The lives of the authors.

How generations shape literature.

I have recently appeared in a few podcasts. Brian Chau and I talked about the literary moment (are there any men publishing novels?) and Macbeth. Brian had great questions and we really got into it with Shakespeare. Alex Dobrenko`got me ranting about philistines, taste, and Samuel Johnson. We had a good laugh. With Michael Newborn I talked about late bloomers.

If you want to hear me talk irl, I’ll be at Bell House next month, in south London.

More soon!

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I am delighted to bring you this written discussion between me and Julianne Werlin, who writes one of my favourite Substacks Life and Letters. Julianne mentioned in a recent post that she was researching and writing about literary generations, and that is what we discuss. How can thinking about writers in generations help us understand literature and literary history? Is demography destiny for novelists?

Enjoy!

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Henry

Julianne, Hello!

You said something in your Substack post today that caught my eye.

I’m currently in the early stages of thinking about a generational history of literary authors. I’m more sympathetic than most to the idea that generations might be, if not exactly the key to all mythologies, at least one digit in that vast, combinatorial code.

So many names start crowding my imagination when I think of this. Tell me, what’s your basic theory of literary generations?

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Julianne

Thanks for starting this conversation, Henry!

My interest in the idea of literary generations emerges from my love of biographical literary criticism, which I know we both share. When we read good literary biographies, or even when we think about the work of a particular author we know well, we understand intuitively that their work has a certain arc of development that’s shaped by their life and is also fully part of that life. We know very well that they write at first as a young man or woman with a certain position in the world, then as an older man or woman, still shaped by earlier experiences but now with a different role and perspective.

But when we scale up to look at literary history—the history of many authors and many books—that sense of the entanglement of work and life often vanishes, as does the complex, layered sense of the decades of experience that may have shaped the publications of a single year. Instead, we tend to look at the immediate events surrounding a literary moment, and we also remove or bracket biographical elements. As a result, we’re often left with an impoverished sense of temporality, as well as deep cleavages between text and context. For me, the appeal of generational thinking is that it’s a way of considering literary history that preserves the centrality of the author and the course of the life, even as we begin to think about many lives rather than just a few, and the passage of centuries rather than decades.

It’s also a way of understanding how literary change happens. In the majority of generational theories, the birth of new people and the death of old people is a major mechanism of social change. It’s certainly not that older people can’t produce novel works or ideas, as you’ve shown in Second Act. But for most people, the first encounter with the world, in all its multiplicity and strangeness, is a formative one. 

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Henry

I often think that one of the interesting things about major authors is when they span generations. Jacobean Shakespeare competing with a new generation, for example. Dickens and the new modes of realism and sensationalism. The ambivalent combination of both ability or inability to integrate with a new generation, a new mode, can have wonderful results.

When Penelope Fitzgerald started writing novels, in her sixties, for example, she felt that her world had vanished. Writing to a friend in 1998, when she was in her eighties, she said, “I suppose it’s ridiculous to regret the Liberal Party, the Church of England, Lyons tea shops, Carter Paterson, telegrams and so on, but so many of them seemed to disappear at once.” She was, in many ways, quite modern, but she harked back.

This nostalgia was the imaginative spirit that gave her novels so much magic. She is a writer of lost worlds. But it also made her less exciting than Martin Amis and his leather jacket. Something similar happened to Elizabeth Jenkins, whose best book, The Tortoise and the Hare, is similarly of another time, and was released in 1954, the year of Lucky Jim. But again, her advantage was that she had the “pre-war” quality so many people at that time missed in their clothes, and perhaps, sometimes, their novels…

So tell me, how will a literary history of generations be different from what we are used to? Are you talking about prosopography, or about something more individuated?

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Julianne

I do find generational approaches to individual authors interesting. As your examples suggest, thinking generationally might be most revealing for late works, which are often shaped by decades of experience. For me, Milton, who described himself as “long choosing and beginning late,” comes instantly to mind. Paradise Lost, composed when he was in his late fifties, encapsulates thirty years of social and intellectual transformations, culminating in a reaction against the politics and aesthetics of his own moment, the Restoration. Of course, no one would treat Paradise Lost as a typical poem of the 1660s: the whole point is that it’s not! But many more conventional late works—ones that weren’t written in the ashes of a revolution—may have an equally complex and ambivalent relationship to their own moment. 

For me, though, the real interest in this approach lies in thinking about how genres and styles form and change within and across generations. Prosopography will play a role, but so will generational succession. We might think, for example, about the relationship between the generation of novelists born in the 1760s and 70s, including Maria Edgeworth (1768), Walter Scott (1771), “Monk” Lewis (1775), Jane Austen (1775), and Fanny Trollope (1779), and the generation born in the 1810s: Thackeray (1811), Dickens (1812), Trollope (1815), Charlotte Brontë (1816), Emily Brontë (1818), and George Eliot (1819). The former group shaped the historical novel, the gothic novel, and social comedy. Their works, in turn, formed the youthful reading of the younger generation, who drew on their predecessors’ techniques in a new, more radical era to create the English social novel. In Trollope’s case, of course, the generational relationship was a biological as well as literary one: Fanny Trollope was his mother. 

We’re used to thinking of these authors as landmarks in literary history. But I think we could do much more to integrate the intimate details of their life course—biography and demography—with the history of their literary works. Generations, after all, are how literature imagines the stakes of historical change. Think of the family dramas of Greek tragedy, Shakespeare’s plots of political succession, or the Bildungsroman. Writers understand that ideas are born and die with human beings, and that every process of intellectual change is also a process of generational change. Demographic history is much closer to the center of literature than we might imagine.

