Can Literature Survive Without Spirituality?

What you speak of is irrelevant to the subject of literature which has been surviving quite well without the CERN project. Art does not wait for science because it is not dependent on science.

 

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Signal I do not find the notion that art outlives the artist of spiritual significance anymore than the notion that a child might outlive its parents. It is not a particularly interesting nor novel idea to say that culture passes its ideas towards a new generation.

 

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Sadly?

Good lord, we can't even agree on the meaning of what we've seen, let alone what we haven't.

*edit - get 'im, Lucy.

 

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. . . . oh god YES! WHERE the hell is the modern literature? lol Just teasing, I spend most of my time parenting, researching and reading non-fiction, so I can't really say that I do a whole lot of fiction reading. By is it just me, or does the modern western world seem so incredibly hung up on pulp in this era?

I did read Memoirs of a Geisha which is a novel by Arthur Golden, published in 1997. That's one that will be around and a classic a hundred years from now, any argument there?

But of these modern authors, do we really believe that anyone will be reading King, Clancy, Steel, Rice, Koontz, Brown, Patterson?

(I'd include Clive Barker in this list, but I have a new found appreciation for him since he dropped of the literary radar some years back to work on his Abarat project. . . which is. . . . nothing less, than . . . ambitious and dare I say genius? One only hopes he doesn't get hit by a bus while he complete it. Although. . . I'm afraid of what it may become once it is over commercialized. Then again, that hasn't happened with LOTR or the Chronicles of Narnia.)

 

Oh, I'm sorry, I thought we were drawing a distinction between literature and pulp. My mistake. In that case, yes, you are quite correct. Otherwise, I would argue, no, you are incorrect. I would say a spiritual renaissance IS necessary. . . at least for the great majority of the highly educated and intellectually enlightened classes.

However, I will agree with you on one point, Art does not necessarily NEED the recognition of spirituality. The lamentation of the LACK of perceived spirituality is enough. However, that is really what has dominated the majority of really good literature for the whole of the modern era. Otherwise, the only other common themes are timeless themes of the human experience. But to relating them to what? Nothingness? Or something higher? It is either one of these or resorting some form of existentialism I would posit.

 

Whether I personally LIKE modern literature or not has nothing to do with the point of this thread...which is posed as a question:

Can literature survive without spirituality?

 

I have no argument with what he's written.

 

Again, any fictional prose is literature.

Whether you like it or not...does not define what is it.

 

The fact that I've read enough books to choke an army has little to do with the point of this thread.

Whats more important is that without understanding why the principle of continuity is important, even if you've read a billion books...you wont understand a single one of them.

 

Ha! Not if the Japanese can help it. Memoirs does an injustice to the history of Geisha’s by making them seem like whores instead of guardians of the traditional arts. Notice how there wasn’t even one Japanese actress who was willing to take part in the project? It forced Mineko Iwasaki, one of the most famous Geisha’s of her generation, to come out and reveal the secrets and the world of the profession knows as ‘art of perfection’ in her own novel. Its a better read for accuracy but its not a literary feat.

“Do we really believe that anyone will be reading King, Clancy, Steel, Rice, Koontz, Brown, Patterson?”

I think you are not speaking of modern literature but postmodern and contemporary unless you don’t think anyone is going to read Vonnegut, Pirandello, Jorge Luis Borges among others . I would say yes in regards to Anne Rice but not the others. People will be reading Wallace, Barker, DeLillo, Burroughs, Gibson (cyberpunk), Morrison, Isabel Allende and a host of others.

“However, that is really what has dominated the majority of really good literature for the whole of the modern era. Otherwise, the only other common themes are timeless themes of the human experience. But to relating them to what? Nothingness? Or something higher? It is either one of these or resorting some form of existentialism I would posit.”

Again it depends on what you are referring to when you speak of ‘spirituality’. The argument can easily be made that existentialist pieces like Tom Stoppard’s ‘Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead’, Pirandello’s ‘The Late Mattia Pascal’, Satre’s ‘Age of Reason’ are all examples of work that extend themselves towards spiritual values. I am not sure if there is anyone in the world of literature who is lamenting about the lack of anything given the amount of writers there are on the scene. The human experience does not have to relate to anything at all, man locked in his own experience does not have to look towards the heavens for his story to have significance, that’s the beauty of literature, if you want stories that look towards the heavens then its best to look towards religious texts, philosophy or mythology. The human experience has always been enough in terms of literature, spiritual themes may or may not be included but its not necessary.

