From "Without the cult of genius, no one is shining/Relatability has become more prized in creative circles than skill or talent — to all of our loss" by James Marriott (London Times).
When this touchy-feely use of relate to took off in the '60s, the adjective form relatable also made its appearance.... A 1965 article in the education journal Theory Into Practice showcased the new meaning when it detailed research findings that "boys saw teachers as more directive, while girls saw them as more 'relatable.' "...
In 1981, the game-show host Bob Eubanks told The Washington Post that "The Newlywed Game" featured "relatable humor, the kind that takes place in every home." The following year, The New York Times quoted a press release for the syndicated series "Couples": "The real difficulties, conflicts and problems of married, dating, living-together and divorced couples rival any type of fictional format for personal and relatable drama."...
By 2006, a Times profile of the new CW network could joke about the creakiness of the cliché: "Someday, there will be an article about television in which no executive uses the word 'relatable,' industry jargon for something with which viewers are supposed to identify or connect. Alas, this is not that article."
The idea of "relating" seems to have taken over over from "identifying." It used to seem to be important to "identify" with the main character. I remember long ago — maybe in the 70s — getting into a conversation about identifying with characters in novels. I said I'd never identified with a character, and my interlocutor said "I always do." We probably had different definitions in mind, with me thinking of a vivid sense that the character and I are the same person, which would be delusional. "Relating" is a more moderate concept: This character seems to feel and act in a way that fits the world as I experience it.
Can you relate to James Marriott, bemoaning the loss of the those gods who walk among us, genius artists? Do you long for a human being to worship, an idol? One answer is: Just get back to worshipping God. Let God be your god.
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33 comments:
Relatability, Arrested Development style.
Maybe so. But a lot of the hostility arises because what the self-defined elites laud as "genius " is no such thing, but rather a Solzhenitzyn-esque lie told to oppress and humiliate the hoi polloi.
What's the big deal with poets and poetry? They tend to get treated like some sort of gods. Remember Vaclev Havel? He was prime minister of Hungary or one of those countries. Do you remember anything at all about him? Yet I'll bet most people who recognize the name at all would say "Oh, yeah. A politician who was some sort of poet, right?"
I probably own more books of poetry, modern to 18th century than 98% of the population. (A dozen or two books) and read more poetry than 98% as well. (Not much and not often)
I like some it OK but a lot I find boring and a lot of it I find boring because I find it pretentious. I've never not enjoyed a Shakespeare production. When I try to read him, I get about 3 lines in and struggle to stay awake.
Some of Conrad's prose moves me much more than any poetry I've ever read. The last 2-3 pages of Youth never fail to move me to tears. Ditto much of Shute's work.
So much for ranting. It's about noon, gonna go to the Cafeteria and whoop it up with a bunch of the boys.
John Henry
All I can say about ‘relating’ to genius is that if I ever were to wake up and discover that I’m a fat black guy, I hope I’m Oscar Peterson Jr., or if I’m also blind, Art Tatum.
- Krumhorn
A democratic society was also less at ease with the idea of a 'natural aristocracy' of artists to match the hereditary aristocracy of landowners and rulers
No. What could to be tolerated was the idea that talent might be parceled out without respect to political views. That is what needed to be quashed. We are now Rome, where art must support the totalitarian state, in the '90s, we were Greece, where art was art and allowed freedom to criticize the state or go wherever it pleased, which is why movies from the '90s were so great.
Now, if you watch a movie, there seem always to be scenes which do not move the plot forward, but are inserted solely to make some political point. Some execrable white supremacist will show up, solely for the purpose of beating him up, or killing him, to burnish the halo around the hero, for example. In the new James Bond movie, there is a throwaway line that the villain could alter his nano-machine virus to kill all black people, just to give the new black woman 007 an extra special good reason to kill him.
There are no gods in human form among us.To call them such ascribes to them powers they do not have but may wish to.The ancient Greeks called this hubris.It is also antithetical to the idea that all men are created equal.
Boo hoo, they have to write books that people want to read!
Imagine that, the glorious them having their fame and fortune held captive by the stinky hoi polloi. What a disaster!
I find that literary critic's assertion that people want their own realities reflected back at them. Are we to believe people have been spending billions to watch superhero movies for the past decade or so because they're looking for relatability?
What I think that critic means by relatable is the push for representation be that racial, sexual orientation, etc. And there is that push, but it's mostly from the type of people Titannia McGrath is parodying, especially the more narcissistically inclined. Those people are likely overrepresented in the critics circle as they come out of college and join his profession. He's probably just conflating his own echo chamber for the wider public.
Do you long for a human being to worship, an idol?
Nope. I have Elon.
The ascendancy of science, Wilson argued, had made human beings less prone to viewing themselves as potentially godlike geniuses
No, plenty of morons on the Left still think of themselves as "godlike geniuses", their problem is that the rest of us are completely unimpressed.
more uncomfortably aware of their kinship with other animals and subjection to biological and physical laws.
