The constant and the change, the literary canon

With inspiration from this debate, I will do a twist, and whine a bit. I don't care for Jack Kerouac even though I own three editions of On the road. I'll sum up the plot for you if you haven't read it, they travelled, they fucked, they worked they got high, they travelled, they fucked, they travelled they got high and they worked, they fucked and they travelled. Suprisingly similar to The Lord of the Rings triolgy where the plot kind of goes they walked and they walked and they walked and they walked, they fought, they hid, they walked they walked and they walked. That pretty much sums up my idea of American literature. The grand travels. You can also see Frodos change as a matter of intoxication and the similarity to On the road is even more evident.

Who am I to judge these, oh lord, I don't want to use the word, but I know I'll be criticized if I don't, masterpieces? I'd say I'm noone better than to pass this judgement as they, in different ways represent what my parent generation valued. Please don't confuse what I call the parent generation with my own parents. I'm not narcissistic enough to bring my own parents into this, and leading that into that I'm only one voice among many. That is what the canon is. Voices. Then you can divide it into two things, what they're saying and how they're saying it. Historically the way they're saying it has a longer staying power than what they're saying. This is why I think that in 150 years On the road will only be a parentheses in the history of literature. Compare it to Crime and punishment by Fyodor Dostovesky (ugh, that is the ugliest spelling of his name) and how Crime and punishment in this offers a different perspective. Yes the plot is very introspective but it offers lessons to learn, something On the road only does to those who can directly relate to it. That generation will fade and the importace of the book will with that fade as well. Surely both books are best enjoyed before your mid 20s of the idealistic idea is lost. They can both be used as tools for the adolescent to find a place in the world, a sort of companionship in the state of being an outsider. Stylstically neither of these works compare to the sonnetts of William Shakespeare or Homerus. When context is lost the how remains.

Good quality literature embrace both of these elements, which is why Shakespeares comedies aren't as funny today as they were when they were written. Without understanding the life in the elizabethan era we can't understand the humor. Just like the French classicism dramas by Molière weren't about the ancient Greeks, he simply used a known and admired concept to tell the stories that'd suit the French upper classes in the 1600s. They tell us more about the lives and issues of them than they do of their heritage. I'm fully aware of the fact that the ideas I'm presenting aren't new, yet there's an essence of reinventing the wheel in any literary discussion. Everything has already been written, every style has been tried.

This is what the modernists had issues with. When everything's already been said but I still have things left to say, how do I go about that? And how, in a post like this can I fail to mention The Wasteland by T.S Eliot, which to me is the perfect example how you can use all the stories already told to tell something new. The Wasteland has what On the road lacks the most, depth. The fact that everything has already been written isn't a hindrance in producing excellent literature, but just like you don't start designing a car by pondering inventing the wheel you can't start from fresh without looking back. As simple as doing footnotes in your dissertation to show you're aware of where the information came from you weave the past into your text and do in fact create something new. That new will not have the same staying power as the original.

Compare that to scientific studies, which ones cause the most outbreak? The first study to show that smoking is bad or the one million following confirming the same thing? This brings me to the debate itself, the one about the literature of the Swedish working class where in the 1930's the writers hit a core in Swedish society with their bare realism and suffocating descriptions of the every day lives of the poor, but only in embracing the culture of the higher classes, the novel, did they get a chance to do so.

After the initial intent of the genre, to publicly show, to gain a greater audience for the issues at hand, what has the working class literature had to deal with, what can it offer now? It goes back to the discussion of how and what. Were these novels so sovereignly written that they deserve a place in the canon? Or do the stories of how actually fall under the category of social history and ethnology? Where is the line drawn between literature and other cultural expressions worthy of preserving?