Literature in the Age of the World State

In writing his "future history" of the world in The Shape of Things to Come H.G. Wells told of the movement of humanity from the failing Modernity he saw all around him in the middle of the "Thirty Years' Crisis" of 1914-1945 to the more flourishing, peaceful, saner world of the early twenty-second century--the shift from the wreck of capitalism and the states system and "traditional" culture with its superstition, tribalism, selfish striving and the rest to a world united under a rational, scientific, global government using the world's resources for the good of all. In telling the tale he did not neglect the development of culture, and especially of literature--with the scattered remarks together comprising a story consistent with the development of society at large (and his ideas about it).

As it happened, H.G. Wells saw some of the literature of his time as having its interest--favorably citing such works as Erich Kästner's Fabian and Hans Fallada 's Little Man, What Now? as "vivid and illuminating" portraits of their time still readable for their historical (and perhaps other) interest two centuries on. However, his view of the avant garde literature of his day was certainly unfavorable, the world of literature and art seeming to him as decadent as the economic and social system in which its producers lived. The more in as they pandered to the sentiment of an essentially privileged and conservative readership, they became increasingly hostile to modernity, science, technology, reason, progress, indeed the view that "there IS such a thing as society" (or noticing these things, acknowledged them only to condemn them as Aldous Huxley did in Brave New World, as he regarded George Bernard Shaw to be doing in Back to Methusaleh) as they retreated into a "bitter and peculiar Bohemia." In the process they also became prone to be "elaborately stylistic and 'rare'"; and "brutally smutty" as, bespeaking a desire for escape "from the immense demands" of civilization's failure and need for radical social, economic, political change they made "a great noise about the intensifications and aberrations of the personal life" instead, reflected in a vast amount of pornography that could be "solemn . . . facetious . . . sadistic," even religious, as it wallowed in its own obscenity, what we would today call "edgelordism" the order of the day.

As one might guess the collapse of civilization in the middle of the century, as the Second World War he envisaged (in many ways with uncanny accuracy, in others less so) did not so much end as fizzle out in exhaustion, paving the way for a pandemic that was more murderous than even the wartime machinery of destruction. However, literature did revive with civilization, albeit along different lines, the "style" and the smuttiness a thing of the past, along with the moral simplicities of the earlier era amid the great changes in life attendant upon the struggle of the workers of the World State and all they represented with the remnants of the bad old ways. Thus where the novel--the "bourgeois," "realist" "nineteenth century" novel--conventionally depicted "individual character in a set battle between good and bad in a world of undisputed standards," the novels of Wells' 1980s were "preoccupied with this universal battle of ideas and mental habits in people's minds"—a battle not of "good and bad" but "a wild confusion between two sorts of good and two sorts of bad and of innate character distorted in a thousand ways." If stylistically less striking than the decadent works of the 1930s and 1940s they were psychologically more complex, and certainly far more attentive to the social facts from which that earlier literature retreated, and apparently more accepting of them. At the same time literature became more "adult"--bespeaking a world of people with longer life expectancies spent in better health than in a time when life tended to be shorter, and the years of relative soundness of body and mind still more so, such that people made more of the fleeting years when they were young than people of the World State era did.

Accordingly one could trace the march toward sanity through the development of literature--and the ways in which, at least after the World State's passage through a busybody, "Puritan" phase in which it was censorious of older work, much of that older work lost its affect for a later, saner people. As Wells recounts, much that people enjoyed previously--like the comedic delight in punching down and punching up within a hierarchy, not least as seen in the "queer clowning with insults and repartees," seemed to the people of the twenty-second century "either fatuous or malicious." Likewise the "false stresses . . . unnecessary sacrifices and desperations" of "'romance'" (about which the author cites Paul Hennessey's remark that it was "'essentially the violent and miserable reaction of weak spirits to prohibitions they cannot fairly overcome'") had little meaning for them. One may add that the "edgy" content of the post-war years also had little meaning for them. (As Wells put it, the reader of that later day, if bothering to look at that material, would "find it neither shocking, disgusting, exciting or interesting," just "comically pretentious and pitifully silly.") For all that it was still the case that they had "popular romancers" writing thrillers about the violent "age of insecurity" between 1945 and the World State's bringing about a healthier order, with the dangers lurking in, of all things, big hotels, with their "secret lifts, passages, ambushes and sinister private rooms" (the era's equivalent of Gothic literature's castles?), while figures like Basil Zaharoff still had their interest for fans of such narratives. All the same, Wells informs us, "admirable biographical studies" were "ousting the old romantic novel from the entertainment of our leisure so soon as our imaginations have passed beyond the purely romantic stage."

