Why 20th Century Literature will be Largely Forgotten

Why 20th Century Literature will be Largely Forgotten

When one considers all that might be included in the Western literature canon, it becomes readily apparent that there is a marked difference between that which is of the 20th century, and that which has come before. I speak of the 20th century as roughly from 1914 (the start of World War I) on into today, for it is this period which is at such odds with the great body of literature that preceded it. Where we had Shakespeare, Dante, Chaucer, Milton, Goethe, Hugo, Blake, and Keats providing classics over hundreds of years that are read to this day (and even farther back to the Homerian epics and biblical texts), we find, in the 20th century, Joyce, Kafka, O’Neill, Faulkner, Steinbeck, Hemingway, and Beckett providing works that have, unfortunately, none of the timeless themes of those earlier masterpieces (or damn little of them), themes necessary to propel, in the very long-term, a piece of literature into a classic “for the ages.”

Where once we had the romantics, we now have the existentialists. Where once we had the beauty of the Renaissance or the significant themes from the Age of Enlightenment, we now have postmodern nihilism.

I would propose that we have no timeless themes inherent in our modern literature because timeless themes presuppose meaning, and we are living in an age where meaning itself is scoffed.

It’s no surprise that this trend began in 1914 with the horror of a war that went beyond anything imaginable up until that time. Eight million men were killed on the battlefields, a generation wiped away in the bloody trenches of Europe. And this on the heels of great upheaval, as the industrial revolution changed the landscape of nations. Factories and mechanization directed the world away from the agrarian one it once was. Travel became easier and immigration and urbanization led to a wholly different social dynamic. Things were faster. The world people knew was suddenly changing, moving, breaking apart at the seams.

Along with this – because of it – came literary modernism, with its focus on the disaffected individual, alienated from a society and a world to which he can no longer relate. The post-war 20s provided a brief respite in mood which was quickly brought to a close by the stock market crash and the resulting Great Depression, further deepening the feelings of frustration and despair, and fueling the literary fire of modernism’s bleak themes. Stories of love, stories of high drama with clear-cut ideas of good and evil, stories with moral messages, were all stories belonging to a distant past.

But at least modernism, unlike postmodernism, provided characters worthy of our sympathy. If realism mixed with hopelessness was the order of the day, we could at least grieve alongside the characters of, say, Steinbeck and Fitzgerald. The stories weren’t going to end well, the protagonists would not be “heroes” in the romantic sense, and there would be no great hurdle conquered in the final act. We would be left feeling the futility of their lives, but at least we would feel some amount of compassion and understanding. Existentialism, littering the literary field, at least allowed one to find some level of meaning, even if it was nothing more than the meaning behind the struggle, in a world gone mad, to find meaning.

With the world blown apart once again with World War II, the descent into meaninglessness went into high gear. The idea of “God” in light of such devastating circumstances as the Holocaust and the rise of Communism and the Iron Curtain, became a quaint, old-fashioned one, and with it, any remaining shred of meaning was left orphaned and, ultimately, discarded. Existentialism and modernism made way for nihilism and postmodernism. Where literary modernism at least gave us characters to relate to, maybe even to root for, postmodernism took even that away from us. One is hard-pressed to find a character to rally around in, for example, O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night, or even in a more contemporary play such as Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross, thus demonstrating how little has changed in the world of literature in the decades since WWII.

Today’s literature, in drama or fiction, centers on “slice of life” snapshots, of normal people living normal lives. The lives are never very interesting and neither are the people. But then they’re not meant to be, the underlying message being that nothing is interesting – how could, after all, meaninglessness be interesting? One doesn’t find heroes or heroic circumstances, for example, in an Annie Proulx short story. One finds uninteresting people leading lives of futility, lives of quiet desperation. We know going in that that fact will not change throughout the course of the narrative. Today’s fiction is merely but the natural extension of earlier, less nihilistic, but still searching-for-meaning-and-coming-up-empty works like As I Lay Dying, or The Sun Also Rises.

Poetry has followed the same path, from Elliott’s less nihilistic The Wasteland, to anything by highly-regarded (for whatever reason) poet Jorie Graham (“I swear to you this begins with that girl on a day after / sudden rain / and then out of nowhere sun [as if to expose the what of / the hills – / the white glare of x, the scathing splendor of y, / the wailing interminable-------?]”), which seems to have as its sole purpose the idea of reminding us that the only meaning is that there is no meaning whatsoever, and don’t bother looking for it.

