The shadow of the Long Present
Stability looks weird from here
The historian Eric Hobsbawm famously spoke of the “Long 19th Century” and the “Short 20th Century,” eras in European history divided up less by arbitrary calendar dates than by the cusps of history.
The Long 19th begins with the French Revolution in 1789, and doesn’t end until 1914 with the First World War, political certainties being blasted to pieces at each extreme.
Hobsbawm proposed as the following century the Short 20th, from 1914 to the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991.*
In that spirit, take a good look at this Calvin and Hobbes comic:
Calvin and Hobbes ran for ten, white-hot years from 1985 to 1995. During that time, it wouldn’t have been odd to see the kind of TV Calvin is watching here: Basic box, one knob for channel, one for volume. Rabbit ears optional.
We had a TV just like this in the den of my family’s suburban house in the 1980s, complete with the pair of pliers sitting on top to change the channel after one of the cheap plastic knobs snapped off of its metal base.
This kind of TV perfectly fits into 1985. But it doesn’t look out of place in 1975, or 1965, or 1955. The programs would be different, there might or might not be cable plugged into the back, but if you make the signifiers generic enough, the actual year is impossible to pin down.
This is what I call the Long Present, and it lasted roughly from the early 1950s to the dawn of the the 1990s, and is centered in English-speaking suburbia.
If you walked into any middle-class suburban home in North America during that time, you could expect to see the following:
• Hot and cold running water
• A refrigerator
• A television set, likely some kind of stereo
• A washer and dryer
• One or two family cars in the driveway or garage
Now, you might say that these things varied wildly over time. Is the TV black and white or colour? Do the cars have tail fins? Is the fridge a 1950s shade of pale blue or does its avocado or goldenrod paint scream of the 1970s?
Well, if you’re watching TV or a movie, those things, like hair styles and fashions, stand out immediately. But if you’re reading a book, they can be elided.
“There was nothing new on TV so we watched re-runs.”
“Dad’s new Oldsmobile had already developed engine trouble.”
“We played out on the cul-de-sac until the street lights came on.”
With a certain cocoon (middle class, suburban, largely white) you could create a zone in which signifiers of date (and sometimes of geographic location) were largely irrelevant. Writers, both for children and adults, began to use the Long Present to their advantage, creating stories that avoided specific name brands, references to current events or topical songs, thus ensuring they could feel fresh in five or ten or twenty years.
This is why my childhood was filled with books written decades before I was born, but which I did not recognize as being old until I developed the habit, around age ten or eleven, of flipping to the front to check the copyright date. This is why everything from Harriet the Spy (1964) to From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler (1967) to Catcher in the Rye (1951) to Blubber (1974) lingered for so long. You could shove them at kids (white, middle-class kids, anyway) without having to give them much historical or cultural context.
The books were then regularly re-skinned with covers appropriate for the decade, so that the characters in a Judy Bloom book of the 1960s will reappear in a brightly-coloured photorealistic illustration sporting 1980s fashions twenty-plus years after their original publication.
Bizarrely, this trend extended into science fiction.
I’m one of the last science fiction fans on the planet who was converted to rocket-ships-and-raygun-stories via Robert A. Heinlein’s juveniles**, which in the 1980s and ’90s were still stocked prominently on library and bookstore shelves, and, just like the other kid lit books, were refreshed with new covers as needed.
Now, SF didn’t age nearly as well during the Long Present, for pretty obvious reasons. I mean, there was an actual moon landing right in the middle of it, for one thing! The future kept happening, and those 1950s visions were starting to rust and corrode before long.
I’ve already written enough about why I think there isn’t, and can’t ever be, a science fiction canon, but damn it if kids publishers weren’t in the vanguard of trying to create one for us! With Heinlein the biggest name in Golden Age SF who also happened to write plenty of children’s literature, his stuff was among the first books you encountered as a young SF fan (alongside Madeleine L’Engle, and to a lesser extent Ursula K. LeGuin’s A Wizard of Earthsea).
The Long Present started to break down by the mid-1990s, right around when Calvin and Hobbes ran its last strip.
