Classic: authors trying to take their texts to the grave. We also wouldn’t have The Master and Margarita if Bulgakov’s wife had respected his death bed wish to have it burnt.
I’m conflicted about this. On one hand, I adore his books and I’m sure this would be great, even if he didn’t think so himself. Reviews I’ve read suggest it’s good, though not as good as his best work.
But I feel like I’m being disloyal if I read something he explicitly wanted no one to read. On balance I think I’ll skip it. I got plenty of other books to read anyway.
This is an ancient conflict. IIUC, Kafka wanted his work destroyed. I think about half his published material is posthumous because his friends couldn't bring themselves to comply with his wishes and, in fact, believed it was important for the world to read it.
I don't know what the "public domain" discourse was in the 1920s, if was considered even an option. But there are other things you relinquish by giving it to public domain, not only money.
The guy died in 1968. He slowly released the material among the course of 44 years; after his death, many of these documents remain unreleased. Kind of a weird behavior for somebody acting under the premise that "it was important for the world to read it".
He then left everything in hands of his secretary, who proceeded to, among other things:
* Sell plenty of Kafka's letters and postcards to private entities.
* Attempting to smuggle (out) some manuscripts without filing photocopies to the Archives of the National Library of Israel, which is required by law and is also, again, kind of a weird behavior for somebody acting under the premise that "it was important for the world to read it".
* Auctioned an original manuscript of The Trial, fetching about 2 million USD.
I couldn't find evidence of one single piece of material that was willingly donated to a museum or similar entity by either Max Brod or Esther Hoffe during the 83 years (!) they had it under their possession.
Even squinting very very very hard at the situation, it's hard for me to not see "the obvious economic reasons attached to it".
>But there are other things you relinquish by giving it to public domain
Kafka was virtually unknown during his lifetime. It's unlikely that there was any expectation of profit. They probably just liked the writings and thought it would be a shame to destroy them.
Would you refuse to unearth an ancient roman villa just because we have a papyrus of an emperor saying he hated its design?
There is a question about at which point personal belongings become part of history, i.e. get museumified, but we all know that at some point we stop thinking of those private endeavors as secrets to keep forever and they become part of public history.
It's a funny sentiment but I don't think Steve Jobs' entire fortune would put the smallest dent into the national debt. A quick google indicates he was worth about 8 billion, while the national debt in 2011 was around 15 trillion. 15 trillion minus 8 billion is still basically 15 trillion...
out of respect? Paraphrasing Chesterton, tradition is refusing to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about.
If I respect an author enough to spend hours of my life reading her work, why should I discard her opinion the moment she dies? If you're going to honor one thing about a person it probably ought to be their will.
Is the profession of a historian inherently immoral then? How many things we know and how many of them are of crucial historical importance that were not supposed to be known?
Idea is that historians don’t deal with recently deceased and they are not digging into their close relatives or friends.
I do wish my close ones to obey my will. I don’t care about some random person 50 years later after I die.
I will also obey the will of my relatives and close ones to show that I respect the will so when it is my turn to go away others will treat me as I treated others.
>Idea is that historians don’t deal with recently deceased
Cold War historians exist and have to deal with people both recently deceased or still alive. Should Cold War history research be locked away for a century or more?
Because it's nice to live in a society where the living isn't tramatised by the knowledge of what happens to your legacy after you die.
For example, it could be argued that the best way to dispose of corpses is composting and not cemeteries or cremation. With that in mind, should the state not impose that everyone is composted?
Even though I personally wouldn't care if that's the ultimate fate of my body, lots of people DO care about that. There would be a harm done to society if something like this was forced on the remains of their loved ones.
So the round about answer is, because it's a nice thing to do that makes people feel good and that has value.
The fact that we are having this discussion sort of underlines the issue with going against the wishes of the dead. It makes people uncomfortable and upset.
That being said, it probably wouldn't feel nearly as ghoulish if Garcia was dead for more than a couple of years. The reason it feels uncomfortable is her family is going against her wishes to publish his book ostensibly for the money. That feels a little like grave robbing. (Which, again, could be viewed in the same light. Why does grave robbing matter?)
Because it will put those who are still living at ease. Dying is a touchy topic already, and the expectation of having one's wishes honored after one's death can inform decisions while still alive.
Also yeah. Disrespecting a perfectly reasonable wish of a deceased and tainting their legacy is just a deeply dishonorable thing and I will actively shun people who do so.
Most definitely not if you have them destroyed like T.P.
What was even your point about "someone's curated image"? Was that supposed to go somewhere or are you planning to impart pieces of your wisdom one statement at a time, hoping people will extrapolate some sort of argument in the most charitable manner?
I really cannot be bothered, especially since it seems like we're just splitting hairs here and arguing about definitions.
Your legacy is by definition everything that you leave behind. If you wrote a book that went unpublished and you didn't completely destroy it then it's part of your legacy by default and it doesn't "taint" it if it gets rediscovered. What might get "tainted" is the public image you wanted to uphold, which is made of a subset (usually small) of your legacy.
The point is that refusing to publish a work because it might "taint" someone's legacy is the same as refusing to public a historical academic paper because some new findings you discovered might "taint" some medieval king's legacy. You're not tainting anything, you're just uncovering more truth and more details which will be useful to future people to reach their own conclusions.
