It’s a view held by many: we are, as a country, quite frankly getting dimmer; one of the victims of this is modern literature – great novels have passed their heyday and literature is all downhill from here. Are the pessimists right and we really have stopped creating, or appreciating, superlative works? Looking to the Amazon bestsellers list, there are indeed a fair few trashy novels there, including Jilly Cooper’s latest. Also at the top, are books perhaps more famous for the films made of them (and the celebrities who act in them) than for their literary worth: take Harry Potter or Eat, Pray, Love. In the nineteenth century, Dickens was so enjoyed by the masses that hundreds would queue up for his latest; now we queue for Twilight.
Seeing the matter in this way of course skews the reality. Dickens was hugely popular in his day; he is also now considered to have been a master. Yet there were a good number of other novelists who too were popular and who now are thought to be not worth remembering. Sensational fiction and melodrama was loved by readers back then too – it wasn’t all Hardy, Dickens and Eliot. In fact, alongside all the movements which have innovated literature – be it Romanticism, Realism or Modernism – there are also those works – many, many of them – which have simply been enjoyed at the time. And yet we tend to forget the trashy novels of yesteryear and are all too conscious and critical of our own.
Another worry raised by the cynics is whether the “great” of today are equal to the “great” of before: are books becoming less sophisticated than before? Are they easier to understand now? Is even the best contemporary literature nothing more than a dumbed-down version of what preceded it? To generalise for a second: the often long and descriptive, often complex and heavily populated plots of the Victorian writers clearly required dedication from their readers. Modernism made readers think in an entirely different way, no longer demanding the commitment to follow a complicated plot, but rather that to accept a lack of plot, to accept, for example, a book which consists purely as a series of monologues, such as Woolf’s The Waves, or which contains long passages in different languages, as in Joyce’s Ulysses. Though there are still of course highly experimental works, perhaps most novels nowadays have moved away from either of these extremes, leaving a difficult question of where they fit into a literary canon, or even if they do at all.
Indeed, writers have often been driven by a fear that they aren’t able to make their mark and will always be in the shadow of their predecessors, and this certainly must be in the minds of contemporary writers as they struggle over the question of what will characterise their own era. Each style seems to have been perfected already. Following the poetic tragedies of Shakespeare, the striking realism of George Eliot, or the experimentalism of T.S Eliot – to pick but a few – is a tall order. The question hangs over post-modernism: how to be new after has been done before? Once all the rules have been broken, as they most certainly were by Joyce et al, where is there to go? Post-modernists can hardly go much further than the modernists themselves – books have already been written with no regular syntax, without the letter “e”, with made-up words – and yet the task of rebuilding literary conventions after everything had been swept away is no easier. Modernism went so far as to question the purpose of literature itself. It’s a rather unenviable job which falls upon the writers of our generation to reconstruct something from that.
And yet the finest writers of today are certainly (and not unsuccessfully) taking on that challenge. Whilst it seems wrong to class such vastly different writers as Faulks, McEwan, Ishiguru and Rushdie in the same breath, a point can be made about all such modern writers: even if ostensibly they are perhaps more easily read than some of their predecessors, this does not mean they are more easily understood. Their novels are neither simple in plot nor in style and certainly not in their implications. They seem to have grown out of the dialectic between following strict traditions and the throwing of any linguistic or literary rules out of the window; contemporary novels are seemingly liberated from the conventions which pervaded literature in one form or another for centuries and yet they are also aware that too far down the road of literary liberty can lie incomprehension. They are, so-to-speak, a fusion of what has gone before, rather than a failure to achieve the literary heights of their ancestors.
So let’s not underestimate what modern literature has to offer. And as for trashy reads – not all literature needs to be great. It never has been so. There will always be Hardys or Joyces or Rushdies and there will equally always be Coopers and Meyers and also a whole range in between. Maybe that’s how it should be: you can’t spend your entire life meditating on the meaning of existence. Sometimes stories of a boy with a magic scar or of vegetarian vampires can be a welcome, and necessary, light relief.
