A RANT

WHAT TRUE MODERN LITERATURE SHOULD LOOK LIKE

FUNNY: Modernist writers Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, Sherwood Anderson and their famous protege, Ernest Hemingway, saw the key to moving literary art forward in removing Victorian-era verbiage. They stressed “economy of language.” They saw modernism in the same terms as modernist painters, architects and designers: via simplicity and clarity. Eliminating the unnecessary to get to the core emotion beneath. Hemingway’s own prose, beginning with his earliest in our time vignettes, embodies this philosophy.

I ASK, then, how did we arrive at the piled-on unreadable verbiage of High Literary Modernism? A combination of Henry James sentence fetish, detail disease, and word clot? Run-on Joyce Faulkner Woolf paragraphs of stream-of-consciousness nonsense within endless Proustian narratives, through which the reader haplessly hopefully wades, as if digging through a garbage dump, until said reader, stupefyingly bored after hundreds or thousands of pages, at last cries out, “Enough!”

WHO PRAISED these High Modernist con artists? Who made them an essential inextricable part of the literary Canon– the art’s Pantheon– while more accessible and frankly more intelligent authors were expunged? High Modernists are held up to gullible students as role models, but in reality they’re giant OBSTACLES preventing the art from moving forward.

OUR STANCE at New Pop Lit is that Ernest Hemingway was not an end point of modernist writing, but a beginning, marking a path to take– one of outward-looking, in-the-real-world expectation and experience. A clear-eyed, clear-headed plunge into the world of now, connecting DIRECTLY and immediately with readers in electric communication– a current of art running through readers like a surge of energy.

THAT’S the path to follow. New art which wakes up the stunned sleepy public to announce, “Literature is BACK!” Then spreading across the planet.

Anyway, that’s the plan.

-Karl Wenclas