The Exhaustion of Literature

Or

How to Become the Literary Voice of Your Generation

By Alex Kolker

In August of 1967, John Barth, in his watershed essay "The Literature of Exhaustion," declared that the novel was no longer relevant as a form of artistic expression -- that, in short, the novel was dead. And yet here we are, nearly thirty years later, and people are still writing novels. Publishers are still publishing novels, and people are still reading them (although certainly neither of these groups engages in these activities as frequently as authors would like). The novel is still seen as the predominant literary form. The New York Times Literary Supplement still dedicates much of the space to the review of novels and the ideas of novelists, and still keeps a weekly record of what the most popular novels are. And although some writers and critics would be hard-pressed to call many of the entries on the New York Times Bestseller List "novels," I would say the problem lies in their definition of the word "novel" rather than on the quality of, say, the latest offering of Stephen King or Jackie Collins.

This leads, in short, to an obvious question: if the novel is dead, why are we still writing, publishing, reading, and even awarding them? And, as with most obvious questions, there is an obvious answer: because Barth, no matter how well-meaning and intelligent his 1967 declaration was, got it wrong. It wasn't the novel itself that was dying. It was merely his (and many others') ideas of what a novel should be.

I cannot fault Barth. He is as much a product of the aesthetic sensibilities of his age as I am a product of mine. Barth became an artist in an age flooded with new ideas about style, artistic convention, and cultural relevance -- ideas which Barth brought to a masterful culmination (or reductio ad absurdum) in "The Literature of Exhaustion." It is those ideas which led Barth to make his declaration, and so it is those ideas we need to overcome if we ever hope to put life back into the novel as a genre -- a genre which has remained the hallmark of the literary world no matter how many eulogies are written for it. The problem is not -- has never been -- with the quality of the novels being written, but in the way that we as an aesthetic elite view novels, both individually and as an art form in general. The problem is, as Barth himself pointed out in 1967, "the tradition of rebelling against Tradition" (29).

* * *

The authors of this century, more than in any other century before it, have come to be grouped into distinct movements and schools. This is no longer solely the result of literary critics coming along after the fact and pigeonholing similar authors into stylistic groups. Now the authors themselves group themselves together, under banners of common philosophical beliefs and stylistic practices. Rather than leaving the task of the identification and grouping of trends to the critics that came after them, the Modernists and Post-Modernists have identified and grouped themselves -- sometimes before some of them have produced even a single Modernist or Post-Modernist work. This has, of course, made the job of the critic of twentieth century American literature that much easier. At the same time, however, it has made the job of the author that much more difficult.

The origins of this new view of literary movements has its start in another field of art altogether: painting. As with authors, painters over the centuries haven't tended to identify themselves as distinct schools. There are some exceptions of course. Artistic tastes tended to recognize national borders, leading to artists grouping up according to their nationalities -- the Flemish school, the Florence school, the Venetian school. There have also been a few personal aberrations in style, such as Mannerism and the Pre-Raphaelite Movement. But for the most part, if you were a painter before 1850, it meant that you painted according to the rigid, established rules of the proper Academy style.

This was never so much a case of artistic totalitarianism as it was a limited view of what was considered to be art. You can see this in some of the early responses to the first movement to truly break the rule of the Academy style. When a loosely-organized group of artists who called themselves "Impressionists" started exhibiting their work in Paris in the 1860s, the Academy and the press didn't criticize them in terms of their break from tradition, but criticized them rather for producing bad art. Of course, to the Academy members and art critics of the day, these were very much the same thing.

Fortunately for the Impressionists, there were quite a few of them. If only one or two artists alone had broken with tradition, their work, if it survived at all, would have been considered merely a curiosity. But with the safety of their numbers, they weathered the rejection of the Academy, holding their own exhibitions and gaining their own following. Suddenly you didn't have to paint by the numbers anymore to be considered an artist. The Impressionist movement showed that a group of artists, by banding together against the established conventions, could establish their own unique identity as a generation in their own right. The Impressionists had a stronger sense of themselves, and of their place in the history of art, than any other group of painters for centuries.