The problem with the postmodern movement, as with any movement, is one feels compelled to jump on board lest one gets left behind. And so one can scarcely find a member of academia who will openly challenge this state of affairs, or an editor of any decent literary magazine who will allow anything with an extra bit of underlying meaning to make it into print. One doesn’t want to risk being ostracized, and so a kind of group-think pervades the intelligentsia. Meaning is passé. Concepts of good and bad are oh so clichéd. And the Jorie Grahams of the world continue to get published.

Always a beat behind the intelligentsia is the mainstream. And the mainstream has caught up. Nowhere is this more evident than in television and film. A perfectly analogous microcosm of the route of literature before and into the 20th century can be seen in the history of television, specifically the situation comedy where we have gone from the romanticism of tiny morality plays with happy endings (Father Knows Best) to more realistic, more serious modernism (All in the Family) to postmodern shows admittedly about “nothing” (Seinfeld). In comedy, everything goes, however, and meaning exists even (maybe especially) if it is in laughter.

Drama is a different story and if anybody needed any more evidence that postmodern nihilism has hit the streets, one need look no further than last year’s Academy Award winner for best picture: No Country for Old Men, a film based on the Cormac McCarthy novel. This is a story that practically begs the viewer to root for one character and against another, and then openly insults the viewer at the end where you can almost hear the Coen brothers, the makers of the film, snickering for making the viewer get sucked in, thinking that things would end in some generally moral state. The message is clear: rooting for morality is naïve and for suckers.

But one wonders if a body of work built on nothing can stand the test of time. Great literature, as Ezra Pound said, is “news that stays news.” There is nothing newsworthy about meaninglessness. And when future generations look to the past to find something of meaning, to find stories that still tell, as Clarence Day put it, “men’s hearts of the hearts of men centuries dead," one has to wonder if the 20th century will be skipped over in light of more meaningful works, in light of works carrying higher messages, carrying questions of morality, examining grander ideas of love and faith and hope. There is something within the human condition that yearns for these things, after all. Future generations may very well find the trek through the 20th century to be an unsatisfying walk through a barren desert, and their thirst will not be slaked until they move yet further back, through the 19th century and before, to the writers of genuine ideas, to the writers who searched, as future generations will, for meaning, and found it. Shakespeare will live on forever. Can the same be said of any of his 20th century counterparts?

nice essay… you also have to consider that the medium has changed immensely… people don’t read anymore… tv and movies have corrupted the genre… it has become a commercial, not a story

-Imp

I think this is actually a good thing. Art doesn’t have to be for the ages to be good. And I think it’s better that it reflects the real world, and not Paradises that have been Lost.

Just a personal opinion.

I would actually be intensely interested in any kind of evidence for this view. When you consider that literacy rates in, say, the US now will be a hell of a lot higher than, say, 200 years ago you start to doubt it. Which is interesting, because I think it is probably generally accepted as true.

Anyway, yeah well written essay. As a massive fan of 20th century literature, I do feel compelled to offer some words of defence.

Right - firstly, surely nobody that has read all of Steinbeck’s ‘important’ novels could think that the below quote applies to all of his work:

Is Tom Joad a futile figure? “Wherever there’s a cop beating a guy…” The message of his spirit enduring forever - could there be anything more properly heroic? What about East of Eden, which, along with parts that support your quote, is ultimately a defence of the view that “thou mayest” and ends with the cycle of sibling rivalry being broken when Adam gives Cal his blessing? Or Cannery Row, you could view it otherwise but I prefer to see it as, ultimately, a celebration of the ordinary nature of most human existence. I won’t continue.

But I don’t think pointing out counter examples, or quibbling over a certain writer is being mis-represented, offers much of a counter argument. What you offer is probably an accurate description of 20th century literature in general. I think you probably need to accept that, really, this started long before the 20th century. Isn’t Moby Dick easily understandable in this way - it’s really all about the search for meaning, and the failure to get anywhere with it. Then of course there’s Dostoyevsky, who always knew that his embrace of Christianity (and so of meaning) was intellectually bankrupt, and the other precursors to existentialism.