By 1995, you could still, just barely, write a story that didn’t feature cellphones, or video game consoles, or personal computers in the home. But by the early 2000s, this was obviously impossible. Consumer technology has seen an acceleration of change so rapid and so granular that if you’re writing about the present, your work can probably be dated to within a few months. Are your protagonists using TikTok? Instagram Stories? Flickr? Are they playing Farmville or Words with Friends? Do they watch Netflix streaming or get the DVDs in the mail? Do they catch an Uber? Blu-ray or HD DVD? Drive a Tesla? Exactly how much do they hate Mark Zuckerberg?
The Long Present is quite thoroughly dead. The Specific Now is where we live.
As a science fiction writer, I wonder if there will ever again be a period of long-term consumer technology stability like the one we saw in the Long Present. It’s possible we’ll hit a plateau sometime in the future, maybe even in my lifetime, and settle in again. Or maybe this is now normal, an endless succession of apps and devices that divide eras into ever-smaller slices. This is an interesting question for building a future.
This is just my personal hypothesis, but the Long Present is part of what made Boomer cultural dominance of the 1980s to early 2000s so thorough and oppressive. There’s long been attempts to pin down subsequent generations, saying, ah, of course Gen Xers all went through this, or Millennials were raised with that. But we didn’t experience that kind of material continuity. You can slice later Generation Xers and all the Millennials into one- to three-year microgenerations, honestly. It’s hard, now, to even imagine a world that with technological stability like the Long Present.
But the people who are, for the most part, still in key positions in everything from government to book publishing to academia must see it quite differently. From their point of view, the Long Present was normal. If the world was in ferment politically at times, there were still certainties, islands of stability in the periodic tables of their lives. And everything since then has been increasingly weird, and fractured.
Some have adapted. (I interviewed a Second World War veteran in his nineties a couple years back – he was heavily into digital photography and had a computer setup that put anything I’ve ever owned to shame.) But some have clearly not.
That’s why in publishing, you get this:
I don’t know if I’d call that a good cover update.
This is both pandering (“Y’know what the kids are into! Texting! They’re allatime texting!”) and shows a lack of faith in the original work.
Books are (and nobody really wants to hear this) 99 percent disposable. They’re of the moment, and most of them will be forgotten entirely within a few years of their publication.
If they survive, it’s because they had something to say that can speak to the human experience across decades and centuries. A cover that attempts to add fresh relevance isn’t going to change that.
Just… let the stuff from the past be. We don’t put covers like this on Little Women or The Little Prince or A Little Princess (oh God, why was everyone little back in the olden days?) because we hope that kids will enjoy those books on their own terms.***
The Long Present has been dead for nearly 30 years. Literature has changed pretty dramatically in that time. Let the past be the past, and the present be the ever-moving target that it is.
*This would place us in the Long 21st Century, presumably, but my personal preference is for the Interregnum of the Long 1990s, which lasted from 1989 (fall of the Berlin Wall) to Sept. 11, 2001, after which the 21st Century proper got started. We’ll have to see how long it lasts.
**My relationship with Robert Heinlein is sort of like the one you have with a cool uncle, who can pull quarters from behind your ears, lets you read his comic books, but then years later you notice that he’s always talking about “welfare bums” or says weird racist stuff, and you wonder if he’s been watching too much Fox News in his old age, or if he was always like that and you didn’t notice.
***If we do put covers like that on these books, please don’t tell me. I don’t need to hear that there’s a copy of The Little Prince where he’s wearing earbuds.
Further Reading
Is there a good Heinlein juvenile I’d recommend to modern kids? No. But my firm opinion remains that Heinlein’s best book is Citizen of the Galaxy, his last juvenile. Yes, it’s rife with Orientalism, but it still shows Heinlein at his least judgmental. The fact that the villains, in the end, are a bunch of rich plutocrats who profit off a distant slave trade in which they don’t get their hands dirty makes it almost relevant! If you’re interested in why people liked Heinlein, it’s a solid example of his voice with less lecturing to the reader than his later works.
I’d be interested to read some E.L. Konigsberg again – can anyone tell me if From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler still holds up?
This newsletter is free. If you would like to pay me to write things, please contact me at ouranosaurus(at)gmail.com.
Mixed-up Files still holds up, I’d say
This is fantastic stuff, Matthew! (Er, no pun intended.)
I also thought Double Star by Heinlein was a good intro to what he was good at and avoided many of the things that would make me facepalm.