Novels That Will Be Considered the Most Important Literary Works of the Twentieth Century in the Year 2100

[Nathan "N.R."]

Novels That Will Be Considered the Most Important Literary Works of the Twentieth Century in the Year 2100

Nightwood, Djuna Barnes
Beckett Trilogy -- Malone Dies, Molloy, The Unnamable
The Lime Works, Thomas Bernhard
Nostromo, Joseph Conrad
JR, William Gaddis
The Recognitions, William Gaddis
Ulysses, James Joyce
One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez
At Swim-Two-Birds, Flann O’Brien
The Inquisitory, Robert Pinget
Remembrance of Things Past, Marcel Proust
Gravity’s Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon
Mulligan Stew, Gilbert Sorrentino

--taken from Dalkey Archive's Context No 1; attention brought by bibliokept.

The following lists are also to be found there:

"Literary Works All Students Should Have Read"

"Most Influential Critical Books of the 20th Century"

"Most Influential Novels of the 20th Century"

"The 20th Century Novels Students Most Like"

"The Pre-20th Century Novels That Most Influenced the 20th Century Novel"

http://www.dalkeyarchive.com/book/?GC...

All of these lists make my heart race. Perhaps I will find myself one day having completionized all of them. Delicious.

The above list I have a good start on.

[edit :: since Dalkey reorganized their website, the above link no long works ; and at the moment I am unable to locate the various issues of Context]

[Lobstergirl]

Every time I see one of these lists I become increasingly angry that we can't manage to find more than zero, one, or two women who belong among the literary greats.

Honestly it makes me just want to ignore the people who are coming up with these lists.

It's a problem in this group as well.

[mark]

now that you mention it, i'm surprised at the lack of Woolf on that list.

2 by Gaddis and 3 by Beckett. huh.

[Jonathan]

I also always find it interesting that these lists tend to be focused around novels as being the most important literary works. I find that poems and plays are just as important (though no doubt Shakespeare would still top the play list along with others).

[Nate D]

It's a sort of boring list -- it assumes that the future won't form new opinions of the currently-overlooked, either.

[Drew]

Agreed, Nate, although I will say I had no plans to read The Lime Works until now, and I'd never even heard of The Inquisitory or Robert Pinget, so I've got to give it a little credit.

[Nathan "N.R."]

Lobstergirl wrote: "Honestly it makes me just want to ignore the people who are coming up with these lists."

Then please do; or simply offer your supplements.

I'd like to see Marguerite Young up there. Why not? And Finnegans Wake and Women and Men should both be up there. The Beckett thing must be a typographical error, cuz that trio/trilogy should be treated as a singularity.

But complaints about lists like this are boring. Four complaint comments and only one suggestion, Woolf (thnk-u, Mark). Which plays and poems, Jonathan? Which currently-overlooked, Nate D? Which women, Lobstergirl?

Forgot to add the link, cuz the other lists are interesting too and one can complain about them too.
http://www.dalkeyarchive.com/book/?GC...

It's a problem in this group as well.

Not enough Female authors in the Completists' Club? Add some.

[Jonfaith]

I tend to believe that people will be reading White Teeth 87 years from now.

[Jessica]

I agree with LobsterGirl. And that Nightwood is chosen as the sole work by a woman writer? C'mon! I've read it, even studied it in college, but any number of Woolf's works is superior and how about some other writers like: Marguerite Duras, Ingeborg Bachman, Clarice Lispector, just to name a very few...

The list is really silly. I'm surprised it's on Dalkey Archives' website.

[Jessica]

and Zadie Smith, yes.

[Nathan "N.R."]

Mulligan Stew, Nostromo, the Bernhard, and Two-Birds typically do not make it onto this kind of list, the ones PW or Time might produce.

It's a BIAS'd list. Thank the viking gods. Biased in the correct direction (straight through Dalkey).

[Nathan "N.R."]

