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>> Male Presenter: Good afternoon. We're very pleased to have a double
dose of Authors at Google today. In fact, we have two
books from the Bestselling and Philosophy series. Our
first speaker is Tyler Shores. And Tyler Shores is no
stranger to the Authors at Google program. In fact, he
was a one of the early founders and was involved for many years
before he left the to pursue a graduate degree in English
literature from the University of Oxford. He's a
frequent contributor to this Blackwell Philosophy series
including Heroes and Philosophy which he spoke with us a
few years ago in the authors at Google channel. And also
Alice in Wonderland and the very soon to be released Arrested Development and Philosophy.
Steve Holt that's going to be awesome. He also taught a class on the Simpsons
and Philosophy at the University of California at Berkeley. So
he's very in tune to the subject matter. He will be
speaking to us today about The Girl with the Dragon
Tattoo and Philosophy. So, without further ado, we must
go deeper.
>> Tyler: All right. Thanks, Cliff. It is good to be back.
And let's see where do I start? Well, I read recently
that The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is the most popular
e-book,the best selling e-book of all time. All time
in a relative sense because when we're talking about e-books, we're not talking about that
long. But that made me think. I do tend to read a lot of books on
my Kindle now. And I was thinking the funny thing is,
in a completely Kindle or Nook or Android tablet
world, I probably never would have read the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. And the reason
for that is I distinctly remember where I was when these
books came on my radar. I was at the Denver Airport,
at the Hudson Booksellers store. I mean, there are
some people in this world I guess. Let me back up for a
second. Some people notice the brand of shoes that other
people wear. Some people notice other people -- can't
help but stare at other people's babies. I'm that other
type of person. I can't help but notice what types of
books that other people read. That's my personal story to the
Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. In a world without the
public visibility of book covers, you'd never know what
people are reading, right? So it wasn't really the first
person or second person but probably the third or fourth
person I saw at that same airport who was reading the
Girl with the Dragon Tattoo -- who was holding this
book -- and I finally said, "Okay, what's the deal with
this book? What's so interesting about it?" So that's
really the point of this talk to kind of think about
these questions. Pose some questions about the book and
give some thought to what is it about the Girl with the
Dragon Tattoo that's so interesting? What's philosophically significant about it?" On
the one hand. I mean, these novels are we might call a typical
example of hardboiled crime fiction. They're very much
like, if you're a fan of the genre, Mickey Spillane,
or Raymond Chandler, or Sue Grafton. They're crime novels, detective novels. But, on the
other hand, I think there is something about the Girl
with the Dragon Tattoo books. They're fictions, but they're
based on very non-fictional issues and themes. We know
that the original title -- the Swedish title for the Girl with
the Dragon Tattoo -- was Men Who Hate Women. And the
reason for this title stems from an actual event that
had a very serious effect upon the author, upon Stieg
Larsson. Time to read a brief excerpt from a news article.
It will give more context for this I think.
[reading]On that day, 15-year-old Stieg watched three friends
*** a girl whose name was Lisbeth, who was the same
age as him and someone he knew. Her screams were
heart-rending, but he didn't intervene. His loyalty to
his friends was too strong. He was too young, too
insecure. It was inevitable that he would realize
afterwards that he could have acted and possibly prevented the ***. Haunted by feelings of
guilt, he contacted the girl a few days later. He begged
her to forgive him for cowardice and passivity. She
told him bitterly that she could not accept his explanations.
"I will never forgive you, ever," she said.
So in some ways the three books -- the books in the series
-- are meant to be a survival story about a girl named
Lisbeth and it's a story about survival and justice and
revenge. The three girl novels also have an uncompromising
moral purpose. At the very end of the book, there's
a very clear statement when one of the main characters
says quote -- when it comes down to it, this story
is not primarily about spies and secret government
agencies, it's about violence against women and the
men who enable it.
So again, the question is why are these books so popular.
