Where Have All the Giants Gone?

On the State of Contemporary English Literature
Edward Ong   


One cannot begin a discussion about Literature, contemporary or classic, without coming across as some spectacled pedant. This is because the tiresome debate about what qualifies a work as 'Literature' is still raging in the self-important world of academia, and no-one has yet had the time (or gumption) to ask himself why English Literature, in particular, has failed to raise itself above the provincial and the mundane.

Perhaps English Literature has always had the penchant for navel-gazing. One is inclined to say major English works such as Eliot's Middlemarch or any of Wilde's works (let us not even mention Dickens) prove that the concerns of English writers were English to the core: class rivalry, social status, the English sense of dignity and pride. You remove the Englishness from these works, they will immediately deflate and cease to be the wide-arching works that millions have proclaimed them to be. However, is this (admittedly one-sided) basis alone enough to explain the de-intellectualisation of English Literature?
Fast-forward a hundred and fifty years or so, and you witness the same process repeating itself: Monica Ali, Zadie Smith, Nick Hornby, Tony Parsons, Helen Fielding, (to a lesser extent) Salman Rushdie. Writers who are never quite at ease outside the confines of English life and mentality. This, to millions of readers, is not a problem. Should English Literature not concern itself with the English way of life? The question, though logically sound, does not call for a logical answer. If the answer were a straightforward yes, one could then assuredly assert that everything Thomas Mann (German) or Franz Kafka (Czech) wrote should in one way or another be read in their socio-cultural settings. (Mann and Kafka scholars would probably chuckle at this rather absurd assertion.) Both Mann and Kafka may be guilty of a lot of things, but navel-gazing is not one of them. Mann's Death in Venice (Der Tod in Venedig) may present a distinctly German protagonist, but its dissection of the universal problems of the human condition – old age, spiritual dilapidation, sexual desire – is effortlessly identifiable. As Aschenbach manoeuvres himself through the labyrinth of Venetian streets in pursuit of the youthful Tadzio, consumed by the flames of Beauty, the reader, too, experiences some sort of heavenly hell, torn between the sublime and the corrupt. When Aschenbach eventually succumbs to Beauty (Death), the reader must confront a similar dilemma in himself: Does the acquisition of Beauty always come with a price? Hyacinthus paid for his when he dallied with the God of Gods, Zeus. The blood spilling from his forehead, in turn, blossomed into one of the most beautiful flowers in the floral kingdom. Perhaps Beauty is inseparable from Death?
The modern man is by no means a simple creature; he cannot be rendered real even if the writer is to provide the most realistic setting with all the necessary trappings. If he is to be flesh and blood at all on the page, his psychological construct must be – to use that rather pompous word - “deconstructed” so that we, the jaded readers, can get at all the nuts and bolts, the essences of the character, without getting sidetracked by fancy, frilly story-telling. Kafka never allowed K., the protagonist of The Trial (Der Prozess), to hide; he pursued him relentlessly and exposed him, frailties and all, to all who care to look. The predicament of K. under an oppressive, bureaucratic regime is the predicament of everyman. We do not have to share K.'s cultural background to comprehend the humiliation of being robbed of one's identity and freedom. K. is on trial for a crime whose nature is never revealed to the reader (a metaphysical one?); his only resort is to put himself through a legal system which has been designed to condemn him no matter what. His relatives, neighbours and co-workers are mere bystanders unconcerned with his fate. As K. stumbles through his attempt to evade a finale as inescapable as death, the reader cannot but admit the vision of the alienated modern man with no-one out there in the silent universe to fend for him but himself. And the battle is always lost before it has begun. 
Insanity, then, is never too far away when the modern man discovers to his rude shock and horror that the forces of the universe are never on his side. He may attempt to reconcile himself to this harrowing fact, but with every botched attempt he loses a piece of his sanity, until that point of absolute inevitability where things must fall apart because the centre cannot hold. The French Nobel Prize winner of 2008, J.M.G. Le Clézio, shows us exactly just that in the poetically impressionistic The Interrogation (Les Procès-Verbal). Following the footsteps of the other French giants, Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus, Le Clézio created a resonant piece about a man, aptly named Adam, who has lost his sanity and attempts to re-interpret the world on his own terms. Adam's world view is fragmented and irrational; it is one that is predominated by destruction and death, by godlessness. He envisions a world where people live side by side and NOT see each other – the breakdown of human communication. The only time people connect is when there has been a death. In a key passage where a crowd has formed on a beach around a drowned man, Le Clézio writes:

