How postmodernism took over the literary world
Walking through the empty streets of Prague in 1979, a lone English philosophy professor approached the top of a staircase in a seemingly deserted apartment building. Two policemen were waiting at the top, seizing the stiff, bespectacled man and shouting for his papers, before throwing him down the stairs.
The professor would wipe himself down once the police had departed, continued up the staircase towards a room full of silent people. They were students and professors also: and the professor was there to teach a course on Wagnerian philosophy.
That professor was Roger Scruton, and he would later be arrested for his lectures in the school, banned from the country until the Velvet Revolution and the fall of communism in Czechoslovakia in 1989.
“There was a real consciousness that it was a life and death struggle,” said Scruton, talking of the school he helped run in secret. “Either these societies were going to be killed off by communism, or people were going to try and keep them alive in the catacombs.”
Scruton wasn’t alone, though. A contemporary French professor of his, by the name of Jacques Derrida, was also arrested for teaching at the same school.
The Czech police planted drugs on Derrida, charging him with illicit trafficking. The two professors shared similar fates for daring to set up the Jan Hus Educational Foundation under Communist party rule, but it was not the first time the two had crossed paths among rebellions against authority.
A young Derrida found himself caught up in the 1968 May protests in Paris, where thousands of students rebelled against their professors and took to the streets, demanding an increase in the minimum wage and an end to imperialist France.
Derrida, Algerian-born and Jewish, soon found himself caught up in a movement which put the treatment of French Algerians at its centre.
The students, unsupplied as they were, came very close to overthrowing the French government. The French President, Charles de Gaulle, secretly fled France to Germany, and the concession of many of the demands of the students resulted in a 35% increase to the minimum wage and an increase in worker’s rights, marking the protests as one of the most successful in the 20th century.
To the students of France, the moral was clear: protesting worked.
Scruton was also at the protests, but found himself on the opposite end of the ideological spectrum.
“Whatever those students believe, I remember thinking, I believe the opposite,” said Scruton after viewing the protests, cementing his traditionalist philosophy.
But times change. Years pass.
And now, Derrida is the philosopher most associated with postmodernism, the movement which has defined literature for the last fifty years, ever since the protests of May 68. Scruton has been called the greatest conservative thinker in modern Britain, and received a knighthood in 2016 for "services to philosophy, teaching and public education".
But how did these two literary thinkers go from almost sharing a Czechoslovakian cell to landing on opposite sides of the defining philosophy of the latter 20th century?
The answer, I think, lies in literature.
The following is an attempt to chronicle postmodernism’s influence on literature, the decline of aesthetic standards in the literary academy, and the undermining of the western canon.
The new academy
To underline the problems in 21st-century literature, here are the last two winners from the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, which together with the Man Booker Prize and the Nobel Prize make up the literary academy:
The Overstory (2018, won in 2019) by Richard Powers is about nine Americans whose unique life experiences with trees bring them together to address the destruction of forests. Less (2017, winner of 2018’s award) by Andrew Sean Greer follows a gay writer-protagonist while he travels the world on a literary tour.
Turning to the Man Booker Prize, we have two joint winners in 2019: Girl, Woman, Other (2019) by Bernardine Evaristo, which follows twelve mostly-black, female characters, and Margaret Atwood’s Testaments (2019), a sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) which depict a future where a totalitarian state enforces the subjugation of women in a patriarchal society.
These are fine novels, worthy of acclaim and perhaps, even, a read. The problem is not that the books are badly written, but that they were chosen because of the political movements they identify with: namely the environmental movement, the LGBTQ+ movement, and the Me-Too movement.
Two factors contribute to winning these awards: The author’s identity and the political alignment of their subject matter. Aestheticism, while a nice bonus, is not forefront in the minds of the panelists who grant these accolades.
Postmodernism in literature often takes the form of post-structuralism, an adaption of Saussurian theory which states that the relationships between words and their meaning (the signifier and the signified) is imposed by cultural and historical norms.
From this stems the focus on dismantling language. The idea of micro-aggression, words as weapons, and language as an attack on identity all come from the linguist Ferdinand de Saussure.
So too has he influenced literature. If the words which make up the core of western civilisation — the western canon — can themselves be changed, then so too can the meaning of western civilization, and from it, the power structures which determine the world we live in.
This concept is the turning point that causes the academic construction of literature to switch from one of aesthetic purposes to one with a political goal.
