Raghu Parthasarathy writes:
The last seven books I read were all published in 1965. I decided on this literary time travel after noticing that I unintentionally read two books in a row from 1965. I thought: Why not continue? Would I get a deep sense of the mid-1960s zeitgeist? I don’t think so . . .
Contra Raghu, I do think that reading old books gives us some sense of how people used to live, and how they used to think. I have nothing new to offer on this front, but here are some relevant ideas we’ve discussed before:
1. The Speed Racer principle: Sometimes the most interesting aspect of a scientific or cultural product is not its overt content but rather its unexamined assumptions.
2. Storytelling as predictive model checking: Fiction is the working out of possibilities. Nonfiction is that too, just with more constraints.
3. Hoberman and Deliverance: Some cultural artifacts are striking because of what they leave out. My go-to example here is the book Deliverance, which was written during the U.S.-Vietnam war and, to my mind, is implicitly all about that war even though I don’t think it is mentioned even once in the book.
4. Also, Raghu mentions Stoner so I’ll point you to my post on the book. In the comments section, Henry Farrell promises us an article called “What Meyer and Rowan on Myth and Ceremony tells us about Forlesen.” So, something to look forward to.
5. And Raghu mentions Donald Westlake. As I wrote a few years ago, my favorite Westlake is Killing Time, but I also like Memory. And then there’s The Axe. And Slayground’s pretty good too. And Ordo, even if it’s kind of a very long extended joke on the idea of murder. Overall, I do think there’s a black hole at the center of Westlake’s writing: as I wrote a few years ago, he has great plots and settings and charming characters, but nothing I’ve ever read of his has the emotional punch of, say, Scott Smith’s A Simple Plan (to choose a book whose plot would fit well into the Westlake canon). But, hey, nobody can do everything. Also see here and here.
My first reaction is that we are all creatures of our times, but we are often unaware of this. Fish don’t know that water is wet. To me, 1965 isn’t that long ago, and I certainly have much of the same values and ideas I had then. Someone of a different era might well think that my attitudes are bound up in 1965ism that I am somehow incapable of recognizing. Some authors are more tied to their times than others. John Updike is an examplar of his time and place; Frank Hebert is not…well, maybe living in a famously wet place motivated him to write about a dry place.
I am pretty sure you don’t think about the price of housing, the availability of jobs, or the risk of some everyday pleasures like its 1965! You don’t expect every public indoor space to reek of tobacco and contain an ashtray or ashes either.
In Patricia Highsmith’s The Price of Salt (1952), the young female protagonist lives in what would now be considered a very small, bare apartment in New York but also quits her job to take a trip without even wondering whether she can get another one later. (The official unemployment rate was about 2.7% in 1952.)
“Contra Raghu, I do think that reading old books gives us *some* sense of how people used to live” — I definitely agree that reading books from the past gives us a sense of how people used to live! (Technologies, political structures, even the types of plots considered interesting.) The difficult question is the extent to which it gives insight into moods or attitudes of the time that are hard to convey. Certainly it leaves us with some sense of these moods, maybe even a lot, but how much it succeeds is perhaps unknowable (like what it’s like to be a bat).
And what was it like to be a bat in 1965?