If the public is still enthusing about it seven years after it ends, it has withstood the test of time.
A metric that can't distinguish between Don Quixote and Firefly doesn't seem useful.
Amadis of Gaul
was written in the 14th century, had its first printed edition in 1508, and the French and German public were each enthused enough to support sequels as late as 1594. This should make us realize that even a work of pop culture that remains popular for a century may not withstand the test of time.
Right, disclaimer, then. This metric wasn't designed for classic literature snobs. You guys still haven't warmed up to Lord of the Rings, for crying out loud.
If "the test of time" means "never forgotten in all of human history", then the vast majority of the Trojan War mythos doesn't count. And if Don Quixote is worthier than Amadis of Gaul on account of being a deconstruction, then I can count myself lucky that Neon Genesis Evangelion isn't more than a century old.
edited 11th Dec '11 8:32:15 AM by DomaDoma
Hail Martin Septim!I think withstanding the test of time has nothing to do with popularity. "To stand the test of time" means however many years later someone can pick it up and still find it of the same excellent quality, enjoyability, potency and relevancy in that time as it was in years passed. Something can stand the test of time without being well known at all.
edited 11th Dec '11 10:19:53 PM by NoirGrimoir
SPATULA, Supporters of Page Altering To Urgently Lead to Amelioration (supports not going through TRS for tweaks and minor improvements.)1) Develop a group of fans that are incredibly devoted and proselytize for your work.
2) Have these fans worm their way into an education board so they can mandate it.
Fight smart, not fair.![]()
JD, I've read your blog, and you may prefer literary fiction, but you aren't pince-nez-loweringly stuffy about it. IIRC, you're quite willing to see the merit in Cormac Mc Carthy without his being hacked to bits by English teachers as a prerequisite. So no, the snob label doesn't apply to you. And your "test of time" is a valid one, because unlike Rottweiler's, it isn't tailored to exclude anything you don't like by arbitrarily calling it "pop culture".
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I thought it was more about keeping to a minimum of Values Dissonance and the various Marches On tropes than anything. Still, it's not a bad system - lacking the proper historical grounding, I'm seeing the gold-obsessed characters in Beowulf as borderline Starfish Aliens.
What the heck are you on about? Other things equal, it's better for a work to be popular. What I wanted you to consider was that a work can be wildly popular for a century or more and then forgotten. In the 1590s, Shakespeare was pop culture. Amadis of Gaul was too. So even if you replaced your "7 years later" test with "70 years later", it would include a mass of forgotten literature like Amadis.
There's more to it than just "time," though. Part of the reason that "standing the test of time" is an issue is how valuable a work is to people in a different culture. A work that resonates across multiple cultures clearly has a broader - perhaps even universal - value. And one of the factors that creates cultural change is time.
It seems like it's more of a sliding scale than a black-or-white issue, though; some works may go in and out of fashion. Others may gain a small but steadfast following that lasts through decades - even centuries. And of course, a work that has lasted for 5 years has some staying power, though less than one that has been appreciated for 50, which has less than one that's been appreciated for 250. And so on.
Amadis inspired a hell of a lot of Tales of Chivalry and Derring-Do, right? Then I don't think you can discount its cultural impact because it took a scant ninety years to become obscure. Some of S.M. Stirling's concepts could well be a mere second generation in that lineage.
Besides, if you're counting things from the fourteenth century that only a few people still read as "forgotten", then that leaves one heck of a Small Reference Pool for anything written in pre-industrial times. And talking of Shakespeare, like half his early sonnets would say that the proper term for Amadis is not "forgotten", but "immortal".
You know, you might be the most sane about this. (For my small-scale purposes, I'm not counting things like Moby Dick that began in obscurity and then found an audience decades later; that sort of thing is nigh-impossible to predict.)
edited 12th Dec '11 6:51:10 AM by DomaDoma
Hail Martin Septim!I agree with this. For example, The Great Gatsby was a flop when it originally came out, and only became appreciated through time. 7 years after it was released, it was probably still panned.
edited 12th Dec '11 9:19:19 AM by andrewswafford
Eh, I still pan it. It's no Catcher In The Rye, but it's as dull as a story that kills that many major characters can possibly get.
Overheard In The Classroom About A Quarter Of The Way In:
He: Hell, I'm still not sure which characters are married to each other.
She: Look for the characters who aren't having sex.
Hail Martin Septim!There also might be room for two scales, a shortish one for popularity—ie, a TV show that stays on the air for decades, like Doctor Who or Saturday Night Live—and a long one for recognizability—work that attains some degree of "immortality" and are likely to still be published and read a long time later (Shakespeare vs Amandis).
I'm thinking that if a franchise is still putting out new stuff, then the test of time hasn't started yet - there's still fresh stuff coming from the creators to pique people's interest. Before you can see how much people really respect a work, you're going to have to see if "out of sight" equals "out of mind".
Now, if a new Gundam show comes out and all people can think of is the superiority of earlier Gundam shows, the popularity litmus might still be in play.
