Why is modern literature so often a disappointment?

If we’re reading for deep meanings – meanings that we hope will fuel us in the daily struggle to keep ourselves headed in a coherent direction – then why is it that so much recent literature seems so insubstantial? My students, my counseling clients, and my reading friends frequently ask this. Some have gone so far as to declare they won’t even bother to read modern literature any more. The other night several of us were discussing Ian McEwan’s Saturday, trying to match up the over-enthusiastic jacket blurb with the disappointing story we’d found between the covers. There seemed to be no similarity. If this writer truly was ‘the most influential writer of our time’ as one critic announced, then we decided the times were indeed in serious trouble.

Were we alone in feeling this way? Well, here’s what the English newspapers report. The Guardian First Book Award judge, Stuart Broom, put it neatly this year when he said of the short-listed entrants: “The fiction looks brilliantly varied, but once again it seems to be non-fiction that is particularly ambitious and unafraid of scaling the really big themes of history, culture, and society.” In other words, the fiction writing was competent but narrow and uninspiring. So why is it that so much of contemporary fiction seems to be so thin when we read it? And why have sales of Memoir and non-fiction steadily outstripped those of novels and short stories, again, and for the past twenty years?

What, in fact, is wrong with modern fiction that it no longer appeals to modern readers?

The answer may be that readers no longer feel nourished by many of the fiction offerings that appear, since they clearly do find memoir to be far more attractive. This under-nourishing aspect of modern fiction is to a large extent due to its technical virtuosity and spiritual vacuity. It doesn’t give us much to live by. Memoir, on the other hand, is almost always about an individual’s struggle for a meaning that can be sufficient to sustain a life, and so inevitably it gives us something meaty to consider.

The difference lies in a major factor – memoir tells the story of a human being going through phases and arriving somewhere more enlightened, and it can’t really be written unless the writer has made that journey. Of course, there are plenty of autobiographies that show us a celebrity who has remained petty-minded while being successful. Barbara Walters’ is the most recent example most of us may have encountered. There is a life story, but no wisdom.

Whenever a human being goes on a life journey of personal growth he or she is likely to go through six archetypal stages – always six of them – the same stages that are mirrored in all great western literature since Homer. These stages are the Innocent, the Orphan, the Pilgrim, the Warrior-Lover, the Monarch, and the Magician. These are psychic mile-posts, if you will, and the achievement of each one involves the reflection of a series of understandings attained. In fact a writer of memoir usually may not know these stages exist in exactly this form, but he or she will be aware that something has changed at certain points on the road to wisdom. By contrast Fiction writers may be accomplished at their trade but simply not have lived enough real life to be able to show the path to wisdom. Readers know this, at a visceral level.

If we are to fuel ourselves with literature (and that’s what it’s for, to feed our psyches, to show us new worlds that keep us alert and alive) then we’ll have to look to see whether the archetypes appear in meaningful ways for us.

Here’s an example: Ulysses, that great literary figure that Homer produced and James Joyce wanted to reintroduce us to, spends most of the Odyssey trying to get home. Lost, he has no idea as to who he truly is. During the tale he encounters many powerful women; Circe, Nausicaa, Calypso, and he has to learn how to treat women decently, before Athena (another woman) will bless his reunion with Penelope. At first he’s a lost Orphan, but once he wakes up to the fact that he keeps running into powerful women, he discovers he’s on a Pilgrimage to find meaning. So, when he reaches his home in Ithaca he has to fight, as a Warrior-Lover, for what he loves. Having done so, he has to reign with Penelope in harmony, a true Monarch who respects her and all the citizens they together have to rule over. At that point Athena appears and completes the situation, making Odysseus into a Magician of sorts. There are six clear archetypes involved. The Ulysses who invented the Trojan Horse, which was after all a disgraceful trick designed to slaughter sleeping Trojans and their children, has come a long way. One may say that Homer redefines the notion of what a ‘hero’ is, and what it means to be an effective human. In so doing he redefines the reader’s frame of reference. We come away from the Odyssey, with any luck, more alert and thoughtful as human beings. We have been nourished by this deeper reading.

There is fiction that does this – and some of it may surprise us. J.K.Rowling’s Harry Potter definitely goes through the six archetypal stages, and has to repeat them each year at a slightly higher level. Perhaps it is this sense of development that has helped to make the books so wildly popular. Children know all about growth and development and who’s ahead and who’s not. It’s one of the things they care passionately about, and so it shouldn’t surprise us that they key in at an unconscious level to issues that are vital to who they are as they grow. There are other writers who achieve this level of awareness, also, and yet others who have no intention of doing so.

So what can we as readers do? I think the first thing is to realize that being disappointed in our modern writers is actually a really good sign – because we know there’s something better out there but we just aren’t being given it. Rather than giving up we have to use this knowledge to make sure we reject the third rate stuff we’re routinely offered. Knowing why something is poor quality is empowering. Ask anyone who has ever had to make a complaint about a substandard product. Perhaps one of the things we as readers can do is ask if the writer is taking us on any sort of journey of discovery. If so, are we discovering simply information (“Oh wow, that’s what it feels like to be a teenage drunk!”) or are we being exposed to wisdom (“What are the things we all can learn from observing the behavior of a teenage drunk?”).

Looking for the six archetypes, though, is a pretty good acid test. As you read, ask yourself: how far has this character in this story progressed? Is the progress towards anything useful? These are reasonable questions. We wouldn’t ask directions from a person who is lost and confused. We don’t ask ignorant people for an opinion on something important to our lives. Therefore we certainly shouldn’t trust that an author has something useful to say just because he or she happens to be in print. If we don’t demand more of our authors we’ll probably get the same sort of stuff we’ve been offered for a long time, now. We deserve better.