And I think I would start with the obvious which is sex
and violence. So let's talk about sex and violence for a
second. Because that's one of the things -- hallmarks or markers of
these kinds of books, popular fiction books. The message about ***
violence against women is painfully clear if you've read
the books. Some of the descriptions are brutal. And one
of the most provocative chapters in the book that we
wrote, the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and Philosophy, the
question is raised what effects does reading about these kind of books, these
graphic depictions of sex and violence have upon us as
readers? Aristotle is one of our favorite ancient Greek
philosophers in the poetics he talks about the cathartic
effects that these kind of descriptions have, these graphic, violent images have -- that
fear and pity are the primary undistilled emotions that we might
feel. But it puts us in the shoes of these vulnerable
characters. And in that sense, I guess the point is, that the Girl with the
Dragon Tattoo isn't about senseless violence or pointless
violence. It is about, in a larger sense, the social vulnerability
of women specifically abuse -- psychological,
*** physical, political abuse that happens against
these like dependent people. So there is a larger
political message that these thrilling crime novels are
supposed to get to. And I think that is one of the
things -- that's one of the key things that makes the
Girl with the Dragon Tattoo kind of a socially conscious
popular fiction. So this idea of social -- I don't know
what to call it -- moral consciousness is one of the
things we discuss in our book in the Girl with the Dragon
Tattoo and Philosophy. There's a lot of interesting moral
questions raised along the way about the ethics of
information, about revenge, about -- one of the things I
think we'd be interested in here at Google is, certainly, how our
identity is shaped in an online age. That's something
that comes up again and again with characters who are
computer hackers. To what extent do we control the
identity we have. To what extent is it something that is kind of shaped by
outside influences that we never see or hear about? So
there's interesting themes here. I think there's a lot
of different questions the book series deals with. And
you might say that the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo books
are popular, I think, because some of the larger themes of the book
strike a cord with us. It's a crime novel but because of
the author's background, Stieg Larsson was a journalist, a crime
reporter. It's meant to be sort of an exposé, too, an attempt to reveal the
sort of moral bankruptcy of these people in power. Throughout the books,
there's a certain sense of comeuppance for those people
who get away with bad things. And more importantly,
there's an examination, especially in the third book,
the Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest, the last book in
the trilogy. It's about how society chooses to treat people it doesn't understand and
about how social labels are applied or misapplied. What happens to
those consequences. What happens when certain people
are characterized in society and the kind of,
you know, wrong consequences -- wrong conclusions that brings
us to. And that's the other thing that makes this unique.
It's a little different than a crime novel book in
the sense that you might wonder who are the bad guys
in the book? And I think that's one of the things that
separates this. For one thing, there's a long list. The bad
guys in the book: the doctors are crooked. The bureaucrats are crooked. The
journalists are crooked. The business men are crooked.
The police and the prosecutors are crooked and bad. So it's old question, Quis custodiet
ipsos custodes. Who will watch the guards. Who watches the watchmen. That kind
of question that comes up again and again. Like, that's
a larger theme in this book series. When there's an
interesting article by 'N Plus One, if anyone reads that
online magazine, where the writer talks about how Stieg Larsson is
discussing the welfare state in Sweden. The welfare state
has a certain amount of complicity in these crimes that
happen all throughout these books over like decades of
what happens in Sweden and what happens to the characters.
If you can't trust the system, who can you trust?
What are you supposed to trust? The role of the state is
supposed to take care of the individual, as the line of
thinking goes. But with the corruption that's going on in
the books, 'take care of' takes on a different meaning more
of like the Mafia sense how exactly is the government complicit
in these sort of things. So anyways, the point is the villains
of the book aren't necessarily just the characters,
there the institutions, the social structures that kind
of allow these crimes happen. I think that's one of the things
that makes this book unique. It's not just a mystery
novel. It's supposed to be a mystery novel with a more politically minded, politically
motivated purpose to it. There's different kinds of bad guys and therefore
there have to be different kinds of good guys. So
it's kind of significant, the fact that the two main characters
in the Girl With the Dragon Tattoo are journalists and a computer hacker whose purpose is to
bring information that's hiding out into the public.
One of the things I talk about in the book is that
this kind of writing, like socially conscious writing, is what Jean-Paul
Sartre calls committed literature. Committed literature
is basically the -- any writing that was with the intention
of social commitment. Any kind of writing that was supposed
to advocate or inspire real change in the world.
And reading these books, reading the Girl with
the Dragon Tattoo books, there is a sense of moral purpose
that's not so obvious with detective fiction. I mean,
for the one thing let's start with the Girl with the
Dragon Tattoo. Like, it's a *** mystery and as
we see it's about a lot more than just about a *** mystery
if you kind of read the books through the end. At one point,
I don't want to spoil the book or the movie which
is coming out next week, I think. There's a serial murderer
who's been committing crimes throughout the decades.
One of the questions is why did this person *** people
or torture people after so many years. The answer is
supposed to make your skin crawl. The murderer says, "because it's so easy to
*** people who disappear that never have these crimes
brought today." And I think that says a lot about
the society that Stieg Larsson thought he was writing
about. The other thing I would bring up is that you know
like I just said that kind of emotional skin-crawling
feeling is something worth thinking about. Sometimes
when we're reading a book -- like, sometimes our heart
starts to beat a little faster. Sometimes our palms
do get slightly sweaty. These are real physical reactions
that happen to, you know, things that don't exactly
exist. So this is kind of interesting. We've all had
this experience. Like, we're watching a movie or
reading a book. We develop real emotional reactions about something
that doesn't exist. Like, these characters aren't
real. These situations aren't real. In philosophy,
we call this the paradox of fiction. How does this
happen? Why does this happen? We empathize with certain fictional characters.
