Literature as it is generally defined–works of creative prose and poetry–has become an obsolete and irrelevant art for the average American. Recent statistics prove this beyond any doubt. A much-publicized study in 2007 found that, in the preceding year, one in four Americans had not read a single book.^[1] Even those that do read tend to stay away from literary works; in a separate study, fewer than half of American adults stated that they ever read literary titles.^[2] For young adults, the findings are even more depressing: more than half of all Americans aged 18-24 admit to never reading any kind of book for pleasure.^[3] Compare this to the average of five hours per day spent watching television, and literature’s decline makes some sense.^[4] Nefarious as television may seem, however, no one forces people to spend nearly a third of their waking hours passively engaged before it, rather than reading. That the choice is so commonly made to pass over books, to consider reading “boring” or “pointless,” indicates some deeper shift in the way Americans relate to literature, and especially poetry, which a scant ten percent of people read. (Gifford)

Almost twenty years ago, Dana Gioia, poet and eventual chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, bemoaned the irrelevance of poetry in contemporary America, and identified several reasons for its decline.^[5] The most important is also the most obvious, especially for those invested in poetry, and Gioia states it in the first sentence of his essay: “American poetry now belongs to a subculture.” Poetry, and creative writing in general, has migrated firmly into the realm of academia, and has thus divorced itself from the daily realities of most Americans. Poetry is largely composed and read within the same closed group: MFAs or other students of creative writing, generating reams of material that never reaches a wider audience. There may still be some cultural mystique attached to the label of ‘writer’ or ‘poet’, but “as individual artists they are almost invisible” (Gioia).

Much of this can be attributed to the post-WWII boom of creative writing programs, through which a student can begin a career path with none of the usual instability historically associated with writing. Rather than living or dying by publication, writers, once credentialed, can theoretically expect to find employment as a teacher of creative writing themselves. Ironically, though less Americans read now than ever, the rise of MFA programs has brought about a veritable explosion of literary production. In 2009, there were 822 creative writing programs in America alone.^[6] If each of those programs only admit five to ten new students per year, that’s a production of 60,000 professional writers per decade—many of whom will seek to publish within the pages of literary magazines, which are themselves a dwindling industry. Due to a shrinking audience, the average literary magazine now publishes scarcely 1500 copies of each issue. The collision of these two numbers–60,000 new writers every decade, 1500 annual copies of each typical forum for these writers’ productions—suggests that “no one is reading all this newly produced literature—not even the writers themselves. And with that in mind, writers have become less and less interested in reaching out to readers” (Genoways).

Here there can be seen the confluence of two elements which, together, have created the perfect storm for literature’s decline: a reading public made continually smaller through the encroachment of alternative entertainments, like television, and a rapidly-expanding writing class hermetically sealed in an insular world that cannot support the weight of their publications. These factors herald a general cheapening of the written word, both in terms of how the public values it, and the diluting effect of an exponentially increasing output. Both are negative effects of the democratization of literature, a process that Jacques Rancière identifies as having started in the mid-19th century.^[7]

Literature, being comprised of the language that we speak, is inextricably imbedded in and reflective of the world in which it is written. Therefore, as political realities have evolved, so has literature, along with its place and function in society. Rancière identifies this phenomenon as “the politics of literature,” and defines it as, “literature … involved in [the] partition of the visible and the sayable, in [the] intertwining of being, doing and saying that frames a polemical common world” (10). When literature began to reflect in itself the rise of social democratic institutions at the beginning of the 19th century, its very nature changed. This change was crystallized in the mid-19th century in the works of Gustave Flaubert, whose “disregard for any difference between high and low subject matters, for any hierarchy between foreground and background, and ultimately between men and things, was the hallmark of democracy” (12). This marked a distinct break with the classical rhetorical distinctions outlined in Aristotle’s poetics, which elevate the noble art of poetic writing above the base art of historical writing, reflecting a hierarchal sensibility that also places action–deeds and speeches–in the province of persons upon a higher plane than those “who do nothing but ‘live’, who are enclosed in the sphere of a reproductive and meaning-less life” (13). With Aristotle, and continuing through the Renaissance, Elizabethan era, and early Enlightenment, “there was a homology between the rationality of poetic fiction and the intelligibility of human actions, conceived of as an adequation between ways of being, ways of doing and ways of speaking” (13). The functions of literature were thus divided into a hierarchal scheme, defined by the role and intent of the speaker or writer. Ecclesiastical writings, composed by a priest, were meant to improve the spirit; the speech of a rhetorician inspired listeners and spurred them to action; poetry, seen as a transcendent art, revealed hidden layers of reality. Each of these functions had a proper language of its own, and differed from everyday speech in the same way that a Shakespearean king’s manner of speaking differed from that of a peasant.

Rancière defines this system of writing as the “representational regime”, which “was based on a definite idea of the speech-act” (14). At the core of the representational system was “the idea of speaking as using words to produce appropriate aims: specific moves in the souls and motions of bodies” (15). The collapse of the hierarchal system in society brought with it a collapse of the hierarchal organization of language, and thus an end to any definite performative aspect. “The rules and hierarchies of representation hung onto a definite link between saying and doing . . . the highest accomplishment of human action was supposed to be the action made by speaking itself” (15).