Revisiting all this I could not help thinking of Wells' ideas about literature as he expressed them in his contemporaneous Experiment in Autobiography (published just the year after Shape). In particular I thought of how trenchant a critic Wells was of the nineteenth century novel as exemplified by a Henry James, and how his pre-war association with James only emphasized for him what the Jamesian novel could not do with its acceptance of "undisputed standards" in society and preoccupation with "exterior reactions"--with Show, Don't Tell--and what it seemed so important to Wells that the novel could and should do amid a sense of that world-crisis to which he was so much more sensitive than his more celebrated contemporaries, not least depicting the "controversial matter stewing and fermenting in all our brains," "the conflicts and changes of ideas within" them. Indeed, writing of the post-World War I literature with its aversion to modernity, it style, its smuttiness, he seems to have thought that for the time being literature was moving away from rather than toward what he hoped, but thought that it would be relevant to a more progressive period. I also could not help thinking of how a Wells was far from alone in his views--his contemporary and friend Upton Sinclair taking a not dissimilar view in his books considering the history of literature (Mammonart), and literature in his time (Money Writes!), as indeed it could seem to me that Sinclair, like Wells an intellectual titan of his day, endeavored to realize similar ideals. Certainly his novel Jimmie Higgins, about the experiences of a socialist American factory worker during the era of the First World War, seems to me to admirably realize the ideal of a novel attentive to "the conflicts and changes of ideas" within a human brain in an age of upheaval--and it may well be that the affinity has its reflection in Upton Sinclair being one of the few contemporaries of Wells' to get a mention in the book, as the author of a work on the problems of the Soviet Union. It seems significant, too, that he imagines Sinclair Lewis (who actually died in 1961) living until 1990--and cites a letter historians believe to have been by him recounting the aftermath of a bombing raid on Berlin in the Second World War Wells anticipated. By contrast figures like Henry James--or the Modernists who idolized him--get no direct mention even as historical curiosities, while it is an interesting irony that even as Virginia Woolf gets no mention here as even an example of the post-war literature he criticized, her scarcely remembered husband Leonard Woolf does (as the author of a pamphlet on world government).

Of course, history has taken a different course, with Wells today scarcely remembered at all as a writer of Literature (indeed, of anything but the handful of "scientific romances" he produced in the earliest part of his career), and the same also going for the Sinclairs, both Upton Sinclair and Sinclair Lewis, as Bernard Shaw has been subject to a similar forgetting that would have likewise buried him were it not for the accident of one of his plays having been the basis of a popular stage and screen musical that, making Shaw safe for popular consumption, can seem to reduce the Social Question to "improving people's English." (Thus does a Disney movie starring a young Lindsay Lohan and Megan Fox evoke Pygmalion!) Meanwhile in the English-speaking world, at least, Kästner, Fallada and the German "New Objectivity" with its realism and attentiveness to society of which they were representative seems to be ignored by, if not unknown to, the literary taste-makers. (As is the case with so many of those authors whose interest is greatest from a standpoint like Wells', Fallada entered my ken not through my literary studies, but my readings in the social sciences--in this particular case, C. Wright Mills' mention of him in White Collar.) Instead it is the denizens of the "bitter and peculiar Bohemia" with their reactionary sensibility and elaborate and rare style and smuttiness--the Modernists as we call them, represented by figures like James Joyce and Virginia Woolf who championed not a New Objectivity but a New Subjectivity, so to speak--that critics have, for generations now, exalted as the height of literary art as one list of their pronouncements after another reminds us. The respecter of contemporary literary standards may smile at Wells' apparent lack of foresight--just as they may smile reading what Upton Sinclair had to say about literature--but one can just as easily do the opposite, taking the contrast between Wells' vision of where literature would be by the twenty-first century, and where it actually is actually reflective of the failure of the world to address the crisis of his day, and so in this era of polycrisis still struggling with it, not at all promisingly in the view of many. And they might well say the same of our sense of comedy and of romance, our notions of morality and of edginess in this era in which it seems that literature is altogether on the way out (with all that that can seem to imply about the state of culture and society now). They might also think about how the last great boom in fiction as the written word was on its way out centered on tales of youth specifically, the young adult fiction boom that is clearly a decade behind us now.