Hail Martin Septim!The OP and it's first response kind of make it clear that "Classic" and standing the test of time isn't something that can be judged while we're currently trying to stand it.
On the one hand, memory is often more powerful than novelty - we tend to elevate what we've already designated as classics above what comes today in part because they've already been designated as classic. In the end it remains to be seen in 50 years or 60 years what will be considered classic and what will die away.
On another, for the test of time recognition is often more valuable than skill - the best works aren't always the best remembered.
On a third, there's the fact that things move fast today than they did hundreds of years ago. Communication, urbanization and industrialization and all that jazz, progression of eras and cultures shifts much faster now, and things are recognized as classic much faster. Hemingway's compiled works became a integral literary staple (a matter of decades) much faster than writers tended to be immortalized in the Renaissance, for example.
Though of course, there may be those unrecognized nowadays that will not be immortalized until quite a long time after their deaths, just as it tended to happen back then.
edited 12th Dec '11 12:23:13 PM by KnownUnknown
The best works aren't always the best remembered, but the better you remember something, the more it makes its mark, and that's a good part of what storytelling is for, right?
Well, there is a point where the public remembers a work detail by agonizing detail. The Star Wars prequels didn't retroactively kill the original trilogy - the fact that every damned line and motion became etched into our collective brainpans did the trick. Last time I saw Empire Strikes Back, it was downright surreal that they were playing the Imperial March in order to get me to take the villains seriously. The barrel of novel insight has been scraped to splinters and everything meaningful is so recognizable it's become a parody of itself.
Hail Martin Septim!
Wait, you're saying Star Wars killed itself?
Not sure you're going to get many supporters for that thesis. But I digress.
edited 12th Dec '11 2:40:13 PM by jewelleddragon
I'm saying cultural overfamiliarity kills anything. Big memes have the lifespan of fruit flies because they're based on five minutes of footage at best - five minutes of footage with not much content, generally - so you've dissected and spun off every frame inside of a week, and then you've got nothing.
edited 12th Dec '11 2:53:38 PM by DomaDoma
Hail Martin Septim!How does a work pass the test of time? You wait. There really isn't another way to judge it. I would say about 20-30 years for books, 10-20 years for movies, and 5-10 years for videogames. It's not to hard to judge how good something is, but very hard to judge whether or not it will pass the "test of time".
Go play Kentucky Route Zero. Now.I think standing the test of time is only relevant if you're comparing it to the present day. If it still stands up today then it has stood the test of time so far, whether it's been 10 years or a 100 years. And who can really say which works will still be relevant in another 10 years.
The problem with that theory is that there's some stuff you simply can't imagine fading in popularity within ten years, mostly older works in their medium.
Am I a good man or a bad man?
True, time marches on. All we can really say is what's stood the test of time up 'til now. My best advice is to not try to play to the ages; write what you enjoy writing so that at the end of it, you've satisfied yourself. Really, that's all you can do; there is no true immortality, and trying to achieve it will just drive you nuts.

(Man, we have got to get a general fiction board.)
It's often said that before we can assess the cultural impact of a popular work, it must first withstand the test of time. But you will note that there are no standards for actually passing the test of time; anyone who says that something has withstood the test of time means only that it's relatively old and they like it.
So I'm going to apply a standard here. It's an arbitrary decision on my part, and hence not tropable, but here's the dramatic example I'm going by here:
True to its nature as a constant fountain of Noodle Incidents, the 1893 Sherlock Holmes story "The Adventure of the Naval Treaty" throws in some tantalizing details about another case, the "Second Stain." It cautions, however, that "the new century will have come... before the story can be safely told."
As "Naval Treaty" was meant to be the second-to-last Holmes story ever, this was basically code for "I know perfectly well you'll all have forgotten about this in seven years." But, famously, the fanbase did no such thing, and indeed, "Second Stain" became the last story in the Return of Sherlock Holmes compendium in 1904.
Hence, my rigorous test of time is as follows:
If the public is still enthusing about it seven years after it ends, it has withstood the test of time.
Hence, Firefly has passed the test. Dollhouse has failed even before the deadline. Pretty clear-cut.
There are some niggling bits, though. "The public" can simply refer to any public venue not devoted to the work. "Enthusing" does not count hatedoms; Water World is not forgotten, but that doesn't mean it has withstood the test of time; but if genuine fans still bring it up apropos of nothing in a public venue, it doesn't matter that hatedoms also exist.
Curiously, the definition of ending is the trickiest. Will Harry Potter have withstood the test of time in 2014, seven years after Deathly Hallows came out? Or is it the Beedle The Bard anniversary in 2015? The anniversary of the last movie in 2018? Or, given Pottermore, has the clock not started yet?
(Personally, I hold that Pottermore can be safely called the reverberations of a pre-existing fandom, but I know there are plenty of younguns out there who only know the movies, so I don't think I can discount the movies as the same. And it'll be easy enough to tell if people are only talking about the movies in 2014 or 2015, but if the movies introduced them to the books...)
Anyway, there are a few kinks to be ironed out. Help me out with those, or set your own standards if you like.
Hail Martin Septim!