This linguistic idea is combined with Derrida’s deconstructionism to formulate an attack on the western canon (the group of texts which define western literature), and post-modernist literature, as it exists in the 21st century, is its result.
Whether a novel is aesthetically pleasing, has coherent plotting, or depicts engaging characters is a nice feature, but not a must. All of what readers consider good story-telling has taken a back seat in almost every major literary award.
The Nobel Prize for Literature committee is the best, or, perhaps the worst, example of this.
Alfred Nobel said the Nobel Prize in Literature would be given to award “the most outstanding work in an ideal direction”. But can that really be true of its 2012 winner and member of the Chinese Communist Party, Mo Yan?
Yan’s prose received criticism before the prize from Chinese literature professor Parry Link for treating events such as the Cultural Revolution and the Great Leap forward with “a kind of daft hilarity”.
At his acceptance speech, Yan defended Chinese censorship, and later declined to sign a petition calling for the release follow-Nobel-prize-winner Liu Xiaobo, imprisoned in China for campaigning against one-party rule in China.
Ironically mirroring the gross misconduct it seeks to weed out through its promotion of identity-oriented literature, the Nobel Prize in Literature was cancelled in 2018 because of accusations of sexual misconduct perpetrated (allegedly) by academy-member Jean-Claude Arnault.
The committee has also rejected Leo Tolstoy, Anton Chekhov, Henrik Ibsen, Émile Zola and Mark Twain for the prize, the raft of left-out Russian authors leading critics to point to Sweden's historic antipathy towards Russia as reasons for withholding the award.
The fact that the committee has awarded more awards to Swedes (where the award ceremony is held) than all the inhabitants of Asia is another tell.
The largest literary institution in the world has long ago showed signs of political bias. Why should things be different now the rest of the academy has followed suit?
The Pendulum
But first, to backtrack. How did we get here?
The impact of postmodernism on the literary academy can only be appreciated by understanding literary influences not as movements or arks, but as a pendulum swing, which moves back and forth between relativism and objectivity, making up the history of literature.
The swing to us looks dangerous because we are at the far end of it, and most of us haven’t been alive long enough to remember anything else. But it is not without precedent.
Observe:
The pendulum began swinging the day the Epic died.
The epic, as a genre, was the text by which those in the west looked to literature as an authority on their value system, beginning with the literary debt we owe to the ancient Greeks with The Iliad and The Odyssey, stemming through ancient Rome with The Aeneid (19BC), moving into the medieval ages with Dante’s Divine Comedy (1320AD) and surviving into the Elizabethan era with The Faerie Queene (1590AD).
Alexandre the Great was said to keep a copy on the Iliad under his bed during his campaigns. The early texts in the ancient world functioned much in the way religious texts did for the medieval world; a moral gauge for how best to conduct and how not-to-conduct oneself.
This pendulum starts swinging, historically, after Paradise Lost (1667) is published. The reason why this happens is because Milton’s Paradise Lost is the culmination of the western epic, and it has constantly battled with the Divine Comedy for the title of greatest literary work ever since its creation.
Harold Bloom, the most influential critic of the late 20th century, famously called Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian (1985) the final word on the western genre (western as in American Old West).
His idea was that, after Blood Meridian, everything which could be said through the genre had been said. It represented the culmination of that literary endeavour, and anything published afterwards would be fruitlessly struggling to get out from under its shadow. It made it impossible for future authors to write in the genre in the same way as before.
So too with Paradise Lost. Authors such as John Keats, known as some of the best composers of poetry ever born, often leave references to being intimidated by Milton. Not just intimidated, but scared of his influence, making them feel small in a way that other literary figures of history were unable to do.
Milton was part of the first regime to depose one of the great European monarchies, culminating in the execution of Charles the First. Milton’s work is a justification of that regime, and the unprecedented actions they took in rebelling against a figure thought to be appointed by God himself.
The character of Satan in the text embodies this: representing a figure so unredeemable for his actions to be content only with his own survival, epitomised in the lines “better to reign in Hell, than serve in Heaven.” – Paradise Lost, 258-63.
Milton was blind when he completed the poem, having most of it composed orally. The problem was that its influence was so great future authors abandoned the genre for good, leaving the epic to lay stagnated until the 20th century.
