/lit/ - Literature

>For me, the last few years of the postmodern era have seemed a bit like the way you feel when you’re in high school and your parents go on a trip, and you throw a party. You get all your friends over and throw this wild disgusting fabulous party. For a while it’s great, free and freeing, parental authority gone and overthrown, a cat’s-away-let’s-play Dionysian revel. But then time passes and the party gets louder and louder, and you run out of drugs, and nobody’s got any money for more drugs, and things get broken and spilled, and there’s a cigarette burn on the couch, and you’re the host and it’s your house too, and you gradually start wishing your parents would come back and restore some fucking order in your house. It’s not a perfect analogy, but the sense I get of my generation of writers and intellectuals or whatever is that it’s 3:00 A.M. and the couch has several burn-holes and somebody’s thrown up in the umbrella stand and we’re wishing the revel would end. The postmodern founders’ patricidal work was great, but patricide produces orphans, and no amount of revelry can make up for the fact that writers my age have been literary orphans throughout our formative years. We’re kind of wishing some parents would come back. And of course we’re uneasy about the fact that we wish they’d come back–I mean, what’s wrong with us? Are we total pussies? Is there something about authority and limits we actually need? And then the uneasiest feeling of all, as we start gradually to realize that parents in fact aren’t ever coming back–which means “we’re” going to have to be the parents.

You could read more Hesse, Orwell, Lewis, Nietzsche.

I (often) find novels built entirely around proving an epistemological ethos to be nauseatingly condescending and poorly written. I think when the auhor hints at her paradigm or shows great truths of the world without a tackle-kit of her approaches to dealing with them makes better books. My rationale behind this opinion is that showing the world (rather through obvious scenarios or the fantastic: either can do the trick) without the filters of philosophy, or with a more subdued filter of intent, tends to maximize the chances of having a good story. Doing this goes a lot farther- people after reading these books will have no trouble using them as tools to help further their philosophical inquiry.

If you're feeling unformed or desiring a stronger philosophical backbone for dealing with the world go straight for philosophy itself- You deserve to deal with the issues of existence head-on, without candy-coating. You can agree with the choices a character in a novel makes; but why not think more about why you agree with them?