To use a different type of storytelling as an example, Wagner wrote a tale of the time of the Gods and men in 'The Ring' as he was dealing with myth but La Boheme and Pagliacci stand very well on their own just telling the tale of love, passionate love without any undertones of spiritual ethics or values.

 

Carcano: Whether I personally LIKE modern literature or not has nothing to do with the point of this thread...which is posed as a question: Can literature survive without spirituality?

Yes and I have been saying that it has been doing so all along for a very, very long time.

Carcano: I have no argument with what he's written.

I wasn’t saying you did, I was saying that everything we have been discussing so far in regards to the OP never touched on the points Signal raised. Hence you’ve been making a different argument from the points Signal raise. Signal’s points are straightforward whereas its been difficult to ascertain what yours have been from the beginning. You have said many things but still haven't stuck to one point so anyone can glean what you really mean.

Carcano: Again, any fictional prose is literature. Whether you like it or not...does not define what is it.

Not at all and its not my definition. All this proves is that you really do not know the difference between fictional prose and what is considered literature. Its the reason why Harlequins written by Georgette Heyer are not part of the syllabus in in an English Lterature course, for sure she was probably more prolific and more read than Bronte and Austen but the latter are considered literature and the former nothing more than popular fiction of its day.

Carcano: Whats more important is that without understanding why the principle of continuity is important, even if you've read a billion books...you wont understand a single one of them.

Again explain your position rather than using an abstraction to describe an abstraction. Just because you have read many books doesn’t mean you have been reading literature nor know of anything about literature. My mother has tons of books and not one of them can be classified as literature.
So go ahead describe what you mean by ‘principle of continuity’, it cannot simply mean that an authors ideas survive him or her as Signal partly inferred as this is an aspect of culture and is hardly an interesting point. That the thoughts of a piece of work is extended towards the reader and future generations goes without saying but its like pointing out that a painting in a gallery will be viewed by more than the artist himself, to which someone can say 'so what. what were you expecting?' :shrug:

So far you have yet to prove that your claim is anything more than the idea of one man who seems disgruntled with everything in modern society. If your claim is to be taken seriously you have to prove there is a lack of something but not only have you yet to do that using authors and text you have yet to describe what it is you believe lacking. In short you have yet to prove that what you claim is even a problem in the world, world of literature or literary circles.

 

Two points here:

First, how do you know that "what is considered literature" means the same thing as what the OP meant when using the term "literature"?

Secondly, you're arguing that "what is considered literature" is defined by a specific group. Can you identify that group? And can you then explain the rationale of that particular definition?

...just curious. I think the entire topic is bogus myself.

 

1. According to Webster's Dicitionary literature is "all writings in prose or verse of an imaginative or critical character, without regard to their excellence: often distinguished from scientific writing, news reporting, etc."

2. According to Lucysnow literature is all writing that Lucy likes.

3. According to Carcano literature is all fictional prose.

You can see here that number one is far too broad, number two is too vague and subjective, whereas number three is *just right*.


Stephen King probably didnt do himself any favours by referring to his work as "the literary equivalent of a cheeseburger and fries".

However, anyone who's read the last chapter of The Gunslinger would have to call it a 'gourmet' cheeseburger and fries...at the very least!!!

With added wheat germ, lemon pepper and paprika...on sesame egg bread!

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Now how would you know if Signal's points are relevant to the OP if you dont even understand the OP???

His comments and mine are two paths up the same mountain.

 

Not just MORE people than the artist himself, but multitudes of people for centuries ever after!

Do you think this is important to the great artists of history?

Why should they care???

If the high priests of scientific materialism are correct, the universe is nothing more than a chaos of randomly appearing, bundles of particles...so what difference would anything make?

Not only would events after your lifetime be meaningless to YOU, but there would be no basis for any structure of VALUE altogether...or indeed anything that could be called cultural.

Remember, the principle of continuity profoundly affects everyone's psychology, either by its active presence, or its reactive absence.

 

Well I have been trying to figure out what Carcano means by the term and which books and authors he is referring to as being without continuity and spirituality but he has yet to offer any examples to prove his point.

This may be long so please bear with me. Literature can be quite broad but it generally has these distinctions.