This was all good and fine for the Impressionists, but it created a unique problem for the generation that came afterwards. For them, there were only three possibilities of where to go next. First, they could continue to paint in the Academy style, and in fact some did. But to those who had been inspired by the Impressionists, returning to the old ways was a step backwards. The second option was to become Impressionists themselves, but no artists in the so-called Post-Impressionist age did so. They were inspired by the extent to which the Impressionists had solidly defined themselves as a generation of their own, distinct from and more "Modern" than any generation that had come before. For the Post-Impressionists merely to continue on with the new Impressionist conventions would make them at the least mere imitators, and at the most invisible in the shadow of the original masters of the style. They would never be able to paint without their work being compared to the masterpieces of Monet, Renoir, and Degas.

This left only the third option. Many of the Post-Impressionist artists used the new conventions of Impressionism as a starting point, but, in order to secure their own distinct identity as artists, they quickly moved beyond those conventions, creating their own, newer conventions -- different not only from the Academy style, but also from the Impressionist style that had replaced it. The only problem with this is that different Post-Impressionist artists created different Post-Impressionist conventions. Once the rules had been broken once, there was no longer any restriction on breaking the rules at all, and different Post-Impressionist artists chose to break different rules in different ways.

At first, these new schools sprouted up naturally, and were little more than loosely-knit groups of artists with similar concerns. The Expressionists, for example, started working together in 1905, but the group didn't even coin a name for themselves until years later. But as more and more groups were founded, these movements sprang into being in a very deliberate and self-conscious manner, and the lines between movements became more strongly defined. For example, just two years after the Expressionists first started gathering together, so casually and without a name, the Cubists were founded as a full-fledged movement -- with set goals and methods and an exclusive roster of members.

Therefore, just one generation after the conventions of the Academy had been overthrown by the Impressionist movement, we get a proliferation of new schools in the visual arts: Expressionism, Cubism, Tubism, Futurism, Surrealism, Fauvism, and Pointalism, to name only the most well-known. This having been said, one can see how the generation of artists which came after the Post-Impressionists suffered from the same dilemma. These Post-Post-Impressionists, however, in order to establish their own distinct artistic identity, not only had to avoid the conventions of the Academy and the Impressionists, but the conventions of all of the many different Post-Impressionist schools as well. Any artist who, in the middle of this century, began painting like Monet would have been considered anachronistic and insignificant, despite the fact that the Impressionist conventions were still less than a century old at the time. The point is that, once the idea that artists could break convention was introduced, each new generation of artists felt it to be their duty to break with convention -- even those conventions that the previous generation had developed to break with the conventions from the generations before.

But this proliferation of schools didn't affect only the plastic arts. This same proliferation has been particularly pronounced in literature as well.

Paris, the seat of the Impressionist revolution in art, was, in the first decade of this century, brimming with a sense of artistic possibilities. The Post-Impressionist painters had gathered there, and were just starting to develop their own various unique styles. But the same thing was happening in the other arts as well. Once the set conventions had been challenged in one art form, no artistic conventions anywhere were safe. And so, along with all of the Post-Impressionist painters, there were also quite a few authors in Paris at the time -- overthrowing their own old literary conventions and founding their own new literary movements. As a young Ezra Pound complained in a letter to a friend, in Paris there were "eight schools for every dozen poets" (Aldington 134).

Despite his complaints about the proliferation of Parisian schools of poetry, Pound was as much a victim of the fervor as any of them. His literary battle cry -- "Make it new!" -- had its roots in the success of the Impressionist painters to "make it new" themselves. And despite his disgust at all of these new schools, Pound left Paris for England and founded a new literary movement of his own -- Imagism.

It was no longer enough for poets of similar tastes and styles to live and work together. Suddenly, they had to firmly establish their own artistic identities, distinct from the identities of the other groups of poets around them. To accomplish this, it was necessary for the founders of these new artistic movements to write philosophical manifestos. At this, Ezra Pound was a master. A mere eighteen months after he had first declared Hilda Doolittle and Richard Aldington "les imagistes," Pound, through a flurry of articles and reviews, had popularized the term throughout European literary circles.

