Stardate 20031128.1205

(On Screen): Jane Gault writes a post (in reaction to one by Terry Teachout) where she asks this question:

But there's one point Mr Teachout makes that I think is really important: we seem to be producing very little indeed in the way of lasting literature these days -- by which I mean literature that will be read in a couple of hundred years. And I'd argue that the reason this is true is that our literary writers have jettisoned the things we know readers respond to -- plot, character, and narrative -- for Language and Relevance.

It's not because plot, character, and language are somehow inimical to art. Homer knew them. Shakespeare is a master of plot and character (though he does occasionally get a bit muddled on his off days.) Dickens depended on them. Yet one too often sees novels driven by plotting and narrative dismissed as some kind of cheap pandering to men's basest instincts.

Instead what do our critics value? Language! The glowing reviews on some author's marvelous use of language could be piled to the moon's distant dead orb and back again.

....

Literature endures in the end because it speaks to something in many generations -- their hopes for glory or fears of failure. Few of us have been kings trying to play three daughters off against each other -- but many of us have been foolish in our demands for familial love, and all of us are haunted by the fear that we may become powerless and old. The more relevant and topical a novel is, the less likely it is to speak to anyone uninterested in political or cultural quarrels that faded out before their grandparents were born.

I confess, I'm hard pressed to think of literary writers whose work will still be read a hundred years from now. Perhaps my readers have some suggestions?

The resulting comment thread is extremely interesting, for there are many suggestions of authors "now" (by consensus in the thread, basically those who worked in the 20th century) whose works will likely still be read in a hundred years. And what becomes clear is that very little of it is "literature".

Or rather, little of it is thought of as "literature" now. There are some who deliberately set out to write "literature", and what they're creating is just as empty as most of the "fine art" which is produced now; concentrating more on form and style than on substance. They've lost their souls; they're more interested in impressing the reader than in communicating with him.

What a lot of people have been pointing to as very likely to still be read in a hundred years is in fact not "literature" (or "Littrahchah"). What commenters are focusing in on as modern writers which will still be read in a hundred years is good storytellers. They're not the ones who are trying to make their use of language the star of the show; they're the ones who are trying to make the words disappear.

James Joyce made the language the star; it is possible to get an entire evening's entertainment out of close consideration of a single paragraph from Finnigan's Wake. The actual story told in Ulysses is really rather banal. But one Joyce was enough.

I can't write fiction. Believe me, I've tried, but I soon gave up. My fiction simply sucked, so I went back to this kind of stuff, "non-fiction", expository writing, what I myself think of as technical writing. (Because that's what I was doing when I learned to do it reasonably well.) And though my prose is sometimes rather florid, I'm told that it flows well and is relatively easy to read. That's certainly my intent; my goal is not to impress you by being articulate, but rather to communicate with you and transfer ideas from my mind to yours with as little distortion as possible. The words are a communication medium, nothing more.

As a software engineer I've been involved in developing human interfaces, and there's an analogy between buttons and screen layouts in a human interface for a computerized tool and the language used by a master storyteller or master expository writer. Both of them exhibit the same virtue when done well: they vanish. (I wrote about invisible user interfaces in this article.)

When you're reading an absorbing novel written by a good story teller, the words flow past your eyes, but you don't see the words. What instead happens is that you become immersed in the story; you leave yourself, leave your body and the time and place where you live, perhaps even leave your personality behind, and travel disembodied to another time and place to witness remarkable events and people, and perhaps become someone else.

The reader can cease to be aware of the passage of time, or the needs of his body, and may suddenly be jarred back to reality to realize that his bladder is painfully full, his leg is cramping because it's been in the same position for hours, and it's 4AM and his eyes are itchy and he has to work the next day. Only the very best writers can do that to us.

We do not read such stories to acquire information; we read them because we enjoy that experience of immersion. And th