How Did Literature Get So Stuck?

Why I Decided to Destroy Modernism, Part 2

• This post is a continuation of a series that began here. To join the Telegram group for the Lil Skribblers project that inspired the series, click here. To mint a Lil Skribbler, click here.

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Some Literary History: The Birth of Literature and the Market for Literature

Divine truths have always been encoded in stories. As Roberto Calasso put it, “when the ancients want to philosophize, they tell a story.” The earliest “books” that we consider literature, such as The Epic of Gilgamesh and The Odyssey, are texts cobbled together from the remnants of such secret-laden stories, passed down orally from generation to generation. Literature, properly speaking, is the continuation of the promulgation of such secrets. Until the modern era (~1800), this largely meant poetry, because poetry, like music, can embed within itself both phenomenological knowledge and descriptive knowledge. The phenomenological content is the poem’s prosody: It is, like music, knowledge that can only be experienced. I am speaking of the sense experience brought about by a particular melody or the rhythm of particular words. The descriptive knowledge of poetry, on the other hand, is the actual content of the words. The interplay between the phenomenological knowledge and the descriptive knowledge constitutes the art of poetry: modulating sense and sound so as to best communicate the incommunicable.

Around 1800, two strange events occurred nearly simultaneously: (1) A class of miscreants we now call “writers” became conscious of “literature” as a form in and of itself, with all its suppleness of form and ambiguity of aim; and (2) imaginative writing became popular entertainment (for the middle classes in England, to begin, but by the age of the baby boomers it had become popular entertainment for all).

The significance of development (1) is that “literature” became an egregore; that is, it developed an independent existence, shorn of direct utility, seeking only its own self-promulgation. This is the condition described by concepts such as art for art’s sake or the “New Criticism” of the Fugitive Poets, or Roberto Calasso’s excellent term absolute literature (absolute both because it encompasses everything and because it is its own end). Prior to this, literature qua literature did not exist. An Elizabethan saw a sonnet sequence the way we might see a Tweet: It was a mode of communication.

The significance of development (2) was the great popularization of prose narratives. Thus this strange beast literature, which properly speaking has only ever existed for the sake of its own self-promulgation, achieved an uneasy symbiosis with financial motive. Sure enough, long before 1800, an Elizabethan might have written a play for money, but the script itself did not make money; the playwright was a part of a team working on the larger whole, and his words were only valuable as a part of the whole.

With literature, for the first time, one’s imagination itself became a financial instrument. This meant both the form and content of literature, and especially the form and content of the novel, progressed according to the tastes of whatever class of people happened to be willing to pay for it. And while—to repeat myself—literature has always existed only for itself, it wears many cloaks, and has lately worn the cloak of entertainment. This is not necessarily a bad thing. Both Joyce and Nabokov provide excellent concrete examples; each was a poet in his youth, and each was able to discover his genius only due to market pressures (the market was so stern with Nabokov that it forced him to write in his third-best language).

Romanticism to Realism

Literary art is the most subtle of the arts, for it produces an aesthetic effect that is simultaneous with the expression of ideas of limitless complexity. In this it is obviously unlike music and visual art, and it is even unlike film due to its far greater capacity for the expression of ideas, and greater flexibility in mode of expression. Literature can also respond most directly to the social conditions of a given age. Modernism—the privileging of a given narrator’s subjectivity, with a focus on the minutiae of his or her consciousness—is the form of literary production that has predominated for the last 100 years or so; really there is no such thing as “postmodernism,” because “postmodernism” is but a distension of modernism; for this reason William Gass correctly referred to the literary art of his era (including his own works) not as “postmodernism” but as “decayed modernism.”

It is high time that we advance beyond this stale perspective. Yet a literary form that surpasses modernism must also include it. The Hegelians among you will be familiar with the thesis/antithesis/synthesis formula whereby an idea (thesis) meets its opposite (antithesis) and encompasses it to form the synthesis. This is in fact a mere footnote to an ancient way of thinking that can be universally applied to all facets of life—but that is an essay for another time. Let us look how this concept might apply to literary trends since 1800.

Romanticism is the direct consequence of the invention of literature itself. It is brought on by the untethering of the numinous from what is commonly called religion: The Romantic poet celebrated himself and his own literary devices without reference to the rest of the world, because this new form had arisen so that man could connect with the divine not for the sake of any tradition but for joy doing so—and often for the despair of doing so as well, as was so often the case for the Romantics after they had come down from Parnassus.

Realism rose in reaction to this. Writers like Victor Hugo, Tolstoy, and Dickens simply could not abide the notion of literature that did not address the social concerns of the day. They had good reason for this. Romanticism in its self-fulfillment leads to the madness and eventual silence of a Rimbaud, or to the wild yawps of Whitman—and while Whitman yawped wonderfully, it is the rare beast who can sustain a literary yawp. The realists on the one hand rejected the notion that literature should be entirely self-contained: While they had typically been impressed by and in their youth ensorcelled by Romanticism, it occurred to them that a world out there existed, and that part of their literary aim should be to represent it. The Self did not exist in a vacuum, after all.

This epoch represented the high point of novelistic art. An internal tension existed within the realist novel that only the truly great could withstand. The author sees himself responding to society, showing how people live; perhaps he even sees himself as a radical aiming to reform the world. And yet the part of him that has been enraptured by literature knows, perhaps with just an inkling, that none of these society-oriented aims constitute the purpose of the novel. The novel assimilates all that real data about the world, and perhaps even the author’s own real political opinions, and makes of the final work something completely, ecstatically useless: a glowing trinket, a rococo bauble. This is, incidentally, the secret to spiritual development: to take all that might be useful in this world and render it useless (such is the logic of religious sacrifice).

Realism to Modernism

The modernists rightly recognized that the realist project was beset by contradictions. Such as:

• A novel which aims to convey the reality of the world will be heavily influenced by the author’s own particular perspective; shouldn’t that individual perspective be emphasized?

• Language is an inherently shaky means of conveying existence; shouldn’t this instability of language be highlighted within the text?

• The idea that humans think and behave according to logic or the dictates of plot is merely an illusion; motivation is more complicated than that. Shouldn’t the novel adapt to convey the muddiness of thought and life?

And so on.

Thet result was a kind of Romanticism Reloaded—a movement in which the author not only sings of himself but re-orients the entire structure of the work around his own inner world. The apotheosis of this movement was James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, about which the more plainspoken poet and novelist Robert Graves has written: “In order to understand the whole book the reader would have to disentangle patiently as much . . . of the snarled detail as he could (a part depends on private associations of Joyce’s); then he would have to put together a new book, working out the relations between the details and trying to see what Joyce intended to signify.”

This did not stop subsequent writers from attempting to outdo one another in creating especially recondite private worlds; thus we have the “decayed modernism,” mentioned earlier, which remained at least putatively cool until the 1980s or so.

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This concludes Part 2 of the “Why I Decided to Destroy Modernism” series. The third and final part will discuss literature today and tomorrow and will tie this all back up with the Lil Skribblers project.