We have like an emotional connection; an emotional investment
on our part. We feel fear, pity, happiness. We
have these real emotional and psychological responses to
fictional events we know aren't actually real. In
philosophy, like, you know, again this is sort of a
paradox. This is something to think about because I
think it's something we've all experienced and like from a
logical standpoint it's worth thinking about. It's worth
thinking about why do we have real reactions. Why do we
care about fictional characters that don't exist?
Speaking of characters -- I think without a doubt one of
the things that makes the books so popular are the
character's in the book specifically Lisbeth Salander because
she's so unique. In particular, like, she's the Girl with
the Dragon Tattoo. She's this sort of computer-hacking, ***-kicking, weird, revenge-driven, antisocial,
loner person but who's also at the same time emotionally
socially vulnerable. We empathize with a character like
that. Someone who's gotten an extremely raw deal in her
life. She's the kind of protagonist we want to relate
to. Speaking specifically about the Girl with the Dragon
Tattoo, as either book, or a movie or as a plot, it's a different
sort of book. Like, at one point it's described as --
it's actually a fascinating case. What I believe is
known in the trade is a locked room mystery on the island
and nothing in the investigation seems to follow normal
logic. Every question remains unanswered. Every clue
leads to a dead end. So the question is like one of the
things I talk about in the book is what kind of book
exactly is the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo? It's a best
seller. It says best seller right here on the top of the
cover. And there's something to that. Like, what I'm
interested in is that there's something to that. Like
this kind of book. Like, what does a best seller mean to
us exactly? The experience of the book -- I guess the
way I think about it. This is sort of my English background.
Reading a book is something that happens, it's a transaction that happens between us,
like a reader reading words on a page. But the question of what
kind of book are we reading and how we read it is sort of shaped by
things outside of us. I think this is something worth
thinking about. There's a lot of cultural factors that I
think come into play here. That kind of shape our
understanding of what, like, popular fiction or what a best
seller is as opposed to, like, literature. So in that
sense one of the questions I've been thinking about this
a lot. The question of: what does literature mean to us, exactly? What is
the difference between, like, a literature, a popular
fiction book, genre fiction book and natural work of
literature? Is there a distinction to be made? Does it
matter? Who makes that decision for us? Like, for
example, this is just one book I borrowed from my library,
Gravity's Rainbow. Can you judge a book by its cover? I mean, not really; no.
Sometimes the cover and the outsides do tell you
something. I mean, look at it -- it's huge. Like, it's
serious business, right, if it's a big, thick book like this. I
mean, obviously no, that's not the whole point. But on the
other hand there are different kinds of social markers.
If you look at these types of books -- this is a Penguin
version of the book. It says literature on the back
cover of the book here. That's interesting. Where
do these distinctions come from about what makes a book
popular fiction. What makes it literature. What makes it a mystery or a romance
novel? And the answer is, you know, a number of things.
There's no one thing that does this. Book publishers do
this when they put labels like this on the book. Bookstores do
this when they put the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo like in
the mystery section, or the best seller section instead of
literature section. We do this when we write critical
books on philosophy about these sort of books. Universities do this. Libraries do this. Book
reviews do this. It all contributes to the way that
we think about these books whether they're best sellers,
or novels, or literature, whatever you want to call them.
It's interesting. It's a classic 'chicken or the
egg' paradox situation like, "is a work of fiction literature?
Is something like this supposed to be literature
because we think of it as literature and therefore we
read it that way? Or is it something only literature after
the fact. We read it and somehow it's decided we treat
it as literature now? I mean, speaking very generally
like one of the things I think we can say safely is
there is a difference between this sort of book, like
popular fiction. It's a serial nature of a book. They're books in
a series. Like, when you read a book in a series like
this, like Twilight or Harry Potter or the Girl With
the Dragon Tattoo books. You're reading them horizontally. You're reading them quickly
but they're supposed to be page turners. They're supposed
to be the books you want to get to the end and find
out what happens next. So you're reading it this way
you're reading it sequentially. In literature, you're
supposed to be reading more vertically. You don't necessarily
read books all the way through to the end. Works of literature, you're reading for depth.
You might read them over and over again. At the
peak of the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo mania, the New
Yorker had a funny quote which I thought was worth sharing.