All works which came after Milton’s opus were parodies of the epic, taking the form of Cervantes’ Don Quixote (1612), which satirises the role of the valiant hero, Melville’s Moby Dick (1851), which casts a bleak and morbid view over the hero’s journey, and culminating in Ulysses (1920), which condenses epic saga into a single day.
This is when the pendulum really begins to swing. Milton’s undermining of literary authority, through his personification of Satan as a relatable figure, begins the great literary back-and-forth between relativist, subjective and individualist thinking and authoritative, societal and objective thought.
The pendulum swings from certainty to relativism, with the blade edging ever closer towards the latter with each swing.
It starts with the Cavalier poets; writers who used their skill to tweak sentiments towards serving Queen and country, before it swung to the Metaphysical poets, John Donne and George Herbert, among others.
Back to the Augustans next, who saw literature as doing the work of politics; espousing their certainty of moral and, by extension, objective authority in literature.
Then again it swings, towards the Romantics this time, who emphasised individual experience and subjective feeling above that of society. Dark romanticism, American romanticism and the Gothic were also a part of this movement.
Then the reaction comes in the form of the Realists, concerned with depicting the absolute, truth state of being in as gritty and thorough a manner as possible through novels like Elizabeth’s Mary Barton (1848) and Stendhal’s Le Rouge et le Noir (1830).
Next came Naturalism, which embraced determinism, detachment, scientific objectivism, and social commentary. This movement is one of the few we could characterise as being mid-swing. It would be replaced as the pendulum swung back to its opposite end, where a group of writers would attempt to separate politics from literature for good.
The Aesthetics movement
Oscar Wilde is best known for his 18th century novel The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890). Wilde was flamboyant, never-bashful and through his novel became the personification of what literary historians would later call the Aesthetics movement.
Around five-hundred words of the novel were deleted before publication without Wilde’s knowledge, his censors hoping to spare their own reputations in Victorian society. Despite the censorship, Wilde was accused of inciting a moral panic with his novel and offending the public sensibilities. He soon became the most famous figures associated with the movement, whose adherents would become known as Aesthetes (pronounced: ees-theets).
What soon began as an appreciation for aestheticism soon descended into scepticism, sickness over the state of the world, and belief in the superiority of human creativity, leading to what literary critics call the Decadence movement: the Mr Hyde to the Aesthetes’ Dr Jekyll.
The decadence movement has its roots in Latin scholar Désiré Nisard, who compared Romanticism to the period of artistic Roman decadence, which he saw as causing the cultural decline of the Roman Empire.
Sensual and sexual expression was encouraged under the movement, beginning in France and clashing with Victorian sensibilities in England, eventually culminating in the trial and imprisonment of Oscar Wilde for “sodomy and gross indecency”.
Wilde would later become a symbol of the Aesthetics movement when he died, chronicling its flamboyant rise and then descent into decadence and persecution in his own life. He would be a rallying point for some, and a warning for others.
While the Aesthetes did not accomplish the goal of separating literature from politics and morality, their influence would live beyond them.
The Aesthetics movement would become the basis in the late 20th by which critics such as Harold Bloom and Roger Scruton would seek to undermine the postmodern doctrine which they saw as stemming first from political motivations.
Bloom summarised his feelings as follows:
“The defense of the Western Canon is in no way a defense of the West or a nationalist enterprise. . . . The greatest enemies of aesthetic and cognitive standards are purported defenders who blather to us about moral and political values in literature. We do not live by the ethics of the Iliad, or by the politics of Plato. Those who teach interpretation have more in common with the Sophists than with Socrates. What can we expect Shakespeare to do for our semiruined society, since the function of Shakespearean drama has so little to do with civic virtue or social justice?”
The Aesthetes of the 19th century failed ultimately because they failed to realise that the epic genre was vital towards the appreciation of the aesthetic. That human action and thought, as well as nature, might in itself by beautiful, was something largely left unappreciated by a movement which focused solely on individualism.
Nevertheless, the descendants of the Aesthetes survived into the 20th century, with Bloom at their lead. He fought what he saw as an attack on aestheticism in literary studies, calling its critics “the school of resentment”, a precursor for what would later become known as intersectionalists, progressive liberals, or, in internet circles, as social justice warriors (SJWs).
Before and after modernity
The pendulum is now on to its final stretch. Again it swings, away from the Aesthetes and towards modernity:
This time it reaches the Modernists, who attempted to establish the systemisation of modern values.
