Art and Progress

I've been viewing a series of lectures on European art--yes, it's part of my self-improvement "program" for the next year or so (see an earlier post, written sometime last week, I believe). One interesting point the professor makes is that we are too quick to believe that an artwork using a more modern style is an automatic improvement on those in more traditional modes--or more broadly, that there exists an inherent progressive trend in the history of art. He uses as one of his primary examples Duccio and Giotto, and argues that Duccio cannot be thought of as less valuable than Giotto simply because Duccio's style looks back to the medieval period instead of looking forward to the Renaissance.

I have no doubt that the professor is right; but I wonder if that idea applies equally to all the arts. Literature that reinvigorates the language of the times usually does so by saying things in a new way--either by discarding shopworn phrases and stale images to arrive at something simple and direct, or by incorporating subtle meanings into what seems, on the surface, simple and direct--or both at the same time. Literature survives because every time it threatens to flop over on its back and die, fresh blood is injected into it in the form of a Shakespeare, a Flaubert, a Hemingway, a Virginia Woolf. All people who threw out what had become stale in the language of the day, and created a language and literature that were both new and necessary.

We live in a confusing and not terribly encouraging moment where literature is concerned, because few people seem interested in finding or creating literature that reinvigorates the language of the times. People are too busy texting each other. (This texting, of course, could become the new literature--but I tend to think that "literature" as we traditionally define it will continue to survive, right alongside all the newfangled ways in which we communicate.) As Andrei Codrescu once put it, most writers nowadays act like people milling around in an airport--an airport where none of the airplanes are taking off. We want writing to "send" us--pardon the pun--to send us where? "Out there," as Codrescu might have phrased it. To some unknown place that we can only dimly fathom, even after having taken the trip.

So I welcome newness in writing--real newness that makes us think about how we speak, how we communicate with one another--that finds ways to point out to us that our everyday language has a stranglehold around our throats. However--if someone decided to write more like Virginia Woolf and less like Michael Chabon, or more like Mark Twain and less like Alice Munro, would I consider either move a step backward? Hardly.