A Response To Modernism

I mourn for the muse.

The state of literature, from my standpoint, is looking grave. Modernism, with coffee houses and controversial lit mags pushing behind it, advances like a glacier, each day claiming more and more traditional-style writing for obscurity.

I shall start with the fate of the lovely, beautiful, profound haiku. The haiku, as most literary textbooks will still define it, is five syllables, seven syllables, five syllables. The first line provides the subject of the haiku, the second line elaborates with a description, the third line says something more profound about the subject by connecting it to something much bigger. For instance,

Chocolate from the pint
Comforting and cold retreat
Good things come frozen.

But lately the haiku has fallen into decadence. One facet of the modernist philosophy is to free oneself from all constraints, especially those of societal standards. Another is that it's okay to break the rules. Rule-breaking began as a way to shock the reader or catch him off-balence, then became a show of confidence ("I've written so much now, people know who I am. I don't need to follow the rules, I'm So-and-so").  Now rule-breaking is so rampant that not only has it become the norm, it has become the new rule. This applies to all poetic forms, not just my favorite tragic beauty, the haiku. Nowadays, all one has to do to write a haiku is write three lines. They do not need to be poetic, they can be any length, with any developmental pace. There is no line-by-line advancement that leaves the reader with a resonant catharsis. Two haikus I read the other day (I'm co-poetry editor for my school's lit mag) involved condoms. Some contend that a "modern" haiku is more real and more correct than a traditional haiku. Even Samantha Tanzer, my mentor and the school's senior haiku laureate, ignores line lengths sometimes.

Moving on to the short story. I feel so old editing some of the short stories that come into the lit mag office every day. "In my day, sonny, writing either made a point or told a story. Please do the same or stop wasting our time, y'hear?" Almost none of it makes a point or tells a story with a beginning, middle, and end. Most of them are just descriptions, only two to seven lines long. There is one about a girl named Rosy, which ends "Rosy has not a friend in the world and the walls of her room have paintings with colorful fruits in them."  The entire seven sentences are bland statements about some aspect of Rosy's life or appearence. There is no message, no moral, certainly no story. It's as if someone were about to introduce me to a friend and were picking very random facts about the friend to give me and see if I can guess who it is. Also, I don't mean to nag, I really don't, but the short stories I read (David Gates is my favorite short fictionist) are more than two to seven sentences long.

This is not merely a failing of the writers. This is also, as I have discovered, a failing of the editors. My co-editor,  whenever she gets something longer than one page, takes a red pen and says, "I like these few lines, let's put them in the magazine." In my day, a short story with three good sentences in it was not chopped up and recognized in a publication. In my day, if your short story had only three good sentences in it, I would have suggested that you throw it away.

Furthermore, the content has degenerated. Every single fiction submission we've gotten so far has the word "cigarette" in it. Every! Single! One! Well, except the one about Rosy. I believe that writers should remember that only about 22% of the population smokes. Even fewer people have children when they are seventeen. My writing, soft, subtle, always with a moral, seems like it came from a century ago, and the lit mag will not accept it because people today can't relate.

However, here's where I really think writing is going to hell. We shouldn't have to write to fit society. We should be able to write to shape society. Write not for comformity, but for change. This has always been the rule among the best writers of history: write not to comfort, but to shock and excite. It used to be that shocking literature, about sex and drugs and abuse, actually shocked people. But now that it has become the norm, I have a challenge for all you short story writers: Write something about morally sound nonsmokers that's at least two pages long. And my challenge to haiku writers: Write something with a five-syllable first line that states, a seven-syllable second line that elaborates, and a five-syllable third line that connects.

And my challenge to all writers: Modernism has gotten old. Write something traditional, and it will be just the new thing you've been looking for.