Literary work tends to have a lasting cultural effect, it exemplifies the mood and values of its age, it explores the thematic problems of its time and brings them to light, to a clarity that can speak to all in that society even if it focuses on the fringe like the work of Gibson when it first hit the scene (who knew back then how important computer technology would be to us in the coming decades, Gibson was a seer). These thematic values through individual experience could be religious as in Dante's Inferno, or socio-economic affecting the individual as was encapsulated in Death of a Salesman, individual alienation as reflected in the work of Camus and Satre. It brings society to a consciousness of itself, its challenging its readers to look at themselves and their society and the concerns of its time but, another important criteria is that the work extends itself past its age by speaking of a deep human universal experience OR is prophetic by speaking intimately of a time that is close at hand. These works had their finger on the pulse.

A work may be popular but dated in the sense that it doesn't speak a universal truth of the human experience though it be a story well told. Carcano seems to think that all modern and contemporary literature fails to fulfill this criteria of universal truth, I disagree. A work isn't always popular or well received but it is eventually recognized like the remarkable story of Confederacy of Dunces written by Toole. The man wrote this one book fell into despondency and topped himself. His mother found the book, insisted that a university professor read it, it then goes on to win the pulitzer prize. If only he had hung on long enough to know his efforts were not wasted and he wasn't a loser after all

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. The title of the book ironically enough is derived from a quote by Jonathan Swift:

“When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him.”

Ha! I just love that. Anyway I digress.

The work either breaks or introduces a new literary style like Wallace has done with 'Infinite Jest' or James Joyce with 'Ulysses' or even Knut Hamsun with 'Hunger'.

Style and beauty. The work surpasses the prosaic in style and beauty. Even a story about the ugly aspects of human nature needs to emphasis this with style to expose what makes darkness just that black and recognize that all of us have a sinister nature to varying degrees. Its this sense of style, sparse and terse that delivers the chill in the following lines:

The second time I meant
To last it out and not come back at all.
I rocked shut


As a seashell.

They had to call and call
And pick the worms off me like sticky pearls.

Dying
Is an art, like everything else,
I do it exceptionally well.

I do it so it feels like hell.
I do it so it feels real.
I guess you could say I've a call.

Sylvia Plath, Lady Lazarus

If this were written sentimental and florid we would have missed the true violent depression that the unrelenting demon suicide leaves on the mind of a scarred and ruined survivor. Its so cold, so clinical. By insisting on integrity of style Plath offered an unadulterated naked truth without any buffer.


Construction. It exemplifies the 'architecture' of a master builder, complex or simple it shows the skill of story building. A great example is Vonnegut's play with time in 'Slaugherhouse-Five' where not only was the protagonist unstuck in time but so was the flow of the text. You are aware of the time shift but its so imperceptible that you didn’t even know how it happened, he just built the experience into the structure of the work (I get goose bumps just thinking about it. Genius!).

Uniqueness. The work is innovative or the voice of the author so singular that it cannot be reproduced nor does it emulate anything else that is out there.

These are a few of the basic qualities that separates literature from popular fiction.

Believe it or not critical appraisal is not a great indication of the quality of a literary work. For example Anais Nin couldn't get published, she was criticized by the literary elite of her day and was only later accepted as an artist and exceptional writer. Her intimate portrayals, ambiguous lyricism (poetic prose) and psychological insight were too new for the publishing world she encountered; she never told a straight structured story from beginning to end, she turned her characters inside out so you only saw the internal world to the exclusion of the external. She didn't build dramatic affect but distilled all that was unnecessary until all that was left of the character and situations was the fragrance, she never objectified the work. It was only later when psychology was mainstreamed, when the use of myth in stories was beginning to be explored and mainstreamed by scholars, when the 60's revolutionized everything was her work then accepted. So oftentimes the critics of the day are unable to pick up on what is important as they tend to uphold the status quo.

Its not one specific group that acknowledges a work as literature but various institutions; the universities (scholars) and literary critics, literary quarterlies and magazines, recognition by other living authors. It can also come from the recognition of institutions like Société littéraire des Goncourt or the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Ultimately though none of these groups nor institutions are the deciding factor since much of what they readily acclaim disappears into the ether. Its time that creates the literary body whether the work is accepted by all or none of these groups, its when a work persists no matter if it be banned or unpublished or unread by the masses of the day or criticized, its a mystery how some novels just do not disappear but grow and grow until eventually it cannot be ignored. I truly believe that truth and beauty cannot be buried for long. In short literature is the accumulation of the creme de la creme, the jewels in cultures crown, exemplifying everything that was of cultural relevance.