Some king's correspondence is very much not the same thing as literary works produced by a writer. That's a completely disingenuous argument. These things document historical fact. They're generally not art.
However adding to an artist's/writer's oeuvre without their consent is no better than changing the works themselves. You might as well be painting over things or change passages willy-nilly.
Additionally our social contract mandates that relatives and other trustees faithfully execute any reasonable last wishes of the deceased. If my sons disrespected my wishes like that, they might as well write "fuck you dad" in my epitaph. Historians years later are bound by no such thing and their insults would mean very little.
>Some king's correspondence is very much not the same thing as literary works produced by a writer.
It is in the context of being a historical fact.
>You might as well be painting over things or change passages willy-nilly.
Non sequitur. Adding a book to a bibliography does not change the content of the books that have come before.
You seem to confuse historical importance with artistic importance. If I only want to read Marquez's good books I will not read this last unofficial one. If I am a student writing a PhD dissertation about him I absolutely want every single fact I can get my hands on. Original sketches are extremely important in every subfield of history: from poetry to literature to music to painting. Many things we have from past artists are private and yet fundamental for understanding their life and their craft.
> It is in the context of being a historical fact.
And if someone chooses to have all of their work destroyed, then that is their history. In any case "public interest" outweighs a person's personal wishes only in very rare exceptions such as statesmanship. Here it clearly doesn't.
> Non sequitur. Adding a book to a bibliography does not change the content of the books that have come before.
Only in the same way that a later chapter in a book doesn't "change" the ones that came before. It changes how the previous works are perceived - art is all about perception.
> If I am a student writing a PhD dissertation about him I absolutely want every single fact I can get my hands on.
There's little reason to care about any unpublished books, because they cannot have had any influence. It's fine to be interested in them anyways, but mere interest of the living is not enough to excuse any of this.
But even if the person who wishes to have their works destroyed gave a completely nonsensical reason, their executors still would not have the right to go against it.
If people cannot expect to have their wishes honored, they will merely take more extreme measures to ensure they leave things behind to their liking. Nowadays that likely means encrypted drives and dead man's switches. But do we really have to go there? Can we maybe instead just expect society to behave honorably?
> Original sketches are extremely important in every subfield of history: from poetry to literature to music to painting.
The word "important" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. It is very important to my daily commute that there be a highway from my front door going straight to my place of work, but I don't think it's going to happen.
This is how I look at it: a lot of artists say that once a work is "out there", it really belongs to the audience. Also, people start to get funny POVs when they get older. He may have been living with a bunch of contradictory energies.
Did Pale King tarnish DFW's reputation? (Maybe a bad example, his demons did a bit of that) DFW's short stories and earlier novels seem to have stood well on their own and survived the publishing of the incomplete Pale King.
I heard about this on NPR this morning (which is looks like someone already posted the link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39633900), and it sounds like the sons justification was that the book was good and the issues was that Gabriel García Márquez's wasn't in the right mind to recognize his own work anymore.
"When he said it doesn't make sense he didn't realize it didn't make sense to him anymore."
I'm not familiar with this work so have no stake in this particular game, but it sits uneasy for me anyways. For myself, I think it mostly comes down to the incentives for releasing it.
Is this a valuable literary work that deserves to be published? How would we even go about deciding such a thing, without breaking the deceased's will anyways?
Or, is this just the estate saying, "The money from the previous books is drying up! We can either get real jobs, or go against dad's wishes for free money." In which case, screw that.
But even if you agree with the latter, given the complexity of the former, I feel like the fix there is that the rules for publishing works of the deceased should be different, e.g. it is immediately in the public domain so that there is no (or at least less) financial incentive since the original author has already decided not to profit from it. That would at least let us address the former questions more clearly and with reverence.
> I feel like the fix there is that the rules for publishing works of the deceased should be different, e.g. it is immediately in the public domain so that there is no (or at least less) financial incentive since the original author has already decided not to profit from it.
sometimes the plan is for the children/successors to benefit from the works. Some do ask for things to be published after they're gone
Yeah, I get it. There's a lot of complexity. I considered including something about "when the author has explicitly said not to release it" which draws up even more complexity in this case because the children argued 'Dad wasn't in the right mind.' So does that make it OK?
But honestly, for my part anyways, I'm not sure any of that matters.
I'm a big fan of creativity. It's probably the most valuable thing people have and it ought to be protected and rewarded.
That's why this is even a dilemma for me because I would be disappointed to see a good creative work lost forever just because they didn't see the value of their own work.
But that's also why I'm against that kind of inheritance. Children, especially those who have the luxury and of good upbringing, should be encouraged to pursue their own creativity and produce their own value, rather than riding on the coattails of their forebears.
> Of course it's not a trashy romance novel, it is an amazing work of art
Quote by the editor. Highlights a problem to me. Since Marquez is so famous, they feel the need to put this novel on a pedestal, even though it might just be "okay". Which of course is okay in itself.
I also think the sons contradict themselves when they say that their father lost the intellectual power to judge if the book should be published, yet didn't he also write it during this time? So I understand it like Marquez was aware of his mental problems and that's why he decided not to publish.
It's not unusual for authors to express a desire for their unpublished works to be destroyed. Kafka wanted all his unpublished works to be destroyed - consider these are most of his known works now, we're quite lucky his executor, Max Brod, defied his wishes.
