High Modernism

What If the Literary Establishment Were a Car Company?

A SPECULATIVE ESSAY

IS IT ABSURD to compare literary products– novels and books of stories and poems– with automobiles?

Yes and no. After all, one is considered “art” and the other merely engineering and design. Plus there’s the unwanted question of aligning literature with Capitalism– even though the literary realm is dominated by giant conglomerates– centered on the same Big Money island as them– with the literary intelligentsia as embedded in the publishing system as anyone, and long has been.

Besides, a few of us believe literature, done right, carries many of the same attributes as a well-made vehicle. Speed, power, beauty, and sound internal structure, to name a few of them.

WHAT IF?

What would the name of said literary car company be, do you think? I have one picked out:

STODGY MOTORS

Fits the vibe. General Motors circa 1970, but worse– stuck in an outdated mindset with an arrogant belief that only they know the right way to do things.

But for the Stodgy board members, everything is great!

“We have all these great models,” they tell themselves. “Why is no one buying them?”

Yes, after all they have their long-time favorite top-of-the-line model, the Proust, first introduced in 1913– same year as Ford’s Model T. (Shown: a more recent model.)

(photo c/o youtube)

Or, the much-lauded Woolf model. Not very quick– top speed of 45 mph– and uncomfortable seats, but will eventually get you where you’re going. Who could not want it? “The engineering is actually remarkable,” a Stodgy salesperson assures us. “Well put together, if you examine it closely. I mean, the parts fit. They really do.”

(photo c/o autoevolution)

Or the more recently designed Beckett. Another award-winner.

(photo c/o car.info)

But what about cutting edge design, consumers ask? The Stodgy Company has that covered, with a more experimental model they call the Kafka. Pushing the boundaries of, well, something.

(photo c/o ugly car)

“How can you not love it? All of it?” the Stodgy representatives ask.

They do. They’ve staked their reputations on their tastes and choices, and will not go back on them. It’d be unheard of. After all, who knows better than them?

“It’s a golden age for Stodgy, you see,” they affirm. “It really is.”

-reportage from Karl Wenclas for Fast Pop

About Modernist Literature

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

Canonical Conformity

ONE THING I learned during the period of my life I spent teaching in high schools is the educational system weeds out the rebels. Often, the most creative, nonconformist members of a class are the delinquents. Usually the leader of the delinquents.

(This was the case in 1960s to 80s England. See this book):

At every stage, more individuals are filtered out as the most obedient climb the institutional ladder: those raising their hands at the front of the class– not bored sleepers at the back.

THE INSTILLED ATTITUDE becomes that of any bureaucracy: “Go along to get along.” The canon of approved literary models becomes unquestioned– even if those models were daring choices at the time they originally were celebrated and canonically included. (Can’t dare anything today!)

Which led to the creation of the god of gods in the literary realm: High Modernism.

Never mind that most of the High Modernist canonical novels connect with few people and are in fact not very good. (Gregor Samsa waking up as a giant insect? Okay, we get the point. We’re hit over the head with it. Now do we still have to read the entire story?)

Aesthetic satisfaction: nil.

c/o pandoraoutletofficialstore

WHY do approved literary intellectuals (see photo) celebrate– nay, require– vagueness and “difficulty” (a favorite term)? The reason is obvious when you think about it. They’ve climbed to high station after an intensive weeding-out process. Understanding difficult, poorly-constructed novels is part of the process. They’re like government bureaucrats pushed upward according to how well they understand obscure regulations– the more obscure, the better. They need to be few. Justifies their position. “Literature” isn’t for everybody! Not just anybody can appreciate those High Modernist guys.

-KW