The End of Literature

[Liam]

Whether you agree or disagree, this is one amazing essay! The author is probably the thousandth to declare that Literature (note the cap!) is dead, but he does so musingly and, I think, convincingly.

Lars Iyer: Nude in your hot tub, facing the abyss (A literary manifesto after the end of Literature and Manifestos)

This, I thought, was a great line: "Whereas Kafka was born too late for religion, we are all born too late for Literature."

[Hamlet]

Very interesting Liam. It's a fascinating and disturbing topic. You always hear the old lament, "The novel is dead!" time and again, and then DeLillo writes Underworld and the critics rave, 'the novel, the only art form capable of expressing so much...'

I only skimmed the article, but he seemed to suggest that there's nothing to resist any longer, I can't quite see that, we have quite a few wars going on, and injustice seems as prevalent as ever.

Literacy, and the quantity of books published. We are probably reading more than ever, yes, but in the past weren't more people illiterate, and so unable to read those great works... and now, not everybody reads them either, I'll hazard a guess and say most people don't read Kafka, and hardly any read Joyce.

I'll have to read through it again, as I didn't have time.

[Galatea92]

I'm not so impressed, Liam. It just seems like another romantic/nihilist english lit student pose. It's written like an english lit essay, and it's published in a magazine of english lit essays - an english lit student talking to english lit students.

It's all based on the unfounded premise that great literature arises only out of resistance to the status quo. It hasn't been true for most of the past 5,000 years (it isn't true of Greek tragedy or of Shakespeare, for example), and it only has a smidgeon of truth during the hundred years from 1830 to 1930, which is the period he's looking back on as his golden age.

The present is always complex, always incomprehensible, always in the process of becoming something out of reach. It's much easier to have faith in the tidied up, unchallenging past.

[Ramblingsid]

I have to say that I found myself a little put off by his style. A little florid and I had a sense he was convincing himself by showing off his extensive knowledge etc etc. A bit of a poser? Intuititively I thought he was talking nonsense but I wouldn't be able to defend that opinion at all. To be honest I dont feel inclined to either - I follow my nose and read what I read. Literature isnt dead its just that there is a great deal of dross around these days - more than ever before - and it is more difficult for lit crit types to sort the wheat from the chaff - why they bother at all I don't know as time will do it for them.

[Liam]

I guess none of you has a PhD in literature, because this is standard practice, .

The essay is playfully self-referential, and in fact does precisely what it accuses post-modern literature of being and doing.

I don't think the author says anywhere that literature is dead. What he does say, is that Literature is dead--as we knew it before the 1960s.

Like when we say that God is dead, obviously we don't really MEAN that, since huge segments of the earth's population still believe in God, quite truthfully and sincerely; but the fact is, we simply can't look at religion the way our ancestors looked at religion before existential philosophy came along and shook that notion.

I think the author makes an excellent point in suggesting that writers today are celebrities rather than thinkers, businessmen rather than philosophers.

So to repeat, literature is not dead, but Literature is.

[Eric]

I side with Galatea on this one. Why does the spooneristic Lars Iyer spend 5,000 words name-dropping and waffling? He's simply selecting a few authors he wants to write about (e.g. Vila-Mata, Bolaño) and demonstrating that they prove that literature isn't dead - in as long-winded and self-indulgent way as possible.

This is the kind of over-long article that sophomores (to use an Americanism) love to read, imagining they are reading something of desperate profundity. It will be forgotten in a month, when someone else comes up with a similar load of generalisations based on a few authors he'd like to tell us about. It reminds me of too many such essays or articles in the LRB, NYRB, TLS, etc., which are written for a rather closed academic audience of novel-examiners and dissecters.

While they still sell books in shops or online, for paper readers or Kindle, there will still be enough things to debate about in the field of literature. These debates about the death of a particular genre seem to be artificial and forced.

[Liam]

You do miss the point in a delightful way, you adorable creature, .

I think the name-dropping (in the essay) is simply replicating the systems of writing that Post-modernism has introduced and popularized in contemporary literature. Think Eco, think Zizek.

[Eric]

The point is that whether this spooneristic Arse Liar is right or wrong, he is too long-winded and waffly. He could have cut his flow down to half the number of words.

[Eric]

As for postmodernism, there are the visual and narrative tricks, the hiatuses, non-sequiturs, and so on, but not all postmodernist novels are nihilist and deadly serious. All three of the Estonian ones I have translated had a certain political commitment (to common sense rather to communo-fascism). And humour.

The first one, Mati Unt's "Things in the Night" was the least political, but its leitmotifs included the dreary Soviet life lived in the suburbs of cities. This one was probably the nearest to the no-values postmodernism that people complain about.

The second, Mati Unt's "Brecht at Night", immediately leaps into the politics of synchronicity (at-the-same-time-ishness) when, while "committed" communist and charismatic womaniser is living in Finnish exile, after (quite understandably as he was Jewish) fleeing the Hitler régime, with his three (!) women, Estonia is being occupied by Soviet troops. The book is set in the year 1940 and is based on real life, with some twists and exaggerations perhaps in the case of Bertolt Brecht's life. But Brecht is hardly thinking of joining the Russian communist revolution. He is planning to flee to America via the Trans-Siberian railway. The true list of Estonian ministers and members of parliament who were literally sent to Siberia was, ironically enough, compiled by an ex-KGB agent, plus descriptions of the takeover by Russia, bring a dimension of seriousness to an otherwise wacky novel.

The third novel is Toomas Vint's "An Unending Landscape" (will be published in August), where a complex and repeated intertextual structure also houses a critique of what is sometimes termed "Green fascism", brought to Estonia by exile Estonians. After years of Russian communism, the Estonians who did not go into exile were, in the 1990s, rather naïvely positive about anything coming from the West. Another aspect of the satire is making fun of the pretentious confidence trickery of modern installation art.

So postmodernism is a style; postmodernist novels need not be apolitical and mere exercises in empty clever-dick narration. They can be committed to sanity.