writer and lecturer; therefore, his discussion of Freud’s theories takes up many volumes, and he was oftentimes at odds with Freud, tinkering, extending, or frequently outright disagreeing. From my perspective, there are two Lacanian concepts that are crucial to our effectiveness as psychoanalytic critics. First, while Freud certainly believed in the significance of language, Lacan took that belief further to the point of making careful attention to language paramount. In fact, he believed that psychoanalysts must work with language just as literary critics do, microscopically and all-encompassingly. No word-choice, no word-order-choice can be taken for granted. Each has significant bearing on interpretation. (I suppose one could go further and say that each word-omission and word-order-not-taken is worthy of attention, too.)
Second, a major criticism (there’s that word) of Freud had to do with causation. Lacan felt that Freud tended to oversimplify the relationship between cause and effect. What appears to be the cause is not the real cause at all. Or it may be more accurate to say that anything attributed to a single cause is misleading because for everything there are multiple causes, with some causes being more significant than others. The analyst—and by extension, the critic—who is satisfied with a one-to-one causal relationship is almost certainly overlooking important facets of cause.
These two Lacanian concepts are so crucial I want to repeat them. Let’s call them important points two and three: The psychoanalytic critic must consider every aspect of the text’s language as significant—diction, syntax, rhetorical posture, everything. Also, psychoanalytic critics must approach each effect as having multiple causes, and therefore they must be dissatisfied with analyses that suggest a facile, single cause, no matter how logical, no matter how well supported by the critique. Causes are always multiple and/or multilayered.
By stopping with Lacan I don’t want to imply that he represents the last word in psychoanalysis. Far from it. Advances in psychoanalysis, psychiatry, and perhaps especially neuropsychology have continued apace for the last half century. Consequently, literary critics inclined toward psychoanalytic interpretation should be aware of the latest advances in our study of the mind. I was recently asked to peer-review an article using trauma theory (a branch of psychoanalytic critique), and the writer only cited pioneers in the field, as if there has been no advancement in our understanding of the mind in decades. I recommended against publication without significant revision to include the work of contemporary (living and practicing) psychologists and psychological theorists. I was gratified to read a later draft that made good use of some of the names I suggested. I was happy to greenlight publication as a useful contribution to the field (and not just a well-written rehash of what has come before).
Let’s call that important point number four: Our understanding of the human psyche and how it relates to behavior is constantly evolving and improving. Psychoanalytic critics must make an effort to stay abreast of new knowledge, at least new knowledge that is directly relevant to the critique they have in mind.
It is also worth noting that we sometimes hear “psychoanalytic criticism” and “Freudian criticism” as synonymous terms, but it’s probably best to think of them as somewhat different. Psychoanalytic criticism is any critique that deals with the unconscious, whereas Freudian criticism makes use specifically of terms and concepts developed by Freud. By the same measure, we may employ Lacanian criticism or Jungian criticism, which are types of psychoanalytic criticism, but as one may imagine they make use of Lacan’s or Jung’s theories and terminologies.
So, then, what is the mission of psychoanalytic criticism? I want to suggest that psychoanalytic criticism has two broad agendas. Through careful examination the critic seeks to find at work the author’s unconscious fears and wishes as they are represented in a literary text. Or (and/or) the critic seeks to find at work a character’s unconscious fears and wishes. With some texts, we can do one or the other or both because we know the author; that is, we have access to their biographies and therefore, to a degree, their personalities. With other texts we are limited to the analysis of the fictional characters (or other literary elements) because we do not have access to the author’s personality. Either the author is unknown, or there is so little known about them that nothing of use can be definitively said. A third approach would be to critique a text psychoanalytically in an effort to reconstruct an unknown or little-known author’s persona. What fears and wishes may be operating in the text, and what may they tell us about the person who created the text? Referencing again my Beowulf monograph, my objective was this last one: I attempt to reconstruct the persona of the anonymous poet by psychoanalyzing the text of the poem.
