LIT CRIT

Jerry Harkins

What do these people have in common:  Harry Martinson, Wislawa Szymborska, Christian Mommsen, Bjornstjerne Bjornson, Sigrid Undset, Par Lagerkvist, Yasunari Kawabata, John Coetzee, Elfriede Jelinek, Herta Müller, Tomas Transtromer and Mo Yan (aka Guan Moye)? 

Let me give you a hint.  There are more Scandinavian names here than you will find on most lists that do not involve winter sports.  Right, there you are:  all are winners of the Nobel Prize for literature.  Further, they also constitute a small part of that large class of writers you never heard of.  You can’t name a single work by any of them.  Hopefully, you have at least a passing acquaintance with some of their fellow laureates, folks like Rudyard Kipling, George Bernard Shaw, Eugene O’Neill and Winston Churchill, all of whom had the good sense to write in English.  If you happen to be Irish or know someone who is, you’ve probably heard of William Butler Yeats and Seamus Heaney.  But if you guessed James Joyce, you’d be wrong.  Ditto for Leo Tolstoy, Henrik Ibsen, Mark Twain, Emile Zola, Marcel Proust, Joseph Conrad, D. H. Lawrence, Wallace Stevens, E. E. Cummings and Vladimir Nabokov.  These worthies were never anointed by the Swedish Academy.

Let me hasten to state the obvious.  Lousy writers do not usually win Nobel Prizes.  All those listed in the first paragraph are or were outstanding practitioners of a difficult art.  Some are or once were widely read.  Some of them and their co-laureates, a very small number, may be read as long as there remain people who care about literature.  But,  if you know only one poem written by a Nobel laureate, it is probably Kipling’s “If” a perennial warhorse of high school anthologies.  It is medium length and maximum embarrassing.  Of its thirty-two lines, here are the four people remember:  "If you can fill the unforgiving minute / With sixty seconds' worth of distance run -- / Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it, / And -- which is more -- you'll be a Man, my son!”  Of course it’s drivel.  Of course that which is an ungrammatical pronoun.  Of course the second line makes no sense.  But “If” threatens to live forever.  The 1907 Nobel Committee cited Kipling’s, “…power of observation, originality of imagination, virility of ideas and remarkable talent for narration.”  George Orwell had the better of it when he wrote, “Kipling is a jingo imperialist, he is morally insensitive and aesthetically disgusting.”

Between 1901 and 2014, one hundred eleven writers were awarded the Nobel Prize.  Of these, maybe sixty percent were well known in their time and place.  The rest were a matter of the Academy displaying its priestly gnosis.  Maybe twenty-five or thirty of those names would be recognized today by a reasonably well informed American.  Writers like Ernest Hemmingway, John Steinbeck, Toni Morrison and even William Faulkner are just too much a part of modern culture to be obscure.  Yet.  No predictions are ventured about their celebrity a hundred years from now.  Educated Europeans are probably better informed about such things than educated Americans because a lot of them for some strange reason speak and read foreign languages.  But even sophisticated French readers would find it hard to place Mo Yan, the 2012 laureate who was cited for his “hallucinatory realism” which strikes an unsophisticated American reader as an oxymoron.  Every French person, even the one or two who are not so sophisticated, knows the work of their countryman Patrick Modiano (2014).  It is just one of the things that make the French different from everybody else.

The sad truth is that literature is not so vital to non-French persons today as it once was.  There are far too many alternatives for information, education and entertainment.  According to one recent survey, 68% of Americans have never been inside a bookstore and, if Amazon has its way, they never will be.  Fully 50% of us have never read a newspaper.

There are three forces at work here.  First, for whatever reason, we do not do a good job teaching basic skills like reading which means that most students do not develop an appreciation of the pleasures of reading.  This is by no means the fault of our teachers but of our Know Nothing politicians who find education a safe subject on which to mount the rhetorical barricades.  Second, our writers, editors and publishers turn out enormous quantities of  soporific prose.  Some of this consists of academics and other professionals writing specialized bullshit to one another in the hope of gaining tenure.  There is a great deal of terrible writing in our newspapers and magazines.  I’m not talking about vocabulary, spelling and the niceties of grammar, but about sentences that have no discernible meaning and paragraphs whose logic contradicts itself.  The classic example of this is the United States Tax Code. For example, Section 24 of Subpart A of Part IV of Subchapter A of Chapter 1 of Subtitle A reads as follows:  “The amount of the credit allowable under subsection (a) shall be reduced (but not below zero) by $50 for each $1,000 (or fraction thereof) by which the taxpayer's modified adjusted gross income exceeds the threshold amount. For purposes of the preceding sentence, the term ‘modified adjusted gross income’ means adjusted gross income increased by any amount excluded from gross income under section 911, 931 or 933.”  The entire tax code, Title 26, is 3,387 pages long.  That’s the Reader’s Digest version.  The IRS Regulations interpreting it run to 13,458 more pages.

