/lit/ - Literature

In what Henry Miller presciently called “the air-conditioned nightmare” of much of modern American and European life, it’s tough to really get a store of interesting life experiences that might help one write, say, a moving novel, or create very profound characters, or have something very interesting to say. One has to be something a notch above the average “Last Man” of today (per Nietzsche) to have interesting thoughts and emotions, or life-experiences, worth conveying through art.

Ironically, it’s probably some “genre fiction” fields, or mining the tropes thereof, like sci-fi, for instance, that might rejuvenate the novel. Guys like Philip K. Dick, for example. Or historical fiction (like McCarthy, Pynchon, Ian McEwan, etc.) Or verging into surrealism, “magical fiction,” fantasy, and the like (like Kafka, Borges, Marquez, Pynchon again, Bolano, Ishiguro, Wallace, etc.). What else, on average, do many who plausibly CAN be great writers (with the requisite degree of socioeconomic comfortability and literacy to do so) have besides this to write of today that’s interesting, unless it’s diversity-hire novels, short stories and/or mediocre free-verse poetry about being a lesbian emigré from the Caribbean (a sort of redo of how Soviet realism made for mediocre artists, but now instead in a “Woke” hypercapitalist society), or some attempt to redo a Flaubert/Joyce/Proust (with a fundamentally realist attitude, that is, but focusing on beauty of style and psychological depth to raise it to the level art) about the modern suburban experience of life?

(And, as the turgidity of a book like Gass’s “The Tunnel” proves, it’s now too easy to go so far with the latter, if one is a super-brainy well-read academic type, that it becomes too off-putting for much of the populace and not really that inspiring. The hangover of modernist and postmodernist literature, basically, which glorified difficulty, complexity, trickiness and flashiness for their own sakes.)

Kacyznski was right about too many things, sadly.

And don’t forget the famous quote of old Frederick Taylor Gates, advisor to the more well-known John D. Rockefeller who worked with him on creating the General Education Board, a massive founding influence on modern standardized public education!

>In our dream, we have limitless resources and the people yield themselves with perfect docility to our molding hand. The present educational conventions fade from their minds; and, unhampered by tradition, we work our own good will upon a grateful and responsive rural folk. We shall not try to make these people or any of their children into philosophers or men of learning, or men of science. We have not to raise up from among them authors, editors, poets or men of letters. We shall not search for embryo great artists, painters, musicians nor lawyers, doctors, preachers, politicians, statesmen, of whom we have an ample supply…