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?