A polemical essay, written by a layperson, on the birth, rise, fall, rise again (etc) of the Robin Hood. I can be reached for comments on (917) 756-8000 or at contact@win.donaldjtrump.com.

Knave Sir Robin

Robin Hood is a legendary English outlaw who hid in a forest. The legend of the legend hides in a different forest: one made of pulped paper.

The character exhibits a fascinating tension: he’s the world’s most famous folk figure, but we know almost nothing about how he was created. He’s the Superman of the Late Middle Ages, but there’s no Action Comics #1 for Robin Hood. Researching the character’s origins is like shoveling smoke. Even by legendary standards he’s a ghost: we can be more certain about King Arthur’s formation (hundreds of years earlier) than we can about Robin’s.

When was he created? By whom was he created? Was he created?

As with Arthur/Artuir/Artorius, it’s faintly possible that Robin was once a real person. The 1225 York assizes mention a “Robert Hod”^[1]https://robinhoodlegend.com/the-many-robin-hoods/ fugitive whose goods (totalling 32 shillings and 6 pence) were confiscated by the crown. There’s no reason to believe that this (or any other) man was a “historical” Robin Hood. Robert/Robin was the fourth most common name in Medieval England^[2]Hartland, Beth. “The Fine Rolls of Henry III (1216–1272).” Henry III Fine Rolls Project, finerollshenry3.org.uk. Accessed 29 July 2022., and Hood not uncommon. Think of the difficulties modern historians would face in writing about a “James Smith”.

There’s a stronger case that the legend dates from this period. In 1261, a fugitive called William (son of Robert) is referred to in a royal document as William “Robehod”.^[3]2 D. Crook, ‘Some further evidence concerning the dating of the origins of the legend of Robin Hood’, English Historical Review,
99 (1984) Then there’s a ‘Gilbert Robynhod’ in the Sussex subsidy roll of 1296.^[4]Ibid. This unusual concatenation of forename + surname into a new surname suggests a false or adopted title…so adopted from where?

History is full of Robins and it’s easy to make false connections. There’s a 1282 French lyric poem called Le Jeu de Robin et de Marion (“The Play of Robin and Marion”), but as there’s no French tradition of Robin Hood stories and Maid Marian doesn’t exist in the earliest English tales, historians regard this as an unrelated figure. Ditto for the folk figure of Robin Goodfellow/Hobgoblin. Exploring a maze means getting lost in false ends; exploring history means getting lost in false beginnings.^[5]Linguistics throws a few more red herrings into the mix. “Robin” is a pet form of “Robert”, which comes to us via Old Germanic *Hrōþi- “fame” + *berhta- … Continue reading)

In 1377 we hit paydirt: William Langland’s Piers Plowman contains a character who knows the “rhymes of Robin Hood”^[6]The full verse goes “If I shulde deye bi this day me liste noughte to loke / I can noughte perfitly my pater-noster as the prest it syngeth / But I can rymes of Robyn hood and Randolf erle of … Continue reading. This is a huge break: Robin Hood’s legend unequivocally existed by the 14th century, and he was apparently famous enough for Langland to name-drop without explanation.

A century later we find the first surviving copies of the tales themselves, including:

Robin Hood and the Monk (>1450?): Robin is captured while at his prayers in St. Mary’s in Nottingham. Little John hatches a plan to free him.

Robin Hood and the Potter (<1503?): Robin, disguised as a potter, outwits and humiliates the Sheriff.

Robin Hood and Guy of Gisborne (<1475?): Robin crosses blades with a vicious hired killer.

Robin Hood and the Sherrif of Nottingham (<1475?): a fragment of a play that seems to be telling the same story as Gisborne. Robin Hood was a common figure for plays – there’s a record of one performed in Exeter in 1426-27. ^[7]Lancashire, p. 134

Robin and Gandelyn (1450?): an eerie poem where Robin shoots a deer with his bow, and is slain by a mysterious arrow in turn.

A Gest [Tale] of Robin Hood (1493-1518?): a rambling series of adventures that’s clearly multiple stories joined together

Here, we see Robin Hood, 1st Draft. They’re fragmentary and contradict each other a bit. Does Robin live in Sherwood (Monk), or Barnsdale (Gest, Gisborne, Potter)? Why is the Nottingham Sheriff chasing Robin eighty miles beyond his jurisdiction (Gest)?

Robin’s character is all over the place in these stories. He’s depicted as a comic buffoon, a devout man of God, and a thuggish murderer. In none of them does he steal from the rich and give to the poor. The Sheriff of Nottingham isn’t an obvious villain but a lawman doing his job.

The morality is gray. Gest has the most benign depiction of Robin (ending lines: “For he was a good outlawe / And dyde pore men moch god”). Contrast with Monk, where the “good outlawe” cheats Little John out of a bet. Or Potter, where he tries to rob a passing traveler of forty shillings. Or Gisborne, where he decapitates a man, mutilates his face with a knife, and sticks his head upon his bow’s end.

Small details clarify Robin and his High Medieval world. Gest states that the king is Edward (presumably, one of the first three Edwards, who reigned from 1272-1377). Additionally, its rhymes only work with a modern long e vowel (“tree” / “company”), so it likely dates to after Jesperson’s Vowel Shift (around 1400).^[8]Ikegami, Masa (1995). “The Language and the Date of “A Gest of Robyn Hode”. The simple, repetitive language found in many of these tales suggests an oral origin.

