A Past Beyond Consideration

English literature has a reputation for being, well, somewhat stuffy, if you will. The subject comes up, and students groan; the last thing they want to read is more Percy Bysshe Shelley, or yet another piece by Tennyson. And The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, that’s a bore. The excitement that wells up from being told we’re going to be reading Frankenstein quickly dies when we realize he’s not the hulking brute Boris Karloff popularized for all those Universal monster movies. No, Mary Shelley’s book is dense and talky, more philosophical essay than thriller.

If that’s how we’re looking at literature in general, it’s no wonder that the modernist period, perhaps the most exciting and energetic time in English literature, has been brushed off and dismissed so thoughtlessly by so many. Everyone knows the names involved – Joyce, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Yeats – but few give them a second thought, let alone attempt to give their work some time. The mighty throngs of casual readers might think their poetry of the same cut as Keats, their prose as stilted as Defoe or Aphra Behn. When it’s all in the past, isn’t it equally irrelevant?

Well, no. Which points to our culture’s terminal illness: finding the past beyond consideration.

Maybe it’s the distance of the years, the eight decades between today and the height of the Modernist movement, or the fact that The Great Gatsby ends up being tied to the back of tenth graders the nation over, but this writing has been declared functionally irrelevant. Whereas once Yeats’ poems could start riots, now they are clever little rhymes to teach the bored, and where Hugh MacDiarmid’s poetry sparked a great Scots linguistic revival, it’s all now peacefully slumbering in used bookstores. I find this reprehensible. I have always believed in the strength and beauty of the English language, but the modern failure to teach it well threatens to obscure our past.

Don’t get me wrong. There is absolutely nothing wrong with easy reading. For every Ulysses, we need a Da Vinci Code to give us a break. Light, casual books are as necessary as the Sisyphean struggle to write the best novel, and even these fairly simply-constructed books can sometimes contain great insight; I need point no further than the strange fact that Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game has become a modern classic, despite its simple prose. It’s by no means a hard book, and that’s one of its virtues. But the question is whether or not these books are all we need, and unfortunately, the answer has consistently been “yes.”

When people proclaim the death of the novel as a genre, they don’t mean that people will stop writing book-length prose fiction as much as they mean that book-length prose fiction has become tired and dull. People aren’t trying to write well anymore as much as they’re trying to write to sell. Such a mess of infinitives aside, it’s true, and it’s mostly due to a cultural backlash against our own literary past, and that’s tragic.

I am a lover of the English language. I’m a fan. It’s a fun little tool we have, and it lends itself well to games and experimentation. And in the early part of the twentieth century, writers everywhere suddenly realized this. Perhaps it was the influence of the drift of the visual arts from strict representation – why paint photorealistic art when there are cameras around? – but writers became concerned with writing as a thing in itself. These years were terribly exciting, with every convention being questioned, every genre exposed, every tradition overturned. When I first learned this in Dr. Fine’s “American Writers in Paris” a few years back, I was shocked, awed, left gasping for breath. This was audaciously experimental stuff that excited me in a way literature hadn’t before. Perhaps it’s because my experience of reading had mostly been confined to science fiction, Shakespeare, spiritual writing (a mysticism I wasn’t supposed to understand anyway) and those drab, socially-conscious novels high schools foist upon their students, the idea that prose and poetry were dynamic and experimental media struck me. Something about “Easter 1916″ fell stronger at my feet than “Ode to a Grecian Urn” and the studiously bland 19th century poetry.

This was writing that was supposed to accomplish something, be it something manifest or something spiritual, and I poured through it with vigor and enthusiasm hoping to grasp some sight of it. I read Gertrude Stein’s nonsense poems because, even though they didn’t say anything at all, they were beautiful. She danced with sound in a wicked waltz, let it drift and flow, because for Stein, sound was the surest, most basic element of spoken language, and what good is the most precise essay or manifesto if it wasn’t simply and surely beautiful? “Sweet sweet sweet sweet sweet tea / Susie Asado…” Nonsense of the highest order, true, but insightful for what it has to say in its very structure. I can’t help but compare her to Piet Mondrian, a Dutch painter who maid simple portraits of grid and color. Both reduced their task to its basics: writing is sound, painting is form.

And ee cummings in “r-p-o-p-h-e-s-s-a-g-r” – he’s realized that all of writing is just marks on paper, and proceeds to mark up his paper with the letters of the word “grasshopper.” This is strange, almost foreign, totally divorced from how we’ve been trained to think about poetry as something rhyming, rhythmic, and almost intentionally dull. We expect poetry to be rich, sumptuous to the point of vomit. I’d been ruined by Shelley. I’d been spoiled by Shakespeare.

