But What If We're Wrong?: Thinking about the Present as If It Were the Past

by Chuck Klosterman

Again and again some yahoo from 1863 can be heard to be strenuously saying the obvious, self-aggrandizing, self-protective, clever, banal thing—and that crap rings so hollow when read against Lincoln or Douglass. It gives me real fear about all of the obvious, self-aggrandizing, self-protective, clever, banal things I’ve been saying all my life.”

But it does reflect something telling about the modern criteria for quantifying art: Symmetrical representation sits at the center of the process.

The reason shadow histories remained in the shadows lay in the centralization of information: If an idea wasn’t discussed on one of three major networks or on the pages of a major daily newspaper or national magazine, it was almost impossible for that idea to gain traction with anyone who wasn’t consciously searching for alternative perspectives.

The aforementioned “unpacking” of literature isn’t just something people enjoy. It’s an essential part of canonization (and not just in literature, but in every form of art). If the meaning of a book can be deduced from a rudimentary description of its palpable plot, the life span of that text is limited to the time of its release. Historically awesome art always means something different from what it superficially appears to suggest—and if future readers can’t convince themselves that the ideas they’re consuming are less obvious than whatever simple logic indicates, that book will disappear. The possibility that a cigar is just a cigar doesn’t work with literary criticism, and that’s amplified by the passage of time. Gary

When any novel is rediscovered and culturally elevated, part of the process is creative: The adoptive generation needs to be able to decide for themselves what the deeper theme is, and it needs to be something that wasn’t widely recognized by the preceding generation.

In one hundred years, it’s possible that the contemporary novel best illustrating media alienation will be something like Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, even though nobody makes that connection now. The defining 9/11 novel may end up being Infinite Jest, even though it was written five years before the actual event and has very little to do with New York or terrorism or global politics.

So this, it seems, is the key for authors who want to live forever: You need to write about important things without actually writing about them.

for a reputation to last, the artistry needs to be at the highest rung. Record sales don’t matter when the people who bought the records are dead and gone.”