Complaints about the above list are silly. Here's a longer list. Of course that word "Should have" might ruffle feathers. But completionism nonetheless.

"Literary Works All Students Should Have Read"

The Koran
The Mahabharata
The Bible
T’Ang Dynasty Lyric Poems
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, Edward Albee
Gabriela, Clove and Cinnamon, Jorge Amado
Poetics, Aristotle
Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen
The Collected Stories, Isaac Babel
Lost in the Funhouse, John Barth
Malone Dies, Samuel Beckett
Molloy, Samuel Beckett
The Unnamable, Samuel Beckett
Waiting for Godot, Samuel Beckett
The Decameron, Giovanni Boccaccio
Labyrinths, Jorge Luis Borges
Mother Courage, Bertolt Brecht
The Death of Virgil, Hermann Broch
Naked Lunch, William Burroughs
The Plague, Albert Camus
Don Quixote, Cervantes
The Canterbury Tales, Geoffrey Chaucer
The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian, Nirad Chaudhuri
collected works of Chekov
Hopscotch, Julio Cortazar
The Divine Comedy, Dante Alighieri
Moll Flanders, Daniel Defoe
Our Mutual Friend, Charles Dickens
USA Trilogy, John Dos Passos
Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoyevsky
The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, Frederick Douglass
The Souls of Black Folk, W. E. B. DuBois
Four Quartets, T. S. Eliot
The Waste Land, T. S. Eliot
Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison
Medea, Euripides
As I Lay Dying, William Faulkner
The Sound and the Fury, William Faulkner
Tom Jones, Henry Fielding
The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald
Bouvard and Pecuchet, Gustave Flaubert
Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert
The Good Soldier, Ford Madox Ford
History of Sexuality, Michel Foucault
Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, Sigmund Freud
JR, William Gaddis
Kaddish, Allen Ginsberg
collected works of Henry Green
The Heart of the Matter, Graham Greene
The Condition of Postmodernity, David Harvey
Being and Time, Martin Heidegger
The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway
Histories, Herodotus
The Illiad, Homer
The Odyssey, Homer
Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston
The Perennial Philosophy, Aldous Huxley
Portrait of a Lady, Henry James
Turn of the Screw and Other Short Novels, Henry James
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce
Ulysses, James Joyce
The Castle, Franz Kafka
The Trial, Franz Kafka
On the Road, Jack Kerouac
Women in Love, D. H. Lawrence
The Apes of God, Wyndham Lewis
Under the Volcano, Malcolm Lowry
The Magic Mountain, Thomas Mann
The Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx
Moby-Dick, Herman Melville
The Confidence-Man, Herman Melville
Paradise Lost, John Milton
The Complete Essays, Michel De Montaigne
Beloved, Toni Morrison
collected stories of Alice Munro
Lolita, Vladmir Nabokov
At Swim-Two-Birds, Flann O’Brien
Collected Prose, Charles Olson
The Maximus Poems, Charles Olson
The Iceman Cometh, Eugene O’Neill
Metamorphoses, Ovid
The Satyricon, Petronius
The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath
Symposium, Plato
Selected Writing of Edgar Allen Poe
Cantos, Ezra Pound
Kiss of the Spiderwoman, Manuel Puig
Gravity’s Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon
The Crying of Lot 49, Thomas Pynchon
Gargantua and Pantagruel, Rabelais
The God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy
Nine Stories, J.D. Salinger
The Catcher in the Rye, J. D. Salinger
Nausea, Jean-Paul Sartre
The Complete Poems, Anne Sexton
Hamlet, William Shakespeare
King Lear, William Shakespeare
Macbeth, William Shakespeare
The Tempest, William Shakespeare
Ceremony, Leslie Marmon Silko
Oedipus, Sophocles
The Road, Wole Soyinka
The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Gertrude Stein
The Red and the Black, Stendhal
Gulliver’s Travels, Jonathan Swift
The Playboy of the Western World, John Synge
Walden, Henry David Thoreau
War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy
Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain
The Aeneid, Virgil
A Handful of Dust, Evelyn Waugh
Miss Lonelyhearts, Nathanael West
Leaves of Grass, Walt Whitman
The Great American Novel, William Carlos Williams
Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf
To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf
The Prelude, William Wordsworth
Collected Poems, W. B. Yeats
A People’s History of the United States, Howard Zinn