This is primarily because of three writers in literature which inspired the modernist movement: Marcel Proust, James Joyce and Virginia Wolfe. Proust would coin the style in his novel In Search of Lost Time (1913–1927) while Joyce would immortalise it in what is called by some as the greatest English novel ever written: Ulysses (1922).
Here’s what Joyce said about his own novel, Ulysses:
“I’ve put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant, and that’s the only way of insuring one’s immortality.” – James Joyce
The book was intended as an academic hurdle. The problem was that enough people started to read it to form some kind of grandiose opinion of it, and so Joyce gave it another shot:
Finnegan’s Wake (1939) is a novel, really, intended to get people to argue about what it is trying to say.
Here’s a paragraph from the opening page:
The fall (bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronntonnerronntuonnthunntrovarrhounawnskawntoohoohoordenenthurnuk!) of a once wallstrait oldparr is retaled early in bed and later on life down through all christian minstrelsy. The great fall of the offwall entailed at such short notice the pftjschute of Finnegan, erse solid man, that the humptyhillhead of humself prumptly sends an unquiring one well to the west in quest of his tumptytumtoes: and their upturnpikepointandplace is at the knock out in the park where oranges have been laid to rust upon the green since dev-linsfirst loved livvy.
- Finnegan’s Wake, James Joyce
Its brilliance — apparently — lies in the fact that we cannot say anything definite about it at all. How clever.
One might think that after Finnegan’s Wake it would seem superfluous to try and replicate the same style in future novels.
But no. Nominated for the Booker Prize last year, Lucy Ellmann's Ducks, Newburyport (2019) tops over one-thousand pages with a single sentence. The academy is riddled with other examples, and most novels which win awards in the 21st century have been very much in the school of Joyce, Wolfe and their ilk.
Just like Blood Meridian was the final word on the Western genre, and Paradise Lost was the last work on the western epic, Finnegan’s Wake was the last word on the modernist genre. All literary works that followed, whether consciously imitating Joyce or not, were footnotes on his work.
But the trend didn’t stop with Finnegan’s Wake. In fact, that was the start of a whole new genre, the genre which would define Western literature for the next half a century.
It kept on going, just as Westerns kept on being written after Blood Meridian was published, so too did the modernist novels: enter the postmodernist novel and the literary academy.
And herein lies the conundrum: that western literature has been stagnate ever since the modernist movement. Here, at last, we reach Postmodernism.
After the reaction to modernism, the pendulum keeps going up and up and up, and since around the end of World War 2, it has yet to come back the other way. Other literary movements lasted no more than a few decades, whereas the postmodernist regime is still going sixty-years strong.
This is not to say that nothing written after modernism has been any good, but rather to point out that our literary movement — for the time being — has stayed fixated on literary devises which are nearly one-hundred years’ old. Despite being opposed to modernism and its values, the postmodernists — at least in the literary world — never evolved beyond the narrative techniques that came out of the modernist period.
It’s hard to say that the pendulum has stopped swinging, merely that it has swung back from modernism the other way so far that it’s hard to see it ever coming back down again.
The modernist works began exploring, as the Romanticists had done before them, the individual experience of life. It is not until Wolfe, and in particular, Joyce, that the novels begin to mirror the exact political project being undertaken in philosophical academia.
Ulysses, Finnegan’s Wake and other works like it became representative of the struggle to undermine western interpretations of literature and reconstruct the meaning of western civilization from its roots: language.
Narrative without metanarrative
One of the greatest victims of postmodernism is the attack on metanarrative. A metanarrative does what it says on the tin, and is an attempt to explain many texts in a general, unified way; Christianity, being a good example of this, but metanarratives would also include attempts to explain bodies and groups of texts and authors, such as the article I am myself writing at this moment.
The issue with deconstructing metanarratives is that they existed before narrative itself did, in the form of oral tradition. In other words, no metanarrative, no literature.
Texts are composed in reaction to each other. Eminem writes a song dissing Sub-Machine Gun Kelly and performs it live. Machine Gun Kelly writes a rebuttal, and the beef continues. Henry Fielding writes Tom Jones (1749) to criticise Richardson’s Pamela (1740), and between them the two form the basis of the Augustan movement.
It is not just that our understanding of literary movements is based around the metanarratives we use to explain literature, it is that literature itself cannot exist in isolation. It has to be a dialogue, a discussion between readers and authors that builds on itself over time. Without metanarrative, literature is simply words on a page.
