An audience poll in three parts!

[theweaselking]

1) In order to be considered educated in modern English literature (paper, so no movies or TV), one must (at a a bare minimum) be familiar with:

[Insert your answer here]


Me, I'm thinking:

Brave New World
1984
Animal Farm
Heart Of Darkness
Hamlet[1]
Romeo And Juliet[1]
The Bible[1][2]
A Tale Of Two Cities

Basically, a reference or allusion to the major points of any of those should be caught by anyone.

What else should be on that list?


2) I'm also thinking of an "honorable mentions" list, with stuff like The Lord Of The Rings, Treasure Island, The Lottery, Lord Of The Flies, I Am Legend, Ender's Game[3], Catcher In The Rye, Atlas Shrugged[3] - stuff where people CAN still be considered well-read without having read them, but they may be missing out. What should be on that?


3) It is not a coincidence that "grade school curriculum" heavily overlaps my essentials list, I think. Is this confirmation bias, or an indication that the Essential Reading list for schoolchildren actually starts with some really good choices?



[1]: gets "Modern English" cred by proxy and influence
[2]: No, seriously, INFLUENCE. But annotated, so people should know The Empty Tomb and The Brutal Torture Of Innocent Job By The Allegedly Benevolent Overlord[4], but who gives a shit about Zachariah? Point is, you need the highlights becuse they show up, a LOT, in other places.
[3]: Being able to recognise popular crap as CRAP, and dissect the failures of logic, worldbuilding, and persuasion is an important skill that more people should have.
[4]: The Book Of Job is a demonstration that not only CAN Satan win, but that he wins any time he feels like putting any effort in, because God is a gullible chump. But this is a diversion.

Comments

[cosmiccat.livejournal.com]

Paradise Lost. It basically invented (or at least codified) the modern perception of Satan.

For Canadians specifically, The Handmaid's Tale rates if only for the stark introduction into "and this is what Canadian literature is like".

Out of Shakespeare's plays, I'd add Julius Caesar.

Oddly, despite being Old English, Beowulf might deserve to be on the list - if only because of the effects of its most recent translations into modern English. For example, Tolkien's translation of Beowulf leads directly into The Lord of the Rings and it's particular cadence and forms of speech, and from there into pretty much all fantasy everywhere. Maybe it's more Honourable Mention territory, though.

And The Book of Job is about God torturing Job in the same way that The Republic is about how much Plato enjoyed chaining people up in caves.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

The problem with adding Beowulf is that while it's undeniably influential, it's also not written in modern English. Same with Chaucer.

And The Book of Job is about God torturing Job in the same way that The Republic is about how much Plato enjoyed chaining people up in caves.

I gotta ask: What message to you think Job has that's *more* clear than "God will fuck up your life on a bet, and wants you to thank him for it?"

[cosmiccat.livejournal.com]

The Book of Job is a dialogue on the subject of "why do bad things happen to good people?" I mentioned The Republic because it's directly comparable - the setup is that Job suffers greatly, and then the meat is the philosophical argument between Job and his friends wherein everyone gives thoughtful speeches about how God is or is not a dick. It's similar to the philosophical letters written by rabbis that traditionally accompany the Torah, except framed as a conversation instead of a straight-up essay.

Focusing on what Satan does to Job in the course of the prologue is missing the entire point, which is the exploration of the question. Two answers are discussed: "they don't - those people must have done something bad" and "we are unaware of the whole picture" (the answer "God does not exist" is not discussed because presumably anyone who believed that exploded enroute). Eventually God shows up and settles the issue by confirming that, yes, we are too tiny to understand why God does what he does. You could take a lot of messages from that - maybe "everything happens for a reason, but you may never know those reasons", or possibly "wealth is not a sign of righteousness; suffering is not a sign of guilt". I'm not a theologian, and there's several thousand years of literature on this very subject to go through.