> It's not unusual for authors to express a desire for their unpublished works to be destroyed. Kafka wanted all his unpublished works to be destroyed - consider these are most of his known works now, we're quite lucky his executor, Max Brod, defied his wishes.
Are we lucky, or was Kafka unlucky?
I find the lack of respect about authors' wishes very shocking.
Why? They’re dead. Not trying to be flippant, I honestly don’t get why the deceased’s desires should be elevated over the living’s. It’s a moral choice I don’t agree with and don’t entirely understand.
This is less about the deceased's desires over that of the living and more about creative control. Any creator will want to polish their work. It's already difficult enough to articulate and express the source of inspiration, and even polished, the material expression almost never matches its source.
I've published two novels, and I have tons of notes for all kinds of things, and frankly while there is lots I have written that I don't want to publish until/unless I rework it, and some things I don't want to publish at all, I couldn't give a shit what gets published after I'm dead other than to the extent it'd harm or embarrass anyone I care about. I don't think I have anything that'd harm anyone, but I do have things that might embarrass some. Like love poems written in my youth that has sentimental value for me, but might be embarrassing to my present or then girlfriend, for example.
Frankly, all I'd ask of a literary executor would be that they 1) humor my requests while I'm alive, 2) respect the wishes of my family. Other than that, whether they actually follow through on my wishes? Put it this way, if I find myself in an afterlife, as an atheist, I doubt whether my executor stuck my wishes will be high on my list of things to care about. And without an afterlife it's not as if I'd be able to care. Or know,
I can see both views. On the one hand, authors aren't always the best judges of their own work and executors can hire someone who may do a good job of polishing. On the other hand, there are unfinished works that are relatively mediocre (True at First Light) or just clearly unfinished (The Last Tycoon).
Of course, a movie studio is almost certain to finish off a movie if a director dies and may remove them for other reasons.
It’s true, a good editor or producer collaborates with the creative to get it across the finish line, flawed as it is.
It works better if there is mutual respect.
My point though is when generalizing and reframing this about the deceased vs living, more often than not, it is no longer about respecting (even respectfully disagreeing) with the creative and more about disrespecting the deceased.
>It’s true, a good editor or producer collaborates with the creative to get it across the finish line, flawed as it is.
If it's a studio film, they may well fire the director and hire a new one. And, of course, screenwriters are casually script doctored with or without their consent.
True, and there's typically far less money (or big expenses) involved with books.
I always assumed Christopher Tolkien had some sort of "do with them what you think best" agreement with his father although I don't actually know. Not that there's anything particularly special in written word beyond Tolkien's originals.
I mean, it was a response to people saying it was ok to desecrate a corpse because they’re dead and won’t know about it. So where do these people draw the line? If it’s OK to desecrate a corpse but necrophilia is “too far” then what is their argument?
The corpse doesn’t know if it was desecrated nor does it know if it was subject to necrophilia. So if desecrating a corpse is “ok” according to the above commentators, why is necrophilia not ok too? And if necrophilia is not ok, then perhaps there’s a flaw in their argument.
That is, some things are morally wrong, even if there is no apparent “victim” as the victim is dead.
While we’re alive, we care. When we’re dead, it’s up to our children to care. Inheritance wishes are generally respected, but also can and do get overridden. I’m not saying that an author’s wishes shouldn’t be taken into account, the living still care about how they felt while they were alive, but it shouldn’t be the one and only priority that gets respected. Again, the dead can’t care anymore. Only the living can.
That really depends upon your beliefs and understanding of the cosmos. Not everyone agrees with that.
To be fair, I have practiced shaivasana (“corpse pose”), specifically including “corpse don’t care” as a response to existential anguish arising and passing. But I also know quite a good bit about what it means to regret and long for second chances or a path not taken. I think it is quite rare for anyone (regardless of beliefs) to die without regrets. If you are able to pull that off for yourself, I’m glad for you.
In a belief system where there is a Creator, and the Creator is a Mother, all of Creation are her children. Thus, as humans, raising and nurturing a child is as much of an act of creation as art, music, etc. And conversely, our artistic creations tend to develop a life of its own.
They weren't deceased when they expressed the desire. You usually don't know when, exactly, you're going to die. Nobody would argue, I hope, with "I'm going on a trip, don't publish anything I'm not done with until I get back and finish it." This just happens to be a very long, one-way trip.
That said, I do think once someone is dead, there's some argument whether you have to respect that. But I at least understand the desire.
Aside from "they're dead, how can it hurt them" factor, there's the point that if an author well and truly wants a given work out of the public eye, they can destroy it themselves when they're alive.
Usually we’re talking about things like the author’s private notes and rough drafts, which they may well wish to keep around while they are alive (because they are useful).
He put them in the care of Brod, who had told him that he would refuse to burn them. If he really wanted the work burned he wouldn't have put it in the hands of his biggest fan.
Virgil's Aeneid is the most famous example that I know...
"According to tradition, Virgil traveled to Greece around 19 BC to revise the Aeneid. After meeting Augustus in Athens and deciding to return home, Virgil caught a fever while visiting a town near Megara. Virgil crossed to Italy by ship, weakened with disease, and died in Brundisium harbour on 21 September 19 BC, leaving a wish that the manuscript of the Aeneid was to be burned. Augustus ordered Virgil's literary executors, Lucius Varius Rufus and Plotius Tucca, to disregard that wish, instead ordering the Aeneid to be published with as few editorial changes as possible. As a result, the existing text of the Aeneid may contain faults which Virgil was planning to correct before publication. However, the only obvious imperfections are a few lines of verse that are metrically unfinished (i.e., not a complete line of dactylic hexameter). Other alleged "imperfections" are subject to scholarly debate."
