Editing The Author in Literature Part 2 (section)

==== The Degeneration Sets In ====
Not before long, the most important stories were told. The national characters were written about. The stories were exhausted. The narratives had taken all the plausible twists that they could take. Nineteenth-century like much else in the West was the heyday of the novel.

Starting out at various times from early 18th century most of the great nations of the West: Britain, Russia, America, France, Germany, Italy, Spain etc. had exhausted themselves by the closing of the 19th century.

The early 20th century saw some great works, but the great literary flowering of the modern West was already on a decline.

V S Naipaul has remarked that much written cultures have their own problems. It is hard to find a ‘new theme’, a ‘new story’ in a culture which has produced giants like Austen and Dickens. One would do well to remember that in a classical world this would not be a problem as no author, dramatist or artist was under pressure to create ‘something new’.

The old stories had to be told in the new idiom. The universal archetypes had to be delivered in contemporary language. With the advent of the novel as the primary vehicle of literature in the 18th century, this had changed. With the focus on the banal and the mundane, the authors were after finding a new story. This led them to a race to find ever novel ways to entertain their audience.

The search soon degenerated into a search for the strange. Like in other disciplines, the good was replaced by the strange. The old stories had to be told in the new idiom. The universal archetypes had to be delivered in contemporary language.  With the advent of the novel as the primary vehicle of literature in the 18th century this had changed. With the focus on the banal and the mundane, the authors were after finding a new story. This led them on a race to find ever novel ways to entertain their audience.

The search soon degenerated into a search for the strange. Like in other disciplines, the good was replaced by the strange. At first, the experiments were limited to the stories. Then the narrative style was experimented with too. At last even language was not left alone. Deconstruction is a process not stopped easily.

One reason for the crisis in literature was the advent of the cinema. The cinema had taken the wind out of both the theatre and the novel. The fast-moving plot of the cinema could hardly be matched in the theatre.

The action that could be shown in cinema was out of the question on a stage. And the emotions became subtler too. What took poets many pages to describe, for example, a great beautiful landscape, would be shown in five seconds without any words in cinema.

Thus the drama and the novel were left to do what the cinema couldn’t do. Even then they could have settled on their own if not for some postmodernist theories that started floating during the same decades.

For the 20th century saw the rise of post-modernism, post-structuralism, and deconstruction in which many universal props of the traditional novel and ancient theatre were destroyed. The post-modernists claimed that there is no objective truth and thus no good or bad.

As a result out went the hero and the heroism from the play and the novel. The deconstructionists claimed that the world is unreal and our eyes, our minds, and our senses lie to us. They also claimed that every story is a narrative presenting one point of view, none of which is correct and none of which can be conclusively proved wrong.

The traditional drama or the novel had a hero and a villain. Its author had very clear ideas about good and bad. The plot was central to the story, although not paramount. The language was refined and lofty. Uncertainty was occasional and little. There was a definite conclusion and a takeaway message.

The postmodern theories destroyed all of these conventions, breaking all of the legs on which a traditional drama or novel would stand. The result was the modern novel with no noble hero, not even a sympathetic common man, no clear idea of good or bad, no plot, no story, no chronology, and no definite conclusion or message.

Authored by Pankaj Saxena. 
Published by IndicaToday.[[Category:Art and Culture]]