Humans will remain humans by nature, and we will feel the same joys and sorrows that those before us felt, and so on for the lifetime of the human race—however these emotions and experiences may differ in their appearances. Writers may invent new and interesting ways of evoking your joy or your sorrow, but they won’t invent you a new emotion. The hyper-eccentricity of new writing is only like handing you a new pair of orange-tinted glasses: it’s beautiful, and it’s interesting for a while, but ultimately you’re seeing the same thing, and you’ll be satisfied and ready to move on pretty quickly. What we care about, really, is the thing: the landscape, the sky, the clouds, the enduring truth that makes us think of God and eternity. Those things won’t change, and thank God they won’t. The best artists have always recognized that they’re not meant to merely create something original or eccentric from their own heart, but throw light on the highest truths, those that are external to us but felt and perceived inwardly. Writers should, rather than merely offer us a new tint of glass (although there is no reason why they shouldn’t offer it additionally), offer us glasses that are clear, through which we can best see and know the highest truths and the face of God. No artist has ever created or will ever create perfectly clear glasses, but they can make them clearer than not. That’s what I believe art is about—not flaunting one’s own self and one’s own originality, but simply and humbly observing and delighting in God and all the beauty and emotion that emanates from Him. Those who focus solely on doing just that, without the kind of anxiety of influence and originality—those who have the truth in their hearts—will be capable of true originality.
If you know where to look, the golden age of imaginative literature flourished in ancient times, reignited in later medieval times, and has continued ever since. To try to argue that, say, Nadine Gordimer's best novel or Toni Morrison's best novel is not equivalent in quality as artwork to any of Jane Austen's novels would be silly. Maybe Victor Hugo and George Eliot and others wrote a couple peaks of the novel form, but certain works like Ngugi wa Thiong'o's Wizard of the Crow can challenge those, and very many authors of the past century-plus add a plethora of vital and impressive cultural and stylistic elements in many imaginative works that the Victorian greats could never dream of. Plus imaginative story in film and video also matches and in many ways surpasses Victorian artworks generally. This is a golden time for imaginative literature and art and has been for centuries. Could it be better? Yes. Is there a lot of bullshit? Yes. Much is changing rapidly, even terminally, and the publishing establishment is unwilling to keep up with the needed pace of change, which forces others to struggle to do so, and some manage it, while plenty of artists in the establishment remain far from untalented or imperceptive - whether in novels, films, videos, and so on. Any artist dying to be somehow especially uniquely original might be well advised to focus on being ever more keenly perceptive to the unprecedently fateful times they live in and then go for the most vital expression and transformation of those times in the biggest or most potent and powerful ways. You can see artists who have attempted this with great success through the years, ongoing. Seems to be a little bit of ego-mania or unwarranted pessimism in approaching or viewing art otherwise, at least outside of utterly stagnant, stagnant societies or cultural fixations. The remarkable aesthetic innovations and normative evolutions of imaginative literature in even the English language have been incredible for half a millennia at least and seem to me to continue without let-up, especially in the cultural and technological explosion of recent decades. Things could be better and far more original than they are, and should be, even to the point of artistic (and personal and social) revolution, but in the meantime, though it can be small consolation in general, given the times, imaginative literature continues at a high level of diversity and vitality, including in some ways without precedent. Originality in art should be judged not only in terms of "style," that one small part of aesthetics that is too often pushed forward with the effect of obscuring far greater features of both aesthetics and the normative qualities of the artwork in full.
Thanks for taking the time to read and respond. I think part of the issue is that you’re lumping different art forms and cultures together while I prefer to separate them. Of course it’s true that “imaginative literature” has existed since humans learned to write and probably always will—and the category is so broad that you can’t really say much more about it than that. But with something like “the English novel” or “Latin poetry” it’s different, and following the thinkers I discuss I think there’s usually an arc that moves from development to perfection to decline. Different art forms are at different points of those arcs right now: I agree that film is probably at a high point, I just don’t think the English novel is. Another person who thought about the arts like this was the philosopher Arthur Danto, who made a compelling case in his book After the End of Art that the story of visual art ended with Andy Warhol.
I disagree that writers who want to create something of lasting literary value should primarily focus on capturing the time they live in. While some great artists do end up doing this, I think formal originality is much more important than originality of content. Lots of writers write about their time and are then forgotten, whereas those who are able to build originally on the formal conventions of their predecessors survive. Further, books that survive for literary reasons do so not because of what they say about the times they were written in but because they capture in a new way something that continues to resonate with readers (think of Jane Austen or Proust).
It's irrelevant whether or not artists write about their own time or any other time in regard to producing great art. This is simply proved by the fact that great art has been created by artists who create art of any and all points in time. There's also zero theoretical reason why this couldn't be so, and done, and it is.