The third and most potent force is that it is no longer necessary to read much.   Worse, reading for pleasure has been reduced to the status of an eccentric hobby.  It is optional, a luxury few people have time for.  In spite of podcasts, audio books, condensed books, electronic books and newspapers containing mostly celebrity gossip written at the fourth grade level, most of us do not include reading or any of its surrogates as part of our lives except for the most utilitarian purposes.  Even then, the first thing the business writer learns is how to compose a punchy executive summary.  We have returned to the days of yore when Western Union charged by the word thereby putting a premium on terseness.  That has now evolved into something called Twitter in which each tweet is limited to 140 characters including spaces and punctuation marks.  Of course for many users of Twitter that just about exhausts their entire vocabulary not counting acronyms, emoticons, and numbers-as-syllables.  (That last sentence contains 144 characters.  Too much punctuation.)

If Shakespeare was the archetypical literary figure of the last 500 years, that of the next 500 is likely to be the red circle with a backward slash through it:  a truly minimalist abbreviation of the complex word NO.  The problem is our free time these days comes in short bursts suitable only for headlines.  We are slaves to our smart phones and please note it is the phones that are smart.  We, on the other hand, have merely to learn a new skill, multitasking.  We text, surf the internet and check our email while we are driving.  We are addicted to machines that can tell us whatever we need to know in nanoseconds.

This has been going on a long time.  By the early 1980’s it had become obvious that we were on the threshold of what came to be called the Information Age.  Until the advent of the personal computer, the tools of the information workers had not changed much for centuries. We employed armies of clerks and bookkeepers, equipping them with paper and pencils, typewriters, carbon paper and adding machines.  Everything was going fine until, on Wednesday, August 12, 1981, IBM introduced its first Personal Computer.  Three months later, it began an unprecedented ad campaign built around the character of Charlie Chaplin’s Little Tramp.  Both television and print versions were brilliantly innovative on many levels , among them, they were minimally verbal, like the silent movies.  And they were powerful.  Within a short time, a new industry was born and both white collar and pink collar productivity posted spectacular gains.  Within five years, companies were instituting epoch-making layoffs in the clerical and middle management sectors of the workforce.

The information revolution has changed the nature of the transaction between writer and reader in a profound way.  The writer’s job used to be to engage the intellect and emotions but is now a matter of concision and simplicity.  A phrase like “Fourscore and seven years ago” is extravagant because it requires a moment’s thought.  It gives a quantum of pleasure where none is needed.  You can buy powerful personal computers today the complete instructions for which contain fewer than ten words.  You are lucky to get a single fold-out sheet with a dozen or so line drawings.  For less than $500, you can buy an iPhone.  Ask it a question, any question, and a robot named Siri will tell you the answer.  It’s an automated voice transaction, no reading or writing required.

So the world has changed and no one knows what to do about it.  Some responses are truly laughable.  As print journalism goes the way of the buggy whip, the best idea The New York Times can come up with is to create more long form, deep think analytic pieces, more soft-focus feature stories and more of yesterday’s hard news tomorrow.  Gone are the days when the Late City edition would provide a full account of today’s World Series game.  Now that is likely to appear the day after tomorrow. It used to be said that yesterday’s paper was good only for lining the bottom of the bird cage.  Now today’s edition will do fine.  Instant obsolescence.  To call it “news” would be false advertising.  If you want to know what’s happening, ask Siri.   Of course The Times has designed a brilliant web site.  Unfortunately Americans think freedom of the press means the press should be free.  Moreover, as Marshall McLuhan said, information wants to be free.

We are at the beginning of the Information Revolution and there is no way of imagining how information exchange will evolve.  Anyone over fifty who has taught bright college students has observed that they seem to process information in unfamiliar and often disconcerting ways.  They connect the dots differently, avoiding the careful sequential logic of Aristotle in favor of what seems to be random walks through non-Euclidean hyperspace.  They seem to function in a world shaped by Gödel’s incompleteness theory or Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle.  But their creativity and insight continue to startle the world and there may be a causal relationship at work there.

It is hard to envision an advanced community without an intensive amount of reading, writing and other verbal behavior.  There may be other ways to communicate.  Some, for example, think the Neanderthals whose vocal anatomy seems to have been inadequate for speech may have developed some level of telepathic skills to meet their needs for cooperative behavior. The 1980 historical novel The Clan of the Cave Bear by Jean M. Auel speculated persuasively about the nature of such skills among Neanderthals and how they might have gradually evolved into vocal language among Cro-Magnon humans.  Others have proposed that we ourselves have always had unrecognized skills for uncovering and validating knowledge, skills that are so basic as to be almost invisible.  The English chemist and philosopher Michael Polanyi  called this “personal knowledge” and suggested it is the root of all complex ideation.  Modern “abstract” art and music seem largely an effort to communicate internal understandings that are verbally inexpressible.

Those of us who love to read, whether the mystery novels of Tony Hillerman or the convoluted prose of James Joyce, are riding a lame horse.  Language is restrictive.  Words are, at best, crude symbols that serve as filters for ideas on their passage from one mind to another.  Grammar sets necessary borders that both define and limit the scope of ideas with alien logic.  For millennia, mathematicians have been developing an entirely different system of symbols and structures to communicate the kinds of ideas that attract their attention.  It may be that we have reached a point in our cultural evolution that will necessitate something similar for more general use.  We are a long way from releasing ourselves from the limitations of words and grammar but the evidence suggests the journey has begun.