"God got tricked by Satan" is just completely wrong, however; the Satan in the story is an advisor to God, and his hypothesis (that Job is only faithful because he is happy; if he were unhappy, he'd renounce his faith) is a totally reasonable one that deserves testing. In the end, Satan is proven wrong (not just about Job, in fact, but all his friends as well) and this particular hypothesis is never tested again. The story isn't about how God will someday destruct-test the reader's faith, it's about that one time he tested Job - and by extension, humanity - and was in general satisfied with the results if not some of the reasoning (Job's friends do get told off for speaking for God).

Furthermore, picking apart the backdrop for the story - the point of which is really the debate Job and his friends have - is like complaining that all of sci-fi is stupid and unreadable because faster-than-light travel is impossible. Who cares? It's just part of the setup.

Of course, I'm looking at the Bible as literature and not religion; anyone insisting that The Book of Job happened exactly as written should get a stinging slap upside the head for obvious reasons.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

I think you're reading a different book, and also far more charitably than the text allows. Job's family curse god before being slaughtered. His work is annihilated. His friends are driven to apostasy. The adversary figure, in fact, gets *everyone* in that story except Job himself to reject God, and he does so by the simple expedient of preying on God's doubts and his mistrust of his own work. He then, with God's blessing, is left free to gleefully destroy everything and drives any number of otherwise-possibly-worthy people into a state of sin, and then kills them outright. Finally, when God EVENTUALLY realises his mistake, the best excuse he can come up with for ruining so many lives ON A BET is "you wouldn't understand my reasons, they're pretty obscure and new and you won't have heard of them"?

You could take a lot of messages from that - maybe "everything happens for a reason, but you may never know those reasons", or possibly "wealth is not a sign of righteousness; suffering is not a sign of guilt".

Except, and this is important, we know exactly why this happened. We know JOB didn't know the reason, but we also know that there WAS no reason besides God losing confidence.

Furthermore, picking apart the backdrop for the story - the point of which is really the debate Job and his friends have - is like complaining that all of sci-fi is stupid and unreadable because faster-than-light travel is impossible. Who cares? It's just part of the setup.

Except if our hypothetical FTL is powered by the suffering of innocents, at which point no, no really, it DOES matter how the FTL works. That piece of information critically alters the stories.

And in this case, the knowledge that God makes Job suffer for no reason, that all of Job's suffering and the death of everyone around him serves no purpose at all, and that, in the end, God can't even explain adequately *to himself* why he did it, let alone to Job?

Yeah, that matters. That changes the story. If you eliminate the explanation, suddenly it's a story of a dude where shit happens and when he eventually breaks God shows up to say "Hey, man, I'm not telling you WHY shit is happening, but there's a reason" - and THAT story, sure, you could take your meaning from.


But we know that there's no grand plan, because the story tells us, the reader, that there is no grand plan.

And we *know* that God is blustering and lying when he says "there are reasons! Really important reasons! You just wouldn't understand!", because we *know* that the only reason all of this happens is that the devil-figure tricked God into doubting Job.

[cosmiccat.livejournal.com]

I'm talking about the friends who are actual characters, who come by to talk to Job after everything you've described happened. You're talking about the prologue as if that's the whole story, and it's not, it's just the setup for the dialogue. Examining it as closely as you are, fiddling around with all the consequences of the things that happen to Job, is just nit-picking when the purpose of it is just to set up that Job has had a really bad time. You can do that to any story, which is why I brought up the FTL - yeah, if the FTL drive is powered by poking orphans with sticks, that's important, but we're not even reaching that stage; you're still getting stuck on "this orphan-powered warp drive would never work, for one thing we'd exhaust the world's supply of orphans in a week". We're not engaging the story, you're just dicking around with the premise.

God's reply to Job moves from the specific to the general - in this specific case, Job was unaware of God's motivations (allowing his subordinate to test a theory), and that situation could be true for just about anything that happens. God talking about how people know nothing about running a planet isn't him blustering to cover a mistake, it's relating the moral of the story: Job had no idea what was going on behind the scenes here, and when it comes to the reader's problems, the same applies. The world is huge and incomprehensible and often cruel; not because you are evil, or the world is evil, but rather because you just don't understand why yet.