[Jonathan]

to add my tuppence worth...I would remove JR (with a list this short one should not have two by the same author!) Nightwood and the Marquez for a start. Then a Woolf is essential (maybe The Waves for shear inventiveness), Malina and probably something by Borges as his work has been so consistently influential....

[Geoff]

For my two complaining cents, Women In Love is kinda crap. The rest seem legit.

[Nathan "N.R."]

Jonfaith wrote: "I tend to believe that people will be reading White Teeth 87 years from now."

I like'd my White Teeth. But I'm pulling for Zadie to make her contribution to the 1000-page Club, and I think she'll have something HUGE (page count and literary unbelievability, both) before her days are through and maybe she'll be there in 2113 chuckling at our efforts over here.

[Nathan "N.R."]

Geoff wrote: "For my two complaining cents, Women In Love is kinda crap. The rest seem legit."

Back in younger days I did about 100 pages of Sons and Lovers. Since, I've not felt much pressure in the Lawrence direction. But he seems to pop up frequently enough that students maybe oughta have a go at him at some point or time, maybe?

And, The Mahabharata -- it's like 15+ volumes in the Clay Sanskrit Library. http://www.claysanskritlibrary.org/ab...

[Geoff]

Nathan "N.R." wrote: " But he seems to pop up frequently enough that students maybe oughta have a go at him at some point or time, maybe?"

Clearly Lawrence seems important to a large swath of academics and critics and writers, so I'll chalk this one up to "just not my type". I've read Sons and Lovers, Women In Love, that sexy one that's famous, and they've only elicited a "meh" from me. Lots of interesting stuff on that list though. I'm already culling...

[Geoff]

...that being said, it's a pretty typical, if thorough, listing of great works. McCaffery's created much more rapid heartbeatings and drooling from me...

[Nate D]

I guess I just meant that the future would surprise us more. How? Hard to say or it wouldn't be a surprise, but let's see some bigger risks. It's admittedly even more presumptuous for me to pick these, but some people who might be seen as key at some point in the future: Sadegh Hedayat, Kathy Acker, Samuel Delany, Agota Kristof, Alain Robbe-Grillet... I imagine the future will re-work our canon in ways we can't yet guess, though.

But sorry to be a complainer -- I still like seeing these, and hope you keep em coming.

[Jonathan]

Nathan "N.R." wrote: "Lobstergirl wrote: "Honestly it makes me just want to ignore the people who are coming up with these lists."

Then please do; or simply offer your supplements.

I'd like to see Marguerite Young up ..."

Well...for plays and poems.

Some poems off the top of my head
The Collected Works of Frank O'Hara
Shakespeare's
Sylvia Plath's collected works
Emily Dickinson's poems
I still believe that Paradise Lost and Dante's Inferno will be important in one hundred years time as surely will Homer's works
Alfred Tennyson's collected works
(I think that any poems that have a timeless appeal would still be there although we might end up with some new additions like something different - i.e. Nox by Anne Carson)

Plays off the top of my head

Shakespeare's oeuvre
Oscar Wilde's plays
Chekhov's plays
The Crucible
George Bernard Shaw's plays
A Streetcar Named Desire
I admit I'm not up to date on too many super contemporary plays and poets (I tend to dislike their work for being too avant garde)

[Nathan "N.R."]

Jonathan wrote: "Well...for plays and poems."

"Novels That Will Be Considered the Most Important Literary Works of the Twentieth Century in the Year 2100"

Like you, I didn't read the entire title of the list. Novels, and therefore no need to have asked for your play and poem suggestions; and Works of the Twentieth Century which would exclude Shakespeare and a few others.

