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+--- Thread: Worlds and novels: The point beyond which the damage begins? (/thread-453.html)
Worlds and novels: The point beyond which the damage begins? - C C - Jan 9, 2015
http://alexanderpruss.blogspot.com/2015/01/novels-and-worlds.html
ALEXANDER PRUSS: As the length increases, the possibilities for good novels initially increase. It may not be possible to write a superb novel significantly shorter than One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. But eventually the possibilities for good novels start to decrease, because the length itself becomes an aesthetic liability. While one could easily have a series of novels that total ten million words, a single novel of ten million words just wouldn't be such a good novel. Indeed, it seems plausible that there is no possible novel of ten million words (in a language like human languages) that's better than War and Peace or One Day or The Lord of the Rings.
If this is right, then there are possible English-language novels with the property that they could not be improved on. For there are only finitely many possible English-language novels of length below ten million, and any novel above that length will be outranked qua novel by some novel of modest length, say War and Peace or One Day.[note 1]
So, there are possible unimprovable English-language novels. Are there possible unimprovable worlds? Or is it the case that we can always improve any possible world, say by adding one more happy angelic mathematician? In the case of novels, we were stipulating a particular kind of artistic production: a novel. Within that artistic production, past a certain point length becomes a defect. But is an analogue true with worlds?
One aspect of the question is this: Is it the case that past a certain point the number of entities, say, becomes a defect? Maybe. Let's think a bit why super-long novels aren't likely to be that great. They either contain lots of different kinds of material or they are repetitive. In the latter case, they're not that great artistically. But if they contain lots of different kinds of material, then they lose the artistic unity that's important to a novel.
Could the same thing be true of worlds? Just adding more and more happy angels past a certain point will make a world repetitive, and hence not better. (Maybe not worse either.) But adding whole new kinds of beings might damage the artistic unity of the world.
[note 1] One might worry about the possibility of arbitrarily long neologisms or names. But a spoken word of English cannot exceed the length of a typical human lifetime at a normal rate of speech, we can stipulate.
RE: Worlds and novels: The point beyond which the damage begins? - Magical Realist - Jan 10, 2015
I have observed a certain deleterious effect making a prolonged series out of a story has on the storyline itself. After so many possibilities are explored, the need to be novel and to outdo what has already happened with more exciting events seems to dominate. Even absurd rescusitations of departed characters may be resorted to, or sensational revelations of secret familial relationships ("Luke, I'm your father."). Then there's always the "prequel." The story essentially has to continually reinvent itself to sustain the interest of the reader/viewer, turning it more into a soap opera rather than maintaining its integrity as a coherent powerful narrative. Just how many more times was it necessary for Harry Potter to defeat Valdemort? When exactly WAS Mulder going to finally make love to Scully? A certain supplemental concern for the characters beyond the story itself, as if they could exist outside of it, waiting offstage as it were to receive their newly written scripts.