Six months after that, Pound left the ranks of the Imagists to found a new school -- Vorticism. It is important for us to remember here, though, that as much as Pound insisted on the philosophical and stylistic differences between Imagism and Vorticism later on, he left the Imagists not because of any such philosophical and stylistic differences, but because of a disagreement he'd had with Amy Lowell over how many of whose poems were to be included in the Imagists' second anthology. Pound's founding of Vorticism was completely incidental. He could no longer call himself an Imagist, not because he had stopped writing Imagist poetry, but merely because he could no longer hang out with his Imagist friends. A year later, Lowell, fearing that other, lesser poets might begin to copy the Imagist style and lessen the group's reputation, "considered copyrighting the name 'Imagist,' forming a 'business association' which would be able to exclude the casual imitator" (Levenson 148).

These episodes point up how ridiculous the proliferation of literary schools had already become -- a mere fifty years after the Impressionist revolution began. In literature, as in the plastic arts, the twentieth century began with a whole list of schools and "isms" popping up everywhere: Modernism, Imagism, Vorticism, Symbolism, Impressionism. As in the plastic arts, everyone wanted to be different from anything that had come before, and different from one another as well.

In literature, however, the distaste for the conventions of the past was particularly pronounced. Ford Maddox Ford gave the following advice to an aspiring poet:

"Forget about Piers Plowman, forget about Shakespeare, Keats, Yeats, Morris, the English Bible and remember only that you live in our terrific, untidy, indifferent, empirical age, where not one single problem is solved and not one single Accepted Idea from the past has any more magic." (Levenson 78)

Such advice is shocking to us today, but the feelings inherent in this quote were quite common in literary circles just seventy-five years ago. Worse yet, note that one of the poets that Ford suggests that his apprentice forget is William Butler Yeats, who is considered to be one of the founders of Modernist poetry, and whose work was only half a generation old at the time. With the proliferation of literary schools, authors became outmoded all the more quickly -- often even before their careers were actually over. Even John Barth can attest to this phenomenon.

It was Guillaume Apollinaire who expressed the Modernist distaste for literary traditions most succinctly, in a line Pound quoted in his manifesto on Vorticism: "One cannot always carry around with him the corpse of his father" (461). It is this separation between the twentieth century and the whole of the history of literature which came before it that is the root of the problems Barth was responding to in 1967, and which still plague the writers of today.

Irving Howe, in his 1970 book on Modernism titled Decline of the New, defined the Modernist writer in this way:

". . . the Modern writer can no longer accept the claims of the world. If he tries to acquiesce in the norms of the audience, he finds himself depressed and outraged. The usual morality seems counterfeit; taste, a genteel indulgence; tradition, a wearisome fetter. It becomes a condition of being a writer that he rebel . . . against the received ways of doing the writer's work." (4)

If one of the conditions of being a writer in the twentieth century is that one must rebel against the received ways of doing the writer's work, then the writers at the end of the twentieth century are required to rebel not only against the pre-Modernist writing methods, but the methods of Modernism and Post-Modernism as well. The question that these authors face, then, is: where else is there to go?

To better illustrate this problem for you, let us return to the history of art. After two generations of the Post-Impressionist proliferation of artistic movements, a new movement began in New York City that has dominated the art world for the last forty years. The movement is called Abstract-Expressionism, and includes such artists and Jackson Pollack, Mark Rothko, Piet Mondrian, Franz Kline, and the like. Pollack's drip paintings are familiar to most. Mondrian paints white canvases divided into simple, primary-colored geometric forms. Rothko fills his canvases with broad, fuzzy blocks of color. Franz Kline painted in a particularly "new" way: by taking a housepainter's brush dipped in black paint and hurling himself back and forth against a huge white canvas.

What has happened is this: after two generations of testing conventions, it was inevitable that someone come up with a movement in art that overthrew all conventions altogether. If the Cubists can discard the conventions of forms, and the Surrealists can discard the convention of representing reality, and the Impressionists themselves can use color not to represent real color but merely to create combinations that are striking to the eye, why can't the Abstract-Expressionists do all three? The result is an anti-representational, formless, completely open style. In this style, anything is possible -- except for a return to the old forms, of course. Andy Warhol's Tomato Soup Can is considered a great work of art. This sort of thing could only have happened in an age in which all artistic conventions have been tested, found wanting, and discarded.

