In a true missing-the-forest-for-the-trees phenomenon, modern literary criticism has left unremarked, to my knowledge at least, the totally anomalous body of “great literature” that has come out of Europe and the West in the past three or so centuries. I don’t mean that it’s anomalously “great” (a shifting category that defies definition in the first place). I mean that the kinds of writing preferentially perceived—more or less universally—as “great” during this period has no precedent in the literary West. Prose that deals with contemporary reality in detail, without supernatural interference of any sort—the stuff of fine fiction, from Richardson to Tolstoy to Munro—has been either absent, or thought of as inferior, for much, much longer than it’s been revered.
It’s not that the prose novel, in quite recognizable forms, didn’t exist before Don Quixote and Clarissa. It’s more that this stuff was looked down on: Italian prose novellas about friars screwing housewives proliferated during the Renaissance, but Petrarch dreamed of a Latin epic (and produced an unreadable one about Scipio), and Boccaccio, who authored the Decameron, is the one who started calling Dante’s Commedia “divine.” Prose could be thought great and a subject for study—but the literary superiority of Virgil, the best poet, over Cicero, the best prose writer, was unquestioned. It may seem like a useless distinction—and it may well be—but the original literary elitism favored verse above prose automatically. (The only exception to this rule is the Bible—but recall that the Bible is, in setting and spirit, Near Eastern; and its status as capital-S Scripture led it, from the beginning, to be examined and experienced differently than Homeric hexameters or Ciceronian periods.)
So, for generations, literary snobs preferred verse—and a specific kind of verse, too. This second, related elitism went back all the way to the West’s origins in Classical Europe, which consistently considered verse set in the misty past as superior to verse (or prose) that treated of contemporary, mundane details. This is why Homer was the Shakespeare-equivalent in that world: Part of the linguistic ground water, universally and sometimes unthinkingly quoted. His epics, we must remember, were set in the distant hazy Age of Heroes, in a time removed even from his contemporaries. The Way Back When, if you will. The classical tragedians, like the Latin poets Ovid and Virgil, would set their masterpieces there; centuries later, Milton would set his own epic, very deliberately, in a similar Way Back When, though in a different mythic universe. Classical satirical poetry, in writers like Juvenal, incorporated all sorts of base and mundane language, the kind of language and subject matter that the Modernists (and not a few contemporary American poets) act like they introduced. Our poets aren’t groundbreakers, even at their most vulgar; read Martial’s epigrams. The satirists were simply perceived as writing something inherently inferior to mythic epic or tragic work. It seems silly to make a hierarchy about this, but that hierarchy held for centuries.
But that’s not even the most glaring elitism, nor the one in which our own aesthetic tastes are most at odds with our cultural predecessors in the West. Consider how we associate supernatural elements with “low” storytelling. The snobbiness of the High Literary Realist for absurd escapist genre tropes, though swiftly and everywhere breaking down (a sort of literary-historical correction demands that it must: Karen Russell has her vampires, Junot Diaz is working on something with zombies; even Franzen’s forthcoming is touted as a little magical), was absolutely unprecedented. It held sway most keenly in the Mailer-Updike-Roth-Wolfe era, when novelists did a lot of journalistic work, and not only in their journalism; but it holds true likewise in the whole idea of The Novel as some magisterial literary accomplishment. Aspiring writers daydream about writing a Great Novel the way Milton daydreamed about writing an epic poem about the Fall of Man or a tragedy about Arthurian knights (he bandied about both ideas before choosing the former).
This is why realist prose devoid of the supernatural is missing from the roster of Great Works of Ages Long Past. Homer and Virgil and Dante and Shakespeare and Goethe had Gods and Sibyls and Satan and witches and Mephistopheles. For centuries, critics tried to separate the Low Comic Shakespeare from the High Poetic Shakespeare—as late as Wordsworth, we hear the claim that “the players” inserted the comic scenes into the plays, not the Bard, oh, never the Bard.
We have introduced names to that litany of great world authors—writers whose works are in prose, without supernatural agency, set in the contemporary world, and full of mundane detail. Consider Leo Tolstoy, whose realist novels we adore, but whose later religious and supernatural parables—where the mysterious stranger will turn out to be an angel, or three priests float over the water—leave most readers cold. That’s not the Tolstoy we care to remember. (Tolstoy’s What is Art?, at one point, contains an exaltation of “primitive” storytelling over contemporary realism—he essentially favored supernaturally charged, simple, and streamlined storytelling, devoid of the observed mundane detail that makes his work so attractive to us.)
Consider, too, James Joyce, who took Homer’s supernatural infrastructure and did his best to build a contemporary and foulmouthed Dublin on it, setting stately, plump Buck Mulligan on the marble pedestal. Such work might have been relegated, automatically, because of its themes and base language, to second-tier status in the classical world, much like Petronius Arbiter, whose great novel Satyricon is utterly modern, and quite Joycean in its own way, but got mangled by the centuries—never preserved in the manner of Virgil’s books or Cicero’s.
Today’s American literary elites reverence Philip Roth above all others, Philip Roth the name they insist on come Nobel season. (In America, even the major poets are minor writers.) Roth is a genius to our liking, who came to prominence with a bawdy tale (Portnoy’s Complaint); and whose writings, exclusively in prose, have always contained a strong helping of the bawdy and satirical. His ancestry, in English, goes back to Chaucer’s racier tales and the Shakespeare of the “low” comic scenes—the same Shakespeare that Thomas Bowdler, Charles and Mary Lamb, and countless other critics and theater directors worked to purge for centuries. Similarly, Salman Rushdie came to prominence writing satirical work (The Satanic Verses is basically what the classical world called a “Menippean satire”), and Rushdie’s classical analogue isn’t one of the usual Dead White Males: It’s Lucian of Samosata (125 – 180 A.D.), the prose writer of dialogues who sent up the Olympian gods with bitter mockery.
Our preferences—prose, timeliness, mundanity—are, of course, not universal; they aren’t even “ours,” taken in the most inclusive sense. Because popular literature insists, quite stubbornly, on the oldest principles. This is the origin of the much-remarked-upon gulf between “Popular” and “Literary.” The form is still prose, granted—but the other key elements are all there. Science fiction and fantasy create other worlds and times not our own; one’s are in the future, the other’s are in a past that never really was (but frequently, in Tolkien and Martin and their ilk, is medieval-England-ish). Millions of readers didn’t go to the Game of Thrones books for finely observed details about the world around them. Historical fiction seeks fine, “real” detail—but only to make the Way Back When more convincing. This kind of storytelling frequently sets forth a clearly defined Good (hobbits; Harry and his friends) and Evil (Orcs; dementors), without an attempt to nuance the motivations overmuch; contrary to post-Empsonian notions of truly fine literature being full of ambiguity, Milton’s Satan and Lord Voldemort both want Power.
Which shows you the paradoxical simplicity of the literary masterpieces that last: They dramatize the most common, basic human states of mind. In the end, what we prefer, what the past preferred, or what posterity will prefer is immaterial. And the differences are purely ones of taste; they are superficial. Reading the above paragraphs, you may think that Tolstoy and Joyce, the (relatively) recent prose realist masters, have nothing in common with the classical poets of Gods and Goddesses, writing epic poems about the misty Age of Heroes. But George Steiner has written, in Tolstoy or Dostoevsky?, an entire (and entirely convincing) chapter about the uncanny resemblances of the Russian novelist and the Greek poet; and Joyce’s relationship to Homer, as every lover of Ulysses knows, was a deliberately cultivated one. What we readers want doesn’t change; how we want it served to us changes. What we want is life.