Of Matters Canonical

I read Jane Galt nearly every day, so I'm not sure how I missed this post of hers in which she talks about literature and why some lit survives and other lit does not. (By "survive", I mean that people still read it fifty, a hundred, two hundred years down the road.) Steven Den Beste also comments on her post, which is how I caught her post in the first place.

(Aside: Is it proper to refer to Jane Galt as "Jane", or by her real name, Megan McArdle? Or should I give up and simply refer to her as "That goofy libertarian lass"? Decisions….)

Anyhoo, I somehow missed this post entirely, which defies explanation since as noted above I check Asymmetrical Information nearly daily and it's a nice, long post. I generally agree with her points, although I don't scoff at the idea that Bill Clinton's list of favorite books (which has been making the rounds of Blogistan over the week I've been gone) actually constitutes favorites. Maybe I'm just naïve here, but I see little reason to believe that Clinton's lying when he says that he loves TS Eliot or W.B. Yeats. (Not that anybody's really calling him a "liar" here.) Six billion people on this earth, so it stands to reason that somebody is going to claim those two fellows for favorites. By all accounts, Bill Clinton is a voracious reader, one of those folks who motors through multiple books at a time (I do this too, although not at nearly so impressive a pace and I tend to miss a lot of stuff in the course of doing so), and it seems perfectly conceivable to me that he really does dig all of the books on his list. My own list of favorite books today would be very different from my list of faves from five years ago, and from the list I'll make five years hence.

Jane goes on to note that "we seem to be producing very little indeed in the way of lasting literature these days". I'm not really sure that's the case, unless she's equating "literature" with "the stuff kept in the Literature section at Borders". I guess Dave Eggers, Michael Chabon, Margaret Atwood, Joyce Carol Oates and others are the kinds of writers Jane is referring to here. If Jane means "literature" as a genre, then she may be right – but she may be colossally wrong, too. The problem with the "Test of Time" is that one actually has to let the time pass, and time is really quite capricious. We don't know what people are going to be reading from our time a hundred years from now. We really have no idea. The history of nearly every art is replete with examples of practitioners revered in their time who lapsed into obscurity (Salieri in music), of practitioners hailed at the time and who never really faded (Beethoven), and of practitioners who were underappreciated for many years until "arriving" (Mozart, Bach, Berlioz). The fact that readers now aren't responding to the current crop of "literary" writers the same way they respond to, say, Stephen King really isn't indicative at all of what future audiences are likely to judge worthy. So I think that trying to decide what works will survive is a futile effort, and I think that when people try to judge what's going to last what they're really doing is listing the works that they hope will last.

I do, though, disagree to a point with Jane/Megan and Steven's views of language and its relation to storytelling. (But only to a point.) It's true that most readers read for story alone, and thus the "literary" writing that works wonders with language tend not to appeal to such readers. But that's not to say that such works won't be appreciated by future generations. Language is a tool of storytelling – for writers it is the tool. (Other storytelling tools are available to comics creators and filmmakers, of course.) SDB is right to note that in a great novel we can be swept away into another time and place, but this happens because of language, not in spite of it. Stories tend to work because of their use of language, in the same way that a chair works because the wooden slats and nails fit together correctly. I've seen many a banal story elevated by language, but I've yet to see a great story succeed in spite of bad language. Dr. Asimov put it thusly:

"If your spelling and grammar are rotten, you won't be writing a great and gorgeous story. Someone who can't use a saw and hammer doesn't turn out stately furniture."

Language is everything to the storyteller. Language is what you use to create and depict your characters; language is what you use to have them do things. I do agree that today's "great writers of the future" will be judged so because of their narratives – but their narratives will survive because of their language. You can't separate the two. No story can take flight unless the language allows it to do so. Now, it's true that in a well-written story the language will "disappear" to a certain extent, in the sense of SDB's "vanishing tools" idea (which always makes me think of his proverbial disappearing pants!). But a lot of readers, especially those who also write themselves, are going to actively notice the language, and it's not really a detriment that they do so, anymore than it is a detriment when a carpenter looks a bit closer at a finely-made chair.

The other point I'd make is that it's important to realize the difference between today's audiences and those of a century from now and a century ago. The average person you'll meet in the bookstore perusing Stephen King and Dean Koontz and Anne Rice probably won't be too interested in suggestions that they also read Bram Stoker or Mary Shelley or Poe. The reader picking up the latest John Grisham probably won't be too keen on perusing Faulkner. The person trying to figure out which Robert Jordan book they haven't read yet isn't likely to be interested in Lord Dunsany, and someone perusing the latest David Weber "Honor Harrington" novel will probably strongly resist the idea that they should also read H.G. Wells. But a smaller subset of such readers are interested in those writers, and not merely because they told good stories but because they inspired earlier audiences and made today's storytellers possible.

Jane quotes a snippet from some writer from yesteryear whose work she still admires, even though he's lapsed into somewhat-obscurity, saying that reading the type of thing this guy wrote is an acquired taste. But really, so is Shakespeare, and so is Twain, and so is, well, anyone. And a hundred years from now, Stephen King will be an acquired taste. In 2103, someone picking up a copy of The Shining will be doing so not for the same reason that your average reader today might pick up that same book, but for the same reason that we pick up a copy of Dracula or Frankenstein. And their reason for doing so won't be simply to get "swept away" in narrative; it will be for that timeless insight conveyed within the language, to uncover the influences earlier writers have for latter ones, et cetera. All this might come under the rubric of "relevance", which I don't use here in the same sense which Jane disparages (and rightly so -- writers who strive too hard for "relevance" to a specific audience run the risk of limiting their appeal to any other audience).

Ultimately, I don't think there's anything wrong with reading to rejoice in language. That's a great deal of why I read Guy Gavriel Kay and JRR Tolkien, to name just two examples. Yes, getting swept away in the narrative is important, but it's not the only thing.

(I'd also note that I think that today's genre books, which are almost totally ignored by today's literary "establishment", are in fact most likely to survive, in my view. I could write a whole post about that, but luckily, Alex Frantz already wrote it.)