[Jonathan]

Nathan "N.R." wrote: "Jonathan wrote: "Well...for plays and poems."

"Novels That Will Be Considered the Most Important Literary Works of the Twentieth Century in the Year 2100"

Like you, I didn't read the entire title..."

Oh I read it in hindsight, but it's just a comment I was making that there's often a push in literature to consider novels of greater importance than poems or plays for instance. I don't disagree with the list entirely, it seems quite solid but I would like to see a broader list with poems and plays included. I don't see how one can only focus on novels as the most important literary works...

[Nathan "N.R."]

Nate D wrote: "I guess I just meant that the future would surprise us more. "

Which goes without saying. But in good Barthian style you've said it. So, but perhaps the future will work through its restructuring and refiltering of the literary canon in part at least on the basis of what we decide today. It makes a big difference to the year 2113 that today people on goodreads are reading Women and Men and Darconville's Cat. It makes a big difference to us today in 2013 that someone 113-odd years ago decided to start reading Moby-Dick. Literary decisions we make today, which books we champion, which authors we remove from a pre-mature BURIAL, will have something to do with setting up a few possibilities for what others might do 100 years hence. In this sense, the original list is not a prediction of what someone else will be doing in 2113, but is an intervention on behalf of a certain kind of book which, at a minimum, ought to be more highly valued in 2113 than it is in 2013 (except for Proust who could never be more highly valued than he is now.)

So no presumptiousness need proffer apologies. Read now as if the very literary life of 2113 depended on your every literary decision, if we are permitted to pretend that Kant were a goodsreader.

__________
Sadegh Hedayat, Kathy Acker, Samuel Delany, Agota Kristof, Alain Robbe-Grillet

You've got some explaining to do. Acker, maybe; at least no one else does what she does. Robbe-Grillet, isn't he now merely an instance of a dead-end manner of noveling? important to know about but maybe not to read? [I like R-G, no doubt, but up there on top?] Delany, you provide further tingles. Hedayat and Kristoff--if you use names like that, you'll have to link us to some of your reviews. (Please?)

[Nathan "N.R."]

Jonathan wrote: "I don't see how one can only focus on novels as the most important literary works..."

You are more than welcome to dig one such list of drama and poetry up, or scratch one together. But there may be reason to believe that the novel was that genre which gained most from having survived the twentieth century. Gass makes a comment about contemporary poetry in which the words just slide off the page; is anyone doing anything interesting in theatre? Has there been anyone at all worthy of Beckett or __________? Which is only to ask that is it true to believe that a priori all literary genres have had equal treatment in the 20th? I suspect not. The Novel has experienced a passage from A to Z and back to Middle C in the course of 100 years. Have Drama and Poetry? [don't ask me about drama and poetry; I simply don't know; I advocate Novels, apologetically]

[Jessica]

for poetry, look at Anne Carson (among many others); for drama, Pinter, early Mamet, Tony Kushner and others.

[Jimmy]

I agree with Nate about the unpredictability factor. These lists take almost no risks, in that there is no difference between a list like this and a list of "most respected novels presently" or something equally generic. What will actually happen is that books that are totally unknown or books that we think are totally bad/unreadable will in 100 years become the new canon.

[Jimmy]

PS - nevertheless I'm going to repost these lists on my group Listomania. Thanks :)

[Nathan "N.R."]

Jimmy wrote: "What will actually happen is that books that are totally unknown or books that we think are totally bad/unreadable will in 100 years become the new canon. "

I agree, and thus: Women and Men, Darconville’s Cat, Finnegans Wake. But, Mulligan Stew, At Swim-Two-Birds, The Lime Works, Nostromo, and The Inquisitory I have never seen on a list of this nature, claiming for these books that status. Also, again, I don't think it's a matter of prediction, but a matter of advocacy. We make tomorrow's canon today.