In the democratic regime of literature, exemplified by Flaubert and continuing into the present, the “connection between meaning and willing” (15) is utterly dismissed; the writer becomes anybody, as does the reader, and the original function of literature goes into abeyance. Rancière sees democratic literature as composed of “mute letters,” which speak “to anybody, without knowing to whom it had to speak, and to whom it had not” (14). Signaling the end of the age of rhetoric, meaning as communicated through literature is no longer a meeting between two distinct wills. It becomes “a relationship between signs and other signs” (15). The realistic novel exemplifies this new purpose for literature, which presents the entire spectrum of mundane activity as a fabric of signs that, once put on display, are open to decipherment. Language itself has no voice, but provides testimony to the current state of the world, the objective truth of things, instead of the subjective communications of orators. “The words of literature . . . display and decipher the signs and symptoms written in a ‘mute writing’ on the body of things and in the fabric of language” (17). Rancière cites the fabric of literature as comprised of a Balzacian “curiosity shop,” in which all images are equal, “sensitive form[s] that [are] a fabric of signs. All these objects [wear] a history on their body,” in which the realist writer “displays the fossils and heiroglyphs of history and civilization” (19).

We can see this phenomenon manifested clearly in the current vogue for literature that showcases the reality, or soul, of the age. This trend covers the entire literary spectrum, from the works of Nobel laureates, like Orhan Pamuk and Herta Muller, who state their intent as holding a mirror to the society they write from, to the grossly personal and self-reflexive phenomenon of “confessional” literature, in the glut of popular memoirs like Eat, Pray, Love, Million Little Pieces, and Angela’s Ashes. The problem with finding any meaning in such literature, when literature has been divested of the ability to communicate its own meaning, is that the attempts at critical explanation rely upon the same system of “mute letters,” or signs, that support the practice of literature itself (20). “Explaining close-to-hand realities as phantasmagorias bearing witness to the hidden truth of a society, this pattern of intelligibility [is] the invention of literature itself” (20).

Some writers, specifically the literary Modernists, like James Joyce and Samuel Beckett, saw through this charade, the pointlessness of signs pointing to signs, and sought to make literature that existed only for its own sake, without any pretense of meaning. This kind of writing “would no longer be the silent language engraved in the flesh of material things. It would fit the radical muteness of things, which have neither will nor meaning. It would express . . . the nonsense of life in general” (22). The democratization of language had laid bare the infinite materials of language and experience and divorced them from any imbued communicative capability. The writer is left with two options: literature that “covert[s] any scrap of everyday life into a sign of history” (23), or literature that says, and thus accomplishes, nothing at all. The illusion that the former pursuit may bear any transformative benefit–may truly teach anything–becomes subject to the paradox of an interpretation causing the transformation of the interpreted object. This is, as Rancière puts its, the “contradiction of literature” (23).

It becomes obvious why literature’s importance has waned in contemporary society: literature no longer does anything. People do not need literature to frame their experience of a shared world. For this they have political commentators, movies, and television. In order for literature to regain value in the minds of the public, writers must reclaim for themselves something of the hierarchal prestige that preceded our current, fully democratized state. Literature must become again the vessel for specialized communication, for knowledge that exists perfectly outside of the common experience. At the end of the 19th century, the French poet Arthur Rimbaud attempted to create a new type of literature that would not simply reflect life, or the meaninglessness inherent in life, but reveal life more clearly to itself, and “change the self-interpretation of life into a new kind of poem, taking part in the framing of a new world and a new collective life” (22). Rimbaud called for a new literature that would no longer describe the world as it appears, but instead leap ahead of it, in advance of life, to reveal the ultimate communality of all things, and the shades of reality hidden beneath the dross of mundane experience. “He called for poems filled with numbers and harmony, for a language open to the five sense, a language of the soul for the soul, containing everything – smells, sounds and colors. This idea of a poetry of the future was in line with the romantic idea of ancient Greek poetry as the music of a collective body” (22).

The importance of this for the continued relevance of literature, and the need for it in our firmly grounded, realist era, cannot be overstated. Rimbaud, in his revolutionary poetics, sought to resuscitate an ancient, visionary purpose for poetry, first exemplified in the Greek Orphic tradition, and carried through the traditions of early Christianity in the mystical writings of Catholic Saints. These two strains, while seemingly divergent in their theology, can be seen as reconciled in their poetic message and intent, and unified in the writings and life of Arthur Rimbaud himself.

by Doug Matus
a writer from Texas who now lives in Los Angeles

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^[1] Fram, Alan. “One in Four Read No Books Last Year.” The Washington Post 21 Aug. 2007.
^[2] Gifford, Sally. “Literary Reading in Dramatic Decline.” National Endowment for the Arts. 8 July 2004. Web. 23 Feb. 2010. <http://www.nea.gov/news/news04/ReadingAtRisk.html>
^[3] Allen, Erin. “Americans Read, Understand Less.” Library of Congress. June 2008. Web. 23 Feb. 2010. <http://www.loc.gov/loc/lcib/0806/reading.html>
^[4] Semuels, Alana. “Television Viewing at All-Time High.” The Los Angeles Times 24 Feb. 2009.
^[5] Gioia, Dana. “Can Poetry Matter?” The Atlantic Monthly May 1991: 94-106.
^[6] Genoways, Ted. “The Death of Fiction?” Mother Jones Jan. 2010. Web.
^[7] Rancière, Jacques. “The Politics of Literature.” SubStance 33.1 (2004): 10-24. Project Muse. Web.