I am not here to argue the merits or demerits of Abstract-Expressionism. My point simply is that, once the conventions had all been overthrown, there was nowhere else that art and the proliferation of artistic movements could possibly go. Abstract-Expressionism has dwindled on for forty years, solely because nothing else has been able to come up and take its place. How do you outmode an artistic style that follows no set conventions? Some contemporary artists have been following old roads instead, such as surrealism and photo-realism. But these efforts are isolated, and generally half-hearted. The art world views their work with interest, but, since it isn't anything new, these artists cannot ever hope to raise the sort of fervor that was showered upon the Impressionists, the Post-Impressionists, and the Abstract-Expressionists after them. The on-going quest for greater novelty has burned itself out.

The same things can be said of the Post-Modernist movement in literature. For all of the claims of a set theory on the aims and methods of Post-Modernism, it is really just literature's version of Abstract-Expressionism -- the complete overthrow of the old set conventions. How else can you categorize a literary movement that includes a novel about the firebombing of Dresden set in part in a zoo on the distant planet Tralfalmadore, or a novel that centers around the exploits of a man sought after by the British government during World War II because he gets an erection every time the Germans are about to attack? Like Pollack's drip paintings and Kline's black lines, these contemporary experimental novels are based first and foremost on a sense of playful experimentation: let's stretch the conventions of literature as far as we can, and see what happens. Barth's essay, in fact, begins with a discussion of the extent to which the challenging of literary conventions had gone as of 1967:

"A catalogue I received some time ago in the mail, for example, advertises such items as Robert Filliou's Ample Food for Stupid Thought, a box full of postcards on which are inscribed "apparently meaningless questions," to be mailed to whomever the purchaser judges them suited for; Ray Johnson's Paper Snake, a collection of whimsical writings, "often pointed," once mailed to various friends (what the catalogue describes as The New York Correspondence School of Literature); and Daniel Spoerri's Anecdoted Typography of Chance, "on the surface" a description of all the objects that happen to be on the author's parlor table . . . ." (29)

One would think that abolishing all conventions would open literature up to a whole new world of possibilities. But this is not the case, because, at the same time that the Post-Modernists were abolishing all of the old literary conventions, John Barth was busy writing the novel's obituary. He notes that, although the new age has opened up the way for authors to do anything, not everything is worth pursuing:

"I suppose the distinction is between things worth remarking -- preferably over beer, if one's of my generation -- and things worth doing. "Somebody ought to make a novel with scenes that pop up, like the old children's books," one says, with the implication that one isn't going to bother doing it oneself." (30)

So just breaking the rules is not enough. According to Barth, there is one literary convention you should never break. For Barth, the best artists are

". . . the few people whose artistic thinking is a ship as any French new-novelist's, but who manage nonetheless to speak eloquently and memorably to our still-human hearts and conditions, as the great artists have always done." (30)

So you must be eloquent and memorable and explore the human heart, but you have to do it in a new and inventive way, succeeding, as Barth puts it, "not even Joyce and Kafka, but those who've succeeded Joyce and Kafka and are now in the evenings of their own careers" (30). This is a tall order indeed! No wonder Barth felt that the possibilities for filling that order were limited and, by his time, nearly exhausted.

Although Barth never directly addresses the artificiality of the proliferation of artistic movements in "The Literature of Exhaustion," a careful reread of the essay shows that this topic is behind almost everything he says:

"Literary forms certainly have histories and historical contingencies, and it may well be that the novel's time as a major art form is up, as the "times" of classical tragedy, grand opera, or the sonnet sequence came to be. No necessary cause for alarm in this at all, except perhaps to certain novelists, and one way to handle such a feeling might be to write a novel about it." (32)

Barth's discussion of literature runs in a similar vein to my own here, except that he uses music rather than art for his analogy:

". . . if Beethoven's Sixth were composed today, it would be an embarrassment; but clearly it wouldn't be, necessarily, if done with ironic intent by a composer quite aware of where we've been and where we are." (31)

Barth is saying that, since other movements in music have arisen since the Classical movement that Beethoven was a part of, a Classical piece written today would not be considered as great a work of art by its own merits -- unless of course our contemporary composer was composing in such an outmoded style for the sake of irony. Since, Barth continues, the novel as a form is also outmoded, no novel written in the second half of this century deserves the sort of attention that a novel from, say, the nineteenth century would deserve. The only option for a novelist at the end of the twentieth century is to write novels based on the irony that one is writing in a dead form.

