With a few exceptions, the underlying subject of novels of the last decade, of the novels that win prizes and get read by book clubs, is a perceived social inequity—past, present or future.
Literature always reflects the concerns of the readers of its time. Today that commitment is to social reform; it was political reform in the 1930’s.*
What is different today is that the distinction between writers and readers has broken down. Thanks to a general concurrence in the reliability of two banal clichés
art is self-expression
anyone can be a writer
there is no 21st century literature. There is just 21st century writing.
It’s interesting that although readers still can be moved by the beauty of an artwork or by a few bars of music, they have become oblivious to the beauties—just as breathtaking—of well-crafted writing. Yes, a reader can be moved, moved indeed, by a piece of writing—by the ideas, the images, the beliefs it expresses. How it is written is judged for efficacy, then dismissed. (Readers—who all know how to put one word after another—assume they are just as competent as the authors.) The words, the phrasing, the structure are only a medium—something you could actually brew up at home—for expressing the affirmation of themselves and of their view of the world that readers crave.
It’s too bad this has happened—the eclipse of literature—at a time when people are obsessed with the injustice of life. If the fixation du jour were—oh, let’s say consciousness—The New York and London Reviews would be just as interesting as they were last century.
* [riff] The greatness of the 19th century novel was based on the writers’ and readers’ shared worries about a complex social structure which, in that scientific age, didn’t make sense. The Athenian audience came to the Theater of Dionysis to share profound emotions with the Immortals. The hectic Roman ruling classes escaped into pastorale. And what about the Troubadours and their anemic idealization of eros? (No one knows where that came from.) The aestheticism of Wilde and friends, despite its ars gratia artis pretensions, was committed to drawing attention to human idiosyncrasies. It was the Elizabethans who internalized the doctrine of art for art’s sake, with results that remain unsurpassed.
RSS Feed