 

Literature does not need a spiritual dimension, but it does need a sense of greatness. By that, I'm not saying something cliched, but a sense that the characters in the book are experiencing something out of the ordinary, and whether it be in the mind of the reader or in the universe of the book, there has to be a sense of impact, but at the same time a sense of uncertainty. Certainly there has to be coninuity, but there are various ways of achieving this. Do you for example mean, physical continuity, as in terms of a legacy... or a mental/profound impact apon the reader..

 

Carcano:

"2. According to Lucysnow literature is all writing that Lucy likes".


Hardly anything I like, I find Wallace a tedious read, Faulkner too but I still recognize that it is correct to refer to it as literature. Shakespeare has become cliche but its still an example of literature.

Stephen King was just being honest. He was also being honest when he called Barker a greater artist than he could ever hope to be and said by comparison he was hardly worthy though he is more widely read and accepted than Barker. King obviously understands the difference between popular fiction and literature and is acknowledging that he will be remembered as a mediocrity whereas Barker will go on to symbolize the 'Edgar Allen Poe' of his time (Kings own words)

You still haven’t a clue as to what literature is Carcano. Ya wanna know why? You had to look it up in Websters.

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Carcano: Now how would you know if Signal's points are relevant to the OP if you dont even understand the OP?? His comments and mine are two paths up the same mountain.

You have a variety of explanations of the opening thread and I am not the only one here who doesn’t see your point. If it was as Signal had pointed out so very clearly and succinctly then the answer to the opening thread would be ‘literature then as now continues to be passed on’. It would have been simple and the discussion would not have continued for this long. To say that an author leaves a bit of their consciousness in a work is not a particularly interesting point to make as it is obvious, nor does it have anything to do with ‘spirituality’.

Carcano: Not just MORE people than the artist himself, but multitudes of people for centuries ever after! Do you think this is important to the great artists of history? Why should they care?? If the high priests of scientific materialism are correct, the universe is nothing more than a chaos of randomly appearing, bundles of particles...so what difference would anything make? Not only would events after your lifetime be meaningless to YOU, but there would be no basis for any structure of VALUE altogether...or indeed anything that could be called cultural.Remember, the principle of continuity profoundly affects everyone's psychology, either by its active presence, or its reactive absence.

So what? This is what culture does, literature is an aspect of culture. Its not a novel idea. Some artists die without ever seeing this occur like Van Gogh for example. As far as he knows he only sold one painting in his life and it was to his brother. He didn’t create art for this purpose he created it out of his personal need.

Whether the universe is made up of ‘randomly appearing bundles of particles’ is irrelevant in terms of art. Colette working through some of the most incredible stories of love and passion could care less about ‘bundles of particles’. Art is not dependent on science. Annie Prolux who loves small towns isn't concerned about the particles when she is working on stories about human fragility.

You haven’t a clue what is meaningful to me.

Do you have anything relevant to say about literature? I mean spit it out man! You make a claim about literature, its proven incorrect and then you go on blithering about continuity and its psychological importance with such urgency when you haven't provided not one single proof to back up your claim that there is something wrong with the state of literature. You fail to see that there is no 'lack' in literature, probably because you are not well exposed to literature. Literature is more than what your thimble will hold. You're claim is nonsense.

Methinks you are projecting a personal concern onto literature. Perhaps you should look towards yourself and ask what does 'continuity' mean to you in your life.

 

To say that there is something wrong with the state of literature is not the point of this thread. The point is to describe how literature cannot survive without spirituality...as defined in the opening post.

Which you still dont understand.

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You are not saying anything Carcano. We have been through this, there are literary works that do not contain any spirituality, so your point is irrelevant whether you think it can survive or not, it has been and will continue to survive exploring all aspects of life and some of those themes have little or no 'spiritual' content. As Challenger pointed out it does not need a 'spiritual dimension'. It is you who fail to properly argue your point of view. Or actually to make any kind of claim that can be discussed without a complete clarification about what you are going on about.

So since you seem to think you know what you are trying to communicate explain to the rest of us why literature cannot survive without spirituality without completely repeating yourself.

You see for this to make sense you have to give an example of, or show how, literature will either lose something that it innately contains eg spirituality and show where this threat comes from or prove it is missing already. Because as it stands right now, you are placing a de facto statement without any proof. There has to be proof that literature is actually in 'danger' of something. Hence 'Can literature 'survive'..