They said, "we're not looking at Tolstoy here -- talking
about the style of Larsson's writing." And that's
true -- we're not looking at Tolstoy but so what? We like
Larsson novels because they're good stories; they're enthralling
stories with interesting characters that are compelling.
And there's something else to them, too. I think that
something else is supposed to be this kind of moral seriousness
which I hinted at before. There's an undeniably blunt
reality to the books. In the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo,
each section of the book is prefaced with these
very real statistics. One of them said 40 percent of
women in Sweden had been subjected to violence by a
man. So the stories themselves may not -- may be works
of fiction, but the crimes in which the novels are based
are far from fiction which is the point I want to make.
So the question I through out before, why do we
feel the way we do about fiction? A related question is
why do we enjoy reading the fiction that we do? In some ways
the argument that I'm making is a good fiction, a good
mystery novel, is a lot like philosophy. As much as we
enjoy the thrill of reaching the end of the mystery,
philosophy shows us that sometimes it's about the
process; it's about the thinking through of getting there
that is the actual thing. It's not so much the end goal
as it is what we do along the way. That's what mysteries
are. It's the unfolding of bits and pieces of
information that we find so interesting. Lisbeth Salander
says at one point. It makes it sound like she's a good a philosopher as she was detective.
She wasn't actually interested in the answer. It was the process
of the solution that was the point. There's something
philosophically satisfying, I think, about the plot on the
of the detective novel in the sense that search for
answers yields tidy resolution. Like, you know, we have
all our answers set at the end of whatever it is we're
reading. So in a philosophical sense, part of the
consolation that we seek in reading fiction is this kind
of reassuring sense that truth can be found. When we
think about the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo books,
there's questions that kind of propel us to read these
things. The search for truth is really like the driving
thing that motivates us to read these books. How did Harriet Vanger disappear?
Who murdered Dag Svensson and Mia Johansson? who was behind the big
government Zalachenko cover-up? What did all the evil mean? These
are questions that have clear definite answers by the end
of the book series. So unlike the clear resolution of
some works of fiction, our real life experience -- it's
true -- our real life experience with the truth is never
quite so neat and tidy. We never have like resolutions that are so cut and dried at the
end of the mystery novel that everything wraps up nicely.
Alfred Whitehead, one of the philosophers I talk about in the
book is -- there are no -- he says there are no whole
truths. All truths are half truths. I think that's a
good way to think about it. So I want to wrap up with a
couple of thoughts. And feel free to ask any questions
if you have them. When we reflect on the reasons why we
read and want to reread books in general and why we would want to read the
Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, we might consider the
following question. What does reading actually mean to us? Why read fiction at all? Is reading
supposed to be a form of escapism? Do we do it as a kind
of mental break from our boring everyday lives? Or is there something else? Do we
read in order to find engagement in the world as a way to
inform the way that we live our experiences? So anyways these
are just some questions I wanted to pose. Our hope in
writing the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and Philosophy is
to encourage everyone, fans of the books or fans of philosophy, to think about these questions.
So I think I'll leave off with that and I'll
turn the table over to Kyle.
>>Male #1: This may be a loaded question especially without
seeing the movie that's coming but how much of the
Philosophy do you think is at risk of being lost when
they turn it into a movie around two hours long.
>> Tyler: That's a good question. Have you seen the Swedish
version of the movie? So there are changes that
happen -- I mean, there's always going to be that problem
with sanitizing like, you know, the sort of books to make
it a happy ending sort of thing. So like, in the Swedish
version in the ending of the movie, Lisbeth has more, like,
an active role getting to the bad guy at the end. There
are those sort of things that make it a lot less
ambiguous which is the point of the book. There's a lot
of moral gray area in the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. That's the point.
There are like good guy characters who do bad things, like
kill people and those sort of things. It is kinda lost. Like, I do worry about that. I
worry about that happy ending syndrome. As an English
major, I was appalled by Pride and Prejudice, the most recent one. They
totally killed the ending. Don't see it. It's a bad
movie. [laughter] They do that. They tend to do that sort of thing. I do worry about
that. But I think it's always. Hmmm?
>>Male #1: [inaudible]
>>Tyler: Yes, it is for the adventurous. That probably helps. Yeah, I mean,
that's a good question though. I think that always
happens. Personally -- and this brings up another
question which is interesting. Do people tend to read
the books first or movies first? I prefer reading the
books first. But there's an argument to be made that when you
watch the movie first you get more out of the book.
You're pleasantly surprised by things you wouldn't have seen in
the movie. Yeah, interesting.
>> Male Presenter: Thank you very much, Tyler.
>> Tyler: Thank you.
[Applause]