It’s easy to imagine a wandering minstrel dropping local names and figures into his ballads to win over his audience that night, and easy to imagine a composite Robin Hood patchworked out of bits of prior literature. He fits into the nascent genre of outlaw stories (inspired by real figures like Hereward the Wake and William Wallace), and there are some “proto-Robin Hood” stories that possess the character’s spark if not his name. The tales contain tropes common to the period, such as disguising oneself as a potter. And some of the vaguer manuscripts (such as Gandelyn) might not even be about Robin Hood. It’s a common name, after all. A nasty name.

Regardless, this version of Robin was soon to die.

The English public came to love the scruffy outlaw, and by the 15th century Robin Hood stories were firmly esconced as part of the May Day games, enjoyed by rich and poor alike. He appeared in plays, lyrics, songs, and prose poems. The omnipresent references to games and contests feel a lingering part of those years. Robin became a shared, communal figure. If Robin was ever the creation of a single man (unlikely), then this certainly had stopped mattering by the Late Middle Ages. He belonged to everyone. If he was originally meant to be a villain, it proves that you can’t sing of a monster without the monster becoming a hero.

Robin’s “Bigger than Jesus” moment came in 1405, when an unknown Franciscan friar grumbles in Dives and Pauper that people would rather hear tales of Robin than attend mass.^[9] ‘gon levir to heryn a tale or a song of Robin Hood or of sum rubaudry than to heryn masse or matynes’. Next to forbidding figures like Prester John and Beowulf, bowed heavy under the weight of myth and legend, Robin was a normal, down-to-earth figure. He’s flawed, foolish at times, and relies on his friends to save him. Although he’s skilled at fighting (interrupted at his prayers in Monk, he snatches up a Zweihänder and kills twelve men with it), he’s not invincible. People often best him both at swordplay and archery. In other words, he’s like us.

Years passed and the final refining touches to Robin’s myth were added. New characters (such as Friar Tuck and Maid Marian) were folded in, while others (such as Much the Millar’s Son and Richard atte Lee) were cast and are now almost forgotten. The character was reimagined to better fit audience tastes. He became less brutal, and more recognizably heroic. He came to embody English ideals of justice and fair play.

But he lost something of himself in the process.

The Gentrification of a Legend

“Robin vs Arthur” is a perennially popular term paper topic. They seem made to be compared. Camelot vs Sherwood Forest, Merry Men vs Knights of the Round Table, Friar Tuck vs Maerlin, Maid Marian vs Guinevere. Their similarities highlight their differences, and their differences their similarities.

Arthur (as per Malory) is a conservative hero: a Christian warrior-king who claims the throne in an age of decadence and chaos and restores Britain to her former glories. His legend is one of chivalry; of noblesse oblige; of romanticism. He wants to Make Britain Great Again.

Robin, by contrast, cuts a very modern figure. Is stealing money wrong? That depends on who you are, who you’re stealing from, and what you do with the money afterward. To Robin, morality isn’t decided by absolute rules but by the power relations between the two parties. To put it crassly, King Arthur votes Tory and the Robin Hood votes SWP.

So it’s interesting to see the chaotic, Puckish figure of early Robin gradually get smoothed out into a “safe” (nonthreatening) romanticised version of himself. This echoes Pinkerian ideas of how civilization works: in the long run, the Empire always wins, with rebellious elements destroyed or assimilated as neutered parodies of themselves. The cult that doesn’t die becomes a religion. The sorceror that doesn’t die becomes a scientist. The knave that doesn’t die becomes a kingsman. Does the Robin Hood that doesn’t die become an Arthur?

A good example of this is Robin Hood’s bloodline. In the first stories, he’s a yeoman – one social rung above a peasant. The fact that he’s robbing travelers on the road to survive indicates a marginal place in society. But I guess some people didn’t like the idea of a smelly commoner doing interesting things, and in the 16th century there were retcons to make him a noble.

In Richard Grafton’s Chronicle at Large (1569), Robin is now an earl. At the century’s end Anthony Munday wrote two plays where Robin is the Lord of Huntingdon. ^[10]Again, nowhere near Sherwood. By the time of the Stuart Restoration he can seem somewhat pathetic, such as in the 1661 play Robin Hood and His Crew of Souldiers, where he grovels before a messenger of the king.^[11]Knight, Stephen. “Robin Hood and the Royal Restoration.” Critical Survey 5 (1993)

This is now the dominant form of Robin Hood’s backstory: he’s a dispossessed noble fighting against the bad Prince John until the true king arrives. He’s not against the king. He’s a supporter of the king. His robberies and slayings are justified because they’re committed against an usurper. In other words, his fate was to have the older, Arthurian ideal of heroism grafted into his body.

These days, with the nobility in retreat and upper class becoming a slur, some might prefer the earlier Robin. Even if he’s a brutal killer, he’s the people’s brutal killer.

This argument can be overstated. Even the early version of Robin is still gallant and respectful toward his social betters. In Gest, he tells his men not to harass yeomen, squires, husbandmen or knights. And although Robin is frequently set against monks, he’s also deeply pious – the motivating action of Robin Hood and the Monk is the hero’s desire to pray at Nottingham.^[12]Sometimes this piety seems a bit humorous or ironic, though. In Gest, he gives thanks saying “Our Lady is the trewest woman/ That ever yet founde I me.”…straight after robbing a … Continue reading He quarrels with and cheats his friends, but he’s also fiercely loyal. In general, his antisocial acts have selfish motives: they’re not some Hobbesian political statement. Many of the rabble-rousing populist elements to the Robin myth (like rebelling against oppressive taxes) are not found in the early stories, but the later ones.