I don't really mean this as an accusation, but I suspect these death-bed demands are simply a pose. Not that they are essentially insincere, but rather a final gesture of conscientiousness that should be ignored.
What is lost to the world by retaining the imperfect, incomplete?
I think a better explanation is that authors and other creators of public works are concerned with how they will be perceived.
Otherwise, they wouldn't spend months and years meticulously editing and improving their works before release.
It's uncomfortable, embarrassing even, to have your unfinished work consumed and reviewed as if it were finished, and as if it were an accurate measure of your intentions and talent.
> It's uncomfortable, embarrassing even, to have your unfinished work consumed and reviewed as if it were finished
Yes, but when the unfinished work is published, it is well known that it was incomplete.
That said, I can understand the author not wanting it to be published. If is a shitty thing to publish it against the author's will when they are alive, it is equally shitty to do it when they have died.
> Yes, but when the unfinished work is published, it is well known that it was incomplete.
Just as a rose by any other name is still a rose, shit is still shit no matter how you frame it, and unfortunately shit tends to stick better than roses.
I’m not sure about that. Presumably after they’ve died the only person that didn’t want it published has gone, so with only people left that want it punished, is that really such a bad thing?
> If is a shitty thing to publish it against the author's will when they are alive, it is equally shitty to do it when they have died.
It's definitely not _equally_ shitty. It's arguable whether it's shitty at all. For an action to be a shitty thing to do, someone must suffer as a result.
I can see a couple of ways to argue that the author's beneficiaries might suffer, and perhaps even that the author themself might suffer depending on your religious beliefs.
But surely it's not anywhere close to _equally_ shitty.
I am firmly on the side of releasing everything. Great works of art are so incredibly valuable (to the culture) that the chance of finding one that might have been missed trumps these other concerns.
GP mentioned that most of Kafka's best works would have been destroyed if his stated wishes were honored (it is debatable whether these were his actual wishes).
A web search turns up that Monet destroyed a lot of his works before he passed.
How many Aeneid's are we 'missing' because the author was successful in destroying their unfinished work?
Society as a whole suffers because of the disrespect shown. Every person committing the act you describe edges society marginally closer to a world in which little respect is shown at all.
Nobody suffers, but it might be indicative that somebody is a shitty _person_ who might maliciously or carelessly cause harm in other ways. (Obviously intent matters here, because would we ever consider it "shitty" to unknowingly urinate on an unmarked grave?)
It is a shitty thing to do, but there is nothing particularly special about the fact that it is a grave, or that there is a particular person involved.
Society suffers, because people do not wish to be subjected to the sight and smells associated with urination.
A cemetery is usually something of a public park, of sorts. Urinating on a random grave is around the same order of shittiness as urinating on any part of a public park meant to be appreciated or contemplated by people.
If the grave of the random person matters a lot to you, ask yourself, would it matter if the headstone were not there? Would it matter if you did not know there was a grave there?
Every time you urinate on the ground, you are urinating on the remains of millions of people.
With every breath you take, you are inhaling the remains of everyone who has ever been cremated longer ago than it took for their burn gases to homogeneously mix in into the atmosphere (which really does not take very long).
> Does somebody suffer if you urinate on the grave of a random person who died a hundred years ago?
If the intent is to insult a group of people or that person’s descendants, yes. If not, honestly, no. Which is why we generally chase drunk teenagers out of graveyards instead of jailing them.
I think the more likely explanation is that they care about the work itself. If I were to write a book that no one else would ever read, I would still want it to be as good as can be.
I wonder how many devs on here publish their feature branches prior to merge? Do they push up all the WIPs too?
One interesting case, an outsider artist, is Henry Darger "In the Realms of the Unreal"
> In the Realms of the Unreal is a 15,145-page work bound in fifteen immense, densely typed volumes (with three of them consisting of several hundred illustrations, scroll-like watercolor paintings on paper derived from magazines and coloring books) created over six decades. Darger illustrated his stories using a technique of traced images cut from magazines and catalogues, arranged in large panoramic landscapes and painted in watercolors, some as large as 30 feet wide and painted on both sides. He wrote himself into the narrative as the children's protector.[3]: 64
Since this is HN, what are the legal, game theoretic, and technical means to ensure that your will is executed to the letter?
Bind the executor to a contract before hand? Perhaps have two additional watchdog entities setup to sue if the executor disobeys? Have a smart contract oracle escrow on the blockchain to automatically pay out to the law firm for suit if the number of ISBNs associated with your name increases?
Terry Pratchett had a plan for things he was working on at the time of his death:
> Pratchett told Neil Gaiman that anything that he had been working on at the time of his death should be destroyed by a steamroller. On 25 August 2017, his assistant Rob Wilkins fulfilled this wish by crushing Pratchett's hard drive under a steamroller at the Great Dorset Steam Fair.
It's what's more important? Doing fan service for fans who will revere your grocery list because it brings them joy? Or leaving behind a body of work you're really proud of and is widely respected?
I make it black and white but it's not obvious to me you always want to publish things just because some people will devour them.