Many scholars expected a reaction against the movement. Some kind of literary rebellion. But it just kind of… never happened. The postmodernists marched on through empty plains of literary thought with little resistance and entrenched themselves for good.
This is because the attempt to even define literature was banished, and with it, the thing itself. I will not be so melodramatic as to say that literature and good fiction is dead; it lives on in many an author; but it has, at the very least, gone unappreciated.
Three main reasons are culpable: The fact that universities were turned more into political institutions as opposed to learning centres; mass communication intensifying the scope of subjective experience, and the decline of the epic as the standard of literary authority.
Thanks to the decline in aestheticism and the undermining of the western canon, the postmodernist obsession with deconstructionism (à la Derrida) became so complete in western literature that all narrative structure became undesirable; hence the works of Ali Smith (i.e. Spring, 2019), Damon Galgut (i.e. In a Strange Room, 2010), Nicholson Baker (i.e. The Mezzanine, 1988), and others.
Without structure, we do not have character. Without characters, we do not have narrative. Without narrative, then the whole endeavour becomes applied philosophy, and literature is forgotten.
The books inspired by Joyce don’t only shun narrative, they celebrate its demise, going out of their way to become as obscurantist and irrelevant to their own subject matter as possible.
Just as postmodernism built on existentialism to achieve literary dominance, so too might a kind of neo-aestheticism help rekindle the prioritisation of narrative, character and beauty in storytelling. Infusing such a movement with the resurrection of the epic would make for wonderful story-craft if done right.
We should not fool ourselves that such a literary movement would last forever, but it could restore balance and add a creative sense of exploration to the world of literature. Maybe the pendulum could start swinging in the other direction again.
Weeding out the politics and relativist philosophy from literature will take time. But once it is accomplished, we might reach a point where becoming immersed in good, academic fiction is as easy as breathing, and reading as common as speaking. Politics and philosophy are very often not worth our time. But good fiction, I think, most certainly is.
But all that is merely fiction. For now, aesthetic writing survives among people who exist purely outside of the academy. We still have plenty of authors — and thankfully, readers — who don’t really get much out of what university professors consider “literary fiction”.
These are known as writers of “genre fiction”, often sneered at as the inferior and under-discussed cousin of literary fiction.
Undermining the underminers
If the steam of consciousness technique popularised by Joyce is the most important literary device of the first-half of the 20th century, world building is undoubtledly the most important device of the second half, recreating entire genres after the success of The Fellowship of the Ring (1953) and Dune (1965).
The issue is the academy does not recognise world-building as a merit-worthy literary device, which prevents successful world-builders from being recognised in literary fiction. Any author who attempted to combine Hemmingway’s iceberg theory with Tolkien-esque world-building would make for some enticing fiction indeed.
H. P. Lovecraft was one of the most prolific “genre writers” and world builders of the 20th century. Unlike his contemporaries, Lovecraft did not create languages or historical settings for his characters to inhabit, but rather attempted to construct an entirely new mythos.
Lovecraft’s assumption was that almost all of western literature was built upon stories taken form Greco-Roman mythology, which informed the western canon and the stories well tell ourselves.
Lovecraft thought that by creating a new mythos it would be possible to recreate an entirely new mode of storytelling and reinvent the western canon. He was not incorrect, it was just that his work did not accomplish this.
That title would go to another author, who reintroduced the epic to western literature via a trilogy of novels: J. R. R. Tolkien.
Tolkien is, for this reason among others, named by professors such as Wheaton College professor Michael D. C. Drout as the most important author of the 20th century.
It is difficult to appreciate the enormity of what Tolkien did, seemingly by accident, when he wrote The Lord of the Rings (1892 –1973).
Tolkien, like Drout, was a professor of Anglo-Saxon studies, as well as a professor of English Language and Literature. Tolkien undertook a translation of Beowulf, an epic which fell outside of the Christian western tradition. He also rediscovered the extinct Gothic language — all surviving poetry written in Gothic is written by Tolkien.
