The End of the End

Linton Weeks wrote an interesting article this week, The Populist Manifesto, about the tension between so-called high literature and pop fiction (as embodied in the speeches of Stephen King and Shirley Hazzard at the National Book Awards). The notion that always surprises me about these articles is the "apocalypse of culture" tone. The sentiments like, "My society is going to be the one in which great novels die" or "My generation marks the end of the English language" or even "Where have all the good authors gone?" are, to me, a supreme form of egoism. But at the end of the article, the author does take note of similar historical patterns of contemporary popularity versus greatness in literature, almost seeming to nod toward the old cliche that the more things change, the more they stay the same. Still, given his concluding quote, you have to think he really believes that our time is different - our time, more than any other time, has buried the magnificence of writing under best seller lists and sales, and that magnificence is never to be regained.

While one might get away with cries of doomsday when speaking about rogue nations with nukes or the state of our global environment, our culture is fairly safe from some sort of middle-brow devastation. If anything, one might say that given the plethora of fiction, movies, novels, poems, paintings, and so on, the real loser is not the arts parton or society in general, but the artist, who must have not just talent, but also luck, business savvy, connections, and so on. The question remains, even in this case, has it ever been different? Velasquez struggled his entire career to be recognized by the court, no doubt because there were plenty of guys out there who would and could paint the little Spanish princess (rather than toil in the fields or serve in the army). Surely there are thousands of most excellent novels and cultural whatnot rotting in basements or steamer trunks because their creators never could get their feet in the doors of agents, or the works came out the same years as others by the same titles.

At the end of reading these kinds of articles, I always come to the same conclusion - that life is mostly unfair to individual artists, but that society as a whole does not appear to suffer unduly from this unfairness. From a macrosocial vantage point, more is more. We have more mediocre or pulpy books perhaps, as we have more people, more readers, and many more authors than we have ever had (in many more languages). If pulpy books start to win prestigious literary awards, then the literariti will no longer consider those awards significant and will turn to other awards to help them filter out their likes from dislikes. Even if there were no awards for remarkable writing, this could hardly signal the end of remarkable writing, only the end of awards as a good device for cherry picking - a scenario that, although difficult to imagine (since the plethora of awards is nearly as large as the plethora of human activity), is not entirely unpleasant.