America and Storytellers

I have said before that I love to read. I believe that storytelling is what makes humans different from the rest of Creation. After all, we are said to be made in the image of our Creator and what has been created is, to make a complex issue simple, a grand story.

I seldom find books these days that simply tell a good story. For the past many years, authors seem to have become obsessed with style over substance. Take, for example, James Joyce.

Joyce could write. His first novel, Potrait of the Artist as a Young Man, was very good, not great but very good, His book of short stories, Dubliners, was brilliant, especially  his Christmas story, The Dead. I know, that does not sound very Christmasy, but it is a beautiful, warmly human story. We will get back to that human part shortly.

I have tried repeatedly to read Ulysses and each time, about half way through, I ask myself why I am bothering. I understand it, and can appreciate the quality of the writing. I even get the humor but, so what? The story is simply boring. The main characters are unpleasant and who really wants to know every thought that passes through their minds.

Then, we reach Finnegan's Wake. The book is absurd and I think that is almost the point. It is experiment for the sake of experiment, a sort of artistic masturbation.

Joyce was an odd man, obsessed with himself and his own thinking. He was so disappointed with the people of his own native Ireland and seemingly wwithdrew into himself. He developed that habit of writing notes documenting his every thought and truly, they were not that special and really uninteresting. His experiments in writing are absurd and I believe that is because he found people absurd and somewhat distasteful, if not downright loathsome.

For reaasons that escape me, literary critics became enamored of his nonsense, hailing his great profundity at every turn. Honestly, he was a naught schoolboy, a near sociopath who expected the World to support him while he thumbed his nose at his supporters. His own wife once asked him when he was going to write something that people could actually read.

Well, as should have been expected, all the praise heaped upon him set the wheel in motion and rather quickly, substance was foresaken for style and classic style was foresaken for experiment, experiment for its own sake. The art of storytelling was lost.

There are still writers who tell stories but the quality of their subject matter is limited. For example, Phiilip Roth and John Updike are fine wordsmiths but their obsessions are trivial and boring. To be blunt, Updike's suburbanites are not the stuff of great stories, nor are Roth's tales of the frustrated Jewish males.

I once heard Ken Kesey say, in an interview, that he wanted writers like Twain and Poe who could write tales of heroes and villians, of machines and monsters. I concur.