They couldn't tear themselves away. The last memory of the man who had lain dead before their eyes and who still haunted the spot a little, was keeping them together, exposed to the rain. It was their human memory that gave them a fellow-feeling even without love, and made them dread the long, lonely journey over the abyss even more than death or pain. This would go on until the day when – in a month, a week, or less – one of them would refer to the incident for the very last time.
~ Le Clézio, 120

The narrator laments that human memory, ironically, gives us a “fellow-feeling even without love,” and that life is a long stretch of solitariness into a terrain empty of meaning and purpose. Le Clézio's message is just as urgent now as it was back in the 60s, when The Interrogation was first published. In the world of 2010, how many of us can truly say, without a single shade of doubt, not one, that human life has a designated purpose? How many of us can in all honesty believe that Love is a solid rock?
Even a “thing” as immanent as Love has a certain quality of the mirage. Love eludes us because we as a human race have romanticised it and shaped it to conform to an image of near-divine perfection. We preach to each other that Love is the ultimate salvation, that it is simplicity and purity personified, the Ideal. That this is not the case in reality most of us have realised, but to see it lyrically and eloquently portrayed, as in Haruki Murakami's debut Norwegian Wood (Noruwei no Mori), is a revelation of a different kind. The novel's protagonist, Toru, recalls the time when he was a university student and best friends with Kizuki and Naoko, a couple. When Kizuki committed suicide at the age of 17, Naoko was devastated, and would not have survived herself had it not been for Toru's devotion to her. The two mourned Kizuki's death by consummating their relationship, but soon Naoko had to leave for a sanatorium for she feared her sanity was at stake. It did not take long for Kizuki to find himself in the embrace of another girl – Midori. Their love for each other flowered during Naoko's absence, but as soon as Kizuki visited Naoko at the sanatorium his old feelings resurfaced and dampened his love for Midori. Derailed by confusion, he kept away from both Naoko and Midori, until he was confronted by a tragic turn of events in the form of Naoko's suicide. By this time Kizuki was lost, and he sought out Reiko, Naoko's companion at the sanatorium, and had sex with her. It was only at this desperate juncture that he finally realised perhaps, just perhaps, happiness could be found with Midori. Murakami cunningly leaves things unsolved. If the synopsis comes across as rambling, that is because Love itself is a rambling phenomenon. It follows no rules, obeys no wishes, and arrests the heart when it suits its whims. Toru's encounters with Love are opaque and charged with dark, conflicting undertones; to him, Love often serves as a means of survival, a way to keep breathing when life suddenly becomes a murderous vacuum. The line between sex and love is eradicated. There is no divinity or saintliness to be found in Love.
Today when one saunters into a bookshop expecting to find a newly published English book that will prompt the reader to reassess this many splendored thing called the human experience, one will walk out again in disappointment. Contemporary English Literature is a little hamlet peopled by petty middle-class types who whinge endlessly about their “partnerless” existence, their post-colonial cultural/racial baggage, and the interminable social problems of the once Great Britain. (There are also bestsellers about that game called soccer and raising impossible children.) To be absolutely fair, there are still a few luminaries left if you care to look past those bestseller shelves: Ian McEwan (English), Doris Lessing (English), Margaret Atwood (Canadian), Paul Auster (my American literary paramour), Michael Cunningham (American). Five names, five fingers on a single hand. That is heart-wrenchingly depressing – and here I will contradict what I have so resolutely said in the introduction – if you turn the clock back by several decades, and realise that English Literature used to be the lair that spawned indomitable giants with names like Virginia Woolf, Iris Murdoch, George Orwell, Graham Greene, J.D. Salinger, and F. Scott Fitzgerald. What in the name of James Joyce is happening to the Anglo literary scene? Who or what is causing this brain drain and making us think that it is the order of the day? Since when did the ordinary and the commonplace become “good enough”? The politically incorrect beast in me must be kept from answering these questions.
I know where all the giants have gone. They have all gone back to the cave to die their dignified deaths and left us midgets floundering in ever-rising mediocrity.

Article Courtesy of
www.thesciolistspupil.blogspot.com

   

For more mindblowers, try these:

The Book of Illusions – Paul Auster
Nausea (La Nausée) – Jean-Paul Sartre
The Waves – Virginia Woolf
The Plague (La Peste) – Albert Camus
The Tin Drum (Die Blechttrommel) – Günter Grass
The English Patient – Michael Ondaatje
The Brothers Karamazov (Brat’ya Karamazovy) – Fyodor Dostoevsky