WHY THE LITERARY GAME NEEDS TO CHANGE

ONE OF THE MOST consequential elections in American history took place on November 5th, 2024 and literature absented itself. The newly elected President is already making threats against Canada, Mexico, Great Britain and Greenland, and literature has absented itself. Unprecedented wealth in the hands of a few individuals; the rise of super-plutocrats like Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Peter Thiel and Jeff Bezos. Perhaps the dawn of the end of the American republic as we know it. Plans to deport twenty million people; threats to cut benefits to veterans and the poor; Elon Musk prepared to grab control of the executive branch and its agencies while making Congress and the Supreme Court puppets or redundant– but established literature, its authors and commentators are nowhere to be found. They’re writing interior monologues, or descriptions of trips to Tuscany, or giving prim readings in New York City at KGB. The country’s about to collapse, the world’s in turmoil, but our privileged literati in their isolated bubble are safe. Or mindlessly complacent.

WHERE ARE GREAT POPULIST NOVELS?

Meaning: novels which can stir the masses and the mandarins as novels once did– as Jack London (The Iron Heel) and Frank Norris (The Octopus) did in reaction to money-grabbing robber barons and monopolists in their day, the early 20th Century– causing President Theodore Roosevelt to act. To move against greedy plutocrats, John D. Rockefeller and his like, who in comparison to today’s ruthless mega-billionaire robber barons were mere shopkeepers.

WHERE ARE THE CRITICS?

Where are the art’s navigators assigned to plot course and steer the ship of literature?

Are they penning unreadable conglomerations of words discussing an art viewed through layers of other people’s musings? Or reviewing irrelevant solipsistic books pushed out by the “literary” arm of the Big Five? While tragedies of the world take place around them, and the floor of their own society begins to sink under their feet?

They seem to think they’re still in the higher reaches of the academy, writing to impress faculty advisors.

The literary art? Does it live, reaching an engaged public? Or is it buried beneath an avalanche of blather?

It’ll have to be dug out with shovels, or by giant mechanical earthmovers.

Time to rescue it.

-Karl Wenclas