IOW, we've stopped pandering to their delusions
A democratic society was also less at ease with the idea of a 'natural aristocracy' of artists to match the hereditary aristocracy of landowners and rulers
No, modern society is simply aware that there's a difference between your ego and reality.
There are people who are better at "X" than other people". But you have to be able to prove it, not merely assert it.
The prevalent idea in the 21st century is not that nobody is a genius but that everybody is — at least potentially.... That way of thinking is incompatible with the recognition of genius which requires humility, the awed acknowledgment that somebody is unfathomably better at something than you are.
What a load of crap. What has changed is that plenty of people now have leisure time, and are capable of widely disseminating their work. So it's no longer possible for anointing editors / publishers / whatever to decree that "this person is a genius", when in fact that person is a drooling idiot, or merely average and there are a ton of people out there who are actually better than he / she is.
The fact that most modern art has become a circle jerk that brings value only to those most obsessed with the jerking, and is ignored by the rest of us as the worthless waste that it is, is sort of the capstone on this.
This is a whine about loss of power by gatekeepers. Nothing more
What an odd column to write in 2021. The Communists and their followers in the West (including wilson who sang Stalin's praises in the 1930s) were actively hostile to the idea of "Genius". Everyone was a worker/peasant with some more equal than others.
In any case, Genius plays by its own rules, which means they get cancelled if they break some taboo. You wonder how many Genius poets and writers never got their work published because it was (insert relevant -ist). How can you can have "Genius" writers if they must conform to the party line?
As for Relating to characters. What struck me about reviews in "Good reads" is how many people start their views with "As a X" and then discuss the novel/play in terms of their "identity". The idea being that "As a X" they don't find anything "Not X" worth reading or "Strange" or "threatening". The whole idea of being challenged by novels/plays from a different POV or perspective is beyond them.
"The prevalent idea in the 21st century is not that nobody is a genius but that everybody is"
That is one prevalent idea. A more prevalent idea is that not everybody is an expert, and that therefore deplorables should bow to their betters.
Simply......wow. Science has done no such thing in regards to having fewer people thinking they are god-like geniuses. Part of our present problems is that we have far too many people who think they are god-like geniuses- Twitter and Tik Tok and other social media platforms are chocked full of such idiots.
That’s why these “reactions” videos get a gazillion views. 🤪
Several studies relate how the "middle generation" of modernist American poets -- Lowell, Berryman, etc. -- began trying to write masterpieces and ended up writing more impromptu and formless poems based on their daily life and the fleeting perceptions passing through their minds. Today we have so much information and text coming at us that neither writers nor readers have much time for masterpieces.
Part of the appeal of Communism to intellectuals was Trotsky's idea that after the Revolution everyone would be a genius -- or at least that everyone would rise to the level of past geniuses, with new geniuses aspiring to yet higher levels:
Man will become immeasurably stronger, wiser, and subtler; his body will become more harmonious, his movements more rhythmic, his voice more musical. The forms of life will become dynamically dramatic. The average human type will rise to the heights of an Aristotle, a Goethe, or a Marx. And above these heights, new peaks will rise.
We live in an age of abundance. Socialists and Communists who once promised mass abundance in some radiant future are now advocating restricted consumption and greater scarcity. We also live in an age when communication and information flows are faster and more abundant than ever before. Genius probably required a more understandable world. It required longer attention spans and more time to work over and assimilate what one learned and craft it into something worthwhile. But today we are carried away by the incessant flow of images, narratives, and information.
"Art Tatum"
I first heard Art Tatum in 1981. I would have sworn on my life the piano he was playing was made out of warm butter.
There are lots of people on the left who are imagining that they are geniuses. They are not. Most have never done anything but school.
"There are no gods in human form among us."
You go through life with the gods you have, not the gods you might want or wish to have at a later time.
A History of Rock Music does a lot to dispel the notion of genius, at least with regard to rock and roll.
It is quite astonishing to hear how many songs are minor tweaks on previous songs in a genre that has already been thought out by many other people and became famous because of a quirk of fate.
The Sound of Silence is kind of a sappy little ditty with a nice little melody. But it became a monster hit after a producer gave it a luscious rich sound without Paul Simon's consent or input. Bridge over Troubled Water is similar. Yes, Paul Simon has significant talent and skill as a musician, but a lot of it was being in the right place at the right time and jumping on the right bandwagon.
the poet ... democratic
Mencken had interesting ideas about poets and democracy.
I don't see a hostility towards geniuses. I see a real hostility towards pretenders to genius, which includes most of our political and entertainment class.
the word 'relatable,' as in 'I like Sarah Palin. She's relatable' (meaning, 'I can relate to her')."
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is it different from empathy?
Gerda Sprinchorn said...
A History of Rock Music does a lot to dispel the notion of genius, at least with regard to rock and roll.
