Nov 02 2008
Are we getting stupider? - Redux
Just a quick muse on a previous topic (Multitasking), that stems from writing the NaNo today. I’ve not only achieved today’s total goal for number of words, I’ve done Monday’s and Tuesday’s, and was 80 words into Wednesday’s by the time my brain got fried.
Along the way, I mused about how, in the current climate, 50,000 words almost does comprise what they now call a “novel.” A lot of modern novels are really short - at least I think so. Certainly much of the more recent writing isn’t anywhere close to the length of weighty tomes like War and Peace or The Brothers Karamazov. Granted, a lot of those Russians were pret-ty heavy thinkers, and longlonglong novels from them aren’t unheard of. But even Lord of the Rings is pretty long, when you think of it.
Maybe my impression that most novels are much shorter than they used to be is completely off. It could be that things like War and Peace stand out precisely because they’re so long, whereas the majority of stuff published in their day, too, could have been shortish.
I need to look into this, I think. Are we getting shorter novels these days as another aspect of our sound-byte society, and our growing inability to concentrate on anything for more than a few minutes? Or am I completely wrong?
I think I got a hint when I was working on my MA thesis in the Philosophy of World Religions. I needed to touch on a lot of theological writings by people like Calvin and Luther, as well as more recent theologians like Charles Finney and Nathaniel Taylor. And I had to peek at some of the philosophical writings from France and Germany too. And I found the same thing - those guys wrote mountains of books, and when you read them, they are thick, very dense, and argued with complexity. Those guys could really think.
I know there are some people whose thought, argument, and sheer output can probably match them. And maybe, again, they stand out because they were the exception rather than the rule.
But when I was doing the thesis, and read more recent books on the same topic as Finney, Calvin, and Luther wrote about - the modern books were much lighter, shorter, and frankly, less thorough. (To be fair, that part might have been because the heavy lifting, philosophy-wise, had already been done by their predecessors, and they didn’t need to reinvent the wheel.)
I get the impression we’re real lightweights in the modern age, when it comes to real thinking. I don’t know if that’s correct. Must. find. out.
Did the creators of NaNoWriMo have any idea this November exercise could inspire questions like this?? 
I enjoy the title of this entry.
As for the question you raise, I’m not sure, either. In my avid reading days, mostly what I read were novels, and probably 3/4 of those were science fiction novels, which really didn’t start coming out commonly until the middle of the 20th century. I remember thinking, a long time ago, that on average, the novels from the 1980s that I read seemed to be longer than the novels form the 1960s. But more typically what happened was that authors tended to write longer books as they gained experience, and a lot of the authors I preferred had been around since the 1940’s. So that opinion is totally unscientific.
A few years ago, I read a short series of books, four of them total, and they averaged about 950 pages each, in hardcover. Really, the way it worked was that they were all just sections of one huge novel, which would have been close to 3000 pages long, if it had been possible to release it in a single volume.
Another example that comes to mind (you’re going to love this one) is L. Ron Hubbard’s “Mission Earth” series, which tips the scales at 1.2 million words or something like that. Enough so that it was published in 10 individual parts. I actually read the first one, but didn’t bother with the other nine. I guess what’s interesting about this example, though, is it demonstrates that you can have a whole LOT of words, and still get stupider.
Are you familiar with Octavia Butler? She would be a similar example of that, only from the other side: Her novels were typically not all that long, but were invariably quite intelligent and a real joy to read.