Introduction
Throughout history there have been certain patterns, rituals and practices that have been crude precursors to the development of modern culture. Whilst not strictly ‘Art’ in the modern sense, they were still ‘art’ or ‘proto-art’ in the basest sense; an attempt to express or communicate ideas via media such as drums, pictograms and little clay statues with huge dongs. They have the same relationship with modern conceptions of art as fire gods have with geophysical explanations of how volcanoes form and function or rain dances have with meteorology.
Whilst superficially interesting and amusing in a ratio of about 1:8 respectively, these are primarily the jurisdiction of anthropologists, archaeologists and the grossly offensive racial stereotypes that George Lucas puts in all his films. In this series of articles (shut up), I shall attempt to outline the often indistinct dividing line between good art, crap art and mere historic curiosity. Our categories for this are:
– Literature
– Music
– Film
– Drawings
While naturally reductive and incomplete, a full account of the major events in the history of art would take up far more time, effort and knowledge than I possess, many times over. Although I’m easily clever enough to do that if I wanted to. It is also worth noting that two of the categories include closely related forms of art; Film includes theatre and Drawing includes sculpture and other ‘fixed’ forms of visual art. Additionally, Literature has some cross-over with theatre because a play that doesn’t have a script may well be blissfully short, but it’s also magnificently shit.
To begin the series, I shall look at literature. Not only is this probably the area I’m best qualified to cover authoritatively, but it’s also the most noble and civilised, being the closest we can get to really touching minds with one another. While the others are obviously powerful, emotive media for communicating our dearest values and beliefs, there’s something about literature that I find particularly pure. Not only can you learn about the hidden world of the author’s mind, but the author can learn more about that world through listening to the interpretations and insights of the reader. A more constructive and rewarding form of introspection and insight I cannot imagine.
With such a weighty and portentous introduction to the section, it should be clear this won’t be for the uninitiated or illiterate, although since the latter can’t read any of this I’m not overly worried about their feedback. However, since it’s a subject I’m extremely well versed in, I shall bend my expertise to making it as intelligible and inclusive an account as is humanly possible. So, where to begin? That’s not as simple a question as it may sound. To answer it, we must first identify the point on the historic spectrum of the written word where ‘literature’ was born from merely ‘writing things down’.
Pre-history and the Origins of Literature
As with so many things, it is tempting to point to the ancient Greeks, who pioneered many areas of civilised endeavour, as the progenitors of modern literature and the art of writing a book. This would be a mistake though, as what was written then was not what should be strictly speaking considered literature. Homer, the most literary-inclined of the time, was simply the interpreter and chronicler of pre-existing mythologies. Such cultural narratives can often be fascinating and entertaining, but fall into the same category as religious doctrine; fanciful bullshit that only got any attention because the people at the time were too bloody stupid to understand particle physics and cosmology. They got as far as the atom and that was about it. That may sound dismissive, but in terms of penetrating the layers of existence, discovering the concept of atoms is analogous to playing pass the parcel with a parcel of 1,000 layers and giving up after the first 3 rounds and then sodding about bumming and making statues of guys with their cocks out.
From the above, you’ve probably gathered this means we can also skip all the other myths and legends of the time. This means the body of folklore that became the Bible, the creation stories of Egypt and the multitude of other societies that were around at the time are all outside our definition of literature. In short, just because you made it up and wrote it down doesn’t mean it’s literary fiction. Not by a long shot. What you’ve got there is what experts in the field refer to as ‘lies, bollocks and superstition’. Is a physics textbook literature? Of course not. Is a physics textbook that’s entirely and demonstrably wrong literary fiction? No; it’s just a shit textbook written by an idiot. On this basis, creation myths are part cultural history, part failed science, all defunct mumbo-jumbo.
So in terms of human history, that saves us quite a bit of time. For several thousand years there was nothing recognisable as literature and then, out of the primordial soup of human thought, the first misshapen attempts at what we would today recognise as literature clawed their way onto land and flailed about gasping for air. I am, of course, talking about William Shakespeare.
Born in 1564 to John Shakespeare and Mary Shakespeare, William would take a place in history. Despite sharing a surname, his parents were not siblings and had a number of healthy children and 3 dead ones. His father made a living in leather and degloving, apparently being held in quite high regard and was able to charge a premium for his expert services. Mary was from a family who already had land, which was lucky for John because at the time all women could be relied on to do was thundering out children like a rotary cannon attached to a womb. William was the eldest surviving son, which allowed him as much opportunity as being the heir apparent of a moderately affluent pervert could provide.
His first written works were produced some time in the 1590s, dealing with some fat dead guys that no-one with a life would ever give a shit about. Around the same time, he also wrote some truly terrible plays, including one about internet grooming and psycho-sexual abuse; themes presumably influenced by his father’s professional interests and the well-established fact that everyone in Britain prior to the early 20th century was utterly and irredeemably deranged. Much of his work around this time is obviously derived from his prior experiences as an actor; the director is always wrong and coherent dialogue is barely a guideline, much less a rule.
Literary scholars estimate that he spent much of the next decade writing prolifically, including such famed works as A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Romeo & Juliet. During this time he honed his skills as the leading – indeed, only – literary force and established an early form of narrative calculus. This can broadly be broken down into three distinct styles:
1) Suspiciously eloquent bores talk extensively in a jolting, unrealistic manner until they all die.
2) Suspiciously eloquent bores talk extensively in a jolting, unrealistic manner until they all get married.