It is quite astonishing to hear how many songs are minor tweaks on previous songs in a genre that has already been thought out by many other people and became famous because of a quirk of fate.
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Yes indeed. And it's something I've noticed in baseball history too; that if you read accounts or listen to recorded interviews by or about baseball players in the first half of the 20th century, you often encounter a quirk of fate or a circumstance whereby a player relates he first got noticed by a scout or someone tipped off a scout about a player. And many of them off-handedly mention how there was some local guy who worked in the mines or who farmed who was as good or better than anybody he ever saw. But alas, this other guy had some issue, like he was married and couldn't afford to quit his job or that he contracted TB, that thwarted his baseball career.
So too, in music and show business generally - the cream does rise to the top but for many their path to success is also dependent upon some lucky break or circumstance.
"A History of Rock Music does a lot to dispel the notion of genius"
You'd have to say that Dylan, Chuck Berry and the Beatles were pop music geniuses. They came along and did something new that had never been done so before so successfully. All Genius is based - to some extent - on prior work. But the Geniuses find some new angle that no one else did.
As Simon and Garfunkle, I never have thought of them as "Genius". At best they were good pop singers.
The Sound of Silence is kind of a sappy little ditty with a nice little melody. But it became a monster hit after a producer gave it a luscious rich sound without Paul Simon's consent or input.
Have you heard the Disturbed cover? Simon approves.
Darkisland, that's "VACLAV Havel," and he was the president first of Czechoslovakia and then of the Czech Republic, not Hungary. The name really ought to have tipped you off.
Anyway, I don't think people in general say, when the name of Havel comes up, "Oh, isn't that the poet who became a Prime Minister?" I had forgotten altogether that he was a poet until you mentioned it just now; I think of him as an Eastern European statesman. One of the better ones to emerge after the Berlin Wall fell.
Now, Ignacy Jan Paderewski honestly was both a virtuoso pianist and a Polish diplomat and statesman. But that was a century ago.
In 1981, the game-show host Bob Eubanks told The Washington Post that "The Newlywed Game" featured "relatable humor, the kind that takes place in every home."
"In the butt, Bob."
The actual clip.
The ascendancy of science, Wilson argued, had made human beings less prone to viewing themselves as potentially godlike geniuses and more uncomfortably aware of their kinship with other animals and subjection to biological and physical laws.
Do real geniuses often view themselves as potentially godlike geniuses? The geniuses of science I know only by reputation; some of the geniuses of art I know by their works: the composer Frank Zappa, the science fiction writers Philip K. Dick and R. A. Lafferty, the crime writer Jim Thompson. I have read about these men and to all appearances they were aware of their lack of kinship with other animals, especially those of the human variety. Some of these men were considered weird or strange, others had severe mental health difficulties.
I doubt if any of them viewed themselves as exercising their godlike genius but instead vacillating between following their inner demand for creation or the more mundane exterior requirements of making a living. Does a potentially true genius attempt to produce ageless art or science, or is he or she just doing the next right thing for them? Is the recognition of genius accomplishment only produced by others after the work is done?
Since genius cannot be accounted for – meaning understood, replicated or borrowed, why do we think that the hidden cause, the genesis of genius can be analyzed? Is it not just part of the recurring mystery?
Paul
Can you relate to James Marriott, bemoaning the loss of the those gods who walk among us, genius artists?
This doesn’t strike me as a fair characterization of what Marriot is bemoaning. Geniuses, as he discusses them, are not “gods”, just humans with a level of talent in a field that others without similar talent simply cannot reach. Where the boundary is not simply one of quantity bridgable by effort, but an unbridgeable quality. This is why he brings up the contrast with “relatability”, where it is more important to identify with specific characteristics of, generally, a small portion of the audience/readership, than it is to expose them to something transcendent.
In other words, “when everyone is special, no one is.”
Though, I believe, as the example of Dave Chappelle partly shows, this effect is less distributed in the population as a whole, than one manufactured and maintained among our cultural “elites”, the self-professed gatekeepers of cultural norms in media and academia, and, more recently, among the internet giants.
I frequently think about a book that the writer lives in the same world I do. This does tend to make it an easier read than say someone like Nathaniel Hawthorne who lived in a very different world though not necessarily more enjoyable.
Everyone should read Vaclav Havel's The Power of the Powerless. I used to think I lived in a different world but now, not so much.
This is a big subject but I'll only make a brief comment. As a student of history, it is obvious that great historical characters are just as un-admirable as they are admirable. The first PR machines were historians, especially those paid to make their subjects look good which includes a large number of the earliest historians. I always separate what a person can do or create from the person him or herself. For example, I am drawn to the creative process of people like Bob Dylan because I admire the result and I find it instructive for me personally. But I have no idea if I would find Dylan an admirable person if I were to meet him and get to know him. So genius is about what a person can and has done that is just beyond the abilities of all other comers. I admire geniuses for their area of genius but feel no need to idolize or worship them as people. We have but one God.
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