> It's what's more important? Doing fan service for fans who will revere your grocery list because it brings them joy? Or leaving behind a body of work you're really proud of and is widely respected?
Since you'll be dead and utterly unaffected either way, I'd go with pleasing the fans. Also, it's really a freebie for your legacy if it's understood that it was written under the influence of dementia and published posthumously.
On the other hand, if I thought it would be depressing or unpleasant to fans more than please them, I would want it destroyed.
But that's what I'd do. Terry Pratchett had every right to make his own decision on this. Even with dementia, that's 100% his call. (Of course, his assistant should make sure he was fairly consistent on this point, when most lucid.)
I get where you're coming from in a way. But speaking personally, the idea of people peeking at my creations before I'm ready for them to is anathema. Like, some fundamental violation of the self.
I think that was the right call. Pratchett's works after the Alzheimer onset weren't bad by any means, but they became very formulaic and didn't have the creativity of his best books. They're not helped by Moist van Lipwig being imo his most boring protagonist.
I don't love Moist the way I do Sam Vimes, but the last handful of Industrial Revolution-themed Discworld novels are among my favorites. Maybe it's because I'm a software developer who trained in economics, but the discussions of monetary systems and public policy in satire is much appreciated.
I really liked the first Moist von Lipwig book. The second one is ok. The third (Raising Steam) is just...bad. It's not funny, it's not anything. You can absolutely tell that Pratchett was losing his abilities.
To me it felt like he was hurrying to kind of tie a bow on Discworld and settle at least some of the longer-term plot threads he'd been playing with, similar to The Shepherd's Crown (which is better). The train theme of the book felt apropos, because he was loading a bunch of his characters on the express train to a reasonably happy ending.
Good call. You can hardly find cases where the heirs of great authors didn't simply leech off the estate, normally with little to no regard to artistic integrity.
Considering that the creation process heavily involved Christopher in that their father-son story time inspired a large part of it, one could probably qualify him as a coauthor in terms of non-financial attachment to the works.
(Oh, and Dweezil is the one who's trying very hard to maintain his father's legacy, the rest of the family is cashing in and selling out at every opportunity.)
After Dr. Seuss died, they started publishing his unpublished stuff. "Daisy-Head Mayzie" is the one that comes to mind. At a certain point in my life I used to think that was bad, but to be honest I feel like it's naive to think we have any control of our legacy after we die.
I think it's best to publish these things, but treat them as more archival biographical than anything else, like a journal. I honestly don't think "Daisy-Head Mayzie" is bad, or even the worst thing with Dr. Seuss' name on it, and it's an interesting look into his opinions on becoming famous. I'm glad it was published, even if he wouldn't be.
They probably wanted to publish the work but couldn't do it, so they left it up to chance. If one really wants to destroy their work, they throw it into the fire like James Joyce did with Stephen Hero, or what became Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Fortunately his wife Nora was quick enough to save it, helped by his sister. I tried to read it but only made it to chapter three.
There’s the famous story about the scholars who broke into Beethoven’s tomb hoping to rescue some lost pieces that were buried with him. When they opened it, they found him furiously erasing the manuscripts.
“What are you doing?” the horrified scholars asked.
“Leave me alone,” Beethoven replied. “I’m decomposing.”
Personally I think it is right to respect the reasonable wishes of the recently deceased, but there’s a time limit on everything. Eventually, the deceased pass into history and become fair game. There’s no sharp boundary, but 10 years isn’t that long.
I think you should have someone you trust to gauge the quality of your work and let them make the call.
Because like people here have pointed out, some authors wanted their works destroyed when they died, but for some that is the work we most know them by.
> "We did think about it for about three seconds - was it a betrayal to my parents, to my father's [wishes]?
> "And we decided, yes, it was a betrayal. But that's what children are for."
Haha, fucking brilliant. I love this. Certainly the children of the man. I think this is a good thing they have done. There is no harm done to the man, since he no longer exists. Truly philosophical descendants of Diogenes of Sinope.
I can't remember if it was Warhol or Zappa who strictly enjoined (with no legal force) his heirs/descendants/family from putting his image/words on coffee mugs and it happened anyway.
As someone who deals with art and artists on the regular, the thing most people don’t realize is how much our perception of them and their art is built on top of an illusion. It’s the artist’s job to create an illusion of a cohesive narrative. Sometimes that gets into artists’ heads and they’re overly afraid of breaking down that narrative, but sometimes that fear is absolutely justified. It’s a hard judgment call that unfortunately gets even more confused by the prospect of making straight bank
Michelangelo burned as many of his sketches as possible days before his death in a similar attempt, some biographers believe, to control his posthumous reputation.
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[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 340 ms ] threadhttps://www.npr.org/2024/03/06/1236246186/gabriel-garcia-mar...
There's also a related story about the author at the time of his death (April 17, 2014):
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7606131 (160 comments)
Gabriel García Márquez, Literary Pioneer, Dies at 87 (nytimes.com)
But I feel like I’m being disloyal if I read something he explicitly wanted no one to read. On balance I think I’ll skip it. I got plenty of other books to read anyway.
Sure, if you also ignore the obvious economic reasons attached to it.
He then left everything in hands of his secretary, who proceeded to, among other things:
* Sell plenty of Kafka's letters and postcards to private entities.