What does it matter? Why bother to critique a text psychoanalytically, or any other way? T. S. Eliot, considered one of the most astute critics of the twentieth century, put it simply (I paraphrase): The ultimate goal of criticism is to understand a work of art better. We psychoanalytic critics may say our goal is to better understand the relationship between the artist and their art, and in so doing understand the work of art better. Is criticism, then, simply an academic pastime, using academic in both its meanings? Is criticism a behavior of the academy, something done by scholars as a function of their scholarship? And is criticism of no practical value?
Regarding the first meaning of academic, I would say yes, probably: It primarily happens in the academy. That is, it is primarily scholars who engage in criticism as we are thinking of it here, psychoanalytic and otherwise. Regarding the second meaning, I hope and believe the answer is no. Criticism does have practical value. Since art is a product of human beings, and a reflection of all that it means to be human, then I think we can modify Eliot’s assessment to say that the ultimate goal of criticism is to understand ourselves better: ourselves as a species, ourselves as a society, and our each individual selves. Important point number five. What could be of greater value? We hardly have time here for a meaningful discussion of whether or not the value is practical. Going back to Plato at least, we have debated the usefulness of knowledge—and if there is a difference between knowledge and understanding. In a contemporary, real-world sense of practicality, understanding human beings is essential to modifying human behavior, whether individually or en masse, including behaviors that are either constructive or destructive.
My literary idol William Gass believed that art (including literature) could impact consciousness, that it could assemble ethical paradigms that would lead individuals and societies to behave more humanely, more empathically. I would direct you in particular to his essay “The Artist and Society,” which I know is not easily available. There is an insightful discussion of the essay, with several block quotes, available online. (here) I am beginning to stray far afield, so I will end this line of thought by simply reiterating that if art has value, practical or ethereal, then criticism of that art is at least equally valuable.
Let me return to psychoanalytic criticism’s mission and restate how we may use it: Through careful examination the critic seeks to find at work the author’s unconscious fears and wishes as they are represented in a literary text. Or (and/or) the critic seeks to find at work a character’s unconscious fears and wishes. With some texts, we can do one or the other or both because we know the author; that is, we have access to their biographies and therefore, to a degree, their personalities. With other texts we are limited to analysis of the fictional characters (or other literary elements) because we do not have access to the author’s personality. Either the author is unknown, or there is so little known about them that nothing of use can be definitively said. A third approach would be to critique a text psychoanalytically in an effort to reconstruct an unknown or little-known author’s persona. What fears and wishes may be operating in the text, and what may they tell us about the person who created the text?
Of the first order would be a text like Henry James’s novella “The Turn of the Screw” (1898). In brief, it is the first-person account of an English governess who comes to believe that her two young charges, a brother and sister, are being harassed or even possessed by the ghosts of two adults who worked at the estate before their deaths. The employees, who were lovers, had an oddly close relationship with the children in life, and are perhaps continuing the relationships as ghosts. In fact, they may have had inappropriate relationships with the children. In the novella, Henry James is always highly suggestive and lightly clear. His vagueness has left a great deal to our imaginations, and to the ingenuity of critics. Via plot details, via characterization, and via a host of symbols (some rather heavy-handed), critics have penned copious readings over the past 125 years. Many of those critiques are based on our understanding of the author, who was a lifelong bachelor. It is believed that James was attracted to men at a time when that would have been an impossible situation in England: perhaps this is reflected in the same-sex relationships between the adults and the children in the story—the wholly inappropriate same-sex relationships. Some critics have speculated that James was a victim of sexual abuse as a child, and that fact has found its way into the novella. What is more, the vagueness of the novella, James’s seeming inability to state anything plainly and directly, may represent his inability to discuss his sexuality and (possibly) the abuse he experienced as a child. “The Turn of the Screw” (with the suggestive imagery of its title) is, above all, a story of psychological repression.