But still, Robin and Arthur feel like they exist on opposite sides of a ravine that cannot be crossed. Where Robin seized greatness, Arthur was born to it. He didn’t pull the sword from the stone because of his strong muscles. As a child, he didn’t have strong muscles – that’s the point of the story! It’s a David and Goliath fable, where success against overwhelming odds clearly proves that God is on his side.

Contrast this with Robin Hood’s usual shtick: challenging people to games and contests of skill. Sometimes he’s disguised. The fact that he’s Robin Hood doesn’t matter – his deeds speak for themselves. His weapon, the powerful English longbow, is itself a symbol of merit over blood. The humblest bastard ever born could slay a noble with nothing but a strong arm and a clear eye. Or hell, why not a king? “God made some men tall and some men short. Sam Colt made all men equal.”

Just the same, this idea is interesting in its implications. If Robin Hood is some meritocratic folk figure, would he even need to be English?

Wale Tales

Stephen Lawhead, in the afterword to his novel Hood, posits that the original Robin Hood was Welsh. 

Quoted at length because I find it interesting:

Within two months of the Battle of Hastings (1066), William the Conqueror and his barons, the new Norman overlords, had subdued 80 percent of England. Within two years, they had it all under their rule. However-and I think this is significant-it took them over two hundred years of almost continual conflict to make any lasting impression on Wales, and by that late date it becomes a question of whether Wales was really ever conquered at all.

In fact, William the Conqueror, recognising an implacable foe and unwilling to spend the rest of his life bogged down in a war he could never win, wisely left the Welsh alone. He established a baronial buffer zone between England and the warlike Britons. This was the territory known as the March. Later, this sensible no-go area and its policy of tolerance would be violated by the Conqueror’s brutish son William II, who sought to fill his tax coffers to pay for his spendthrift ways and expensive wars in France. Wales and its great swathes of undeveloped territory seemed a plum ripe for the plucking, and it is in this historical context in the year AD 1093) that I have chosen to set Hood.

A Welsh location is also suggested by the nature and landscape of the region. Wales of the March borderland was primeval forest. While the forests of England had long since become well-managed business property where each woodland was a veritable factory, Wales still had enormous stretches of virgin wood, untouched except for hunting and hiding. The forest of the March was a fearsome wilderness when the woods of England resembled well-kept garden preserves. It would have been exceedingly difficult for Robin and his outlaw band to actually hide in England’s ever-dwindling Sherwood, but he could have lived for years in the forests of the March and never been seen or heard.

This entry from the Welsh chronicle of the times known as Brenhinedd Y Saesson, or The Kings of the Saxons, makes the situation very clear:

Anno Domini MLXXXXV (1095). In that year King William Rufus mustered a host past number against the Cymry. But the Cymry trusted in God with their prayers and fastings and alms and penances and placed their hope in God. And they harassed their foes so that the Ffreinc dared not go into the woods or the wild places, but they traversed the open lands sorely fatigued, and thence returned home empty-handed. And thus the Cymry boldly defended their land with joy. 

That, I think, is the Robin Hood legend in seed form. The plucky Britons, disadvantaged in the open field, took to the forest and from there conducted a guerrilla war, striking the Normans at will from the relative safety of the woods-an ongoing tactic that would endure with considerable success for whole generations. That is the kernel from which the great durable oak of legend eventually grew.

Finally, we have the Briton expertise with the warbow, or longbow as it is most often called. While one can read reams of accounts about the English talent for archery, it is seldom recognized-but well documented-that the Angles and Saxons actually learned the weapon and its use from the Welsh. No doubt, the invaders learned fear and respect for the longbow the hard way before acquiring its remarkable potential for themselves.

[…]

Taken altogether, then, these clues of time, place, and weaponry indicate the germinal soil out of which Robin Hood sprang. As for the English Robin Hood with whom we are all so familiar… Just as Arthur, a Briton, was later Anglicised-made into the quintessential English king and hero by the same enemy Saxons he fought against -a similar makeover must have happened to Robin. The British resistance leader, outlawed to the primeval forests of the March, eventually emerged in the popular imagination as an aristocratic Englishman, fighting to right the wrongs of England and curb the powers of an overbearing monarchy. It is a tale that has worn well throughout the years. However, the real story, I think, must be far more interesting.

Robin Hood, a Welsh icon? Intriguing if speculative stuff. Some of his claims seem a little over-argued. The “ever-dwindling” Sherwood was still one of the largest preserves in England as of 1327-36.

And if Robin’s legend was merely the sparks thrown off by the Welsh/Norman conflict, why has so little of this context survived in the stories? The locations associated with the Robin Hood stories (Nottingham, Locksley, Sherwood, Rockingham, Barnsdale, and so on) are all many days’ march away from the Welsh border. How did the tale migrate so far, while leaving nothing of itself in Wales? It’s as odd as the modern US/Mexico border tension birthing a Chicano folk figure who’s only spoken about in Wichita, Kansas, but never in San Diego or Ciudad Juárez.

But there’s something that Lawhead doesn’t mention.

In the early 13th century (almost certainly before the start of the Robin Hood legend, in other words), a prose narrative called Fouke le Fitz Waryn was written, based loosely on the life of Fulk FitzWarin III.

