At 07:38 AM 1/23/00 -0500, Lucas Klein wrote:
>>>>
are you truly so quick to dismiss Seamus Heaney or Gunter Grass or Thomas
Pynchon or Octavio Paz or Don DeLillo or Jeanette Winterson or Robert
Pinsky or Mo Yan or Toni Morrison or Kenzaburo Oe or Italo Calvino or
Wang Wen-hsing or Georges Perec or Anthony Hecht or Julio Cortazar or
Naguib Mahfouz or Gabriel Garcia Marquez or Chinua Achebe or Mario Vargas
Llosa or Galway Kinnel or Elizabeth Bishop or W. S. Merwin or Charles
Wright or
?
<<<<<<<<
Well, of course, good literature was written during the second half of
the twentieth century. Good literature was written during the second half
of the eighteenth century too. About some of the names on Lucas's list
I'd be inclined to snort "Come on!," but in general I can sincerely
acknowledge that these writers are important for their time. And I don't
want to come across like the old lady in _Cranford_, with her irrefutable
proof that Johnson is worth reading and Dickens isn't. But the key
question, at least for me, is:
what changes in language have these writers brought about?
You can locate some credits due on Lucas's list; magical realism, for
instance, though even that owes most of its being to surrealism -- i.e.,
a movement dating from the first half of the century. But in English the
big changes are the ones brought about by just two writers: Joyce and
Pound. For my money, these are the writers of their century.
Meanwhile, 1998 has come and gone, and I haven't yet become conscious of
the advent of a second _Lyrical Ballads_. But I'm waiting in confidence.
The twenty-first century will have a literature yet.
Jonathan Morse