Aesthetic Views

My aesthetic views on literature and writing can be explained by relating my experience with literature, mostly as a reader. As a lay reader it is essential that I understand what I am reading. As a scholar of literature it is necessary that the density of all the available literary devices, used in context contribute to my reading experience. The reading of any novel, theoretical text, literary journal, collection of short stories, or poetry must not be arduous, but at least enjoyable.

In the early stages of the reading experience it is quite common to put a book down, close it and put it away. The story may have been dull and uninteresting, or the length of the text may have been too daunting. Today, the scholar is more selective in his choice of reading matter, armed with knowledge of the literary canon.

It is argued that the length of a book is not a measure of its literary quality. This has often been a misconception among new readers. J M Coetzee’s DISGRACE is just over two-hundred pages long, but is considered to be a great work of literary art. The Booker Prize awarded to this novel is testament to this. Wilbur Smith remains one of the world’s best-selling novelists. His escapist adventure stories, well-researched as it is, has never won any major literary awards. Coetzee has won the Booker Prize twice. His novels are short, yet better researched than Smith’s. There is more fact than fiction in Coetzee’s oevre than Smith’s library of over thirty novels. Therein lies the rub, as Shakespeare said.

One of the great novels of the twentieth century is F Scott Fitzgerald’s THE GREAT GATSBY. It is very short, just over a hundred and thirty pages long, but aesthetic pleasure is derived from the quality of Fitzgerald’s prose. And yet around the same time that Fitzgerald wrote his novel, the Irish writer, James Joyce produced the more remarkable ULYSSES. It is one of the longest books written, famous for its innovative use of the modernistic device of stream of consciousness writing. Joyce was not afraid of experimenting with the literary art form. Could we label him a writer’s Picasso? Writers such as Virginian Wolf continued this trend successfully.

In later years Coetzee also lent himself to experimentation and in DUSKLANDS he produced two stories within a story. The stories of Eugene Dawn and Jacobus Coetzee are both a postmodern and postcolonial study of the treatment of the “ other “. The overlapping of journals and diaries in DIARY OF A BAD YEAR, a semi-biographical study of a wide range of topics from child pornography to terrorism to America’s war on terror, is another example of experimentation. Its weakness is that it rambles, having to fill gaps continuously as if there is a fear of running out of something to say, or of not filling the pages.

Long novels are a rarity these days. It is perhaps the ever-increasing demands of a technologically advanced society with a short attention span that has influenced publishers to discourage this form. Certainly economics does have a say here. There can be no guarantee that a modern day twenty-first century James Joyce will sell. Gone are the days of Tolstoyan epics. The children’s book genre witnessed a sensation in the HARRY POTTER series by J K Rowling. I sense a revival in the fantasy-fiction form in the mould of Tolkien’s LORD OF THE RINGS trilogy.

Thankfully institutions such as Pulitzer and Booker will endear publishers to seek out literature of a high aesthetic quality and ensure that writers continue to push the boundaries of literary innovations.