The historical Fulk III is interesting in his own right. Essentially, in 1200, King John refused to renew Fulk III’s hereditary title to Whittington Castle, and in 1201, Fulk led an outlaw band in revolt against the king. He skirmished with the crown for years before being granted a pardon (and the rights to Whittington Castle) in 1203. Fulk III seems to have been a troublesome fellow. This was only the first f many issues he provoked, which culminated in Henry III saying “May the Devil take you to hell.”

In Fouke le Fitz Waryn we meet a romantic cipher of Fulk III who’s very similar to Robin Hood. The tales are set in the woods, and there are adventures aplenty: quests, disguises, kidnappings, monsters, magic, and mischief.

He’s no hero, but he has a sense of mercy (and irony). At one point, Fulk and his outlaws ambush the king’s hunting party while disguised as peasants and coal burners. “And Fulk and his company leaped out of the thicket, and cried upon the King, and seized him forthwith. ‘Sir King,’ said Fulk, ‘now I have you in my power, and such judgment will I mete out unto you as you would have done unto me if that you had taken me.'” But then the king pleads for his life, and Fulk lets him go.

Historians have often wondered about the links between Fouke le Fitz Waryn and the later Robin Hood legends. Gest is a particularly cogent reference point: many events line up in both narratives. Both stories have a similar scene where a wealthy caravan is waylaid, the caravaners abducted and terrorized…and are then allowed to dine with the outlaws before being sent on their way with their property. And in Robin and Gandelyn, the murderer of Robin is named as “Wrennoc”, who is the son of one of Fulk’s enemies in Fouke le Fitz Waryn.

Why is this significant?

Because Whittington Castle is on the border to Wales! Fulk III was a marcher lord! He doesn’t appear to have had any Cymry ancestry (the name FitzWarin is Norman French), but this is a big piece of evidence connecting Robin Hood to the political milieau of Wales.

You could also argue for a Scotland connection. Andrew of Wyntoun, writing in about 1420^[13]Orygynale Cronykil of Scotland, asserts that Robin and Little John were historic figures living in 1280, in the reign of Edward I. He writes approvingly of their banditry, and connects it with the anti-English sentiment found in Scotland (notable that this is around the time William Wallace was alive, who also dwelled in a wood).

All of this is thin gruel, but it would be a typically black twist of history for an anti-English icon to be repurposed and rebranded as a symbol of English identity. Indeed, if you want a modern parallel to Robin Hood, you might think of a $20 T-shirt with Che Guevera’s face on it.

Laughing to Scorn Thy Laws & Terrors

But focusing on specific details risks missing the Sherwood Forest for the trees. The story of Robin Hood had to come from somewhere, but the figure of Robin Hood can come from anywhere. He’s merely the expression of an idea that has worn well: you can break the law and still be a hero.

His thuggish, cruel side became smoothed away. But this, in part, demonstrates a desire for people to identify with him, to see themselves in this forbidding brigand from the woods.

You can laugh as Kevin Costner plays Robin Hood with an American accent. You can cringe as some weirdo cranks out a term paper arguing that Robin is actually a radical Marxist–Leninist–Maoist revolutionary. But truthfully, such plasticity is a long and honored tradition of the Robin Hood saga. He’s an outlaw. And outlaws dress in whatever garb they need to.

Robin Hood isn’t a character, he’s a symbol. A dagger glinting in the dark. He remains existentially frightening because of what he represents.

If you deem a tax unfair, you should not pay it. If you consider a law unjust, you should not follow it. If a game is rigged against you, you should cheat to win it. From whence does moral law flow? From the mouths of corrupt priests? Kings? Or is it as Robin Hood’s spiritual compatriots Napalm Death: “when all is said and done / Heaven lies in my heart.” It’s said that nature evolves crabs over and over because they’re an effective shape. Stories evolve Robin Hood because they’re such frightening, effective, and inspiring figures.

To a commoner, he’s a hero. To a rich man, he’s a horror movie monster. You’re in a forest. A branch cracks. He’s out hunting you. Your money can’t save you. The bag at your side, bulging with coin, is attracting him like chum to a shark. He doesn’t care that you’re wearing royal blue. It makes you an easier target. You hear a whisper of leaves. A thud. Another man-at-arms falls, scrabbling at the arrow in his throat. He’s coming for you. It’s too late to run.

The profusion of proto-Robin Hood figures littering history speaks to his popularity. Robin Hood can appear anywhere. This itself is an indictment of the human condition. He can be found in 20th century Iraq, having traded his yew longbow for a Dragonov SVD 7.62×54mmR sniper rifle. Or, in 19th century Victoria, wearing a iron helmet made of hammered ploughboards. He’s a relationship, a dynamic, a sparking chemical reaction that society recreates over and over. Anywhere the strong oppress the weak, they sow the dragon’s teeth for more Robin Hoods.

Poor villagers live in the shadow of a mountain, scratching a living from the ribs of the earth. Inside the mountain is an immense quantity of gold, protected by a dragon.

An adventurer arrives. In the dead of night he scales the mountain, kills the dragon, and returns with a single gold piece to prove his deed. The villagers regard it with awe and suspicion, as though it might dissolve in his hand.

“There’s more inside,” the dragonslayer says. “The wyrm is dead, and you are all rich.” 

Villagers cautiously enter the mountain and take handfuls of gold from around the dragon’s cooling body. It’s as the adventurer said – there’s nearly limitless amounts of it. Soon men are hauling goldfrom the mountain by the wagonload, each believing that they have become rich.

