Not the End of Literature

Lars Iyer, author of the very well-received novel/memoir/blog extension Spurious has written a very interesting essay that I cannot agree with but nonetheless encourage everyone to read. The subject is the end of literature, and Iyer’s diagnosis is one that I think pertains to perhaps 95% of all literature being published today:

The history of Literature is like a sound in an echo-chamber, growing fainter with each reiteration. Or, to use another metaphor, it could be said that Literature was, after all, a finite resource—like oil, like water—that was tapped and burned away by each explosive new manifestation. If the history of Literature is a history of new ideas about what Literature can be, then we have reached a place where modernism and postmodernism have drunk the well dry. Postmodernism, which was surely just modernism by a more desperate name, brought us to our endgame: everything is available and nothing is surprising. In the past, each great sentence contained a manifesto and every literary life proposed an unorthodoxy, but now all is Xerox, footnote, playacting. Even originality itself no longer has the ability to surprise us. We have witnessed so many stylistic and formal gambits that even something original in all its constituent parts contains the meta-quality of newness, and so, paradoxically, is instantly recognisable.

Iyer then goes on to give readings of three of my favorite authors, authors whom he considers as having made literature out of the death of literature: Enrique Vila-Matas, Thomas Bernhard, and Roberto Bolano. I agree completely that these authors have made much from the idea of negation, particularly in conjunction with literary culture, but I cannot agree with Iyer that their work represents a dead end. As I once tried to explain in an essay on Manuel Puig for The Point, and as I once learned from Thomas Mann, art continues to live by rejuvenating past forms. (Contra Iyer, this is no more a part of the postmodern era than plots and characters are, even though postmodernism highlights the idea of borrowing.) Bolano, Puig, and Vila-Matas (and to a lesser extent Bernhard) did/are doing that, and so did W.G. Sebald, who also belongs on this list. In addition to those pursuing the literature of exhaustion, there are also Laszlo Krasznahorkai, Cesar Aira, Geoff Dyer, and, I am certain, plenty more who are pushing us into new forms.

Iyer is completely right that for the vast majority of the book-buying and -producing public these names and their work will be irrelevant. These are the readers for whom literature remains as dead as ever, and they are the majority. But when was it ever not thus?

You Might Also Like:

More from Conversational Reading:

1. Does Postmodern Fiction Really Exist? Dan takes up a worthwhile question I’ve seen pondered variously, whether or not postmodern literature is actually distinct from modernist literature: Jonathan suggests that poets...
2. Whatever Happened to Modernism? The title of this post is a means for acknowledging the title of Gabriel Josipovici’s newest book of criticism, Whatever Happened to Modernism?, which touched...
3. The Purpose of Literature There is an interesting conversation going on between Leonard Bast and Dan Green (of The Reading Experience), as to whether literature can be justified solely...
4. The World Sphere of Literature The book: The World Republic of Letters The contention: There is a "world republic of letters" analagous to the international political system. Entrenched by hundreds...
5. Shaping Africa’s Literature Michael at the Literary Saloon picked up on this: But there is an additional side to Achebe’s importance that few people know about. In the...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.