Why examine only "the English novel"? Why focus so narrowly? Why not look at, minimally, novels written in English across time? Or, in an increasingly globalized culture - all novels everywhere across time, especially of late. I mean, it's simple common sense that certain cultures or societies at certain points in time are going to advantage or disadvantage the creation of certain types of works of art. This probably explains the qualified height of the novel (not very diverse, which also has aesthetic implications) during Victorian times. (One can to some theoretical extent separate aesthetics from a whole work of art but then you are judging some theoretical idea of aesthetics and not the artwork, the full work of art, itself.) The thing is, there are some absolutely extraordinary novels written within the past 100 years and more too, many very highly competent and lengthy novels that have the advantage over Victorian novelists in having ready access to and learning from many more varied and innovative types of novels - as well as many additional historical and cultural and personal (aka normative) experiences - far more so than Victorians had access to. So you would expect subsequent novels to be very impressive even when compared to the best Victorian novels - even though those societies advantaged big novels of society - and they are.
"Development to perfection"? Perfection is a very weird notion in human affairs, which are always changing, and therefore so should the art, at least in art forms as amorphous, adaptable, and endlessly capacious as the novel. So "development to perfection to decline" is no necessary law of history and can't be - not for flexible forms of art. I mean, compare ancient plays to contemporary plays, and now become screenplays. No reason a high level can't be reached and then maintained, conceivably forever. If you're talking about a particular aesthetic that has been "perfected," well, that's an aesthetic component of a work of art, not the work of art itself. Theoretically any such aesthetic perfection could be carried indefinitely across time through the ever-changing social elements that make up so much of art - new social elements that provide their own novel aesthetic opportunities, complications, and limitations. Of course some art forms will fall in and out of fashion, including sometimes permanently, and often for good reason, typically sociological. If we think that a particular art has been perfected, then either the art is far less complex and malleable than the novel, or the particular society and culture has ended, moved on, or wholly stagnated. And yet the great Satyricon reads almost absolutely contemporary. Many great works of the past do. Jane Austen not least. Has there been a drop or rise in big satire, or in Jane Austen type novels. Doesn't seem so to me.
Of course, certain forms of art will come and go, rise and fall, in various societies and cultures but that has to do with cultural and social reasons - the normative, not the aesthetic. Why? Because, again, human affairs are always changing (unless, as noted, you are talking about very stagnant epochs). So there's no reason that the most flexible artforms cannot continue indefinitely at a very high level - plays, stories, novels, and the like - sometimes with certain inevitable modifications. And there's every reason why they should. And in my view we are seeing this in a variety of forms of imaginative lit - novels, stories, plays, poems....
This is often if not always true of other fields too. I mean, take philosophy. There is no golden age of philosophy. There are golden ages. The very heights keep being hit again and again over time, while of course there are some lows, again depending upon the social and cultural situations.
Humans will remain humans by nature, and we will feel the same joys and sorrows that those before us felt, and so on for the lifetime of the human race—however these emotions and experiences may differ in their appearances. Writers may invent new and interesting ways of evoking your joy or your sorrow, but they won’t invent you a new emotion. The hyper-eccentricity of new writing is only like handing you a new pair of orange-tinted glasses: it’s beautiful, and it’s interesting for a while, but ultimately you’re seeing the same thing, and you’ll be satisfied and ready to move on pretty quickly. What we care about, really, is the thing: the landscape, the sky, the clouds, the enduring truth that makes us think of God and eternity. Those things won’t change, and thank God they won’t. The best artists have always recognized that they’re not meant to merely create something original or eccentric from their own heart, but throw light on the highest truths, those that are external to us but felt and perceived inwardly. Writers should, rather than merely offer us a new tint of glass (although there is no reason why they shouldn’t offer it additionally), offer us glasses that are clear, through which we can best see and know the highest truths and the face of God. No artist has ever created or will ever create perfectly clear glasses, but they can make them clearer than not. That’s what I believe art is about—not flaunting one’s own self and one’s own originality, but simply and humbly observing and delighting in God and all the beauty and emotion that emanates from Him. Those who focus solely on doing just that, without the kind of anxiety of influence and originality—those who have the truth in their hearts—will be capable of true originality.
If you know where to look, the golden age of imaginative literature flourished in ancient times, reignited in later medieval times, and has continued ever since. To try to argue that, say, Nadine Gordimer's best novel or Toni Morrison's best novel is not equivalent in quality as artwork to any of Jane Austen's novels would be silly. Maybe Victor Hugo and George Eliot and others wrote a couple peaks of the novel form, but certain works like Ngugi wa Thiong'o's Wizard of the Crow can challenge those, and very many authors of the past century-plus add a plethora of vital and impressive cultural and stylistic elements in many imaginative works that the Victorian greats could never dream of. Plus imaginative story in film and video also matches and in many ways surpasses Victorian artworks generally. This is a golden time for imaginative literature and art and has been for centuries. Could it be better? Yes. Is there a lot of bullshit? Yes. Much is changing rapidly, even terminally, and the publishing establishment is unwilling to keep up with the needed pace of change, which forces others to struggle to do so, and some manage it, while plenty of artists in the establishment remain far from untalented or imperceptive - whether in novels, films, videos, and so on. Any artist dying to be somehow especially uniquely original might be well advised to focus on being ever more keenly perceptive to the unprecedently fateful times they live in and then go for the most vital expression and transformation of those times in the biggest or most potent and powerful ways. You can see artists who have attempted this with great success through the years, ongoing. Seems to be a little bit of ego-mania or unwarranted pessimism in approaching or viewing art otherwise, at least outside of utterly stagnant, stagnant societies or cultural fixations. The remarkable aesthetic innovations and normative evolutions of imaginative literature in even the English language have been incredible for half a millennia at least and seem to me to continue without let-up, especially in the cultural and technological explosion of recent decades. Things could be better and far more original than they are, and should be, even to the point of artistic (and personal and social) revolution, but in the meantime, though it can be small consolation in general, given the times, imaginative literature continues at a high level of diversity and vitality, including in some ways without precedent. Originality in art should be judged not only in terms of "style," that one small part of aesthetics that is too often pushed forward with the effect of obscuring far greater features of both aesthetics and the normative qualities of the artwork in full.
