SubStance

SubStance 32.1 (2003) 61-65

Quo Vadimus?

Peter Swirski

I cracked my crystal ball last Friday when I was taking out the tea leaves, and with my Tarot cards purloined—exactly as they foretold they would be—I'm left with a less reliable means of speculation: my own brain. The question that fascinates me is the future of literary culture and literary studies. What I want to know is: whence tomorrow, noble art and noble profession?

Those who love Ulysses find new wonders in it every time they read. To which I say, cool. Read it again and again, you lucky Smart People; you really have it over the rest of us poor peasants who find it to be one long tedious joke, which isn't very funny because it has to be explained.

—Orson Scott Card¹

Apart from alarmist post-mortems staged from time to time in the media, not much editorial space is given to the book culture of tomorrow. In the era of CD-ROM, MP3, VCR, 3D and HDTV, book reading may indeed seem defunct or at least moribund. "People Don't Read Any More!" shout banner headlines in—of all places—the print media. Others draw attention to a recent Gallup Poll that appears to diagnose a novel tendency: aliteracy. "I didn't finish one book," demurs a typical undergraduate who nonetheless aced her English course, "I skimmed every second page." ² Such a willing suspension of belief in reading is said to affect even educated professionals, including teachers who, in the same Gallup Poll, report the same aliteracy rate as their students: 50%.

But even as the tekkies trumpet the death of book culture, the facts paint an opposite picture. Every index, from total sales, to the annual number of new titles, to the index of diversity (different titles per million of population) shows a spectacular and seemingly unstoppable rise. ³ Assuming thus that we will continue to read—and talk about reading—at least in the foreseeable future, I will limit my remarks to prose fiction, trimming things to manageable proportions.

The assumption above is not as straightforward as it may seem. It flies, for example, in the face of the Pomo school of fiction, typified perhaps by the 1,000+ pages of Infinite Jest from the wordprocessor of David Foster Wallace (appropriately enough, a 2002 Disney prof at Pomona College). With [End Page 61] an almost programmatic vengeance, postmodernists revel in abstract narrative codes aimed at the inner circle of lit-crit priesthood that shares, if not always enjoys, the insipid inside joke. Tom Wolfe's The Painted Word diagnosed and dissected such involutionary, over-theorized practices in painting, decrying the Emperor's full monty so aptly that one regrets he never followed up with a sequel-a kind of Printed Painted Word.

Where in the auld lang syne literature was a mirror of the world, postmodernist prose is no more than a mirror of the mirror in its endless fascination with itself, its ontological and epistemological status, and its potential for self-reflection and self-parody. The result is as we know it today: a series of cunning but predominantly sterile meta-fiction stunts. Yet literature, just like science, should be open to everybody, and not just to the trained specialists of the text-fixated Ivory Tower which, with each day, looks more and more like a check-threatened ivory castle on a busy cultural chessboard.

Fortunately, avant-garde fiction—addressed to the vocal elite and nursed by the academic minority—is not representative of literary culture in general. Exhibiting few signs of narrative exhaustion, popular literature continues to expand radially, creating new forms of expression, tackling an ever widening range of social, technological and cultural issues, and smashing readership records in the process. The place of literary studies in the years to come will depend on the skill with which it repositions itself vis-à-vis genre fiction. Rhetorical polarization of popular and highbrow cultures apart, cultural eclecticism will continue to swell the ranks of the commercial nobrow culture which, as education and material affluence spread, will...