Literature Town (Part 1)

 Literature Town - How not to get lost in texts

A very common problem for students and teachers (and people generally I guess) when dealing with literature is the sheer amount of it, and the seemingly endless accumulation of titles, authors, movements, sub-movements and the chronology of it all. Where does this one fit? When did that one write? Do those two belong to the same movement? Is the Naturalistic novel the same as Modern? Who’s that guy? What did she write? When was that?

The answer, of course, is simple: read it all and you’ll find out. Or you could do worse than reading the excellent little book by Pierre Bayard (a University professor of Literature): ‘How to talk about books you haven’t read’ – don’t be fooled by the title, it’s light-hearted but deadly serious too, and enormously useful. Or you could read on right here 😊

Because the answer to the problem stated above can be given in one word: Connections. The problem is to do with getting a cohesive vision of how literature forms a whole, where each work is related to other works, each movement to other movements, each author to other authors. It's a combination of chronology and, much more importantly, of relationships. Once you understand that, and you have a good idea of those relationships (or at the very least, of their existence), you can start navigating the huge waters of Literature with a more reliable, well, boat I suppose - a good, solid boat with nice sails, a rudder and a good understanding of the winds. Happily mixing metaphors that way, let me introduce you to literature Town.

Let’s imagine that all books and their authors live in just one town –  and as we draw the comparison further, we will give examples of how the metaphor (literature as a town) works.

Just as in a typical provincial town, there will be a number of individuals who are all – because the town is quite small – related to one another. Some will be related by blood (siblings, close and distant cousins, grand-sons and grand-fathers: Kingsley Amis/Martin Amis; the Naipauls), but most will be related by social ties by virtue of living in the same town. So some people will have good, neighbourly relationships (Dickens and Collins), some will be close friends (Bloomsbury; Pepys and Evelyn; Henry James and Edmund Gosse; Wordsworth and Shelley) while others will be enemies (Modernists/Romantics; Flaubert and Lamartine).

Many individuals will know each other only from a distance, and as is usual, sub-groups are likely to form as well. Those sub-groups may form because of geographical distance (Magic realism in South America; Nouveau roman in France; The Great American Novel), or because of a certain like-mindedness (SF, Detective, Romance, the Victorian Novel, Realism), or perhaps in reaction to the existence of another group (to support it, to oppose it: Post-modernism; Angry Young Men; Realism; Eliot and Edwardian poetry). Of course, even within one group there might be differences of opinion (science fiction/Fantasy; hard sf, New Wave, Space operas). Sometimes, there will even be individuals who behave like hermits and seem cut-off from the town’s life (James Joyce; David Foster Wallace; De Assis). And of course, there will be those figures everyone in town knows, or has heard about (Joyce; Beckett; Kafka; Borges; Shakespeare; Hemingway). Often, those figures will also be tutelary ones, which in turn means that their disciples might be found in yet another area, all obsessively working in the spirit of their master. Some will move to the trendy places, but most will not: those places are expensive, and unfortunately, the Arts are not exempt from commercial pressures.

As also happens in real-life towns, there will be specialisations: one may sell fish, the other brooms and the third services (poetry/novels/theatre; sub-genres). It is likely that some areas of the town will reflect those specialisations; for example, there will be a commercial area, perhaps of a certain kind (How to-books; Self-improvement books; Cookbooks). There will also be residential areas (Trollope, Galsworthy, Martin du Gard) and others where one can relax (Family sagas; pot boilers; easy reading) or even learn about lives they don’t have ((auto)biographies, True crime) or lives they wish they had (Chick-lit, Romance, Adventure).

And as in any town, those neighbourhoods might be more or less reputable, and tourists might be told to avoid this neighbourhood or that part of the town (science fiction is for geeks; romance is not literature). Such a reputation might not be founded, the inhabitants of that neighbourhood might think differently about it, but that’s the way most other inhabitants of the town see it. By the same token, there will likely be a fashionable area (introspective novel in France in the 90s; Post-post colonial; Roman à clef; Epistolary novel; Harry Potter derivatives), where trendy bars and upmarket restaurants are to be found, if only temporarily (Wizards, then Vampires, then SM), while another neighbourhood will comprise mostly cheap but sometimes surprisingly sturdy housing (Dan Brown, never-ending series, Romans de gare), and yet another will be defined by the grandeur and exclusivity of its villas (Modernism; experimental literature; OULIPO; Poetry). And there will be those areas which started out as genre-novels and ended up as classics (Alexandre Dumas, say).

Finally, such a town, while it is a geographically identifiable area (you could make a map of it), also has porous borders. There is a field on the edge of town: is it city or country? Or such individual might work in town and live outside of it. Or another came to live in town recently: does he belong to the town? And what about that last, who lives half the time in the town and half the time somewhere else? Does he belong? (Margaret Atwood (novels and poetry); J. Paterson (adults/YAL); J. Banville (Mainstream/detective); P.K. Dick, W. Gibson (sf to mainstream). So while everyone can say what the town is, what its name is, and where it kind of stops, in fact no-one knows for sure when they actually walk around it. There will be official documents, and maps, and paid-for parcels, but the map, we know, is not the territory: the borders between town and not-town are a lot blurrier than that. This emphasises the fluid nature of the world of books: while some names remain as if written in marble on the main square, many will pop up for a while then disappear, some will find readers but only for a while, and most will remain forever unknown and forgotten (for fun, have a look at Arnold Bennett’s Fame and Fiction (1901), where he discusses Mrs. Ward, Mrs. Cholmondeley and other 19^th Century best-selling authors – to the tune of hundreds of thousands copies sold – who are now completely forgotten and out-of-print).

If, having posited all the above, one decided to get to know each individual in that village, one would quickly discover that a whole life would not be enough. There are just too many people there, and each has a whole story to tell. Not only that, each is related to the story of more people, each has a family, an ancestry, roots, and personal tales of growing and being. Getting to know each of those individual personally is simply impossible. Similarly, the town of books is ultimately unknowable: ‘if you imagine all the libraries of the world, or even only one: what has one read? A few pages. Of all that’s written, one has read a few pages and no more’ (J-L. Borges). What is possible is to map out what the town looks like from above (textbooks, surveys, Best of), or to concentrate on one neighbourhood (Victorian novel; Fantasy; Autobiographies; Bloomsbury) or on one individual (Terry Pratchett, Dickens, Dumas). But none of these choices can deal with the world of relationships around the texts selected, and all of them will fall short of highlighting what Literature is (hint: a web of relationships 😉).

To be continued...