Asymmetrical Information

From the desk of Jane Galt:

What books will our grandchildren read?

Terry Teachout, whose blog you should be reading every day in order to get the cultural education you're sadly missing on this site, has a wonderful post on popular culture:

But while the noir novelists scarcely deserve to be ranked among America’s best and most significant writers, their harsh tales are infinitely more readable than the chokingly tedious output of a thousand American writers of impeccably correct reputation, and I venture to guess that people will still be turning the pages of James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice and Cornell Woolrich’s I Married a Dead Man long after the likes of Toni Morrison and Allan Gurganus are remembered only by aging professors of literary theory who wonder why nobody signs up for their classes any more.

Does that put me in Stephen King’s camp? I think not. I don’t think The Long Goodbye is as good a book as The Great Gatsby, and I believe the difference between the two books is hugely important. But I also don’t think it’s absurd to compare them, and I probably re-read one as often as the other.

The point is that I accept the existence of hierarchies of quality without feeling oppressed by them. I have plenty of room in my life for F. Scott Fitzgerald and Raymond Chandler, for Aaron Copland and Louis Armstrong, for George Balanchine and Fred Astaire, and I love them all without confusing their relative merits, much less jumping to the conclusion that all merits are relative.

I was just reading (also on Mr Teachout's blog) Bill Clinton's list of his favourite 21 books. It's exquisitely sculpted to cast him as the perfect New Democratic intellectual, with nods to every ethnic constituency, every intellectual pretension, and of course, with TS Eliot, the aging hippie stoner "Wow, like that stuff totally blew my mind, man -- it's like, uber-groovy" contingent. It's also (as all such lists are) perfectly false. I find it impossible to believe, for example, that WB Yeats is your favorite poet if you are not Irish. I find it doubly impossible to believe that TS Eliot is actually one of Bill Clinton's 21 favorite books. Politicians might as well title these lists "people whose names will make me look smart to intellectuals and inoffensive to voters" and be done with it.

But there's one point Mr Teachout makes that I think is really important: we seem to be producing very little indeed in the way of lasting literature these days -- by which I mean literature that will be read in a couple of hundred years. And I'd argue that the reason this is true is that our literary writers have jettisoned the things we know readers respond to -- plot, character, and narrative -- for Language and Relevance.

It's not because plot, character, and language are somehow inimical to art. Homer knew them. Shakespeare is a master of plot and character (though he does occasionally get a bit muddled on his off days.) Dickens depended on them. Yet one too often sees novels driven by plotting and narrative dismissed as some kind of cheap pandering to men's basest instincts.

Instead what do our critics value? Language! The glowing reviews on some author's marvelous use of language could be piled to the moon's distant dead orb and back again.

But language ages awefully quickly. I invite your attention to the opening paragraph of April Hopes, which I selected at random from among the novels of William Dean Howells. Mr Howells, for those who do not know, was known as "the dean of American letters", and probably the most critically lionized author of his day. (Mark Twain, his good friend, was the P.J. O'Rourke of the same era.) Keep in mind, as you are reading this, that Mr Howells was in the avant garde, one of the Realists who stripped away the artifice and roseate moralizing of the Romantic school:

From his place on the floor of the Hemenway Gymnasium Mr. Elbridge G.
Mavering looked on at the Class Day gaiety with the advantage which his
stature, gave him over most people there. Hundreds of these were pretty
girls, in a great variety of charming costumes, such as the eclecticism
of modern fashion permits, and all sorts of ingenious compromises between
walking dress and ball dress. It struck him that the young men on whose
arms they hung, in promenading around the long oval within the crowd of
stationary spectators, were very much younger than students used to be,
whether they wore the dress-coats of the Seniors or the cut-away of the
Juniors and Sophomores; and the young girls themselves did not look so
old as he remembered them in his day. There vas a band playing
somewhere, and the galleries were well filled with spectators seated at
their ease, and intent on the party-coloured turmoil of the floor, where
from time to time the younger promenaders broke away from the ranks into
a waltz, and after some turns drifted back, smiling and controlling their
quick breath, and resumed their promenade. The place was intensely
light, in the candour of a summer day which had no reserves; and the
brilliancy was not broken by the simple decorations. Ropes of wild
laurel twisted up the pine posts of the aisles, and swung in festoons
overhead; masses of tropical plants in pots were set along between the
posts on one side of the room; and on the other were the lunch tables,
where a great many people were standing about, eating chicken and salmon
salads, or strawberries and ice-cream, and drinking claret-cup. From the
whole rose that blended odour of viands, of flowers, of stuff's, of
toilet perfumes, which is the characteristic expression of, all social
festivities, and which exhilarates or depresses--according as one is new
or old to it.

A little painful, isn't it? Yet the great hulking list of a sentence, festooned with clauses and garlanded with surplus description, was the height of literary fashion in the days before television. As it happens, I like such novels. But they're definitely an acquired taste, and few people who aren't professional literary types will take the time to wade through them. Language is the most ephemeral of all literary qualities; usage and fashion changes too quickly. Oh, yes, Shakespeare makes brilliant use of language, as do many other literary greats. But thinking that you can build great literature solely on inventive uses of language is like thinking you can build a house out of aluminum siding. We wouldn't go to see any Shakespeare play that just strung all of his memorable quotes together.

Many of today's critics seem to be a little confused about what language is for. Such as the awestruck reviewer I once encountered who was dazzled by a short-story writer's ability to take 57 pages to say . . . nothing. Honey, that's not a short story; that's my senior thesis. And there seems to be some tacit agreement among book reviewers that none of them will discuss David Foster Wallace without devoting at least half their column-inches to his incredible vocabulary. It seems precarious indeed to perch one's hopes for posterity on a talent that can be replicated by anyone with a dictionary and a little time on their hands.

If one does not have a talent for twisting words into ornamental objects, one needn't give up literary hopes, however: there is always Relevance. I mean, Toni Morrison -- Nobel prize for literature? Huh? What's the metric here?

Alas for the writer, relevance is even more ephemeral than language. Recently I've been reading John Dos Passos, who was an early combination of those twin critical obsessions. Long segments of USA make me physically wince. If there is anything sadder than reading someone hopelessly outdated who thinks he's the newest thing since next week, I haven't found it. At least when F. Scott Fitzgerald committed those sort of sins, he made up for it with glorious prose. John Dos Passos, in contrast, writes prose as if he's determined to make his reader suffer every bit as much as the soldiers in France. Oh, you kid!

There are exceptions, of course. We still read Uncle Tom's cabin. But that's because it's melodrama, and melodrama is inherently accessible. The scores of other novels on the subject, such as Clotelle, are long forgotten.

Literature endures in the end because it speaks to something in many generations -- their hopes for glory or fears of failure. Few of us have been kings trying to play three daughters off against each other -- but many of us have been foolish in our demands for familial love, and all of us are haunted by the fear that we may become powerless and old. The more relevant and topical a novel is, the less likely it is to speak to anyone uninterested in political or cultural quarrels that faded out before their grandparents were born.

I confess, I'm hard pressed to think of literary writers whose work will still be read a hundred years from now. Perhaps my readers have some suggestions?

Note: the original of this post had a bug and I had to delete it. This version, alas, lacks all the fine comments. Apologies for the inconvenience, and so on.

Posted by Jane Galt at November 24, 2003 4:42 PM | TrackBack | Technorati inbound links