I was thinking recently about the grand themes of great literature. Not that I've read any great literature lately -- reading, sadly, feels guilty when I feel that instead, I should be reading a text book or some company's job description. May I should just say #%*$ it to all that and just go back to finding books and reading them. Instead of watching American Idol. Yes, I can't believe it either. I actually tune into that show once in a while nowadays, which is sad to say the least. And it just adds to the guilt. Life's all a big darn cycle of guilt nowadays, isn't it!!
As I reflected on the great literary themes, however, I couldn't help but apply them to my own fleeting ideas that come and go often when I'm supposed to be working or paying attention to something else. Some of them have hints of greatness clouding them like an aura in need of a heavenly deity; others are more of the everyday anecdote, should-have-blogged-this-but-didn't type; yet others are great things of prodigious irony that are deeply personal. If I were to write the "next great American novel" (or, let's not kid ourselves, if I could muster to write "the next average short story"), I truly wonder what my literary catharsis would be about.
Would it be about a personal journey? A coming-of-age story? An individual-vs-society showdown? An overcoming of (internal) crisis? A critique of society? A lesson learned or un-learned?
The thing that fascinates me about fiction, particularly epic, timeless fiction (and I don't mean Harry Potter) is that it has an element of revealing a grandiose truth about its thematic element, and that truth is very much a nonfiction. Novels like Les Miserables or Crime and Punishment may use characters who never lived, but they might as well have. These novels aren't making up something that could not have occured; they aren't lying. What they are doing is making us question the very essence of our character as men (or women); they critique the societies in which they take place in a way those criticisms had not been presented prior. In the nineteenth century, these novels were ahead of their time.
The problem now is that it has all been done. As much as literature has evolved and progressed, as much as we can be thankful for the Hemingways and the Faulkners and Garcia Marquezes and Bulgakovs, as much as I enjoy modern historical fiction -- there don't seem to be stories that have not been told before. During my flight to Boston from Rio, I read The Kite Runner -- that book by Khaled Hosseini that everyone raved about. I loved it -- it had drama, it had expressive language, a riveting plot, a cultural legacy, a sense of novelty because the author was Afghan-American (a first). But I knew what the ending was going to be before I finished.
My absolute favorite book of last summer was La Sombra del Viento (The Shadow of the Wind), a top Spanish bestseller, literary mystery, and a romantic thriller in turn-of-the-century Barcelona that used some of the most colorful and poetic language I'd read recently (at least in Spanish). I liked this book so much I bought it in an English translation for my sister and for friends. One Amazon reviewer wrote that this was "a Hollywood-esque version of a great 19th century novel". I loved, loved, loved the book, but that is exactly what it was: a beautiful, bright revival of a Romantic era theme. A theme we could all use a little more of today instead of the graphic sex in modern books (can't you turn on the TV for that?), but a theme that's been long done. Modern novelists, like physicists, "stand on the shoulders of giants".
They also stand on the edge of a publishing industry in trouble. An industry that I wanted to enter for a long time. Long before college, but now I may be changing my mind after realizing that a potential starting salary per year equals around half (maybe less now?) of my college tuition bill. And an industry that is so desperate for "innovation" in the form of explicitness and simplicity that it has forgotten the power of metaphor, the rhythm of phrasing, and the poetry of words. Speaking of poetry, it mustn't rhyme, either -- that's so "constricting" against the "free" expression... whatever. Modern poetry is a lost art entirely.
Of course nobody invented archetypes. Nobody invented themes in literature; those were always human themes and the rhythm behind anybody's story. People were and remain products of their times, and great books reflect the author's time both then and now. Innovators in books have come and gone, left their mark, others followed. Yet in our world where nothing is private anymore (and people don't have the time to read long sentences), literature follows suit. The difference now is that instead of reading really any kind of books, we spend more time on Facebook reading bursts of tidbids about people we barely know because we no longer realize how to communicate or date or speak or interact with people in real life. Is the information age in reality killing information we could have learned before?
I wanted to write a book since I was a little girl, but, like most other things, fear of failure and a perceived lack of experience kept and is keeping me from starting. I used to say, a novel that is in the very least good cannot be truly fiction. Nobody is talking about a novel that's great; a novel that discovers great truths about our universe and presents them in a novel way, like Hugo or Hemingway or Fitzgerald did. But even a good novel must rely on life experience; if not the author's, then someone's.
An active imagination can only go so far. A true author must know not only what her feelings are, but how to tap them. How to mold them, make shapes of them. Apply them to situations she may not have experienced yet, or might never experience; just having feelings isn't enough. There is something greater to understand -- something I can't quite put my finger on, but a sense of reconciliation with surroundings. An urgent necessity to tell not only a simple story, but the analytic capacity to classify reality, to invent a separate reality, place it into the world that exists or once existed -- but make it believable. And, of course, the words, the passion, the need to make it real once more... but real on the author's terms.
Going into my house