I think we need to change tack here. Lets think about another duty incumbent upon any writer who fancies himself as a ‘man of ideas’. He needs to be intellectually honest. He cannot embrace ideas he knows to be intellectually bankrupt. I’m sure I’m not alone in finding the ending of Crime and Punishment unsatisfactory. Why? Because the ‘resolution’ isn’t supported by any ‘argument’ contained in the text, moreover the ‘arguments’ against the resolution are never answered. If a novel which holds to some sort of concrete, ‘proper’, notion of meaning was written today it would, quite rightly, be lampooned unless it contained some weighty intellectual arguments in favour of it’s position.

You assume that these future generations will have re-embraced the grand concept of meaning. You assume that all of the arguments against this concept put forward in the last 150 odd years will be conclusively refuted. Your argument only has any sense if our current ideas about meaning are mistaken. If they are, in actual fact, correct then to do anything other than a depict men, not especially great in what was once (emptily) called the grand scheme of things would be dishonest and, frankly, useless. You can only write against the mood of the times if you tell us what is wrong with that mood - all else is vain posturing.

And anyway, its all about expectations. If you think of man as ‘special’, as inhabiting a universe designed and created for his use and control, with rigid moral commands and heroic ideals giving proper structure and direction to his actions and acting as some kind of cosmic measure of his ‘greatness’ then a novel that removes man from his throne, casts doubt on any sort of meaning other than what man creates for himself and shows that the heroic ideal is, after all, an ideal will appear unsatisfactory. But if you don’t have those expectations in the first place…

Finally,

Cormac McCarthy is a great name to bring up in this connection. I don’t know if you’re familiar with his work in general. Some would call him a nihilist - I think that is a mistake. You should not confuse a writer with his characters. What Cormac McCarthy does, and his novel Blood Meridian is a great example of this, is issue challenges. He portrays man as man is (with characters such as Chigurh in No Country, or Judge Holden in Blood Meridian providing much of the description) and leaves you to sort out what, if anything, it is all about. How else to interpret what he does in No Country for Old Men; ostensibly the point is that the world is going to hell in a handcart and things didn’t used to be that way (what with young people having no manners and doing drugs), but this point is undercut in various places with indications that, actually, things weren’t so great in the old days either. Again, this is a challenge - was the country ever for old men in the first place?

As a last word: Moby Dick hasn’t been forgotten, and I don’t see much difference between it and a (meaningless) 20th century novel. So why should 20th century literature be any different?

Rainey, this was a great essay. I wrote a lengthy reply but forgot to copy it and lost it (the essay, not my sanity … then again). I’ll try the abbreviated version.

Impenitent and Faust raised some good points on this subject.

I believe this trend is going to continue as a passing of the guard. The organism is evolving. This is more evident with internet access. These very forums make a great example. Someone posts their piece of literature, people read it, some like it, some love it, some comment on it, the author gets instant feed back, additions or subtrations are made, and sometimes meaning is found in this microcosm. Had Kant had internet access in his day, I believe some problems might have been resolved. It’s a great tool for revaluing literature, this technology. Of course that does kill a little romanticism and the nostalgia that comes with it, but here we are. Can’t wait to see what happens down the road when the dust settles, if the dust settles.

Yes, “good” is a relative term, Faust, and I wouldn’t argue that timelessness alone should be the standard, any more than one could argue that reflecting the real world ought to be the standard. But the latter is especially problematic, I think. What exactly the “real world” is is up for grabs. It’s interesting to consider that in many respects the world was a far more dangerous, depressing place in the time of the romantics. But what did they choose to see and what did they choose to reflect? Our reflections come, I would submit, from our own presuppositions and worldviews. One dominant worldview exists now in the literary arts. It won’t forever, and, for good or for bad, I doubt its reflections will be sought after by those who come after it.

Thank you, IrvingWashington, for your thoughtful post and your words of defense. I should say upfront, as an aside, that I am not necessarily attacking 20th century literature in any other way than in a macro way, in the aggregate, as an overall trend. There are pieces that, taken individually, are absolutely amazing. Joyce, Faulkner, Steinbeck…these guys were geniuses, and it would take a fool to argue otherwise.