Another interesting example from the same time period is the work of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and his Sherlock Holmes mysteries, of which he ultimately wrote four novels and sixty short stories. The apparently platonic relationship of Holmes and his sidekick Dr. Watson has of course been the subject of countless critiques. The fictional character Holmes, like the real Henry James, never marries. Perhaps of greater interest is the fact that the danger in the Holmes stories is always associated with British colonization. Conan Doyle was writing during an expansionary period of the Empire. Britain’s global influence was steadily increasing from about 1815 to 1915, adding 10 million square miles of territory and subjugating as many as 400 million people. Conan Doyle’s first Holmes story appeared in 1886, the last in 1927—all but the final twelve were published during the height of British colonial expansion prior to the First World War. Again, the antagonist or antagonistic element consistently comes from one of the colonies. In the first Sherlock Holmes story, A Study in Scarlet, the murders are connected to Mormonism, a religion that originated in the United States. In the second story, The Sign of Four, the murder is provoked by treasure brought back from India. In the third, “A Scandal in Bohemia,” again it is an American, an opera singer, who is at the root of an extortion plot. In the fourth, “The Red-Headed League,” an American millionaire is behind a robbery that is to unfold in the heart of London. Plot after plot hinges on someone or something that has returned to England from a colony or former colony: The U.S., Canada, South America, Asia, Africa. Critics have suggested that the guilt associated with the subjugation and exploitation of millions led Conan Doyle to enact revenge on British citizens at the hands of the colonized. The guilt, as well as the fear of retribution. Conan Doyle was staunchly and outspokenly pro-Queen Victoria, pro-King Edward VII, and pro-Empire, which contributed greatly to his being knighted in 1901.
At the most fundamental Freudian level, we can see that both Henry James and Arthur Conan Doyle were motivated, on some level, by fear and/or inappropriate wish fulfillment.
This time period—around 1900, which we also associate with the writings of Sigmund Freud—is important to our interests, but for now let me go back a bit further.
Of course all of Shakespeare’s plays have been fertile ground for a wide variety of critical analyses. In terms of psychological criticism, his most famous play, Hamlet, has lent itself to discussions of the Oedipal complex: young Hamlet fosters a desire to kill his uncle and stepfather, Claudius, upon marrying Gertrude after what may appear an inappropriately short period of mourning the death of King Hamlet. Young Hamlet had been in love with Ophelia, but he rejects her after developing his obsession to kill Claudius, who has usurped King Hamlet’s status.
William Shakespeare, as a person, is much more of a mystery than authors like Henry James and Arthur Conan Doyle, for whom we have extensive biographical accounts as well as diaries, letters, and other documents directly attached to their lives. It is difficult to say anything with certainty when it comes to the life of Shakespeare. There are no letters, no diaries, and scant official documentation. We have the texts of the plays and the poems, and we have a great deal of documentary evidence from the time period. We can’t say for certain what may have motivated Shakespeare based on his personal history, but we do know about the outbreaks of plague, the assassinations and attempted assassinations of monarchs, and we know about the fear of invasion by Spain, France and other European powers. Psychoanalytic critics can make educated guesses about how this cultural milieu may have impacted Shakespeare’s writing.
I have done similar guesswork when it comes to the Old English poem Beowulf and its anonymous poet, composed around AD 725. We know nothing of the poet himself (assuming a male poet), not even his name, but we know quite a lot about his time period. It isn’t nearly as well documented as Shakespeare’s day, almost a thousand years later, but there is a considerable record, including numerous firsthand, eyewitness accounts. Drawing from this material, I theorized in The “Beowulf” Poet and His Real Monsters that the three monsters in the poem may have represented specific sources of anxiety for the poet and his audience: continual armed violence, the dangers of reproduction, and illnesses that were caused by agents beyond people’s comprehension—manifested in Grendel, Grendel’s Mother, and the dragon.
