Shaun de Waal
The books that most profoundly shaped the thought of this century were written before it began – Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859), Karl Marx’s Das Kapital (1867), and Sigmund Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams (1899). Each in its way was at the epicentre of a movement that rippled out into Western consciousness and fundamentally changed society.
Darwin’s work challenged accepted notions of humanity’s most distant past; Marx – and disciples such as Lenin – galvanised new movements into humanity’s future. Freud generated entirely new conceptions of our deepest being.
It is unlikely, though, that any books of the 20th century will have a comparatively seismic effect on the 21st. The time of the book, in some ways, is over; the last half-millennium since the invention of the printing press was its golden age. New technologies have supplanted the book as a crucible of intellectual transition and transmission, just as the motor car supplanted the horse-drawn carriage.
Moreover, the collapse of utopian ideologies and the triumph of the culture of the mass market has devalued intellectual work in general – unless it be bent to the making of money. The projects of human thought since the Renaissance have lost their power: reading no longer holds a central place in how we think about ourselves and our societies.
The 20th century produced many remarkable works that probed the human soul (or what was left of it). If we care for our souls, and not just our senses and our stomachs, we should trace the ways such works questioned and portrayed the nature of our existence.
In the early years of the century, an upheaval took place in literature – one that came to be called modernism. Similar shifts happened in all the arts, from music to architecture, though from this vantage point it is often hard to see whether what seemed like a new beginning was more than the last great spasm of a moribund culture.
James Joyce’s novel Ulysses (1922) was both the culmination of the great realist novel of the 19th century, pushing naturalism to its shattering point, and a radically new way of writing fiction. Its minute attention to detail, whether that of daily physical life or that of the subtle shifts of consciousness, was wedded to an encylopaedic sense of how writing and storytelling themselves could adjust our perceptions of life.
TS Eliot’s long poem The Waste Land, which came out in the same year, drew on the mythic past to express a perception of social decay and personal despair. While, in the decades that followed, Eliot moved ever closer to conservative values, especially religious ones, his old poetic comrade in arms, Ezra Pound, flirted with fascism and descended into madness. For him, the West was becoming the museum of a culture no longer held in any esteem. Civilisation had been “botched”; it was “an old bitch gone in the teeth”.
That was as World War II pounded Europe. In the inter-war years, writers such as poet WHAuden and novelist Graham Greene had expressed something of the unease and the political and moral complexity of that era. After the war, George Orwell encapsulated in Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) the fears of a world that had not yet entirely dealt with totalitarianism – as did Gnter Grass, in a different way,
in The Tin Drum (1959). Samuel Beckett’s work portrayed a frayed humanity barely clinging to meaning: in his most famous play, Waiting for Godot (1953), he echoed Lenin’s famous question -“What is to be done?”-with “Nothing to be done.”
In the Fifties, the writing of the United States – which had produced key voices such as Ernest Hemingway, F Scott Fitzgerald and William Faulkner before the war -experienced a new surge.
The Beat Generation challenged the solidities of the prosperous post-war era. Jack Kerouac celebrated the vast spaces of the United States and the wild energy of jazz in On the Road (1957), but he ended up as a mother-smothered alcoholic. Allen Ginsberg embraced the implications of freedom more thoroughly, from the antiestablishment jeremiad that was his long poem Howl (1955) to his engagement in movements of social change such as the hippie flowering of the 1960s. William Burroughs explored the savage misanthropies of his own psyche in fractured novels such as The Naked Lunch (1959), creating nightmarish allegories of a world both enslaved and liberated by drugs and sex.
DH Lawrence’s sexually frank novel Lady Chatterly’s Lover was first published in 1928 but caused public controversy in 1959 and 1960 when an unexpurgated paperback edition was proposed. The resultant trial, and the publishers’ victory, opened the way for increasingly graphic representations of sexuality in literature.
Alfred Kinsey’s ground-breaking studies, Sexual Behaviour in the Human Male (1948) and Sexual Behaviour in the Human Female (1953) had already helped propel a re- evaluation of that realm, and later writers were able to delve imaginatively into its secrets.
Gore Vidal’s The City and the Pillar (1949) foreshadowed the greater openness about homosexuality that was to make works such as Edmund White’s A Boy’s Own Story (1982) a bestseller in the 1980s. Such writers found constituencies as much as readerships, and the power of books to challenge social mores was affirmed.
The women’s movement had shown the way, with polemical and autobiographical works bringing feminist issues into mainstream discourse. Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (1949), Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (1963) and Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch (1970) changed lives.
Black writers, whether as minorities in the First World or as denizens of former colonies, used literature to question established hierarchies. With Things Fall Apart (1958), Chinua Achebe kicked off a surge in African writing; in 1993 African-American author Toni Morrison, whose work investigated the history and consciousness of slavery, won the Nobel Prize for Literature.
South Africa’s Nadine Gordimer had received that prize in 1991, indicating the prominence post-colonial writing had achieved, and the continuing value of work that engaged with social conditions. One of her forebears in that respect was Alan Paton, whose Cry, The Beloved Country (1948) had a huge impact and sold in huge quantities. Meanwhile, Herman Charles Bosman, whose first collection of stories, Mafeking Road, was published in 1947, cast a sly, wry light on South African realities.
The post-colonial world is still fertile ground for writers. Salman Rushdie, drawing on magic realist novels such as Gabriel Garca Mrquez’s monumental One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), showed how the dialogue between First and Third Worlds could be extended in exciting literary directions with novels such as the much-lauded Midnight’s Children (1981).
Such a brief list, of course, skims over the top of the vast number of books produced this century, many of them masterpieces to be valued in terms other than their impact on society at large. The majority of sales, however, went to popular authors writing in a diluted form of 19th-century realism (often with a generous dollop of consumerist fantasy). Entertainment became more important than enlightenment, money the over-arching measure of success.
Yet serious writers continue to try to enliven the tradition for a little longer, to make it new one more time, and novelists such as Don DeLillo in the USand John Banville in the UKare succeeding handsomely. Even if the book is to be replaced by electronic forms of communication, and the image is to conquer the word, sensation to overpower contemplation, that doesn’t cause the books we have already to disappear. We still have a great store of literature filled with priceless treasures.