The problem is when some artist comes along and throws everybody for a loop because it’s not what they’ve been conditioned to see. Movies were never questioned until someone got the strange idea of adding dialogue – spoken, no less! – not the tried and proven subtitles – but actual voices! – which, of course, they all said would never work! So now, when someone adds a plethora of visual images, the pundits say the brain can’t process both simultaneously. “Too many notes!” – Mozart’s critics in Amadeus.
“Good artists work within their chosen genre – great artists transform it!” – Barbara Hardy.
The 20th century was shocked by Joyce, Eliot, and Picasso, as was the 19th by writers and artists we all take for granted today.
At the turn of the First Millennium, with no precedent, isolated from the rest of the civilized world, Murasaki Shikibu, a Japanese lady, wrote one of the world’s greatest novels – The Tale of Genji. 600 years later, Cervantes wrote the first great novel in Western civilization, Don Quixote, which some consider the world’s greatest novel ever written. Over 2,300 years before Homer spoke (he didn’t write), The Iliad and the Odyssey are considered to be among the greatest epic poems ever. 300 years later, in 458 BC and 429 BC, Aeschylus and Sophocles wrote Oresteia and Oedipus the King, respectively – considered two of the greatest plays of all time only rivaled by Lear and Hamlet (one list ranks them in this order – Lear, Oedipus, Hamlet, and Oresteia. Interesting how some of the greatest are some of the first. Mere coincidence, or is there some reason? If one were to look at most lists of the greatest, one gets the distinct impression artists either refined the genre they worked in or transformed it. For example, the best list I’ve come across, Daniel Burt’s list of the greatest novels of all time, ranks the first four as such – Don Quixote, War and Peace, Ulysses, and Remembrance of Things Past. More or less, poets would rank as follows: Shakespeare, Dante, Homer, Chaucer, Milton, Virgil, Yeats, Pushkin, and Eliot. Regardless, perhaps you see a pattern: in all categories, the earliest and the most recent seem to dominate, with the more recent so drastically different from the earliest – Don Quixote and War and Peace versus Ulysses and Remembrance of Things Past, Oedipus and Oresteia versus Lear and Hamlet or a Long Day’s Journey Into Night and Waiting for Godot (ranked 6 & 8 respectively [Burt’s list]).
My point is – much like the visual arts, only radical change eventually seems to break the stagnation that seems to petrify. Who could be more extreme than Joyce compared to Cervantes or Tolstoy? Or Beckett compared to Shakespeare, Sophocles, and Aeschylus? Or Yeats and Eliot compared to Homer, Dante, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Virgil, etc.?
“Good artists work within their chosen genre – great artists transform it!”
Most of the ones I’ve cited were those who started, refined, or changed it! Clones eventually lost their luster or, in many cases, disappeared altogether. By the way, the last one on Burt’s list of the most influential was Gertrude Stein, and aside from her writing, we all know her influence on the greats of the 20th century.