An essay from the late and not so great Willett's Magazine.
There’s a popular
literary game, which consists of predicting which writers will “endure”.
Whenever the waters of clickbait grow still and old, some webzine site will
stir it up by playing this old game, asking what names among today’s writers
will be counted in a hundred years. Heated arguments will break out: the
question of whether the works of Stephan King will be recognized one hundred
years from now as the greatest American fiction of our time will elicit heated
comments, and there will surely be much knocking of the elites.
Nobody seems to
predict that a writer that they don’t like will be recognized in one hundred
years. Nor does anybody ask about the institutions that preserve for posterity
the reputation of a writer. Instead, these predictions rely on a sort of
amorphous popular will, with powers beyond any dreamt up by Rousseau. The
general will will judge the quick and the dead. That’s the sense.
There are two issues
here, actually. One is that the posterity of a work is a form of credentialling
– that time awards a good quality seal to the lucky genius. Auden, beautifully,
captures this, in my opinion, specious idea:
Time, that is
intolerant
of the brave and innocent,
And indifferent in a week,
To a beautiful physique,
Worships language and forgives
Everyone by whom it lives;
Pardons cowardice, conceit,
Lays its honours at their feet.
Time that with this
strange excuse
Pardoned Kipling and his views,
And will pardon Paul Claudel,
Pardons him for writing well.
Auden, In Memory of
W.B.Yeats
Auden wrote that in
1939, and part of him knew that time and the Nazis were definitely not
pardoning those who lived by language, but condemning them: hence the aborted
careers of scores of poets, novelists, dramatists, essayists and the lot. Time
may well condemn to very long, or even perpetual, obscurity those writings that
have not stuck, in some way, to the usual institutions, or that emanated from
condemned ethnicities or genders.
The other issue is
projecting one’s own taste and time on the future. Here, we do have historical
evidence, although it is never used by any of those who play the game. It is as
if posterity hasn’t been there before us. But it has.
So, how should one go
about making predictions about the endurance of written work?
Over the long term, my
feeling is that the chance of a prediction being fulfilled, at least for the
reasons one says it will be fulfilled, is vanishingly small. Remember, for the
medievals, the important Latin poet after Virgil was Statius. Statius. Who even
recognizes the name? Ovid, Lucretius, or Catullus just weren’t in the running.
Lucretius did not have a very great posterity in the Roman world, and only came
into European culture, really, when a manuscript of the Nature of Things was
discovered in 1417 in Florence, according to Stephan Greenblatt. So over time,
posterity is swallowed up in such unexpected events that we can’t guess. We
need a more manageable time sequence to answer the question – we need
relatively short term posterity. There needs to be at least certain structures
that are generally continuous, as, for instance, an economic structure that is
generally the same over time, and a structure of religious belief that is also
coherent over time. Even so, there are unpredictable contingencies. The Library
of Alexandria burned; Franz Kafka’s manuscripts didn’t, despite his dying
request. So it goes. Statius, when all is said and done, had a good run – as
good as Shakespeare’s. He’s gone now: even the Loeb Classical library is not
all that enthusiastic about The Thebiad.
Given these
conditions, we can still see patterns in, say, the last three hundred years.
Starting in the 18th century, the literary nexus of publishers, the writers,
and the audience started to take a modern shape. Writers could come from
anywhere, but readers, and publishers, came mostly from the middle class. There
was certainly room for the working class and the upper class, but writers that
appealed to a working class audience had to eventually appeal to a middle class
audience to endure. Aleida Assmann wrote an essay about this for Representations
in 1996: Texts, Traces, Trash: The Changing Media of Cultural Memory . She
points out that the mythology of glory, which Burckhardt traces to Dante, and
the city state culture of Italy in the fourteenth century, was, for the writer,
shaped by the idea of a group who would preserve it, and upon this group was
projected contemporary attitudes: true posterity would consist of people like
the friends of the poet, gentle people, highborn, with swift minds. It was an
almost tactile sense of posterity, posterity with a face. The posterity of the
poem was the posterity of the people who read and understood the poem, the
educated audience. But in the eighteenth century, the semantic markers shifted.
Assman quotes Swift’s preface to the Tale of the Tub to show that the circle
was replaced by the seller — the face by the invisible hand, to be slightly
anachronistic about it.
One new factor in the
manufacture of posterity, in the twentieth century, has been the rise of
educational institutions as transmitters of literature in the vulgar tongue.
One has to take that into account, as well as the relatively rapid changes that
tend to traverse the academy, which is very much a product of capitalism and
has been, for the most part, absorbed in the mechanism of vocationalisation.
That mechanism, of course, makes sense once we factor in the costs of higher
education. In the Anglophone world, the bright Ph.D in English or Comparative
Lit might owe as much as 100,000 dollars in student debt, and faces an
absolutely pitiless job market. It is no exaggeration to say that the
humanities in the U.S. were assassinated by the regime of tuition hikes and the
withdrawal of public financing. Education for its own sake, culture for its own
sake, it is fair to say, is no longer the major part of the academic mission,
and when it is, its teachers feel a nagging guilt. This is because they are
betraying their best students – and they know it.