I wouldn’t presume that the arguments against meaning will be “conclusively refuted.” (One does wonder, though, given the mind-set of our times, what exactly can be meant by current ideas being considered “correct”.) I would only say that if history teaches us anything, it is that the pendulum swings back. No matter where it swings to, it always swings back. I’ll leave it to the philosophers to decide if “the grand concept of meaning” is justified. I happen to think it is. But either way, my suspicion is that the human race will be able to tolerate meaninglessness only so long. After all, “intellectually bankrupt ideas” is a pretty subjective concept, it seems to me, and one that can apply both ways

As for Moby Dick, my understanding is that its relevance, and ensuing popularity, didn’t become truly manifest until the early 20th century, at the beginning of the modernist movement, as a matter of fact. Perhaps Melville anticipated modernism, I don’t know. But the novel was received better years after it was published. Absent modernism, it might very well have been left forgotten. In other words, like you, I don’t see any difference between it and a 20th century novel, either.

Me too, san. The internet, as you mention, is definitely a factor. But the end result might be the same, just speeded up a bit. And so the dust will settle. But it probably won’t stay settled for long.

I meant that people don’t read (and intently study “the classics”) anymore

you are correct… not long ago the only thing that was printed were bibles and the only ones who could read them were monks… the literacy rate thing is a red herring, just because you have the ability to read doesn’t mean you spend hours sitting and reading (and studying as in school) a book (most people don’t have that luxury of time)… housewives and romance paperbacks on the other hand…

newspapers and magazines are not literature

-Imp

WHAT? Newspapers and magazines not Literature? I will not sit here and listen to this. I’ll look to my Mad magazine for consolation.

So, I’m confused. What’s the difference between a book and great piece of literature? One is harder to understand at first?

Kafka, Bernhard, Beckett, Camus, Kazantzakis, etc, are disposable???

Here’s a thing: clearly, pre-20th century literature has not been forgotten. Clearly, the prevailing world-view has changed since those times. But this hasn’t led to a rejection of older literature not reflecting the current view. Now, if in the future the prevailing view is to change (I assume this would be required, by the terms of your argument, for ‘modern’ literature to be forgotten - why would the world forget works that reflected its prevailing concerns) the claim must be that this will lead to a rejection/forgetting of 20th century lit. I think we also need to accept that whatever the ‘next’ world-view is going to be, its not going to be a wholesale re-acceptance of old orthodoxy. Whatever it shall be, it will be a development from the current, and previous, views. It is only when you take a broad overview that shifts in overall views appear sudden; in actual fact, they have always been gradual processes. Given this, the literature of now, and the world-view represented in it, will be as relevant to our putative new world-view as the work of Shakespeare is to us now. To deny this is to hold that, against all the evidence of history, the next change in ‘cultural momentum’ will be a purely retrograde reversion to previous dogmas.

I don’t know what my point was with Moby Dick, you are of course entirely correct in that it was only seen as a masterpiece decades after it was published. And, indeed, critics of the time, while admiring of its use of language, really did not ‘get it’.

But this is my general point: Cultural shifts are created by individuals produced in a society in a large part shaped by the influences most prevalent in that society. Whoever it is (as a part of a larger group) that affects a change in that culture will be equally influenced by what has shaped him whether they accept or reject the prevailing views of that culture. In a sentence, 20th century literature will not be forgotten because it will have shaped what will replace it.

Again, is this true? Lets get things concrete. In what era were the classics more widely read? It is oh so easy to talk in crude generalities in order to make this kind of point about society. Show me some evidence and I’ll shut up.

You make a good point about gradual processes in shifts of overall view. And certainly, in literature, there are influences that carry through the years. There is a connection of sorts, a kind of blending and running together and, interestingly, one can even say the influences run both directions. T. S. Eliot made an eloquent argument for this when he wrote, “What happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it.” This is interesting to contemplate. And so, yes, I would say that the next prevailing worldview will be influenced, at least somewhat, by the current one.

And yet, I’m not sure that means today’s literature will necessarily resonate. I can see it being studied in an historical way. But outside of the stuffy halls of academia, will it resonate with the general culture? I have this vision of university students sitting around reading our stuff for historical purposes and saying, “God, those people were depressing.” I mean, look, the Bible is still the best-selling book each year. People still read Paradise Lost, and Romeo and Juliet, and Doctor Faustus, and Utopia, and Gulliver’s Travels, and Les Miserables, and Great Expectations, and Huckleberry Finn, and the poetry of Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson. And they do so not necessarily as a way to study past culture, but because the works have meaning in and of themselves. They resonate still to this day. And this is where the timelessness comes in. Now, I would argue that these works are even more important today because there is nothing like them – nothing with the same kind of meaning, nothing with the same kind of large ideas these works dealt in – in today’s body of literature. All of which indicates to me that our culture, in general terms, is much more interested in meaning than the culture that pervades the academic intelligentsia. But it’s the academic intelligentsia that calls the shots.

