I’m always interested in tracing the lineage of art, of finding an indication of what influenced an artist, and of discovering what aspects of a past novel, for instance, have been adopted and repeated by contemporary novelists. It’s a small thing, but I feel as though I more thoroughly understand Philip Roth’s American Pastoral when I see that he’s adopted Proust’s technique of allowing the dialogue of several characters to run together as a series of sentences rather than breaking them up into individual paragraphs. This connection with Proust doesn’t inform my understanding of Roth’s characters or his plot, but it adds to my enjoyment of the novel by delivering to me a new angle from which to approach the text.
If I wrote literary criticism, I would use this singular connection between Proust and Roth as a launching point for an essay comparing the two authors. From here I would first look for writing that anyone else had done about these two authors, either together or separately, in the hope of finding an idea I could either agree or disagree with, and then, depending on critical conversation that already exists, I would begin searching the texts for similarities—no matter how insignificant—in theme or character that I could use to support my hypothesis. (Example: I once read an essay in which a critic argued that Joyce revealed his personal bias against Theosophists [a pseudo-religious fad in his day] based on a series of events in the plots of his stories and novels that, when matched up with their teachings, would read as being critical of the Theosophist ideology.) What does this accomplish? Well, nothing.
I believe the most meaningful commentary to be found on literature is what’s contained—either stated directly or indirectly revealed through style—in the work of fiction writers. Roth’s reflection of Proust in his own fiction, for example, can be read as an analysis of Proust in the same way one would read an essay with a title like “In Search of a Lost New Jersey: Memory, Childhood, and Disillusionment in Swann In Love and The Plot Against America”. The influence of Proust on Roth demonstrates a general agreement by Roth with Proust’s work, and in using, for instance, the technique of build up and disappointment—In Search of Lost Time is filled with people/events who are thought to be wonderful until the reality is reveled, and American Pastoral, as the title suggests, is centered on the disillusionment of an ideal American life—Roth makes a specific comment on the themes with which Proust grapples.
This is a broad (and merely preliminary) analysis of two very intricate and nuanced novels, but it is an approach I find far more informative than the hyper-esoteric analysis pursued in the kind of academic criticism that has risen as a genre separate from literature. Now, I should make a distinction here between criticism and pure literary theory. Theory concerns itself with questions such as “What is literature?” and academic criticism is, well, an academic exercise which has driven the division of literature into categories and sub-categories and sub-sub-categories derived from arbitrary and abstract sets of criteria. In other words, theory attempts to analyze literature as a whole, and criticism conducts its analysis by reducing literature into small non-mutually exclusive groups like Modernism, Post-Modernism, Magical Realism, Post-Colonialism, and so on.
So, which is the better approach? As you may have surmised, I prefer studying the big picture. Attempting to group authors by any arbitrary set of characteristics—which includes distinctions like origin and time period—has always seemed more than a little reductive to me. Tolstoy (Russian, 19th Century) had more in common stylistically with Dickens (English, 19th Century) than with many Russians, and Dostoevsky (Russian, 19th Century) has more in common with the authors categorized as Modernists (European, 20th Century) than he did with the authors of his time. And then there’s James Joyce who, depending on whom one consults, could be classified as a Modernist, a Post-Modernist, a Post-Colonialist, or probably anything else a person could want to mount an argument for (seriously, the only writer who’s had more written about their work than Joyce is Shakespeare, and Joyce only wrote three novels, ten short stories, and a slim collection of poetry).
I prefer an analysis that cuts across the shortsighted groupings applied to literature over, say, the past one-hundred-and-fifty years. It seems odd to me that all of the art produced from the 14th through the 17th century in Europe can be classified as Renaissance Art but the literature produced just in the past century requires such an endless number of distinctions. Perhaps this is simply an issue of objective distance. It seems unlikely that in three-hundred years historians will still bother with such distinctions as Modernism and Post-Modernism. How will they discuss the literature of our era in the 24th century? Well, I believe all the literature produced from the industrial revolution to, perhaps, the end of the 21st, will be grouped together as an artifact of civilization’s progress from industrialization through the fulfillment of whatever it is that’s happening now with the growing interconnectedness of people and digital technology. I am not one of the doomsayers who believes that digitization will make the novel obsolete, rather as a member of the last generation of writers who was born before the widespread dissemination of home computers and cellular phones and before the invention of the Internet, I believe I’m among a group of writers who will produce the last chapter of literature based on the shared experience of the pre-digital era. I write stories now in which people do not carry cell phones or communicate through email and already I feel a bit anachronistic.