Until The Lord of the Rings, all western epics has come from the Greco-Roman tradition. The Greek’s created the stories which would form Homer and Vigil’s works, while Dante’s Inferno and Paradise Lost were based on a combination of Greco-Roman figures and Christian mythology
Tolkien did what Lovecraft had set out to do, but accidentally. He accomplished this because of his in-depth knowledge of Anglo-Saxon society and literature, and was able to bring out the epic text which defined that culture, Beowulf, into an epic of his own and revive the genre by tapping into an old and largely forgotten culture outside of the western canon: that of Anglo-Saxon, Scandinavian heritage, rather than Mediterranean.
Because of what Tolkien accomplished, there is now scope for epic tales to be reintroduced into literary fiction via the fantasy genre of subsequent subgenres. What Tolkien did for Beowulf might also be done for The Muhabarata, The Shahnameh or The Epic of Gilgamesh.
The more depressing realisation is that the academy especially doesn’t like accolading fantasy authors.
Magical Realism was a literary movement attempting to combine fantasy tropes with literary fiction. It broke down as a movement, firstly, when it failed to incorporate fantasy motifs such as the hero’s journey, and secondly when it was destroyed by identity politics after Salman Rushdie’s condemning by the literary world (i.e. Roald Dahl) for daring to write a novel critical of Islam, The Satanic Verses (1988).
Literary critics often encourage literary-fiction authors to step into genre-fiction, such as Kazuro Ishiguro with The Buried Giant (2015) and Margaret Atwood, (Handmaid’s Tale) but it rarely happens the other way around.
Atwood and Ishiguro are, rightly, accused of being “genre tourists”, in the sense that they don’t understand the genre conventions of fantasy and science fiction which they are wading into.
Kasuro Ishiguro is an excellent writer, but he completely ignored all the conventions of fantasy when writing the Buried Giant, alienating readers of that genre despite applause from the academy.
Writers such as: Patrick Rothus, George RR Martin (more for his short stories such as In the House of the Worm (1973) than A Song of Ice and Fire series), and the late Iain M. Banks are also contenders for crossover into the literary world. But as of yet, none of even been nominated for a mainstream literary award.
Rothus’ The Name of the Wind (2007) has all the genre conventions of literary fiction, and if there was ever a time to recognise a non-academic writer, that would have been it.
But it does need to be a two-way street: the academy needs to encourage authors to explore that direction but authors need to take steps to do it themselves.
This can also be achieved through combining subgenres. Historical fiction is closest to bridging the gap and I think if any author will move through genre fiction into literary fiction it will be through combining fantasy and historical fiction.
Whether an author is able to achieve this, or if the academy will allow it, remains to be seen. But one thing is for sure: The saving grace of literary fiction has to come from fantasy and science fiction, as this is the genre which now carries the torch of the once-considered-dead epic genre. Otherwise, it’ll stay boring and irrelevant.
While attempting this it is important to remember the benefits postmodernism have given to literature. With it came an increased focus on individual experience, just like the breakthrough of romanticism, as well as a deep commitment towards microphoning unheard voices and looking through less-appreciated cultural traditions to find undiscovered stories.
It is simply that the motivation for this is backward. Instead of looking for forgotten, less well-known authors from different communities for aesthetic reasons, the academy seeks to promote authors based entirely on the political flavour of the day.
Just as naturalism built itself on reaction to realism, and also built on the work done by the romantics, so too can a new type of neo-aestheticism emerge from the work of the literary techniques of the modernists and the breath of interpretation encouraged by postmodernism. By appreciating the strengths of the movement, instead of ignoring it, the literature which comes afterward will be all the more fascinating.
An ode to the ode
What is happening to literary fiction — award winning novels and poetry — is much the same as happened with classical music at the end of the 19th century.
Classical music did not die out so much that it faded into the background, becoming more a part of the wallpaper than the furniture. With the invention of the record player in 1877, the days of attending an orchestra became numbered.
As music moved into the home, music became less an event and more something which was simply there, all the time, with every meal and morning routine. Literature is headed much the same way, with classical books becoming shelf-filling ornaments rather than living, breathing texts with life spilling over them into the next generation.
Literature is now diffusing back into its roots. The first texts of The Iliad and the Epic of Gilgamesh were song orally in taverns, halls and on dirt-tracks before they were written. (As singing evolved among Neanderthals before the spoken word did, it is not inaccurate to say that literature is the birth of all our language; and therefore, our thoughts).
In much the same way, poetry is now regressing back to its oral form with the rise of spoken word, with most contemporary performances more akin to rap gigs than poetry readings. The movement which began with the protests of May ‘68 is now reaching its conclusion.
