Postscript

As soon as this series finished, a friend wrote to me and said: “I think the problem is that the sort of tacked-on near-afterthought at the end strikes me as the most important part: Everything is changing. Quickly. And most of this series seems to me to be addressing the current state of things as if it’s crystallized in some way.”

He sent me a link to an article on Wired.com—Bruce Sterling’s “Eighteen Challenges in Contemporary Literaturel.” Several people have already responded in the article’s comments to the effect that many of these items are not challenges but opportunities. I agree, mostly. First, I’d like to say a few things on the macro level.

Thinking of the current state and future of our literature in terms of what “problems” it is facing seems wrong. “Challenges” and “opportunities” are closer, but perhaps “challenging opportunities” would be the best way to think of it. But even these are limited. Most of Sterling’s items are, I think, irrelevant; that is, literature will transcend these “challenges” fluidly and without our even noticing, or will be unaffected by them in any major way.

Take Sterling’s first item: “Literature is language-based and national; contemporary society is globalizing and polyglot.” Modernism anticipated this trend 100 years ago. Pound and Eliot and Nabokov are all polyglot and multi-national. Ditto Beckett. Ditto Joyce. You might even say that Finnegan’s Wake is the ultimate form of this polyglot multi-national literature (though it’s mostly unreadable!).

Numbers 2 and 3 are irrelevant: Literature has no need to follow into the realm of cell-phones and streaming video, and the failure of intellectual property systems has only been a problem for those who are ossified in an outdated model of artistic production. It has only been a problem for the media conglomerates that, as Sterling points out in #7, are failing.

Numbers 4, 5, 6, and 7 are simply, as one commenter put it, problems faced by the “dead and dying aspects of print culture.” Literature will (and is already) transcending them via online publications (e.g. Wired.com or Flatmancrooked) and devices like the Kindle.

Numbers 9, 11, and 12 (literary heritage now a searchable database, collapsed barriers to publication, and algorithms and social media replacing editors) are all great new benefits for contemporary literature. Things will be slightly different, but hardly in a challenging or problematic way.

#13 and #14 are also not really problems for contemporary literature. Convergence culture may obliterate distinctions between some media, but that will only enrich and broaden what we now think of as literature, while the central core (literary text) will continue as it has. It’s not as if the arrival of the music video heralded the death of purely auditory music. As for “compositor systems remak[ing] media in their own hybrid creole image,” well, that’s the great thing about text: it’s so versatile. It can survive myriad minor transformations (of font and word per page, etc.) and still be uniquely itself; it is also not very susceptible to the sorts of transformations that compositor systems make to other forms of media (I suppose you could take the text of Don Quixote and put anime scenes behind it with a techno soundtrack, but that’s more so “remix” than repacking).

Sterling’s concerns with Scholars and Academia are also largely irrelevant. True enough that Higher Education is suffering from bubble-inflation (#16), but Academia will no longer house the intelligentsia (#15), so these two sort of cancel each other out. Access to vast searchable databases will only create more people who are extremely specialized, rather than destroy our traditional scholars “steeped within the disciplines.”

# 17 is also largely irrelevant to the current generation (and especially to the next one). As geographical location becomes more and more irrelevant to social networking and community, and as our culture becomes more and more pluralistic, this “polarizing civil cold war” will disappear, as it never really had much substance to begin with. There will still be conservatives and liberals and a thousand other dichotomies, but that’s the point: they will be part of a thousand other dichotomies and will no longer have any pretense of true representation or dominance, making them impotent.

#18 is a joke. Ross Brighton has already aptly explained so in the comments to Sterling’s article: “Poetry is not dying. There is more poetry being written, and published, than ever before. It is vibrant and vital. It functions as a kind of subculture, subeconomy. There’s no money in it (aside from grants and the like), so people write and publish out of dedication.”

Not to bash Sterling’s list entirely, however. What seem to me to be the real important “challenging opportunities” presented in the list are numbers 8 and 10:

“8. Long tail balkanizes audiences, disrupts means of canon-building and fragments literary reputation.”

“10. Contemporary literature not confronting issues of general urgency; dominant best-sellers are in former niche genres such as fantasies, romances and teen books.”

The Long Tail is the idea that when distribution and inventory costs are cheap, a business (like Amazon.com) can make a significant profit by selling small quantities of hard-to-find items rather than selling large quantities of popular items. Sterling’s point that this “balkanizes audiences” and “fragments literary reputation” is insightful. This trend is here to stay (especially with digital distribution or even print-on-demand). But is it a challenge for contemporary literature? Well, it means that there will be fewer Stephen King’s and Vonnegut’s and more Paul Bowles’s and Edward Dahlberg’s. So, we trash our fantasies of mega-fame. This will disrupt our means of “canon-building,” but canon-building has always been so artificial and elitist to begin with. The biggest challenge here will be learning to think outside the terms of a traditional canon, in figuring out how to reformulate academic reading criteria in light of an organic canon that is sprawling and in flux.

In the comments, Rothstei speaks intelligently about number 10:

“We have a positive feedback loop for shit-lit, and a negative one for urgent works…But hasn’t this always been the case? Hasn’t good lit, with a sense of vital urgency, always been a flailing corpse, fighting to get up the stairs to the stage? There might have been a couple ages of light, when a small feedback loop of good lit seized the day and made their way (no doubt unread) to the majority of shelves…all the digital is really doing …is turning shit-lit into spam-lit…Or have I missed the point? Did we actually have a cultural …propensity for literature that has strangely evaporated?”

This seems right on the money to me. If anything is bankrupt, it’s the concept of “general urgency.” The problem isn’t that contemporary literature doesn’t confront urgent issues, but that contemporary society has no sense of general urgency, but a manifold and multiform sense of urgency. Again, the challenge here will be adapting our thinking to pluralism rather than adapting our literature to an illusory concept of “general urgency.”

And yes, believe it or not, I’m going to connect this all back to hip-hop. It seems clear to me, that more than any other dominant subculture (that sounds paradoxical, I know, but I think its right), and especially more than any other form of music, hip-hop represents the sort of thinking that will carry us past the challenges represented by The Long Tail and the pluralism of urgency. It contains multitudes in a way that indie rock or electronica do not: it always has been about a constantly shifting lexicon, a plurality of style and streamlined mode of transformation. In this, it is similar to geekdom or nerd-culture and I think it’s no coincidence that both of these subcultures (if you still believe that word means anything) matured together. Literature is, by far, the old man on the block and its ways and styles seem old-fashioned and out of touch. But when I read Borges on Kafka, or see how Poe influenced Mallarmé, or Homer influenced Joyce (or maybe as Borges would have it, how Joyce influenced our reading of Homer), I can only see Literature as a giant beast existing outside of time, whose scales are the size of small villages and huge cities (which are one and the same) and whose language is seemingly strident but in fact an infinitely melodious blending of all language; it is a true chimera, a polymorph, and its pace may seem behind the times, but its already ahead of them as well. That we presume to direct its course is arrogant and narrow-minded. It will handle itself if we continue writing, and that seems unavoidable, as we’re all more than fond of blathering out our opinions in a voice of ultimate authority.

By Christopher Robinson