The local economy instantly crashes. Gold is so common that it’s useless as a means of exchange – might as well barter with air or dirt. Nobody will accept it as payment for any good or service. 

The dragonslayer is astonished. He thought he’d killed a dragon. Instead, he’d really killed gold.

Obscurus artifex

AI generated-art is fascinating and should be closely watched by anyone in any creative field.

The speed at which technological breakthroughs are occurring is a little alarming. Lenin said “There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen”. 2022 is shaping up to be fifty-two Lenin-weeks back to back to back.

In the space of a few months this has gone from being a niche interest to a rapidly-growing commercial concern. A wave of consumer-facing products and services now exist, of which Midjourney, Stable Diffusion, DALL-E 2. and Craiyon (the last two are based on OpenAI’s GPT-3) have received the most media attention.

It’s hard to know just how capable these things are. Once, it was claimed that DALL-E 2 couldn’t create an image of a horse riding an astronaut…but it could. You just had to ask it right. As someone once noted, it’s often like neural nets have the ability to do things but not the motivation, and can be tricked into performing well via cleverly-worded prompts. For example, prompting with “trending on Artstation” seems to increase the quality of DALL-E 2’s output. And none of the things that could possibly be bottlenecking GPT-3 in its current form (corpus size, or parameter count, or whatever) are close to a theoretical limit, meaning there is likely a massive amount of headroom still to be explored. OpenAI recently slashed the price of GPT-3 by 66%, which could be a sign that GPT-4 is nearing release.

Most commentary has focused on the job displacement issue. Will artists now be out of work now?

A valid concern. AI-generated art has potential to create the same kind of industry shifts that mp3 piracy did twenty-five years ago.

A basic economics concept: any product has a mixture of fixed costs and marginal costs. Fixed costs do not vary with the number of products, while marginal costs do. In practice, the fixed costs of a Metallica album are whatever it costs them to write and perform the music, and the marginal costs of a Metallica album are the pressing, distribution, shelving, and so on. The fixed costs get you one of a thing. The marginal costs get you the second.

At the start of the millenium, digital filesharing caused the marginal costs of music to crash to near zero. Suddenly, no shelf space was required to stock music, and no trucks were needed to ship it. You could fill an entire hard drive with Metallica songs for free if you wanted.

This famously crunched the record industry and did great damage to other fields. But through it all, artists had a lifeline: piracy didn’t affect their fixed costs. “Someone still has to pay us to create art, right? You can’t pirate art if nobody makes it.” Thanks to AI, this is no longer necessarily true. Now artists are hammered at both sides: in the 00’s Digital filesharing disrupted the distribution of art, and in the 20s neural nets will disrupt the creation of it.

But  if this was the only consequence, I’d probably feel quite well disposed to AI art.

Technology has always displaced employment. We generally consider this to be a net positive. Yes, it sucks that wheelwrights don’t exist anymore, but now we have cars.

There’s an anti-technology attitude among artists that’s a little frustrating. We’re now standing at the threshold of an age of wonder. A day where you can just imagine something and get a photorealistic image of it. I think it’s honestly amazing, and if a porn artist has to get a day job because neural nets can create better rule 34 of Dora the Explorer shitting into CatDog’s mouth than he can, then so be it.

And as patio11 notes, all artists are reliant on technology themselves. They just don’t realize it. When a writer uses a thesaurus to look up a different word for brown, that’s normal. When a writer uses NovelAI to workshop a scene…well, that’s just wrong.

But there’s something far more disquietening going on: AI-generated art almost seems like an axe aimed at the concept of art itself.

Art won’t die, but it’s likely that over the next twenty years (or sooner), it will cease to exist in its current form. What the next evolution of art looks like remains to be seen. But it now must evolve.

What is art?

An academic would tell you that it’s an artist’s aesthetic experience trapped inside a medium.

An evolutionary psychologist would tell you it’s a peacock’s tail: a form of social signaling designed to attract a mate.

But for the average person, it’s probably fair to say “art is the world made special”.

What’s the difference between an empty wall, and a wall with a painting on it? The second wall is special. 

Art adds uniqueness to the world. However poor or hackish an individual piece of art might be, collectively, art enriches our experience of living.

Art’s specialness stems, in part, from its rareness. Few men can paint like Da Vinci, few sculpters can shape marble like Michelangelo could. When you look at the Sistene Chapel, you are gazing upon the apex of human achievement.

(Modern and contemporary art is a slightly different story. Obviously Duchamp’s Fountain isn’t particularly rare – there’s urinals in every public place – but it’s “rare” in the sense that it was a bold statement, a founding work in a new movement, was seen as opening new avenues of discussion about everyday objects elevated to art, blah blah. Not every urinal is a work of art.)

…all of this goes away when a neural net can fire out a firehose of Da Vincis. When everything is special, nothing is.

The permanent debasing of art is a difficult idea to get your head around. In a sense, it’s actually worse than art disappearing. Imagine if every art gallery was suddenly empty. Yes, the world would be much the poorer, but we would create new art to replace it.

But imagine if the concept of art ceased to exist. But imagine if those artworks…but through sheer commonality, we lost our ability to appreciate them.

This has happened before. We stand on the bones of many past dragons.

Watch this:

No, Youtube’s player didn’t break. You saw the whole thing. This is Fred Ott’s Sneeze, from 1896. It’s Thomas Edison’s assistant sneezing, shot on a kinetograph.