It is right and proper that new forms of music and literature should take over from the old. Rock and roll would never have existed if music was viewed as the sole property of a certain religion, nation or ethnic group with no room for improvement.
But it is precisely the literary academy’s superior view of its all-encompassing disdain for narrative value — and how it sees any attempt to improve upon or move on from postmodern tropes as a western-values-imposed moral coup — which holds back the very western canon they sought to expand in the first place.
By attempting to break open the door to literary-access, they have welded it shut, closed away from the very voices they sought to empower.
Roger Scruton may have recovered from his tumble down the stairs, but his reputation was never the same after the backlash he received for his challenge to the liberal oligarchy in Thinkers of the New Left (1985).
He would spent the last years of his career struggling for money, shunned by academic society, spending his final months cancelled via Twitter-mobs from a government position and defending himself against tabloid hack-jobs.
Scruton died in January 2020, only three month’s after the death of Harold Bloom’s in 2019. With the two professors gone, the last of the Aesthetes have now departed.
Theirs is the last in the line of a tradition that protected literature and the arts from political influence, and sought to let stories be judged on the merit of their own beauty and aesthetic value.
Without them, it will be a long road before the literary world can once again stand up for good story-telling, enthralling characters and beautiful prose.
But, thanks to the imprints from many a writer’s boot left on the great, winding track that is the western canon, the path ahead is already a well-trodden one.
Francis Kett
Bibliography:
1. Saussure's Lectures on General Linguistics
2. Saussure's Philosophy of Language as Phenomenology: Undoing the Doctrine of the Course in General Linguistics, Beata Stawarska
3. Limiting the Arbitrary: Linguistic naturalism and its opposites in Plato's Cratylus and modern theories of language, John E. Joseph
4. Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, Kant
5. The Western Canon, Harold Bloom
6. The Anxiety of Influence, Harold Bloom
7. The Portrait of Dorian Grey (plus introduction by Oscar Wilde
8. Thinkers of the New Left, by Roger Scruton
9. Mo Yan defended Chinese censorship: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/dec/07/mo-yan-censorship-nobel
10. More on the above: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/china/11338916/Mo-Yan-stirs-controversy-with-support-for-Chinese-president.html
11. Mo Yan controversies: https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2012/12/06/mo-yan-nobel-prize/?pagination=false&printpage=true
12. Roger Scruton thrown down stairs in Prague: https://www.roger-scruton.com/articles/20-latest/615-the-mail-on-sunday-30th-june-2019
13. The Name of the Wind, Patrick Rothus
14. A song of Ice and Fire series, GRRRM
15. In the House of the Worm, GRRM
16. The Wasp Factory, Iain M Banks
17. Blood Meridian, Cormack McCarthy
18. Discipline and Punish, Foucault
19. The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien
20. The Mountains of Madness, Necromicon, etc., H. P. Lovecraft
21. The Buried Giant, Ishiguro
22. The Handmaid’s Tale, Atwood
23. Paradise Lost, Milton
24. Moby Dick, Melville
25. The comelete works of James Joyce
26. Flush, Virginia Wolfe
27. To the Lighthouse, Virginia Wolfe
28. Mrs Dalloway, Wolfe
29. The Casual Vacancy, Rowling
30. Harry Potter series, Rowling
31. Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault, Stephen Hicks
32. Girl, Woman, Other (2019) by Bernardine Evaristo
33. The Mezzanine, Nicholson Baker
34. In a Strange Room, Damon Galgut
35. Spring, Ali Smith
36. The Overstory, Richard Powers
37. Less, Andrew Sean Greer
38. The Faerie Queene, Spenser
39. Complete works of Homer
40. The Divide Comedy, Dante
41. The Aeneid, Vigil
42. Beowulf, the Beowulf poet
43. Michael Draut, modern scholar lecture series
44. Stephen Hicks postmodernism lecture series
45. Mary Barton, Elizabeth Gaskell
46. Tom Jones, Henry Fielding
47. Pamela, Richardson
48. Clarissa, Richardson
49. Le Rouge et le Noir, Stendhal
50. Dune, Frank Herbert
51. Hemmingway, complete works
52. The Satanic Verses, Rushdie
53. Ducks, Newburyport, Lucy Ellmann
54. Waiting for Godot, Becket
55. Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, Erich Auerbach, Willard R. Trask (Translator), Edward W. Said (Introduction)