Also, this list is in the Completists' Club. I put it here because I want to read all of them.

[Nate D]

The Inquisitory does sound terribly interesting, and it is indeed an entirely unexpected inclusion. So yeah, more like that. Okay so here're some books that I hope will be more widely read than now (excerpts from my top-40 books, mostly, but I hope worthy ones):

Coleman Dowell - Island People
Now buried, but as dense and broad-reaching and experience-inclusive as anything necessitating Great Books inclusion.

Ann Quin - Tripticks
Tangled mass of televised modern meltdown and american experience that pioneered literary collage techniques and very much warrants many closer looks.

Anna Kavan - Ice
Though enjoying a massive resurgence lately (at least on GR), I still don't think it's given up all of its secrets and resonances yet. And a key moment in the evolution of subjective narrators in lit, I believe.

Sadegh Hedayat - The Blind Owl
Lest we ignore the world beyond Europe and the Americas, here's a key work of Persian modernism that prefigures the nouvelle roman in many ways.

Agota Kristof - The Notebook, The Proof, The Third Lie: Three Novels
A devastating phantasmagoria of the mid-20th century Europe, and of the inability of words and narrative to contain the truths at the heart of experience.

Samuel Delany - Dhalgren
All of Delany's science fiction is deft and urgent, the breadth and depth of his concerns and post-modern complexity make this a masterwork (admittedly, already a blockbuster compared to these others though)

Leonora Carrington - The Stone Door
Sprawling across time despite its fairy-tale concision, this is my favorite surrealist novel and a book deserving of much more study than it receives.

Bruno Schulz - The Messiah
An entirely lost work that I hope will have been re-found and canonized in the next century.

[Nathan "N.R."]

Nate D wrote: "Bruno Schulz - The Messiah
An entirely lost work that I hope will have been re-found and canonized in the next century"

From wikipedia:
"Schulz is known to have been working on a novel called The Messiah, but no trace of the manuscript survived his death."

Meanwhile: Bruno Schulz.

[Jim]

I'm reading Nightwood right now, and Dalkey list aside, it certainly seems reasonable to put this book on any important books of the 20th century list. Every time I finish a chapter I think, "Wow, that chapter alone is worth reading the book!" and it just keeps growing chapter by chapter. Her writing is easily on a par with Virginia Woolf, although an NC-17 version of Woolf. The chapter, "Watchman, What Of The Night?" totally blew me away!!

And so, regarding the original list above, Nightwood is IN!

[mark]

i think Nightwood is amazing. definitely deserves to be on any list of key literature.

[Darwin8u]

I'm late to lunch and pissed that Cormac McCarthy didn't make the list. Dalkey can go press and screw a ripe watermellon now.

[Nathan "N.R."]

I would like to take this opportunity to BUMP Nate D's list just a few comments above this one (that I'm writing right here) :: https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...

[Nate D]

Actually I'd love to see some more wild guesses from others here!

[Nate D]

But also an addition to my former list:

I'm going to take an arguably unorthodox position and say that Dennis Cooper's 5-part George Miles Cycle, probably to be reprinted as a single 700-odd-page tome at some point, is going to be looked back upon as one of the definitive works of the end of the 20th century. Despite its "pop" stylings (sure to be of greater sociological interest later), it's an incredibly intelligent formalist late-postmodern study of contemporary media representation, desire, and the artist's attempt to negotiate the two in order to to reconcile his own experience and create something transcendent (usually failed, but Cooper himself has indeed reconciled desire, representation, and art here to create something nearly perfect).

The entire cycle is also too fearless in addressing its subjects directly and uneuphemistically, to be widely processed in its own time, also a mark of a work that grows into its legacy. Given the tendency of past transgression to age into palatability and recognition, I could even see this winding up on school reading lists in a century. (Although, conversely, I'd like to think that this will always be a little too harsh (though too self-aware not to be funny as well) not to retain its danger.)