I’ve always thought that these Modernist freaks, they were the rebels, this was countercultural. To my culture, our culture, a culture obsessed with rebellion, that can’t get over the Sixties, these guys should be absolutely riveting. They were druggies and drunks, mystics and madmen; hell, Harry Crosby worshipped the sun, and killed himself because it seemed the artistic thing to do. They formed feminist communes. They were sexual revolutionaries, with openly lesbian writer couples such as H.D. and Bryher, Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas. Without them, the “revolution” of the Sixties could never have happened. But we don’t remember them, because we have forgotten our past, just as much as we’re obsessed with it. We can’t escape our own history, but we’ve forgotten how to remember things that didn’t happen to us. When our parents die, the Sixties die with them.

The failure to teach and know literature well is symptomatic of this. For all of its emphasis on historical context, it lacked any sense of the excitement of the time, the chaos and realignment that all of this literature represented. I remember tenth grade, when we had to read The Great Gatsby, and all we wanted to do was complain. I skimmed the book myself, and, a thief in the night, seized the rest of the story off of SparkNotes to pass off as real reading. A lot of us did. It wasn’t that we were lazy or disrespectful, but – and this kept coming up – we didn’t really see what the point was. Instead of being taught about the strange and exciting things Fitzgerald and his ilk were doing to English prose, reinventing the way English fiction was written, covering new ground, capturing the chaos and confusion of the postwar world, all we learned was the same old trope about symbols.

Sixteen year-olds are not interested in densely symbolist work. Somehow, across the country, we decided that Modernist writing was everything it was trying not to be: obscure, dull, stolid, and traditional. In the eighty years between us, the past has ossified. Am I the only one who finds this absolutely tragic?

History has always been a great concern of mine. I remember thinking to myself, struggling to keep my mind occupied during my philosophy class as my professor barely spoke English and was subsequently incomprehensible, that this generation, our generation, is precariously and uniquely placed straddling two centuries, reared in one, bound for another, and that it should, at least, give us a certain perspective on the century into which we were born. They are both, after a fashion, ours, and we have a responsibility to both, especially to remember that culture is more than pop culture, that literature is more than The Devil Wears Prada, those easy chick-lit books that dominate bookshelves and are promptly forgotten within a few years, and that the past certainly has something to say to us. GK Chesterton says that democracy is flawed in limiting the franchise to those souls who merely happen to be walking about, but that tradition is the democracy of the dead, giving them a voice in our future, and ensuring us one, as well. But, culturally, we’ve failed at that, as well. The only past we remember is our own. The only legacy we respect is our own. Is it any wonder we think of pop culture as pretty much starting with the Beatles? And how long will it be until we forget the contributions of Lenny Bruce and Jimi Hendrix because they are no longer a part of our living memory?

I started out wanting to write a rousing choir of defense for modernism and the modernist novel, a ballad of love to the twisted things you can do with English and the necessity of fiction, a koan to Ulysses, and here I am writing their dirge and mourning the morning when memory fails, when we get up and do out daily chores without even realizing we’ve killed our past, poured in concrete by our own insistence on being in the present, and The Godfather has joined The Sheik on the sterile shelves of the Library of Congress. We’ve insisted our past was dull, obscurantist, a futile and empty existence untouched by modern enlightened ideas. Our parents, we believe, discovered love and sex, and rock music liberated us for both. Prior to the Sixties, we say, nobody questioned the government, and the fifties, our parents’ childhood, was nothing but gee-whiz leave it to beaver. But life has always been subversive. The Twenties gave us Tiajuana bibles, those cheap, dirty, sexy comic strips; they gave us Cab Calloway’s “Minnie the Moocher,” a wicked number about drugs and druggies; and they gave us the sexual frustration of Ernest Hemingway, the anti-war poetry of Siegfried Sassoon, the anarchy and creativity and sheer confusion. But all we remember was Calvin Coolidge and, somewhere deep in the storehouses of memory, is a vague recollection of the Teapot Dome scandal. We think they were all stuffy Victorians and Edwardians. So we’ve written them off. They were sexual and cultural libertines, philosophers and thinkers, anarchists, terrorists, communists, screenwriters, tabloid writers, and celebrities, protesting an unpopular war and lamenting a culture obsessed with materialism, or chanting the praises of wealth. Living in times so damned different, how can they possibly have anything to say to us?

Because we’re not like that at all, are we?