Another factor, one
whose effects are unknown – but that I think we can see in the reputation of
male writers from the 60s to the 80s – is the changing composition of who
counts in posterity. For the longest time, say, a couple thousand years, women
hardly counted at all. This fact has a well known bearing on the rarity of
women writers, given the institutions that actively worked to suppress women
writers. But it has an as yet unstudied effect, as well, on posterity, which
has always been in the hands of a massively male dominated circle. Virginia
Woolf asked about Shakespeare’s sister – we can ask about Virginia Woolf. Her
reputation was, in the hands of the masculinist opinion-makers, battered
as much as possible after her death. She was snobbish. She wasn’t serious. Or
her feminism wasn’t serious. Or her pacifism was disgusting. Or she was a
lesbian. In the sixties, Virginia Woolf’s stock was much, much below D.H.
Lawrence’s.
I think it is a sign
of the times that Lawrence’s posterity has taken a huge hit since then. If we
were to take a survey now among the literati, it would be a good bet that Woolf
would come out before Lawrence. This would have surprised the English critics
of the 1950s. F.R. Leavis, the editor of the enormously influential Scrutiny review,
campaigned hard against her, excluding her from the Great Tradition. For
Leavis, the great English novelist of the 20th century was clearly D.H.
Lawrence. The Leavisian antagonism against Woolf is shared by many of the
common sense English critics up to this day. As James Wood has observed, what
connects Leavis, John Bayley, and John Carey – all influential English literary
critics – was an abhorrence for all things Bloomsbury, and especially
Woolf. I’d add Christopher Ricks to that number. Frank Kermode, a literary
politician if ever there was one, caught something in the air in 1978 when he
wrote that Woolf seemed to be coming into her own again. And, in an
unconsciously sexist phrase, he gave away the side that opposed Woolf:
There are even
attempts to develop, from some of her remarks, a theory of androgyny, founded
in her reading of Coleridge; Roger Poole, sympathetic to feminism, nevertheless
makes some sturdy qualifications here, and one is glad of them, for a bass
voice strengthens the chorus.
Ah, those bass
voices….
Certainly she is
taught more than Lawrence in the U.S. In my own opinion, Woolf is a more
interesting writer than Lawrence, more of an artist: Lawrence would simply have
been incapable of the formal pleasures of To the Lighthouse or Jacob’s
Room. Woolf, as The Years shows, was perfectly capable of
the multi-generational epic so adored by the bluff and morally hearty school of
critics. However, I don’t know how to “rank” them against each other besides
making such observations. The need for the ranking exercise stems partly from
the classroom, and even in that locus, to my perception, there is a failure to
teach canon-making – the critical intelligence that the student can bring to
his or her own experience of literature, art, films, etc., with, always, the
codicil that other intelligences may come to other conclusions. The
entertainment industry, on the other hand, is fully aware of this fact, which
is why it is profligate with ranking exercises, while it prizes only one:
earnings. One of the reasons that ranking has a slightly masculinist air
to it is that it invites the same kind of hierarchical projection we see in
other places in the patriarchy, and the same kind of boxing matches in which
what is at stake is as much the ego of the critic as the worth of the artist.
However, this
observation may be my quirk. Posterity, up to now, has ranked us whether we
want it to or not. Since the late nineteenth century, we have developed a
certain feeling for the statistical, a sixth sense for frequencies, as we find
ourselves in nets of them: polled, counted, interviewed, surveyed, etc. To
return to the Woolf vs. Lawrence matchup: Lawrence scholars have been
complaining for decades about the lack of interest in the great D.H., but
perhaps this is a reaction to Lawrence being pushed, by English critics, as the
greatest, the novelist up there with Joyce, Proust, Mann, etc. The whole
crew. Whereas even with the discouraging word in the years immediately
after her death, Woolf always sold. The interest of academics and the larger circle
of literati in Woolf has not, really, been a ranking movement – there’s no
Leavis out there for Virginia Woolf. It seems somehow tasteless, a
misunderstanding of Woolf’s own sensibility, to get all frothy about the
greatest.
This, possibly, tells
us something deeper about the very idea of posterity, its claim on the living.
If there is a future beyond our coming climate change deaths, I think it
is fair to say that the next hundred years will see a take off in the posterity
of certain writers who were, by gender or race, not considered previously by
all the white guys. At the same time, there may be a reconsideration of the
whole meaning of lasting a hundred, two hundred, years.
2.
So here’s a concrete
question. Given these circumstances, what chance does, say, Stephen King have
to be remembered to future generations? And what chance do the brilliant
mandarins, the literary novelists, have? To pose the question wholly in one
category of literature – in poetry, I suppose, the same question could counterpoise
Marilyn Hacker and, say, Li’l Kim, or John Ashberry and Bob Dylan.