I want to return to the year 1900. It has been noted that creative writers in the twentieth century and beyond have been more concerned with character motivation than writers in the past. Let’s take as one example a writer I’ve already alluded to—considered by many the greatest writer in the English language, Shakespeare. As great as Shakespeare was, his treatment of character motivation was consistently cursory. Why is Hamlet so quick to turn against his mother and his girlfriend, based on the urgings of a ghost? In The Winter’s Tale, why does Leontes turn against his wife, Hermione, based solely on the friendly hospitality she shows her husband’s oldest friend? How can Othello move so easily from adoring Desdemona to murdering her? The examples are abundant. We could explore any number of explanations, but the important point is that Shakespeare’s audience didn’t seem to care much about character motivation, a token effort is all they required of their playwrights. Said differently, the early modern audiences appeared to have little interest in the psychology of their fictional characters. Of course, Shakespeare was interested in his characters’ psychology. It was often the element he added to his revisions of previously existing plays: a focus on his characters’ tendency toward introspection. Yet it was still minimal compared to the psychological novels and plays (and films) as they developed in the twentieth century. One theory is that the wide dissemination of Freud’s theories—which began in the 1890s, but not until the 1920s were his works widely translated and read—made twentieth-century readers and theatergoers much more interested in the psychology (i.e. the motivation) of the fictional characters they were seeing on the page, the stage, and ultimately the screen. Important point number six.
It may be worth noting that in the United States the first college to establish a course in “psychology” was Harvard, in 1873, taught by Henry James’s older brother William, who eventually wrote the first psychology textbook, The Principles of Psychology, published in 1890. It was the primary college psychology textbook for decades, and greatly influenced thought in other disciplines as well.
I want to turn now from one side of the page to the other, from psychoanalytic critic to writer of fiction, which has been my chief interest since childhood. As a writer, I’m not mindful of my characters’ psychology—and certainly not of my own. It sounds like a simple goal, but when I put pen to paper I’m trying to tell an interesting story in an interesting way. I know there are elements at work beneath the surface of my awareness, but when I’m writing a story or a novel or a poem (my poetry tends to be strongly narrative), I’m not thinking about what those influential elements may be. Similarly, I’m not even thinking about what the text I’m writing may mean. Long ago I decided that meaning was the reader’s purview. In fact, when I let go of my concern for meaning in my stories, my stories became much, much better—more interesting and probably more meaningful.
William Gass said it well: “You hope that the amount of meaning you can pack into a book will always be more than you are capable of consciously understanding…. You have to trick your medium into doing far better than you, as a conscious and clearheaded person, might manage” (my italics).
That is, Gass understood that while he was writing consciously—making deliberate choices about plot, characterization, setting, word choice, and so on—his unconscious mind was at work as well, perhaps operating on a more symbolic level; and because of the influence of his unconscious thoughts, the work would turn out more complex, more engaging, and more interesting than it would if just his consciousness was directing the narrative.
When I write, I deliberately (i.e. consciously) put what I think of as “constellations of images” into the work: repeated words, phrases, ideas (much as we do in poetry, even when I’m writing prose), as well as allusions to the great, classical repositories of narrative. In the west, writers have tended to allude to four narrative sources: the Bible, classical mythology, history, and Shakespeare. I don’t limit myself to these sources for allusions, but I do draw from them copiously. These techniques are not done at random. I have intentions, but I also know that each reader is going to bring their own perspective, their own experiences to my text, and therefore read it and interpret it idiosyncratically. By using these “constellations of images” I’m feeding their imaginations as readers, giving them a lot of handholds for scaling their own personal understanding of the text (and perhaps their own personal understanding of me as the author of the text).