3) Suspiciously eloquent bores talk extensively in a jolting, unrealistic manner until some of them die and some of them get married.
It is arguable that there was a fourth thematic model he used, which was a verbose revisionism based on a little research and a lot of hot air. Whether this is really a theme in itself or simply a historically inspired interpretation of the above three is a matter of much debate in the knee-high dust of university corridors. What is known is that he wrote four fantastic plays; The Tempest, Othello, Macbeth and Hamlet. The rest of his output is often wildly overrated, but due to the sheer quantity of it this is to be expected. And sheer quantity there most certainly was, as Shakespeare was the Danielle Steele of the late 16th and early 17th century, only with four pieces of good work.
It has been argued – and I find out only during the writing of this that it has been argued by people other than me, years ago. Smug pricks – that Shakespeare isn’t really literature in the sense we would understand it as. Having first come up with this theory myself and then finding out that some less clever people with a head-start also thought something similar, I’d have to agree with this reading of his place in literary history. Rather than literature in the strong, Literature sense, it is more a midway point between the guff ‘n’ wizards cultural mythology and modern literature. Between his semi-mystical stories, historical revisionism and emotive loquacity, Shakespeare paints a British metanarrative that gives form and foundation to what was a mongrel nation of yokels as it became a major cultural, economic and military powerhouse.
After Shakespeare simultaneously rocked and bored the tits off the burgeoning literary world, nothing at all happened for just over a century. Presumably wary of even looking at a stage or any collection of words greater than 50, the British kept their heads down and did some other stuff that I don’t really know or care about because it was (and still is) intensely boring. Then Daniel Defoe invented the novel. Admittedly, he didn’t do a great job of it and only really managed to write a book about one guy stuck on one island doing approximately jack shit, but it was in many ways the genesis of what now we would consider literature.
Robinson Crusoe is, on the one hand, a tremendously insightful proto-humanist journey – all good art is a journey, even if you embark upon, go through and then finish it sitting on your arse in a pile of empty crisp packets – through the human condition and the importance of society when it comes to finding meaning and purpose in an otherwise cold, mechanistic world. On the other, it’s a self-indulgent bit of personal exegesis about how emo Defoe was and how nobody understood him. It’s possible that the themes of isolation, abandonment and battling with despair are due to his experiences of The Great Plague. It’s also possible that he was a self-indulgent ballbag who felt his genius wasn’t appreciated by a society that, generally speaking, was too busy wading through turds and dying of dysentery to have time for his whining diatribes. Whatever your reading of this work, there are two things that aren’t disputed amongst literary experts; first that he invented the concept of ‘the novel’ and second that he’s at least partially responsible for me wasting several hours of my life watching Tom Hanks talk to a fucking volleyball. He went on to write some other books that no-one gives a shit about and then died, hopefully with a deep sense of regret and howling ‘Wiiiiiiillllsooooon‘ at his bemused relatives, as they stood around his deathbed.
Then came another long period of inactivity in the world of literature. For many years, all that anyone wrote was 500+ page philosophical treatise and recipes for mud casserole. It wasn’t really until the 19th century that things got moving again, taking the next step towards what we would later come to understand as Proper Books. Writers such as Goethe and Poe picked up where Defoe had left off, evolving emo into go(e)th(e). Fortunately, the first shoots of progress were starting to emerge from the ancient, cracked earth of the patriarch.
Mournful, self-indulgent misery was not the sole preserve of men and it was around this time that female authors started adding to the growing corpus of cripplingly tedious books. The likes of Jane Austen started writing the kind of squalid, joyless prose that would later be carried through by the Brontë sisters and eventually lead to the yawn-worthy dross of writers like Lionel Shriver and E.L. James.
Where they did break from the establishment was by writing things that were actually quite good. Whether this was intentionally breaking the unspoken rule previously held inviolate over literature or simply a misunderstanding of the brief is unclear. Either way, Mary Shelley wrote some of the very few examples of pre-20th century literature that are not only tolerable, but genuinely excellent. By exploring themes such as identity, human rights and what was at the time a growing awareness of our ascension to practical godhood by previous standards, she effectively invented science fiction. In doing so, she introduced the concept of intelligent, incisive and socially subversive fiction, despite not being a man or from an established Family of Note.
During the late 19th century, the novel as an art form was furthered by writers including noted paedophile and Bible-basher Lewis Carroll, Russian windbags Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoyevsky, arch-satirist and Irish bottom- and potato- enthusiast Oscar Wilde, inventor of The Twilight Saga Bram Stoker, and the great-yet-drug-addled Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. It was during this era that the standards and framework of modern literature were finalised. While too old and wordy to be worth reading themselves, their works deserve substantial credit for the last stage of synthesising the vital ingredients of not just modern literature, but the art of storytelling and character development we now recognise as Good Books..
And at this point, our Comprehensive History of the Arts: Literature Part 1 comes to a close. In the next part, we shall see how literature as we know and love it finally came into being after this long and slow trudge through the cultural Dark Ages of the written word finally gave birth to anything worth giving a shit about. With the invention of comprehensible and engaging prose, believable characters, interesting plots that don’t involve making pots of tea or painfully drawn-out decorative insults, a golden age of true literature blossomed.
I hope you have all learned something of value so far. If so, then more nuggets of truth are yours to be had. If not, stop reading my blog because I’m sick to fucking death of thick people free-loading on my talent and giving me no credit.
FINE RUBY DRINK 