Evolution of Literature

To understand any sort of evolution, what you need first is a long enough time frame. Today, with classical English literature comfortably being half a millennium old, perhaps we can start to analyze how far it has progressed and what we can expect in the future.

Perhaps the two greatest traditions of the English language are ‘Naturalism’ and ‘Romanticism’. Naturalism is the writing and description of things “as they are”. For example, it could be about the way human beings behave in everyday situations and how the world around us goes by. Romanticism is the portrayal of things “how they ought to be”.  How a king should rule (as opposed to how he actually does), how a person should carry out his duties and even what duties there ought to be there towards others.

It need not be mentioned that Romanticism far outlives works of Naturalism, simply because the world keeps changing and a new generation cannot identify with the way things were in the previous generation. The books we see as classics today are mostly based on Romanticism. They have lived with us because some characters in them are model human beings, and because we always aspire to reach their levels. ‘Romeo and Juliet’ describes what lovers ought to be like, and it is the gold standard against which every couple in the world wants to compete. In ‘A Tale of Two Cities’, Sydney’s character is the one of supreme sacrifice and people will keep reading about him because all of us will want to live a life like his. But literature related to Naturalism will stay relevant for maybe a couple of generations and then fade in to the ‘History’ section. We don’t read the way people actually behaved in the nineteenth century because our lives are not like their lives anymore, and have changed beyond measure. Those descriptions seem alien to us now. It is no wonder that people today don’t really read about Gandhi and Bhagat Singh because our priorities today are different. Stories of village life by Premchand and others do not appeal to us because we no longer live in villages.

As far as new patterns in English literature go, with so many nations now speaking English, there has been an influx of new ideas, new vocabulary, and new portrayal of situations hitherto unknown to the English speaking world. The nouveau English speakers are happy just to show us what happens in their countries and bring it about as a novel idea. Since we can’t expect them to contribute much to Romanticism, suddenly, there is a barrage of Naturalism. There aren’t many classics that one can recollect over the past 50 years.

Though there has been a marked improvement and expansion of Naturalism, but still Naturalism is no Romanticism. We read about things that happen in life, but we don’t get uplifted towards a higher ideal. We have become used to judging a book by the portrayal of the ideas and not the ideas themselves. And since an idea can be expressed in a million different ways, writers are happy just to explore a new perspective of putting an idea across. The emphasis now is to impress the reader through presentation of new facts. And facts in today’s world of the internet are never in short supply.

It will only take a writer of great self confidence and steely resolve to go across the current and not write just for the sake of selling books. But ultimately, it will be works like those that will be remembered a hundred years from now. Lots of pieces will come out that will thrill me but very rare pieces will come that will exalt me. A shame, in my opinion.