I have experienced two phenomena as a writer that I want to share because they relate directly to our interest in psychology and the unconscious mind. For more than thirty years my process has been to write in the morning, Monday through Friday. When I taught full-time, I would only manage about 30 minutes per morning writing session (now it’s somewhat more). Some mornings I sat down to write knowing precisely where I was in the narrative I was working on. That is, I’d left off the previous morning with a clear sense of what to write next (I’d just run out of time). On those mornings, the writing tended to produce a fine enough first draft. The writing session was satisfactory. Other mornings, I wasn’t sure where to take the narrative. I would sit with my coffee and a blank sheet of paper staring at me. Some writers, I knew, would say at that point “Well, I don’t have anything today. I’ll try again tomorrow.” I, on the other hand, had learned that if I just start writing—put pen to paper and begin producing text—the ideas would come. Not only that, the writing tended to be much, much better on those days that began so aimlessly. More interesting, more creative, more linguistically complex. I have a theory as to why.
On the mornings when I had a clear sense of what I wanted to write, the composing of text was directed primarily by my conscious mind, whereas on the mornings when I had a fuzzy sense or no sense at all, the composing of text was directed by my unconscious mind. And, lo and behold, it turns out my unconscious mind is a much better writer than my conscious mind. Said differently, my conscious mind operates in the real, and my unconscious mind operates in the surreal. And most of us would agree that surrealistic images are more engaging, more captivating than realistic ones.
The other phenomenon has to do with not writing. I’m dedicated to my creative writing, but I will have stretches when I’m not writing for several days—generally this happens when I’m traveling or on vacation. I have had a few occasions where a significant illness or injury has prevented me from writing for several days. I notice that I begin to get anxious, I have difficulty concentrating, I become impatient, and generally I just feel uneasy. These symptoms of my not-writing correspond precisely with sleep deprivation. Returning to Freud, he compared creative writing to daytime dreaming. He theorized that the mind of the creative writer is functioning in much the same way as the brain does when we’re sleeping and dreaming. I feel that my experience gives credence to Freud’s theory. By not writing for several days I’m depriving my mind of its process for analyzing and interpreting my world. I’ve often said that my writing is a kind of meditation. It keeps me centered. It may also be keeping me mentally healthy.
I will end on a note about a possible future for psychoanalytic criticism. As we know, a dominant topic in the academy is artificial intelligence: how is it reshaping society, how is it reshaping education, how is it reshaping us? It is a broad and constantly changing subject, so I want to focus on a very narrow sliver: AI’s production of narrative text. I have no doubt that commercial publishers in the U.S. and elsewhere will start marketing books written by artificial-intelligence “authors.” There will be no need for royalty payments, no authorial egos for editors to bruise (really, no need for editors), no missed deadlines by unpredictable human writers, who become sick, who become distracted, who become blocked.
If you follow developments in artificial intelligence, you’re probably familiar with the “black box problem.” AI is autodidactic, gathering data and “learning” from that data of its own mysterious volition. When AI begins doing things that its programmers didn’t program it to do, demonstrating processes and outcomes the programmers themselves don’t understand, the AI is operating in a so-called black box. AI that is composing narratives—telling stories, writing novels, etc.—is essentially drawing from its unconscious, its impenetrable black box. At that point, computer scientists are unable to untangle and understand the AI author’s complex programming, but perhaps psychoanalytic critics can employ their skill sets, analyzing the language of the narrative itself to perceive the artificial author’s unconscious mind. Such a process was predicted by science fiction writers. In Robert Heinlein’s novel The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress (1966), computer technicians are essentially psychoanalysts who diagnose and fix problems by talking to the computer, asking it questions, and analyzing its responses. Similarly, in Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), the computer, HAL, has what amounts to a nervous breakdown when faced with an ethical dilemma.
As the new generation of critics, you may well be at the forefront of working with artificial intelligences, reading their output, analyzing their language, and assessing their unconscious programming. If so, I encourage you not to ignore the old, human-produced texts, for they are the gateway to comprehending the artificial authors of the very near future, and humanity will likely depend on that comprehension. Humanity will likely depend on you. Vitally important point number seven.
12 Winters Blog 
1 comment