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Henry

The way literature is taught to undergraduates (or at least the way it was taught to me, and the way I think it ought to be taught, which is (broadly) chronologically and canonically) implicitly acknowledges this, I think, but without making it central to study as you say. In the days of my supremacy, I shall have undergraduates learn less literary theory and more literary history, and in that paper they will study “small group theory”. Think of Goethe and the Jena set, or James and the Rye set. It is often the case that artists innovate in these small, intense, slightly unstable groups. The Impressionists were like this, too.

And I think that’s a better intersection with your ideas that the usual “Millennial are snowflakes” stuff we hear about generations. It is the ideas that matter, as well as the general character. One reason I wish Turgenev was as popular as Tolstoy is that Fathers & Sons is such a mirror of our times. There are many Bazarovs among us today, but the novel’s main lesson for us, as such, is that ideas and temperament work together. It is not just the hot blood of youth that misguides Bazarov. It is the nature of him being that sort of person, in that sort of group, in that generation. We must see this all entangled.

Nesting these ideas can become a bit of a riddle. But I think it makes more sense if we think of them as part of a web, with the author, like a spider, in the middle. Martha Nussbaum described her book The Fragility of Goodness as a web of ideas, rather than a liner argument. She derives this simile from Heraclitus (we know it at second hand; she thinks it authentic):

Just as the spider, standing in the middle of its web, perceives at once whenever a fly damages one of its threads and quickly hurries there as though distressed by the flaw in that thread, so too does the human soul, when some part of the body is harmed, hasten immediately to that spot, as though it could not bear the injury done to the body, to which it is firmly and proportionately joined.

She uses this to contrast Sophocles to Plato. Plato sees the soul ascending, from the particular to the universal, from the fake reality of the world to the true reality of the metaphysical. The Sophoclean soul, in contrast, “advances its understanding of life and of itself… by hovering in thought and imagination around the enigmatic complexities of the seen particular… seated in the middle of its web of connections, responsive to the pull of each separate thread.”¹

Literary study is often quite Platonic, looking for the “really real” in its various theories of the world, but literature itself seems to me to be more of a Heraclitian web, of which generations must surely be an important thread.

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Julianne

Yes, exactly: I see generations as an element of literary history, implicit in the importance we already attach to the lives of authors, but in need of quite a bit of further elaboration.

Part of the reason this hasn’t happened is that we associate generations with the kind of pop analysis you allude to, in which each generation is taken as a homogenous unit with hard boundaries separating, say, “Millennials” from “Generation X.” If generations determine our characters and possibilities, and if they shift at fixed intervals of 15, 21, or 30 years, then studying them becomes a codebreaking exercise, a question of finding the right set of dates. Quite a few generational theorists have tried to do exactly that. The philosopher José Ortega y Gasset, for instance, proposed taking the birth year of the leading intellectual of each era—for the Renaissance it was to be Descartes—and then placing 7 years on each side to create a 15-year interval; the trick was to arrange all the other intellectuals across history into equally valid divisions and then to align them with one another. (It didn’t work.)

Obviously, that kind of thing is absurd. But it’s no less absurd to discount the importance of an individual’s age and cohort in shaping attitudes, especially in literary history. I’m glad you mentioned Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons. As you suggest, it’s the perfect illustration of how inescapable generational analysis is for literature—and, I would add, for its authors. 

Take Turgenev himself. Born in 1818, he came of age under a deeply reactionary regime. But as he entered middle age, a wave of liberalizing reforms lifted restrictions on the universities and the press. The way was opened for a new generation of student radicals: Bazarov’s generation, but not, of course, Turgenev’s. When Fathers and Sons was published he was 44, precisely the same age as Nikolai Kirsanov, the novel’s titular father, which is surely no coincidence. The complexity of the novel’s perspective is unintelligible without taking its author’s generation into account: distanced from the views of contemporary youth, yet finding a kind of melancholy sympathy in that very distance. 

Dostoevsky, in fact, though it was decidedly too sympathetic for someone who, as a middle-aged intellectual, ought to know better! A member of Turgenev’s generation, he wrote his own depiction of the youthful nihilists a decade later in The Devils, published in the same magazine as Fathers and Sons. In that novel, he included a scathing portrait of Turgenev as the ridiculous middle-aged novelist Karmazinov, a talentless has-been who seeks to curry favor with the younger generation by way of expressing radical political sympathies. In describing him, Dostoevsky can’t resist lapsing into literary criticism:

all these talented gentlemen of the middling sort who are sometimes in their lifetime accepted almost as geniuses, pass out of memory quite suddenly and without a trace when they die, and what’s more, it often happens that even during their lifetime, as soon as a new generation grows up and takes the place of the one in which they have flourished, they are forgotten and neglected by every one in an incredibly short time.²

The vector of forces that made age so salient inside each novel is also what made it so powerful outside the novels, in the lives of the authors. It’s the interrelationship between the two that I find so intriguing, and generational analysis is one way of getting at it.

1. This is the full quotation. “The Sophoclean soul is more like Heraclitus’s image of psuché: a spider sitting in the middle of its web, able to feel and respond to any tug in any part of the complicated structure. It advances its understanding of life and of itself not by a Platonic movement from the particular to the universal, from the perceived world to a simpler, clearer world, but by hovering in thought and imagination around the enigmatic complexities of the seen particular (as we, if we are good readers of this style, hover around the details of the text), seated in the middle of its web of connections, responsive to the pull of each separate thread.” p. 69

2. Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Possessed, Translated by Constance Garnett.