On the evidence of
genre alone, gothic and horror writers have a pretty good survival rate. At
least three or four writers of gothic novels in the eighteenth century are
still in print, and still found on the shelves of medium sized public
libraries, as well as being assigned in classes and being made into films (the
addition of media technologies has a major impact on posterity, I should note:
printing did everything for, say, Lucretius, while it did little for Statius).
Books by Horace Walpole, Ann Radcliffe, Monk Lewis, and William Beckworth are
still in print, as are those by Mary Shelley, Bram Stoker, and Sheridan La Fanu
from the nineteeth century. That is just in English culture – there is also, of
course, Theodore Gautier (author of the original Mummy story) and Gaston
Leroux; there is ETA Hoffman and Meyrink.
One strong driver of
reputation is that a book generates a character. Frankenstein, or Dracula, or,
the Mummy, or – going towards another genre – a Sherlock Holmes overshadows the
works in which they were represented. King has not, I believe, created that
kind of character, unlike, say, Ann Rice. Furthermore, King is proudest of his
thousand page works. One thing about gothic and mystery fiction is that it is
generally either small or medium sized. As it gets more literary, however, the
larger size helps. Hugo’s Notre Dame with the hunchback is a Stephen King sized
novel.
Again, though, one
can’t just bet on this recipe. Film, which now plays a major role in the
posterity management of fiction, is very stagily centered around character; yet
that is simply to say that it is stagily centered about the star. Hector Lector
is a famous character who, I feel, may be fading into obscurity, but is still
remembered as a character, and he is taken from a Thomas Harris novel that
nobody predicts a long posterity for (although who knows?). In that sense,
Hector Lector might well outlive his bookish source entirely. Who remembers a
single book by George Du Maurier? And yet his mesmerist, Svengali, entered
popular lore. On the other hand, the process goes into reverse with films, too.
Who remembers the name of the character played by Jack Nicholson in The
Shining? Rather, one remembers Jack Nicholson. Or at least that’s what I do.
Posterity for a
mandarin depends a lot on networking, on circle-making. It isn’t necessary to
be part of the establishment, but it is helpful, if one is on the outs with the
establishment, to create a counter-establishment. Compare, for instance, the
posthumous fates of D.H. Lawrence and John Cowper Powys – both writers of big
novels, both of a philosophical bent, both obsessed with sex. Powys has his
fans – Steiner called the Glastonbury Romance one of the three great books of
the twentieth century. But really, Powys never made a counter-establishment. He
became quaint – that is, he was on the outs with the conventions of the modern
novel, but he never had a following that theorized that extra-territoriality.
Lawrence, however, was the establishment rebel par excellence. There’s nothing
like breaking decisively with Bertrand Russell to show that 1, you are a rebel,
and 2, you know Bertrand Russell.
Now, my comments so
far have not been about the quality of these writers at all. My notes have been
about posterity as an effect not of the popular will, nor of quality, but of
social forces.
Certain American
novelists I like best – Gaddis, for instance, and McCarthy – are, I think, not
destined for a long posterity. Gaddis is like George Meredith – he is eccentric
enough as a writer that he attracts only a passionate few. But Meredith was
able to produce one or two conventional novels, like the Ordeal of Richard
Feveral. Gaddis only produced prodigies: The Recognitions, J.R. One hundred
years from now, I have my doubts these novels will be much read. But that says
nothing, to me, about their intrinsic quality. As for McCarthy, Cormac
McCarthy, the case is trickier. I can see his later novels, which to me are
much worse than his earlier ones, enduring. But his difficult works, Suttree,
Blood Meridian, and some of the shorter early ones, are too negative, and,
though movie like in their own ways, not movie like in Hollywood ways. Of
course, this is where the educational institutions come in, creating the
substructure of posterity. Joyce seems to be the limit case for these
institutions, but it could well be that McCarthy would join Faulkner on the
curriculum. I wonder.
3.
There is an
enlightenment moment in the posterity imago – it consists in assuming that the
world will not end. This was quite a radical thing in the thirteenth century. I
wonder if it isn’t still a radical thing. I’ve recently talked to two people,
from opposite sides of the political spectrum, both of whom assured me that the
world was going to undergo a disaster in the next one hundred years. In fact,
the expectation that the world is going to end seems so deeply etched in the
Western template that it might be impossible to erase. In this sense, too, the
prediction of the posterity of one’s favorite author is generally made without
any attention to how posterity works. It is, in other words, a combination of
incredible optimism and a severely narrow sociological viewpoint. Like heaven,
purgatory and hell, posterity, that secular afterlife, is on the rocks. Time is
much more indifferent than even Auden imagined. Yet I still can’t believe that.
The incredible indifference to climate change on the part of our governing
class shows that we can not trust them, any longer, with posterity. Posterity,
in the future, I think, has to be oppositional, or it won’t be at all. We have
to take it from them, take it back from them. In the long run, we aren’t all
dead.