* Attempting to smuggle (out) some manuscripts without filing photocopies to the Archives of the National Library of Israel, which is required by law and is also, again, kind of a weird behavior for somebody acting under the premise that "it was important for the world to read it".
* Auctioned an original manuscript of The Trial, fetching about 2 million USD.
I couldn't find evidence of one single piece of material that was willingly donated to a museum or similar entity by either Max Brod or Esther Hoffe during the 83 years (!) they had it under their possession.
Even squinting very very very hard at the situation, it's hard for me to not see "the obvious economic reasons attached to it".
>But there are other things you relinquish by giving it to public domain
Like what?
What you relinquish when you release something into public domain is control over how publishes and possibly who edits it.
I believe the world would not have been a better place without these books.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Brod#Publication_of_Kafk...
He won't mind.
There is a question about at which point personal belongings become part of history, i.e. get museumified, but we all know that at some point we stop thinking of those private endeavors as secrets to keep forever and they become part of public history.
Let's start by looting rich dead people fortune the day they die: Steve Jobs money could have been used to reduce the US national debt!
If I respect an author enough to spend hours of my life reading her work, why should I discard her opinion the moment she dies? If you're going to honor one thing about a person it probably ought to be their will.
I do wish my close ones to obey my will. I don’t care about some random person 50 years later after I die.
I will also obey the will of my relatives and close ones to show that I respect the will so when it is my turn to go away others will treat me as I treated others.
Cold War historians exist and have to deal with people both recently deceased or still alive. Should Cold War history research be locked away for a century or more?
For example, it could be argued that the best way to dispose of corpses is composting and not cemeteries or cremation. With that in mind, should the state not impose that everyone is composted?
Even though I personally wouldn't care if that's the ultimate fate of my body, lots of people DO care about that. There would be a harm done to society if something like this was forced on the remains of their loved ones.
So the round about answer is, because it's a nice thing to do that makes people feel good and that has value.
The fact that we are having this discussion sort of underlines the issue with going against the wishes of the dead. It makes people uncomfortable and upset.
That being said, it probably wouldn't feel nearly as ghoulish if Garcia was dead for more than a couple of years. The reason it feels uncomfortable is her family is going against her wishes to publish his book ostensibly for the money. That feels a little like grave robbing. (Which, again, could be viewed in the same light. Why does grave robbing matter?)
Also yeah. Disrespecting a perfectly reasonable wish of a deceased and tainting their legacy is just a deeply dishonorable thing and I will actively shun people who do so.
What was even your point about "someone's curated image"? Was that supposed to go somewhere or are you planning to impart pieces of your wisdom one statement at a time, hoping people will extrapolate some sort of argument in the most charitable manner?
I really cannot be bothered, especially since it seems like we're just splitting hairs here and arguing about definitions.
The point is that refusing to publish a work because it might "taint" someone's legacy is the same as refusing to public a historical academic paper because some new findings you discovered might "taint" some medieval king's legacy. You're not tainting anything, you're just uncovering more truth and more details which will be useful to future people to reach their own conclusions.
However adding to an artist's/writer's oeuvre without their consent is no better than changing the works themselves. You might as well be painting over things or change passages willy-nilly.
Additionally our social contract mandates that relatives and other trustees faithfully execute any reasonable last wishes of the deceased. If my sons disrespected my wishes like that, they might as well write "fuck you dad" in my epitaph. Historians years later are bound by no such thing and their insults would mean very little.
It is in the context of being a historical fact.
>You might as well be painting over things or change passages willy-nilly.
Non sequitur. Adding a book to a bibliography does not change the content of the books that have come before.
You seem to confuse historical importance with artistic importance. If I only want to read Marquez's good books I will not read this last unofficial one. If I am a student writing a PhD dissertation about him I absolutely want every single fact I can get my hands on. Original sketches are extremely important in every subfield of history: from poetry to literature to music to painting. Many things we have from past artists are private and yet fundamental for understanding their life and their craft.
And if someone chooses to have all of their work destroyed, then that is their history. In any case "public interest" outweighs a person's personal wishes only in very rare exceptions such as statesmanship. Here it clearly doesn't.
> Non sequitur. Adding a book to a bibliography does not change the content of the books that have come before.
Only in the same way that a later chapter in a book doesn't "change" the ones that came before. It changes how the previous works are perceived - art is all about perception.
> If I am a student writing a PhD dissertation about him I absolutely want every single fact I can get my hands on.
There's little reason to care about any unpublished books, because they cannot have had any influence. It's fine to be interested in them anyways, but mere interest of the living is not enough to excuse any of this.
But even if the person who wishes to have their works destroyed gave a completely nonsensical reason, their executors still would not have the right to go against it.
If people cannot expect to have their wishes honored, they will merely take more extreme measures to ensure they leave things behind to their liking. Nowadays that likely means encrypted drives and dead man's switches. But do we really have to go there? Can we maybe instead just expect society to behave honorably?
> Original sketches are extremely important in every subfield of history: from poetry to literature to music to painting.
The word "important" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. It is very important to my daily commute that there be a highway from my front door going straight to my place of work, but I don't think it's going to happen.
Did Pale King tarnish DFW's reputation? (Maybe a bad example, his demons did a bit of that) DFW's short stories and earlier novels seem to have stood well on their own and survived the publishing of the incomplete Pale King.