Yeah, in this instance there's some values dissonance going on with regard to the explanation for Job's suffering: to a modern audience "my servant felt you were faking it" is kind of a weak excuse, forgetting that from God's perspective, physical suffering is brief and death merely a movement from a mortal state to an immortal one, and our preoccupation with temporary mortal problems is a human character flaw not evidence of an uncaring God. So ruining Job's life is really not a big deal to God, but testing his faith is - because Job's life only lasts a brief time, but Job's soul will last forever.

In the end, the only one of Job's friends to not be rebuked by God is one who suggests that the solution to the dilemma is to search for answers, not to assign blame. This is a running theme in rabbinical discussions and the philosophy behind the existence of the Talmud.

Of course, to people sitting in the 21st century, this all seems kind of silly - God's boast about "well what do YOU know about creating a world?" falls a bit flat when we can answer with some confidence "rather a lot, actually, we could probably pull it off given sufficient materials and time; would you like to see our computer simulations?". So yeah, I do read it a bit charitably, because it was written at a time when people did not benefit from the centuries of philosophical and technological development that I do. Instead, it's written by people who live in a world which is clearly magical, in which God must exist because bolts of pure destruction rain down from the thundering heavens all the time. And so, given a world which metes out terrible punishment seemingly at random, people chose not to believe that they deserve it, or that the world is evil, but simply that they didn't understand yet.

This has, as it turns out, proven to be the correct answer (although not quite in the way they imagined).

Anyway, wrapping up: nitpicking the premise is unhelpful, insulting the work by judging it according to modern standards is unfair, and the overall message can be read as "never assume you have all the answers" or perhaps more poetically "humility is the beginning of wisdom".

Also, you have been told this multiple times now by me and several others - the Satan in Job is not The Devil. That figure came along thousands of years later, you might as well be insisting that this is a story about God battling Megatron. Not the same guy. Really. There are no antagonists in this story, in the same way (and for the same reason) that there are no antagonists in The Republic.

I understand that you despise American evangelicals, and with good reason, but try not to take it out on the stories.

[glenn-3.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure that "Don't be silly, of course God isn't tricked into doing something He doesn't want to do. He assigned Satan to the task of testing people in the first place, knowing both that Satan would go about the job by killing a bunch of people just to put one guy on the spot, and also that Job would pass the test!" is really helping. I mean, yes, I know that Satan=job title, and that job is basically prosecuting attorney, so it's not about the Devil getting one over on God. But if you're trying to reassure people that things happen for Reasons...shouldn't you think of at least one solid reason? Testing somebody by torturing them, when you already know how it will turn out, isn't much of a reason, as far as I'm concerned. If anything, it's worse than random, because if Job hadn't been a conspicuously pious man, nobody would have bothered heaping misfortunes on him to see if he'd stop being one. *shrug* Your mileage obviously varies.

[cosmiccat.livejournal.com]

"God was testing you" is pretty much the solid reason given for everything bad that happens, though.

The Book of Job provides a catch-22 for these questions, of course - trying to guess God's motivations is exactly what story is advising against, on the grounds that he is a pan-universal being of infinite intelligence and power, and I can't make pancakes without burning them to the pan. God, as a character, operates under a convenient Omniscient Morality License which results in his motivations and activities becoming basically incomprehensible because we are not in full possession of the facts. The Book of Job takes the position that if God's apparent reasons for doing something do not satisfy you, it's due to a lack of information on your end and nothing else.

This same issue gets explored in a slightly more modern style in Paradise Lost, which is also about the ineffability and seeming tyrannical cruelty of God, with much of it framed around Satan losing faith in God's omniscience. (It's kind of a weak defence of God, though, because Satan gets all the best lines and makes a much better case for his position).

Anyway, I guess my point is that The Book of Job isn't what we bring up when we want to chortle about how God is a buffoon, it's what we throw in fundamentalists' faces when they say stupid things like "that hurricane was punishment for their sins". People figured out that line was obnoxious bullshit three thousand years ago and Job is the resulting warning against pretending to know the mind of God.