I admit that I would find Barth's arguments much more compelling if it weren't for the fact that he has authored seven novels himself, and works now at Johns Hopkins University, teaching the next generation of authors how to write. This doesn't sound like exhaustion at all. What has become exhausted is not the novel as a form, but rather the different combinations of conventions authors have used over the years to produce novels. Barth himself admits as much:

"By "exhaustion" I don't mean anything so tired as the subject of physical, moral, or intellectual decadence, only the used-upness of certain forms or exhaustion of certain possibilities -- by no means necessarily a cause for despair." (29)

There have been enough variations on the novel form in the brief history of the genre that any novel -- even one of Barth's so-called novels of exhaustion -- can be pigeonholed into some category or another. And if that category is one that was founded before 1967, then Barth would argue that the work can have no sincere significance in our time. This, of course, is ridiculous. Just because a novel written in 1997 has Modernist overtones does not mean that the ideas expressed in the novel are any less current. It also doesn't mean that the novel can express those ideas only in ironic and self-consciously anachronistic tones. It just means that the author prefers to write in the Modernist style. Nothing less. Nothing more.

I am not suggesting that Barth write in any way other than in the style that pleases him most. But his so-called exhaustion of literature isn't really the death-throes of the genre, as he claims. It is only the last, predictable stage in the proliferation of literary movements over the last century. The novel would have been a very shoddy artistic vehicle indeed if, in the relatively brief span of time from Joseph Andrews to Giles Goat-Boy, authors had been able to exhaust all of its artistic possibilities. But of course this is not what actually happened. It isn't that the well was drunk dry, but rather that our water-bearers abandoned the well in favor of "hipper" wells -- a whole succession of them, in fact -- further down the road.

If this were only a case of "my literature is hipper than your literature," this question would be an academic one, decided ultimately by the readers and critics of future centuries. But the problems with this aesthetic view run deeper than that. The spread of Post-Modernism -- the complete overthrow of artistic tradition -- over the last thirty years has been killing literature, by alienating literature from the audience for which authors are supposed to be writing.

Let us return, for one last comparison, to the Abstract-Expressionists. There is a reason why Rothko paints large swatches of litmus paper and calls it art. Andy Warhol was making a theoretical and philosophical statement when he painted the tomato soup can. It's just that, if you don't know the theory from which Rothko or Warhol is working, you can't see what it is that he is trying to do. This doesn't mean that the paintings are no good. It means that the paintings are good only to those who have read up on the theory.

In the same way, if you aren't well-versed on modern discourse theory and reflexivity, a lot of Vladimir Nabokov's work is going to be lost to you. And if you haven't read Barth's "The Literature of Exhaustion," you're going to have trouble seeing how, in Chimera, he is attempting to "paradoxically turn the felt ultimacies of our time into material and means for his work" (Barth 32). Howe, in fact, defines contemporary literature, with a note of smug pride, specifically in terms of its inaccessibility:

"[Modernist and Post-Modernist literature] is almost always difficult: that is a sign of its Modernity. To the established guardians of culture, the Modern writer seems willfully inaccessible. He works with unfamiliar forms; he chooses subjects that disturb the audience and threaten its most cherished sentiments; he provokes traditionalist critics to such epithets as 'unwholesome,' 'coterie,' and 'decadent.'" (3)

Contemporary literature is becoming more and more inaccessible to the casual reader. Worse yet, contemporary authors are priding themselves on their inaccessibility. This is not to say that these works have no value. If you are up on the theory, these works are as great and subtle and significant as any of the more representational novels. But is it really such a good idea to be producing literature that only a select few can appreciate? A novice casually leafing through a copy Finnegan's Wake may never pick up another novel again. No wonder Stephen King and Jackie Collins top the New York Times Bestseller List, while Thomas Pynchon receives only sagacious nods from the few critics and readers "in the know."

