Megan McArdle tackles Terry Teachout, 20th-Century literature and Bill Clinton's favorite paperbacks:
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.
As an example of language being transient, she provided an excerpt of the kind of romantic-era descriptive overtures we always skipped through in grade school, remarking:
A little painful, isn't it?
Well, it ain't Hemingway. And though baroque stuff like that is taxing, it's not bad once you fall into the author's rhythm (and familiarize yourself with a few of those 35-cent words). A lot depends on our reception. Modern American penmanship not only prizes itself on transparency and expedience, but derides and rejects anything sufficiently wordy or multi-claused as pretentious. For better or worse, that desire for frankness and informality is ingrained in our writing - and in some cases, communication in general. Trying to carry on a conversation at a loud, preferably urban social using sentences longer than ten words is a good comparison. Can't do it and remain the center of attention, can you? Contrast your average American blogger with an Englishman who's not trying to be hip; the difference in language is enormous.
But I digress.
[O]ne too often sees novels driven by plotting and narrative dismissed as some kind of cheap pandering to men's basest instincts.
It's not just writing, Megan - it's modern art. Style over substance. The culture making art values a sensational experience over a lasting one, so shouldn't that be the way for everyone? Movies are sold on novelty, shock, special effects or celebrity; lacking any sort of transcendental qualities, they earn their box office share in early weeks and more often than not fade from view. When Frank Stella beat Clement Greenberg at his own game and killed avant-garde-as-craftsmanship, fine art began a spiral around concept and novelty, and everyone started racing each other to be the first one to deconstruct art into sheer absurdity. They succeeded, and "modern art" is as much a cliché as it is a euphemism. In my last days as a painting undergraduate, I wrote a dismissive review of a graduate show that amounted to a stinging indictment of craftless Postmodernism itself. I'll never forget the stares in class answering my suggestion that art as ephemera was a "waste of time." The radio? I think we can all agree that auto-tuned voices, quantized rhythms, fancy engineering and flawless video choreography a timeless single does not make. And so the fancy novelette passes quietly.
But thinking that you can build great literature solely on inventive uses of language...
Then what's poetry, goddamned awful poetry?
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.
Another analogy to popular music: songs whose lyrics are contemporary run the risk of becoming obsolete and irrelevant if they're not considered, much later after their time, to be windows into a given period. You can trace that back through centuries. Going universal - songs or books - is tricky to get right, but if it works, it works. We'll always have Holden Caufield.
And finally, the challenge:
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?
I wonder if the answer is more sociological and scientific than critical. Anybody whose work is over fifty or sixty years old should manage - at least among the well-read - throughout the ages. That's on account of my assuming anything that can survive two generations removed will withstand all but wholesale cultural annihilation. Ephemeral works stand the least chance of escaping the collapse of trend. Modern archiving, however, barely a century old, increases the chances of relevance (or at least proximity) even more. It would be interesting to see how the works of our decades perform in ten more.
We'll always have Flannery O'Connor. And John Steinbeck. And Douglas Adams.