Impermanence

Issue 110

Split, Croatia 2016

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Skim your eye across these ten names and decide whether any strike you as notable:

• Paul Johann Ludwig Heyse

• Count Maurice Polidore Marie Bernhard Maeterlinck

• Gerhart Johann Robert Hauptmann

• Rabindranath Tagore

• Romain Rolland

• Carl Gustaf Verner von Heidenstam

• Henrik Pontoppidan

• Karl Adolph Gjellerup

• Carl Friedrich Georg Spitteler

• Knut Pedersen Hamsun

Unless you have a particular affinity for the subject, you might not recognize anybody on this list, though you will probably recognize a consistent lineage. Nearly all of the names should put your mind toward a particular spot in the world. Beyond one exception, we’re in Northern Europe, we’re looking at a list of men, and we’re at least a few generations into the past—these are all reasonable conclusions. Now let’s try it once more with a fresh list of ten names:

• Mario Vargas Llosa

• Tomas Tranströmer

• Mo Yan

• Alice Munro

• Patrick Modiano

• Svetlana Alexievich

• Bob Dylan

• Kazuo Ishiguro

• Olga Tokarczuk

• Peter Handke

• Louise Glück

Our list has certainly changed—we’ve added several women, we seem to be using fewer syllables, we’ve broadened the geography, and I am certain that you can now recognize a name or two. You might even spot the organizing principle of this second list, and then start making some assumptions about what I showed you first.

For that first list we have the Nobel Prize in Literature winners from 1910 to 1920, though neither 1914 nor 1918 had any winners, as Europe was busy with other obligations during those years; for the second list we have the winners from 2010 to 2020, a much more familiar roster of names for anybody reading today.

Occasionally, you’ll hear names on this second list discussed with exalted tones, spoken with reverence and grandness and timeliness, and that’s perfectly fine because a few of them even deserve that praise. Implicit in nearly all that acclaim is, however, a belief that the second list won’t ever become as unfamiliar as the first list. There’s an assumption that today’s acclaim will never be esoteric or forgettable or even uninteresting to future generations—which reveals, among many shortcomings, more than a dash of hubris. History is a reasonable guide until proven wrong, and it is perfectly sensible to assume that in one hundred years you’ll have to be quite the eccentric, or a subject matter expert for a forgotten, uninteresting age, to know the names on the second list—to have any reaction that’s different from how you reacted to the first list. To assume that the distant future will care about today’s literary giants is almost childlike—it is a cry to remember this time, when the child lives, as particularly special, and not just another blurry decade from an obscure era.

Don’t forget to consider the reverse: if I am wrong, that means that the distant future has a literary culture that lives in the past, which is quite a depressing outcome. Although I do find benefits and pleasure and knowledge from reading old novels, I also regard it important to remain in touch with my own time, with the literary world as it is today. I think that I would do rather poorly on any exhaustive test of, for example, 19th Century literature that was given to students in the 19th Century, even though I’ve read plenty of novels from the period. And that’s because nearly every writer talked about in anxious, breathless conversation during that century has been dismissed by history—and the few writers from that century who we still read today are the exceptions that snuck into our age. For the sake of an enlivened and interesting future, I do hope that most of our present authors are just as forgettable, and that they aren’t still deemed the most valuable literary giants in one hundred years.

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It is worth noting that there’s nothing particularly special about my choice of the Noble Prize for a literary measurement. It is a useful gauge, one that provides a metric for prestigious literary taste, and it just happens to have a long enough history for this exercise, but any fridge magnet or trophy or town ribbon bestowed to the top local short story will do just fine. Count past winners of the National Book Award or look at critic lists from a previous century and the exercise doesn’t change. Nearly all notable names in the arts are mere starbursts—a flash that illuminates the sky and widens nearby eyes, but, for those who blink, there’s nothing left to see. The incredibly rare exceptions—the Shakespeares and the Dantes and the Tolstoys—are exceptions that define the rule, and that is, for any writer who slogs with an empty page, news that can eventually be declared good.

Although for most writers—those strange primates who typically come equipped with a bit more obsessiveness, a bit more selfishness—this might be tricky to see. Is all the work futile? Pointless? Is it time to pack up? After a little contemplation, after the discouragement has worn off, some writers will recognize the upside: because the distinction between success and failure is so marginal, and because it is ultimately ephemeral whether you’re on the bestseller list or whether you stand on a cardboard box and shout your poems in a park, then all the literary status games drop away. To sit before a blank page and scribble while knowing the banality of the literary hierarchy is to take a small step toward freedom with your pen: the only concern left in your mind is the writing—what’s actually on the page.

Of course no sane artist sets out for acclaim—the majority of writers that I know simply want a consistent, encouraging readership. An opportunity to fill some pages, readers curious about their words, a little less worry about selling the next piece. Nothing more than the ability to combine grit and the occasional bit of luck to keep practicing the craft. But if you are trying to write an unforgettable novel, or struggling with a tricky essay, it is worth contemplating how fleeting, or how inconsequential, success lasts for those at the pinnacle of the profession; neither the artful paragraphs nor the apt metaphors are remembered for that long, and all those books that are anxiously awaited are, soon enough, curious items in tomorrow’s discount bin.

Yet this truth does contrast with the timeworn advice that you should write for posterity. To assume that you’re writing each page for the unborn, and that all your contemporary critics have long since, so to speak, left the scene. This is a useful heuristic to mumble while you stare at a blank page because it orients you toward sincerity and timelessness and also dismisses the ephemeral—although it is admittedly grandiose because, well, you can pretty much guarantee that you’ll have no readers in posterity. So the notion of writing for a distant future might be the right pose, the right attitude, for someone struggling with a sentence, for someone who wants to concentrate on what truly matters, even though it is fundamentally deluded as a possibility—you end up lying to yourself so that you’re honest on the page.

To write for posterity while also believing that posterity will never come is obviously a peculiar sensation, but it does at least point the way forward: focusing on the moment is all that remains. It is a reminder that you can only control, in the end, this one moment—the writing of the sentence that’s directly in front of you. How it lands is beyond your control. How long it lasts is beyond your control. And how it is interpreted isn’t even within a laughable distance of your control. To recognize this can make the labor a bit easier and even freeing—as there’s nothing worth pondering other than the sentence that you’re trying to write. The rest is a distraction, a loss of purpose, and, beyond that lesson, there’s also the truth that everyone you’re trying to impress will soon be gone, as will everyone who has ever heard of the people you’re trying to impress, in an upheaval that’s only a blink or two away. So there’s nothing worth considering beyond your effort and concentration and the drive you have to create the sentence right before you, which can be a rather liberating thought, and isn’t really, in the end, just about writing.