Again, the objections are obvious: art should not have to bend itself to the lowest common denominator of the public. And while this is true, I couldn't help noting the irony, back when I was an undergraduate when, after listening to my American Literature professor go on and on about the wonderful opacity of a novel like John Hawkes's Second Skin, I would then traipse over to my Creative Writing class, where the professor kept stressing good plot structure, well-defined characters, and clear language. The question I am left asking is: who do I want to have reading my novel when it's published? Who do I want to have reading my novel a hundred years from now? My freshmen students may have an easier time reading Anne Tyler's The Accidental Tourist than they have reading Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, but that doesn't mean that the former novel is any less significant, or any less current. Indeed, some of the greatest examples of American novels -- The Great Gatsby, My Antonia, House of Mirth, The Old Man and the Sea, The Grapes of Wrath -- are delightfully accessible to my undergraduate students, and yet at the same time subtle, and significant, and still relevant today.

It is then, in the long run, the proliferation of literary movements that "exhausted" literature, that caused the novel's decline in popularity. It was never, as Barth suggested, just the built-in limitations of the genre itself.

The big question for me and my peers, then, as potential members of the first generation of authors of the twenty-first century, is: where do we go from here? Notice that I didn't ask: what new school of literature can we form to truly capture the spirit of our age? Brett Easton Ellis and Douglas Coupland have already tried this, and I don't think any of us would say that these two authors have defined our generation to anywhere near the extent that Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald defined their generation, or Henry James and Edith Wharton defined theirs.

The secret, simply enough, is just to write whatever you want in any style that you want. Forget about literary conventions and literary movements. Literature can't always be new. We have seen how, in just a hundred short years, the pursuit of artistic novelty has burned itself out -- has left us running around in circles at the end of a blind alley. Thirty years ago, Barth wrung his hands, bemoaning the fact that we can't say anything anymore that hasn't been said, and we can't say it using any method that someone else hasn't already used. Quoting one of Jorge Luis Borges's editors, Barth notes: "no one has claim to originality in literature; all writers are more or less faithful amanuenses of the spirit, translators and annotators of pre-existing archetypes" (33). But so what? John Gardner tells us, in his book On Moral Fiction:

"Insofar as literature is a telling of new stories, literature has been 'exhausted' for centuries; but insofar as literature tells archetypal stories in an attempt to understand once more their truth -- translate their wisdom for another generation -- literature will be exhausted only when we all, in our foolish arrogance, abandon it." (66)

What is wrong with the old ways, then, if they are the ways in which an author personally sees and/or wishes to represent the world? Just because we've had one or two successful literary movements over the last eighty years doesn't mean that an author has to belong to a literary movement to be successful. Instead, authors should just write what they want to, and leave the task of pigeonholing into literary movements to the critics of the generations to come. As Gardner notes:

"Some critics hail [changes in literary convention] as insightful, the expression of a new apprehension of reality. . . . But this is . . . misleading. . . . Despite the aha's of some modern philosophers, metaphysical systems do not, generally speaking, break down, shattered by later, keener insight; they are simply abandoned. . . . [The old conventions] are not demonstrably more valid but only, for the moment, more hip." (10-1)

List of Work Cited:

Aldington, Richard, Life for Life's Sake. New York: Viking Press, 1941.
Barth, John, "The Literature of Exhaustion." The Atlantic, 220:2 (Aug 1967), 29-34.
Gardner, John, On Moral Fiction. New York: HarperCollins, 1978.
Howe, Irving, Decline of the New. New York: Harcourt Brace & World, 1970.
Levenson, Michael H., A Genealogy of Modernism: A Study of English Literary Doctrine 1908 - 1922. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1984.
Pound, Ezra, "Vorticism," Fortnightly Review, XCVI (1914).
- - - Letter, Egoist, 1 (March 16, 1914).

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