July 27, 2002
From the desk of Jane Galt:Jessica's rant on hyperstylism is
Jessica's rant on hyperstylism is causing me to drag out one of my pet theories, which applies to the current crop of modern novelists thus: almost none of these folks will be remembered in 100 years.
Why? They're all hat and no cattle, a long run for a short slide. There's no there there. They're all politics and prose, no plot or character. And that may sell to people in English departments who read enough literature to get bored with compelling characters and deft plotting, but in fifty or a hundred years, no one except those confined within the walls of an English department will bother to read them. Oh, sure, we all love a well-turned sentence or biting satire. The problem is that social commentary is deadly dull once you're out of the immediate environment that produced it, and well-turned sentences tend to lose their luster after a hundred years or so, when the literary fashion or the language has changed. The only things that endure are character and plot.
Ever read Gulliver's Travels? Not careful excerpts or adaptions; the whole thing. I have, about eight times. I wrote my senior thesis on it. Actual enjoyment of the work is left for people who can learn to read early 18th century English well enough for it to feel natural, painstakingly wade through all the references, immerse themselves in the history of the era -- and then get a belly laugh when Swift skewers Walpole. Now, how many people are going to do that? And that's Swift's easiest work, outside of his verse. Try to read Tale of a Tub sometime. After about three pages you'll be too tired to look at all the footnotes. After ten, you'll decide that it's really long past time you got to regrouting the tile in the guest bathroom.
Yet we still rever Gulliver's Travels, Robinson Crusoe, and Pamela not for their social commentary, but for their prodigious invention, their compelling imagery, their plot. Shakespeare is still read today not only because his language was vivid, but his characters are real. King Lear is as fine a piece of human drama as has ever been written. The Taming of the Shrew may be un-PC, but it's still hilarious after more than 400 years. A good stage production of the Merchant of Venice or Macbeth can keep you on the edge of your seat for the entire four hours. Hamlet is -- well, frankly, a little uneven, but what great soliloquies! He is not read today because he had something compelling to say about rampant consumerism at the Elizabethan Court, but because he had something compelling to say about the nature of man.
In a hundred years, when the current political winds have died down and the literary fashion has altered, who will care to read Dom DeLillo? His work has flashes of sublime prose, but they are interleaved with a great deal of dross. And his characters? Yawn. His plot? 'Scuse me, did I miss something? I can find twenty trendy authors from the 1920's with the same mix of characteristics who will be remembered not even by most graduate students in English literature today.
And even the more famous authors from that era -- how are they faring? In inverse proportion to how many circus tricks and social themes their authors piled into the work. Compare Hemingway to Dos Passos. I've been re-reading ol' John recently, and I'm afraid I spend less time thinking "How brilliant!" than "My, what a lot of work he put into all those passages everyone skips over because they're hopelessly out of date."
Now take Infinite Jest. I read rather more of it than I would have liked trying to find out what, exactly, everyone was talking about. Going back to the reviews, I found out: his sprawling, silly plot with its one-dimensional characters, stiff dialogue, and exuberant use of extremely obscure words. I could have gotten the same experience, in other words, by watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer and reading a dictionary.
[As a side note, I am more than a little shocked by the number of reviewers who talk about his incredible vocabulary. You would think that his books had been written under the same conditions as the SAT. Given the extreme obscurity of the words used, and the sheer number of them, I have a hard time believing that these were words he came across in the course of his regular reading. His "singular achievement" is open to anyone with time on their hands and access to a library with an O.E.D and a Roget's.]
Our current crop of literary wunderkinds will be little noted nor long remembered. Yet I think that probably Robert Heinlein and Isaac Asimov will still be around in a hundred years, much as we still read Wells and Verne. I think I've just formulated Jane's Rule: The longevity of one's work is inversely proportional to the pomposity of one's proclamations about one's Art.
Of course, that seems to indicate that this blog will be around forever. And doesn't it feel like it already?
Posted by Jane Galt at July 27, 2002 1:21 PM | TrackBack | Technorati inbound links"); ?>