I wouldn't call a draft of an unpublished novel on a personal hard drive, "out there".
Is this a valuable literary work that deserves to be published? How would we even go about deciding such a thing, without breaking the deceased's will anyways?
Or, is this just the estate saying, "The money from the previous books is drying up! We can either get real jobs, or go against dad's wishes for free money." In which case, screw that.
But even if you agree with the latter, given the complexity of the former, I feel like the fix there is that the rules for publishing works of the deceased should be different, e.g. it is immediately in the public domain so that there is no (or at least less) financial incentive since the original author has already decided not to profit from it. That would at least let us address the former questions more clearly and with reverence.
sometimes the plan is for the children/successors to benefit from the works. Some do ask for things to be published after they're gone
But honestly, for my part anyways, I'm not sure any of that matters.
I'm a big fan of creativity. It's probably the most valuable thing people have and it ought to be protected and rewarded.
That's why this is even a dilemma for me because I would be disappointed to see a good creative work lost forever just because they didn't see the value of their own work.
But that's also why I'm against that kind of inheritance. Children, especially those who have the luxury and of good upbringing, should be encouraged to pursue their own creativity and produce their own value, rather than riding on the coattails of their forebears.
Quote by the editor. Highlights a problem to me. Since Marquez is so famous, they feel the need to put this novel on a pedestal, even though it might just be "okay". Which of course is okay in itself.
I also think the sons contradict themselves when they say that their father lost the intellectual power to judge if the book should be published, yet didn't he also write it during this time? So I understand it like Marquez was aware of his mental problems and that's why he decided not to publish.
Are we lucky, or was Kafka unlucky?
I find the lack of respect about authors' wishes very shocking.
Frankly, all I'd ask of a literary executor would be that they 1) humor my requests while I'm alive, 2) respect the wishes of my family. Other than that, whether they actually follow through on my wishes? Put it this way, if I find myself in an afterlife, as an atheist, I doubt whether my executor stuck my wishes will be high on my list of things to care about. And without an afterlife it's not as if I'd be able to care. Or know,
Of course, a movie studio is almost certain to finish off a movie if a director dies and may remove them for other reasons.
It works better if there is mutual respect.
My point though is when generalizing and reframing this about the deceased vs living, more often than not, it is no longer about respecting (even respectfully disagreeing) with the creative and more about disrespecting the deceased.
If it's a studio film, they may well fire the director and hire a new one. And, of course, screenwriters are casually script doctored with or without their consent.
With books, the balance of power isn’t so skewed to the publisher, though I suppose it depends on what it is.
I don’t know what circumstances Tolkien’s unfinished work was released, though it seems like his son toiled away at them for years.
I always assumed Christopher Tolkien had some sort of "do with them what you think best" agreement with his father although I don't actually know. Not that there's anything particularly special in written word beyond Tolkien's originals.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symphony_No._8_(Schubert)#Earl...
I mean they’re dead right? Everything meaningful and special about them is gone.
The corpse doesn’t know if it was desecrated nor does it know if it was subject to necrophilia. So if desecrating a corpse is “ok” according to the above commentators, why is necrophilia not ok too? And if necrophilia is not ok, then perhaps there’s a flaw in their argument.
That is, some things are morally wrong, even if there is no apparent “victim” as the victim is dead.
To be fair, I have practiced shaivasana (“corpse pose”), specifically including “corpse don’t care” as a response to existential anguish arising and passing. But I also know quite a good bit about what it means to regret and long for second chances or a path not taken. I think it is quite rare for anyone (regardless of beliefs) to die without regrets. If you are able to pull that off for yourself, I’m glad for you.
In a belief system where there is a Creator, and the Creator is a Mother, all of Creation are her children. Thus, as humans, raising and nurturing a child is as much of an act of creation as art, music, etc. And conversely, our artistic creations tend to develop a life of its own.
That means it's illegal to not respect the dead person's wishes. The copyright is theirs, not their descendant's.
That said, I do think once someone is dead, there's some argument whether you have to respect that. But I at least understand the desire.
"According to tradition, Virgil traveled to Greece around 19 BC to revise the Aeneid. After meeting Augustus in Athens and deciding to return home, Virgil caught a fever while visiting a town near Megara. Virgil crossed to Italy by ship, weakened with disease, and died in Brundisium harbour on 21 September 19 BC, leaving a wish that the manuscript of the Aeneid was to be burned. Augustus ordered Virgil's literary executors, Lucius Varius Rufus and Plotius Tucca, to disregard that wish, instead ordering the Aeneid to be published with as few editorial changes as possible. As a result, the existing text of the Aeneid may contain faults which Virgil was planning to correct before publication. However, the only obvious imperfections are a few lines of verse that are metrically unfinished (i.e., not a complete line of dactylic hexameter). Other alleged "imperfections" are subject to scholarly debate."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeneid#Virgil's_death,_and_edi...
I don't really mean this as an accusation, but I suspect these death-bed demands are simply a pose. Not that they are essentially insincere, but rather a final gesture of conscientiousness that should be ignored.
What is lost to the world by retaining the imperfect, incomplete?
Otherwise, they wouldn't spend months and years meticulously editing and improving their works before release.
It's uncomfortable, embarrassing even, to have your unfinished work consumed and reviewed as if it were finished, and as if it were an accurate measure of your intentions and talent.
Yes, but when the unfinished work is published, it is well known that it was incomplete.