Thanks for taking the time to read and respond. I think part of the issue is that you’re lumping different art forms and cultures together while I prefer to separate them. Of course it’s true that “imaginative literature” has existed since humans learned to write and probably always will—and the category is so broad that you can’t really say much more about it than that. But with something like “the English novel” or “Latin poetry” it’s different, and following the thinkers I discuss I think there’s usually an arc that moves from development to perfection to decline. Different art forms are at different points of those arcs right now: I agree that film is probably at a high point, I just don’t think the English novel is. Another person who thought about the arts like this was the philosopher Arthur Danto, who made a compelling case in his book After the End of Art that the story of visual art ended with Andy Warhol.
I disagree that writers who want to create something of lasting literary value should primarily focus on capturing the time they live in. While some great artists do end up doing this, I think formal originality is much more important than originality of content. Lots of writers write about their time and are then forgotten, whereas those who are able to build originally on the formal conventions of their predecessors survive. Further, books that survive for literary reasons do so not because of what they say about the times they were written in but because they capture in a new way something that continues to resonate with readers (think of Jane Austen or Proust).
It's irrelevant whether or not artists write about their own time or any other time in regard to producing great art. This is simply proved by the fact that great art has been created by artists who create art of any and all points in time. There's also zero theoretical reason why this couldn't be so, and done, and it is.
Why examine only "the English novel"? Why focus so narrowly? Why not look at, minimally, novels written in English across time? Or, in an increasingly globalized culture - all novels everywhere across time, especially of late. I mean, it's simple common sense that certain cultures or societies at certain points in time are going to advantage or disadvantage the creation of certain types of works of art. This probably explains the qualified height of the novel (not very diverse, which also has aesthetic implications) during Victorian times. (One can to some theoretical extent separate aesthetics from a whole work of art but then you are judging some theoretical idea of aesthetics and not the artwork, the full work of art, itself.) The thing is, there are some absolutely extraordinary novels written within the past 100 years and more too, many very highly competent and lengthy novels that have the advantage over Victorian novelists in having ready access to and learning from many more varied and innovative types of novels - as well as many additional historical and cultural and personal (aka normative) experiences - far more so than Victorians had access to. So you would expect subsequent novels to be very impressive even when compared to the best Victorian novels - even though those societies advantaged big novels of society - and they are.
"Development to perfection"? Perfection is a very weird notion in human affairs, which are always changing, and therefore so should the art, at least in art forms as amorphous, adaptable, and endlessly capacious as the novel. So "development to perfection to decline" is no necessary law of history and can't be - not for flexible forms of art. I mean, compare ancient plays to contemporary plays, and now become screenplays. No reason a high level can't be reached and then maintained, conceivably forever. If you're talking about a particular aesthetic that has been "perfected," well, that's an aesthetic component of a work of art, not the work of art itself. Theoretically any such aesthetic perfection could be carried indefinitely across time through the ever-changing social elements that make up so much of art - new social elements that provide their own novel aesthetic opportunities, complications, and limitations. Of course some art forms will fall in and out of fashion, including sometimes permanently, and often for good reason, typically sociological. If we think that a particular art has been perfected, then either the art is far less complex and malleable than the novel, or the particular society and culture has ended, moved on, or wholly stagnated. And yet the great Satyricon reads almost absolutely contemporary. Many great works of the past do. Jane Austen not least. Has there been a drop or rise in big satire, or in Jane Austen type novels. Doesn't seem so to me.
Of course, certain forms of art will come and go, rise and fall, in various societies and cultures but that has to do with cultural and social reasons - the normative, not the aesthetic. Why? Because, again, human affairs are always changing (unless, as noted, you are talking about very stagnant epochs). So there's no reason that the most flexible artforms cannot continue indefinitely at a very high level - plays, stories, novels, and the like - sometimes with certain inevitable modifications. And there's every reason why they should. And in my view we are seeing this in a variety of forms of imaginative lit - novels, stories, plays, poems....
This is often if not always true of other fields too. I mean, take philosophy. There is no golden age of philosophy. There are golden ages. The very heights keep being hit again and again over time, while of course there are some lows, again depending upon the social and cultural situations.