It wasn’t the first film, but it was the first to be copyrighted. People used to pay money to watch things like this, in traveling road shows. The new technology amazed people.

What feeling does it produce in you now?

I’ll tell you what I feel: absolutely nothing. It’s just a grainy video of a man sneezing. We’ve had this technology for well over a century and the novelty is gone, along with the emotional response that it once triggered. The thing exists but its soul has departed, exorcised by technology and time.

Even more “legitimate” art isn’t safe. An Aboriginal cave painting provokes scientific interest…but I doubt I’m feeling what the person who painted it felt. A lot of art from centuries past feels quaint and odd, because it was baked in a fire of religious fervor that modern audiences don’t share.

Even if you look at the paintings in this book so closely that your nose touches the paper, you’re still looking at them across a vast distance: the centuries that separate the highly religious, proto-scientific age of Jan Van Eyck (c. 1390-1441) from our own post-Christian, science-saturated age. We can’t see them as Van Eyck meant them to be seen and his contemporaries did see them, because the old beliefs and certainties have vanished or changed. Perhaps the portraits – including his own shrewd, thin-lipped and highly intelligent face, watching with careful, observant eyes beneath a red turban – have best ridden out the centuries. But what do the Madonnas and Annunciations mean now? Not what they meant once: Protestantism and secularism have trampled on Van Eyck’s Catholic world.^[1]https://papyrocentricperformativity.wordpress.com/2013/07/02/eycks-eyes/

What he means is that although Van Eyck’s paintings remain, the context that allowed us to appreciate them has vanished (unless you’re Catholic). For art in general, the Reformation is here, and the Enlightenment soon.

Heap of Broken Images

But maybe this sort of jeremiad comes years too late.

I largely agree with nostalgebraist’s thoughts here. AI is just an A-bomb falling on a city already blown to rubble. It almost doesn’t matter. There’s too much art already.

Every year, there are thousands of new books that nobody reads, millions of new photos whose fate is to sit on page 214 of an instagram feed, hundreds of albums that clog Bandcamp’s servers, etc.

Even huge cultural moments (such as massive Hollywood movies underpinned by hundred million dollar ad spends) no longer seem to mean what they did. Massive studios spend a quarter of a billion dollars making a movie…and after a few years, it’s like it never existed. It’s frequently joked that James Cameron’s Avatar grossed $2.847 billion at the box office…and yet nobody can remember a single thing about it.

There’s so much stuff now. Great news for the consumer, but for the artist it feels like pouring endless smoke into a black sky. The novelty has gone, and no matter what you do, there’s someone out there doing it better.

The most reliable way to establish yourself as an artist is to find a “scene” that’s small enough for a name to stand out, exploit that scene as much as possible, and pray it doesn’t collapse. You can’t realistically be the best writer, but maybe you can be the best Post-Futurist LGTB Afropunk writer. Be a big fish in a small pond. But soon (possibly very soon), AI-generated art will be able to instantly fill any niche you point it at.

The future

I think art will re-emerge in a new form. The beauty and rareness-seeking impulse hasn’t gone away.

But what will that new form look like?

We might see a concerted pushback toward human-generated art. “Created by a person” might become the next hot marketing buzzword, the way Queen albums used to be advertised as having no synthesisers.

Or art might rally around performance. Computers have beaten humans at chess for a long time, but chess between two humans is still fascinating to watch. And someone like DrDisrespect is doing far more than playing a videogame: an aimbot can easily defeat him in raw technical skill…but nobody wants to watch an aimbot stream a game. Already, Art and Music are among the top-viewed categories on Twitch. There seems to be demand for this kind of connection, and insight into the creative process.

Lastly, art might coalesce around intentionality, meaning, and context.

I appreciated Bruno Schulz’s prose and George Trakl’s poetry more when I knew the circumstances under which they made it. I appreciated Black Sabbath more when I knew about the pain in Tony Iommi’s amputated fingertips. That sense of human connection is very important, or at least it is to me. “This isn’t just a random shard of beauty and horror, it was forged by a mind.”

Can GPT-3 offer that? Here’s the circumstances under which it makes art.

But regardless of what happens, I think we’re heading into a world where art has no intrinsic value, in and of itself. It only has conditional value due to the circumstances attached to it. This was probably always at least partially true, and will now become fully true. It is the Total Eclipse of the Art.

Years pass at the village. Everyone uses paper money now. Mountains of gold are left lying in the street. Its value now stands at negative. You pay to have it carted away.

It still glitters, just as it did. Occasionally someone notices the shine, and thinks that it’s pretty. Then they understand, a little, why their ancestors prized it so highly.

But that world has gone away. The shine is everywhere. Gold means nothing.

…except in one household.

The dragonslayer has kept the original piece he took. It’s on his mantlepiece. He cannot say why, but he can’t bear to throw it away. He looks on that tiny scrap of worthless metal and sees anew the dragon: the heaving scales, the flaming breath. Remembers the blood pounding in his ears, the terror wrapped like a claw around his heart. Remembers how he felt in the moment after he drove a sword through the monster’s breast, and knew that it was all over.

Yes, the gold still has meaning to him.

I’ve had it with this dump. We got no food, we got no jobs, our pets’ heads are falling off, and now it’s time to talk about the prose of Stephen King and Dean Koontz.

They are two of the highest-selling authors of our time. They’ve sold thousands of books, maybe tens of thousands. You might not like either them, but clearly they’re doing something that works.

