Paradiso

In ‘The Virginian’ you have the genesis to all fiction written in the 20th century within the realm of the ‘Western’ genre. 

It is a novel that is as ‘heroic’ as it is at times romantic, and intensely ‘Southern’; yet, there is a depth and wit to it that comes across both loyal, and indebted to that of Shakespeare and the European tradition, and often the novel will (a praise that is as high as any) echo that of Melville. 

And like Melville, Wister manages to create what few authors can: a cast of Shakespearean characters. All of whom are psychological studies, full of wit, depth and exuberant self-irony such as what we see especially within the tradition of the British, both pre-Shakespeare with Chaucer, or later with Jane Austen or George Eliot, and more “recently” in Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast. Wister manages to paint this strange ideal – American and European prose – beautifully onto the rough country of the barren, uncivilized West. There is no need for absurd gunfights or blood spatter (although this has its merits under the right conditions), rather Wister’s novel is intensely emotional. It is within the character’s inner ‘conflicts’ we find the real battle(s).

The Virginian is an exuberant, and to my recollection, a rather unique blend of the European and American tradition. What Wister does, while not always flawlessly so, yet he dares to attempt! is — despite the novel’s heroism — to criticise both what had come before him, and, what we will later see form much of American fiction, especially the quote: “post-modern” tradition in which we find rather ironically, as it defeats the tradition’s self-proclaimed purpose, a landscape of novels that have become utterly cliché-ridden and almost archaic in their approach. 

Wister formed a path that (thanks to ideology in some cases, and self-importance in others) has been all but forgotten. Here I will have to criticize authors I also enjoy (and in some cases adore deeply): Delillo, Roth, the new(er) works of Pynchon, Barth, David Foster Wallace, J. Cohen, among others.

In other words: what they have forgotten is combining the best of what the high British literature (or: the tradition) gave us along with the best of American literature: Melville, James and Faulkner. This is a synthesis that should ridden us of much of the self-important, self-indulgent, post-existential literature that is often published, and infuriatingly recycled. 

This is where the Latin American tradition has stood strong for decades. Within prose giants such as Lezama Lima, Cortàzar, Fuentes and Bolaño (among others) there is a willingness to maintain the integrity and originality inherited from the Tradition.

Do not get me wrong. The above-mentioned American authors have produced novels of serious originality: Underworld, Gravity’s Rainbow and Infinite Jest are spectacular in many aspects. What I am referring to are tendencies within the very anatomy of the late 20th century works that are produced. It is the hyper-fixation on ‘the self’ such self that is present, that all but excludes aesthetic merit and actual human life (separate self’s). Instead the reader ends up with a work that is more or less a treatise of the late 20th century/21st century “individual” masked in self-indulgent and self-conscious prose that have all but left modern American/Western literacy stale, stagnant, and I fear beyond the possibility of restitution.

Within the tradition after Wister we don’t find what Dr Samuel Johnson so expertly notes about Shakespeare: “Shakespeare has no heroes; his scenes are occupied only by men, who act and speak as the reader thinks that he should himself have spoken or acted on the same occasion.” In the long tradition between Shakespeare and the 21st century we find plenty of heroes, sure, but also a vast array of ‘men’. While within the tradition of the late 20th-21st century we find many heroes, and even worse: we find few if any “men” i.e relatable human beings who are as we are ourselves. Rather there is now the all but formulaic wordplays, repetitive self-conscious prose, and an insessant model of fractured stories that renders the project(s) incoherent, non-connected, and sadly ends up fracturing ‘the self’ more than it glues it together.

In essence: the celebration of the absence of a tradition (and of a dominant literary critical establishment) has led to the absence of what one can call actual human exploration. We are left instead with one crude self-conscious piece of literature after the other.

A reorientation toward our tradition would not only benefit the reader, but also the modern writer. This is why I have been a staunch defender of Prof. Harold Bloom’s ‘The Western Canon’ for years. T. S. Eliot for all his flaws was fascinated with the ‘presence’ of the past; and this concept is sadly what is often missing in contemporary literacy, and worse: celebrated to be missing. There is a stubbornness that is bordering on stupidity to resist canonization and the Tradition. Leading us down a path of pseudo-originality and semantic gibberish.

Unfortunately, it will rarely work for many of our modern 21st century readers who, well, according to Bloom, will have sacrificed the “sublime” for the cheap(er) fix of “pleasure,” or said in a different way: finds the alienation of the self that is found in modern 21st century prose and fractured storytelling both intriguing and compelling.

The modern reader craves the alienation, not the art.