Too Much a Modern? A Few More Thoughts

After having written of my preference for the nineteenth and early twentieth century in capital L literature recently it seems to me that there is a little bit more to say regarding those preferences.

There is the fact that I have been little inclined to go along with authority--and its prejudice--in favor of the superiority of the old to the new, the ancients or the Elizabethans to, for instance, the moderns, and so ready to believe that the moderns are just as worthy, and perhaps more so (that, however much some may reject it, there can be such a thing as progress in the world of the arts.

There is the fact that I care more about what writers say and how they say it--in fact, preferring their saying something important and interesting without much in the way of graces to their elegantly saying something banal, and been interested in the big wide world out there and looking at it and picturing it to us rather than the hazy imaginings of, for example, a Medieval mind as Johan Huizinga described it (which, certainly going by Ian Watt, seems a very modern, post-Scientific Revolution preference).

There is, where how a thing is said, my preference for clarity and efficiency in the conveyance of the content to ostentatious decoration (with this, too, a rather modern, post-Scientific Revolution view apparently).

There is my impatience of the bowing and scraping before power and authority and patron we got so much of in older literature, bowing and scraping before tradition and piety--my sympathies instead consistently lying with the defiant, and the impious, and the iconoclastic; those who rebelled, who satirized, who offered truth rather than what the powerful wanted to hear.

There is, alongside my aforementioned appreciation for the "discovery of society," what went along with it, the discovery of history, too--the discovery of past, and present, and future, as we have known them only in modern times.

All this has left me reading a good deal of old work with interest in its historical significance and admiration for its pioneering new forms or its technical accomplishment rather than real enjoyment--an experience that, I think, is more common than those who read older works let on. Being frank about that has, I think, been useful to me in studying literature. But it is probably not very helpful to one pursuing a career of studying literature, the literary priesthood not caring to look at things so closely, or caring much for those who think for themselves rather than accept the judgments of Tradition, the prestige of the Postmodern, and the longstanding distaste of the critical elite for much of what I have described here.