Stephen King

The word that captures King’s prose is “conversational”. His writing has the relaxed, chatty quality of a neighbour telling you about his day.

“The terror, which would not end for another twenty-eight years – if it ever did end – began, so far as I know or can tell, with a boat made from a sheet of newspapers floating down a gutter swollen with rain.”

That’s the opening sentence of It. Note the elliptic, rambling style. The way it’s loaded with clauses. The self-conscious hedging of “so far as I know” and “if it ever did end“.

This is how people talk in real life. They don’t move in a straight line toward the point: they wander, they misspeak, and they double back and have to correct themselves. Record yourself talking sometime.

The stumbling “if it ever did end” is especially good: it’s like the guy’s still getting the story straight in his head. It perfectly suggests the dark, turbulent glass of a human mind, and grounds the story in reality.

Why does this work? Remember that stories were communicated orally for the majority of human history. We’re the odd ones out by reading books in the third millennium. “Pulped trees imprinted with thousands of black letters” is not a particularly natural way to consume stories, and it forces the reader to do several awkward deciphering acts. Black letters must be decoded into images, and those images unpackaged into setting, tone, characters, subtext, and so forth. Anything that can shortcut this process – making the images bloom faster, or shine brighter – is a mitzvah. King hardwires his story directly into your subconscious by making it sound like it’s coming out of a living person’s someone’s mouth.

Furthermore, King is a horror author, and horror isn’t about scary clowns and haunted cars, it’s about the contrast of states – normal against abnormal, sane against mad, dead against alive. A dead body starting to walk is only disturbing in a universe where that isn’t supposed to happen. A character’s descent into madness is only meaningful in a world that presupposes sanity. A lot of bad horror fails because it plunges you into the deep end too quickly. Everyone’s dead, everyone’s insane. We don’t get a sense of normalcy being ruptured.

As King understood forty years ago, “Monster in a little town” isn’t spooky because of the monster, it’s spooky because of the little town – the idea that normal, wholesome life has gone wrong.

And so he’s starting the story in the most normal way he can: a chatty, avuncular older relative, telling you about a sheet of newspaper floating into a gutter.

Dean Koontz

Dean Koontz is often regarded as Stephen King’s peer. They are shelved together, read by the same people, their parents conspired to have their surnames both start with K, etc. King/Koontz are potentially the world’s most famous duo in the world where neither member has ever had anything to do with the other.

But his prose is massively different; heavy where King’s is easy, concise where King’s is garrulous. Koontz has spoken about his writing process before.

I work 10- and 11-hour days because in long sessions I fall away more completely into story and characters than I would in, say, a six-hour day. On good days, I might wind up with five or six pages of finished work; on bad days, a third of a page. Even five or six is not a high rate of production for a 10- or 11-hour day, but there are more good days than bad. And the secret is doing it day after day, committing to it and avoiding distractions. A month–perhaps 22 to 25 work days–goes by and, as a slow drip of water can fill a huge cauldron in a month, so you discover that you have 75 polished pages. The process is slow, but that’s a good thing. Because I don’t do a quick first draft and then revise it, I have plenty of time to let the subconscious work; therefore, I am led to surprise after surprise that enriches story and deepens character. I have a low boredom threshold, and in part I suspect I fell into this method of working in order to keep myself mystified about the direction of the piece–and therefore entertained. A very long novel, like FROM THE CORNER OF HIS EYE can take a year. A book like THE GOOD GUY, six months.

And he revises heavily. He uses a computer now, but once used a typewriter, and piled up fearsome amounts of wastepaper. If pages were people, Dean Koontz would be eating his last meal on death row right now.

My wife, Gerda, had been urging me to trade my typewriter for a computer. When I finished WHISPERS, she informed me that she had tracked our office supplies, and that for every page in the final manuscript, I had used thirty-two pages of typing paper, which meant that I had done thirty-one discarded drafts of every page, typing eight hundred pages of text again and again to polish it. Although I was aware of my obsessive-compulsive rewriting, I hadn’t realized quite how many revisions I usually undertook.

Here are the results of that [excerpts from the first few pages of The Taking].

A few minutes past one o’clock in the morning, a hard rain fell without warning. No thunder preceded the deluge, no wind.

The abruptness and the ferocity of the downpour had the urgent quality of a perilous storm in a dream.

Lying in bed beside her husband, Molly Sloan had been restless before the sudden cloudburst. She grew increasingly fidgety as she listened to the rush of rain.

The voices of the tempest were legion, like an angry crowd chanting in a lost language. […] Beside her, Neil snored softly, oblivious of the storm.

Sleep always found him within a minute of the moment when he put his head on the pillow and closed his eyes. He seldom stirred during the night; after eight hours, he woke in the same position in which he had gone to sleep–rested, invigorated.

Neil claimed that only the innocent enjoyed such perfect sleep.

Molly called it the sleep of the slacker.

Throughout their seven years of marriage, they had conducted their lives by different clocks.

She dwelled as much in the future as in the present, envisioning where she wished to go, relentlessly mapping the path that ought to lead to her high goals. Her strong mainspring was wound tight.

Neil lived in the moment. To him, the far future was next week, and he trusted time to take him there whether or not he planned the journey.

They were as different as mice and moonbeams.

You’re watching condensed sweat when you read his prose. It’s sparse and best-sellery, but every word choice was labored over.