But it is the meaning that these works offer that I would suggest gives us your reason as to why they have not been forgotten. (And why today’s works stand a fair chance of being forgotten.) Maybe you’re right and there won’t be any sudden shift to “previous dogmas.” Maybe it will be a more tempered kind of thing, influenced by today’s more nihilistic approach to things. But the interest in meaning certainly seems to be there. My suspicion is that it has always been there. And I just don’t see it being served adequately by today’s postmodernism. Something’s gotta give.

Thankyou for your thought provoking essay rainey.

However…

I disagree with you that 20th century literature is only a footnote to what has gone before. To think this is to miss the overall picture, one in which Western art and science are moving irresistibly closer together (the former, though, closer to the latter).

The animal side of our nature is attracted to the plays and literature of earlier European writers, since what contains meaning is comforting to our minds, fulfilling our imaginary ideals concerning how the world works and comforting our childish emotions.

The cerebral literature of the 20th century is far more cold and challenging, just like the world itself. It reflects far more accurately the real universe discovered by our sciences, shorn of the idealism and romanticism of earlier European generations.

Hi Leander.

Well, this may be the real bone of contention at the bottom of any discussion of what 20th century literature will mean in the long term. I suppose one’s prediction on the matter may come from one’s own presuppositions and one’s own worldview. I, for example, don’t see a lot of the ideals of our literary forefathers being “imaginary”, nor their emotions “childish.” Nor do I see science as being able to adequately reveal “the real universe.” I’m not entirely sure what “real universe” means, truth be told. There are many questions that remain open that belong more in the domain of the philosophers than the scientists, and lend themselves as always to the interpretations of the artists and the poets. But regardless, the facts seem to be that many people see meaning where others do not. Those who do not have run roughshod over literature in the 20th century, particularly the last half of it and on into today. There is nothing that says they will always do so. It would be very surprising to me, in fact, if they did.

Your Eliot quote, by the way, is from the same essay – Tradition and the Individual Talent – from which I quoted Eliot in an above post, and the same essay I’ve quoted from in my sig. Eliot’s interest is not in ridding oneself of one’s emotion or personality, but rather to step outside of the emotion so as to capture it - in art - in a more objective, more impersonal way, to scrutinize it, in a sense, so as to better illuminate it, and get a better grip on it. To look at it in a more universal, human way; he felt this was the duty of a poet. He was analogizing the process to science, not proposing that art become as, or give way to, science.

Whether something ‘resonates’ or not is an entirely personal matter and it would be fruitless to debate whether a work will resonate with future generations.

I wonder what allows you to make the claim that 20th century literature is without meaning? Sure, there is the thought that meaning isn’t something that is given to us from above, or part of the fabric of the word, but is to be given to the world by us. Let’s take an example of a writer whose work I greatly admire, Cormac McCarthy. Lets take his ‘The Road’ as a case in point. This is a book about a man and his son struggling through a post-apocalyptic wasteland. We aren’t told what caused it, just that it is. We know that the struggle is, in all probability, hopeless. This landscape is barren and ridden with cannibalistic tribes that imprison humans in cages to keep a steady food supply. There is no suggestion of any ‘ultimate redemption’ for mankind, no indication that mankind will come and work together to build a new world, better than the one before. No, the only meaning to be found in this desert is in the relationship between the father and son. He cares for his boy, he tries to instill in him a sense of moral value (though only such a sense as appropriate to the situation they find themselves in where self-preservation is the priority). Ultimately, he dies but manages to deliver his son into the hands of a group of fellow travellers. His son survives, into a future that is still uncertain, but in the knowledge that in this seemingly meaningless and desolate landscape there is meaning to be created in the relationships that we form with others. To see this novel as embodying the view that everything is, more or less, meaningless is to ignore the entire purpose of the book. If everything where meaningless, why bother struggling in the first place?

I think, also, that one can read too much into society at large by giving undue attention to particular strands in modern thought. I think that what most ‘intellectuals’ would accept is the view that meaning is something to be created rather than to be found. This is not equivalent to the view that there is no meaning to be found in the world. For sure, for a person of a certain temperament the former may collapse into the latter. But is it not, in actual fact, liberating to hold that, ultimately, the world is what we make it to be, for good or ill?