That said, I can understand the author not wanting it to be published. If is a shitty thing to publish it against the author's will when they are alive, it is equally shitty to do it when they have died.
Just as a rose by any other name is still a rose, shit is still shit no matter how you frame it, and unfortunately shit tends to stick better than roses.
It's definitely not _equally_ shitty. It's arguable whether it's shitty at all. For an action to be a shitty thing to do, someone must suffer as a result.
I can see a couple of ways to argue that the author's beneficiaries might suffer, and perhaps even that the author themself might suffer depending on your religious beliefs.
But surely it's not anywhere close to _equally_ shitty.
I am firmly on the side of releasing everything. Great works of art are so incredibly valuable (to the culture) that the chance of finding one that might have been missed trumps these other concerns.
GP mentioned that most of Kafka's best works would have been destroyed if his stated wishes were honored (it is debatable whether these were his actual wishes).
A web search turns up that Monet destroyed a lot of his works before he passed.
How many Aeneid's are we 'missing' because the author was successful in destroying their unfinished work?
Does somebody suffer if you urinate on the grave of a random person who died a hundred years ago? Is it a shitty thing to do?
(I acknowledge this is specious!)
Society suffers, because people do not wish to be subjected to the sight and smells associated with urination.
A cemetery is usually something of a public park, of sorts. Urinating on a random grave is around the same order of shittiness as urinating on any part of a public park meant to be appreciated or contemplated by people.
If the grave of the random person matters a lot to you, ask yourself, would it matter if the headstone were not there? Would it matter if you did not know there was a grave there?
Every time you urinate on the ground, you are urinating on the remains of millions of people.
With every breath you take, you are inhaling the remains of everyone who has ever been cremated longer ago than it took for their burn gases to homogeneously mix in into the atmosphere (which really does not take very long).
If the intent is to insult a group of people or that person’s descendants, yes. If not, honestly, no. Which is why we generally chase drunk teenagers out of graveyards instead of jailing them.
I wonder how many devs on here publish their feature branches prior to merge? Do they push up all the WIPs too?
>It is unlikely that Marcus Aurelius ever intended the writings to be published.
It is lore that one of his jesters burned himself to save the writings from a fire.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meditations
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johannes_Brahms#Works ("...once claimed to have destroyed 20 string quartets before he issued his official First in 1873...")
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedrich_Kuhlau
> In the Realms of the Unreal is a 15,145-page work bound in fifteen immense, densely typed volumes (with three of them consisting of several hundred illustrations, scroll-like watercolor paintings on paper derived from magazines and coloring books) created over six decades. Darger illustrated his stories using a technique of traced images cut from magazines and catalogues, arranged in large panoramic landscapes and painted in watercolors, some as large as 30 feet wide and painted on both sides. He wrote himself into the narrative as the children's protector.[3]: 64
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Darger#In_the_Realms_of_...
Bind the executor to a contract before hand? Perhaps have two additional watchdog entities setup to sue if the executor disobeys? Have a smart contract oracle escrow on the blockchain to automatically pay out to the law firm for suit if the number of ISBNs associated with your name increases?
> Pratchett told Neil Gaiman that anything that he had been working on at the time of his death should be destroyed by a steamroller. On 25 August 2017, his assistant Rob Wilkins fulfilled this wish by crushing Pratchett's hard drive under a steamroller at the Great Dorset Steam Fair.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terry_Pratchett#Unfinished_tex...
I make it black and white but it's not obvious to me you always want to publish things just because some people will devour them.
Since you'll be dead and utterly unaffected either way, I'd go with pleasing the fans. Also, it's really a freebie for your legacy if it's understood that it was written under the influence of dementia and published posthumously.
On the other hand, if I thought it would be depressing or unpleasant to fans more than please them, I would want it destroyed.
But that's what I'd do. Terry Pratchett had every right to make his own decision on this. Even with dementia, that's 100% his call. (Of course, his assistant should make sure he was fairly consistent on this point, when most lucid.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moon_Zappa
(Oh, and Dweezil is the one who's trying very hard to maintain his father's legacy, the rest of the family is cashing in and selling out at every opportunity.)
I think it's best to publish these things, but treat them as more archival biographical than anything else, like a journal. I honestly don't think "Daisy-Head Mayzie" is bad, or even the worst thing with Dr. Seuss' name on it, and it's an interesting look into his opinions on becoming famous. I'm glad it was published, even if he wouldn't be.
Gabriel García Márquez Wanted to Destroy His Last Novel. It's Being Published - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39630173
“What are you doing?” the horrified scholars asked.
“Leave me alone,” Beethoven replied. “I’m decomposing.”
Could be another masterpiece... or it could be one of the 3480 new "Dune" novels allegedly written from Frank Herbert's notes. Quality stuff, that.
I think you should have someone you trust to gauge the quality of your work and let them make the call.
Because like people here have pointed out, some authors wanted their works destroyed when they died, but for some that is the work we most know them by.
> "And we decided, yes, it was a betrayal. But that's what children are for."
Haha, fucking brilliant. I love this. Certainly the children of the man. I think this is a good thing they have done. There is no harm done to the man, since he no longer exists. Truly philosophical descendants of Diogenes of Sinope.
Garnering all this attention and going through all this trouble? For money? Over stuff that wasn't even his but just "given to him"?
No way!