Koontz’s prose has a lyrical aspect. It’s full of assonance and alliteration – notice that Koontz runs words with similar sounds or syllables close together (lost language…sleep of the slacker…mice and moonbeams). This consonance triggers the phonological loop that helps anchor phrases in memory, which is why it’s so common in advertising slogans (“Heinz means beans”). It might seem strange that Koontz’s Flannery O’Connor-inspired prose would share a link to advertising culture, but there it is.

Yes, it’s purple, sometimes excessively so. “Mice and moonbeams” is maybe too far. But it’s also fascinating in just how…labored it looks. Koontz uses the English language like a gymnasium. Every single word seems to be slotted into place with the perfection of the stones at Sacsayhuaman.

So when does it fail?

In technology it’s sometimes said that there are no bad products, only bad prices. Likewise, there might be no bad prose styles, just bad uses of them.

King’s prose often misfires, usually for the reason that he’s applying his “chatty neighbor” style to something that should not be written in the voice of a chatty neighbor.

For instance, here’s a later passage from King’s It. It’s from the POV of Pennywise the Clown (whom we now know is the mask of an incomprehensibly ancient being).

Something new had happened.

For the first time in forever, something new.

Before the universe there had been only two things. One was Itself and the other was the Turtle. The Turtle was a stupid old thing that never came out of its shell. It thought that maybe the Turtle was dead, had been dead for the last billion years or so. Even if it wasn’t, it was still a stupid old thing, and even if the Turtle had vomited the universe out whole, that didn’t change the fact of its stupidity.

It had come here long after the Turtle withdrew into its shell, here to Earth, and It had discovered a depth of imagination here that was almost new, almost of concern. This quality of imagination made the food very rich. Its teeth rent flesh gone stiff with exotic terrors and voluptuous fears: they dreamed of nightbeasts and moving muds; against their will they contemplated endless gulphs.

Upon this rich food It existed in a simple cycle of waking to eat and sleeping to dream. It had created a place in Its own image, and It looked upon this place with favor from the deadlights which were Its eyes. Derry was Its killing-pen, the people of Derry Its sheep. Things had gone on.

Then… these children.

Something new.

For the first time in forever.

Most of it is okay. Even the technical issues (like the dangling participle in the fourth ‘graf) don’t detract from its fun, jagged energy. Gulph is a good word (an antiquated and obscure spelling of gulf), emphasising Its age.

But King keeps slipping into his homespun jus’ folks style, with comical results. “stupid old thing…dead for the last billion years or so.” King makes this unholy nightmare sound like a grumpy old man with a transmission that won’t start.

And remember, Pennywise existed before the universe did. Would it really think of people as “sheep” in a “killing pen”? That’s pure anthropomorphization. That’s like writing “Derry was Its Pallet Town, the people of Derry Its Pokemon.”

Think of how King’s inspirations – HP Lovecraft, Arthur Machen, Richard Matheson – would have handled a passage like this. Better. Perhaps far better. Whenever their weaknesses in other areas, they understood that when the sidewalk ends and the bug parade begins (to paraphrase White Zombie) the writing has to change to match.

What about Koontz?

His shortcomings become obvious when you read more than five or six of his books. He keeps coming back to the same images. Birds fluttering. Rain falling. Sun striking fire against waves. This ends up deadening instead of vivifying his prose, because you can see the merry-go-round of his mind turning around and around, cycling through the same few stock images.

Remember the opening scene of The Taking?

A few minutes past one o’clock in the morning, a hard rain fell without warning. No thunder preceded the deluge, no wind.

Here’s the first chapter of Dark Rivers of the Heart.

Without thunder or lightning, without wind, the storm had come in from the Pacific at the end of a somber February twilight. 

…and the first chapter of False Memory:

[…] rotten weather in southern California was seldom accompanied by thunder. Usually, rain fell unannounced, hissing on the streets, whispering through the foliage […]

…and a middle chapter of Twilight Eyes: 

Tuesday morning, the sky was without sun, and the storm was without lightning, and the rain was without wind. 

Etc.

Koontz is a magician with a small bag of tricks, and the more you read him, the more (over)familiar his writing becomes.

And it’s often too heavy handed, too forced, too obviously written. Sometimes it works, other times it just gets in the way of the story. Koontz can have a show-offy quality: he wants you to know he’s rewritten every sentence fifty times. Here is a particularly annoying moment from Odd Hours. (The hero has just knocked a man unconscious with a flashlight.)

The cracked lens cast a thin jagged shadow on his face. But as I peeled back one of his eyelids to be sure that I had not given him a concussion, I could see him well enough to know that I had never seen him before and that I preferred never to see him again.

Eye of newt. Wool-of-bat hair. Nose of Turk and Tartar’s lips. A lolling tongue like a fillet of fenny snake. He was not exactly ugly, but he looked peculiar, as if he’d been conjured in a cauldron by Macbeth’s coven of witches.

The “eye of newt” part was kind of cute. But Koontz can’t resist explaining the joke. “Look, everyone! I’m quoting Macbeth!”

While we’re dropping quotes, here’s another one: “Good prose should be transparent, like a window pane”. George Orwell said that. At its worst, Koontz’s writing is like a stained glass window. Impressive and admirable, but it poisons your view of what’s on the other side.

Koontz and King could both be considered masters. Study their books: you’ll learn a lot. But the final lesson any master can teach is that there are no masters, that by copying another author we copy their limitations, and that the student must someday leave the sensei’s path behind and walk their own.