Put it this way: Dostoyevsky reacted so violently against the idea that without God everything is permitted that he embraced orthodox Christianity and conservative politics. He was a person of a ‘certain temperament’. Nietzsche, on the other hand, positively advocated the view that we create our own meaning as being life-affirming. Someone like Kafka, or maybe Camus, couldn’t get past the absurdity of a life without pre-defined meaning. Then you have someone like Steinbeck, who saw meaning and a certain beauty in the lives of drunken bums on Cannery Row. Different people, different temperaments, different reactions.

When we view 20th century literature as an attempt to forge meaning in this confusing and transient world we start to appreciate that there are other types of beauty than the obvious.

Well I’m not going to try to define meaning for others. If finding meaning means creating it rather than discovering it, that’s up to the individual in question. And not having read The Road, I will take you at your word that there is meaning within its pages. But I would argue this is the exception to 20th century literature, especially today’s postmodern literature, rather than the rule. Most of what I see is fiction (and poetry) about, really, nothing at all. I am reminded of Gertrude Stein’s famous description of Oakland, California: “There’s no ‘there’ there.” And I’m having trouble believing that meaning can be found in “nothing.” What we’re seeing time and again are slice-of-life stories of people leading bleak lives. Now, that might provide a good start to a story, but in today’s literary world, this is typically also acting as the middle and the end.

Here, let’s do an experiment. I’m going to reach over beside my desk to a stack of recent New Yorkers that I’m keeping around basically because I’m too lazy to toss them out. I’ll pull one out entirely at random and let’s have a look at the issue’s short story. The New Yorker, after all, seems a pretty good gauge of what today’s fiction is all about. Typically they feature a well-respected author who’s not overly mainstream, somebody you can take seriously in other words.

Okay, I’ve grabbed the issue from June 30, 2008. This issue’s short story is entitled “Deep-Holes” and it’s written by Alice Munro. Now, Munro is a highly respected writer today. Probably you’ve heard of her. If not, you can read her bio here: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice_Munro. She’s won awards. “One of our greatest contemporary writers of fiction…Our Chekhov.”

I read this story when it first came out, but now I have to read it again, mainly because the issue date was June 30, and I am guessing if I read it on that date, I probably forgot it by July 1st. Yes, now I remember (as I skim back over it). This is your perfect example of today’s fiction. It’s a slice-of-life piece. We are introduced to a basically dysfunctional family, first at a picnic when the kids are young and one breaks both legs, and then we follow them (especially the one son) as they make their way through life. The son becomes estranged from his family and, yadda, yadda, yadda, ends up homeless in Toronto. And that’s the way it ends.

Don’t look now but I think I already forgot it again.

Okay, now, let me pull off of my shelf a collection of short stories from before the days of postmodern nihilism and pick something totally at random. Okay, I’ve got the book…now, let me just flip the pages and I will stick my finger in a completely random place. Aha! “The Cask of Amontillado” by Edgar Allen Poe (1846). “The thousand injuries of Fortunato I had borne as I best could, but when he ventured upon insult, I vowed revenge.” Yes, I certainly remember this one. How could anybody forget it? A story about revenge, about pride, told in an extremely compelling manner. THIS is a story about something, by God.

Can you see my problem? (And don’t even get me started on the state of poetry today.) Now, I’m not saying Munro’s brand of realism, or modernism, or postmodernism, or whatever we want to call it, isn’t any good. But am I to seriously believe that anybody (outside of some history of obscure literature class) will be reading her in 100 years, let alone 200 or 300? Cripes, will anybody be reading her in five? And it’s not just her. I appreciate your comments on McCarthy. But overall, from where I sit, pretty much everybody today seems to be Alice Munro.

Rainey - Have you ever read Horace? The greek Horace.

He did “slice of life” stuff. Very contemporary - to his time.

He’s not read much, but he’s still read.

Well let me differentiate between slice of life stuff about nothing, and slice of life stuff about something. I’m not criticizing slice of life stuff per se, just the former type of it. Horace’s Odes, for example, were about things, contemporary things, yes, and often drawn from daily life. But even still, they often dealt with philosophy, theology, and a multitude of things concerning the human condition. Not only that, they were beautiful, and a pleasure to read. If you’re going to write boring stuff about nothing, at least dress it up and give it some kind of style. Make it a decent reading experience. The postmodernists can’t even get that right.

I’ll grant that about post-modernists. But I won’t grant that all 20th-century writers are postmodernists.