I can’t stand supposed “modern literature”, or at least stories about mundane people being miserable in ordinary surroundings. I just read whatever trips my trigger, usually sci-fi or speculative fiction/fantasy.
"Modern literature" is, technically, whatever gets written in the modern world, which includes Tolkien's "Lord of the Rings," accounted by British readers as "The Novel of the Century"--and rightly so, as I will explain at length and at the drop of a hat to anyone I can force to sit and listen to me--also, Gene Wolfe, Louis L'Amour, Isaac Asimov, C. S. Lewis, John Updike, Jack London, and even Garrison Keillor. What you are calling "Modern literature" (modern people who are miserable in their modern surroundings and reveling oh-so-miserably in their modernity--those who scoff and jeer and look askance at those bucolic dunces who haven't yet understood the hidden gnosis that drives them and enlightens them to Darkness--what we might call “the literature of misery“ or, for short, “mizlit“) is as surely a genre as any detective story, Harlequin romance, western, crime novel or bug-eyed science fiction adventure--that is, it is a distillation of human experiences, perceptions and interests into a particular little cocktail that floats the boat of the particular collective who embrace it--and it is nothing more. It is no more an indication of the true shape of reality or the true nature of modern life than a Zane Gray novel is: it is just the particular taste of a particular group of people who have decreed themselves the "taste-makers" of what we have decided to call "the modern world"--the academics, and the sorts of people who really believe that getting published in The New Yorker is the apotheosis of the writer and the validation of one's life as a human, making one one of the Chosen Jeerers.
I think it was JRR Tolkien (or maybe it was his pal, CS Lewis) who responded to the charges of writing “escapist literature” by saying that there is nothing at all wrong with dreaming of escape if one is in prison, which is an apt description of the experience of living in the modern world, or reading what is taken by some to be its representative literature. SF (the “S” can stand either for “Science” or “Speculative”) and fantasy writers are engineering a jailbreak: they want, not unnaturally, to get the hell out of here! And who (besides the mizlit crowd, who have pre-emptively decreed that there is nowhere else to escape to) would disagree? It is a world of Fact without Meaning, of Desire without Hope, of Life without Joy-- the sort of place whose denizens congratulate themselves on their wisdom of realizing that they are imprisoned without Hope--because, without Hope, there is no reason to make the effort to escape; the fundamentally-disillusioned cannot, after all, ever be disappointed, because there was never anything to hope for anyway.
The impulse towards fantasy and science fiction literature has, I believe, its grounding in what is inadequately called the “religious” impulse. It is the desire for the world as our more "ancient" (i.e., less delusional and more aware of the realities around them, and less sheltered by merely intellectual constructs that tend to disenchant reality so as to geld it and make it more malleable to our immediate plans for it) forbears experienced it: a world of awe and wonder and unimaginable danger, a world of infinite (or at least, really, really big) possibility, a world where Something or Someone far greater than oneself was waiting for you, a world full of freedoms and powers and astonishments undreamt of--in other words, we want miracles, which are not just wonders, but signs from the bigger world beyond--signposts, in fact, pointing THIS WAY OUT. Where SF too often fails (or rather, its practitioners fail) is that they wind up constructing immense Disneylands where everything is an E-ticket (and there is no Small World pavilion), and where you can have a great time while you're there--but it's really just this world rearranged, and with some new, cool gadgets that capture the attention--"and," as a friend of mine remarked, "eventually, you know, you have to go home."
The best SF (like the best movies, plays, concerts, art exhibits, or anything) goes home with you. It actually shifts your vision and your understanding, at least on an intuitive level if not a cognitive one. You see the world differently; sometimes you see beyond the world (and I don't mean just the planet)--maybe to possibilities that you don't believe are true, but which may be possible--and even entertaining the possibility can be vision-shifting, maybe even a little disturbing, but the disturbance usually helps you to clarify your own vision. It can provide you (at least imaginatively) with experiences it isn't possible for you to have. It broadens you in a way that a mizlit addict can't be broadened, because his literature is a celebration of right where he is, and is based on the firm belief that there's no need to go anywhere else because nowhere else is really any different--it's just more of the same, but a different color.
Way past time to shut up. Your serve.
That is just a great post, thank you for the effort. I’m going to put that in the whole mental cabinet and refer to it if this subject ever comes up! If I recall Gene Wolfe mentioned the “taste makers” as well. One of the things he pointed out was that the taste makers usually dug things like the Odyssey, but anything modern dasn’t contain fantastic elements lest it be considered garbage.
Anyhow I never come across folks who are jumping up and down to want to tell me all about this new novel concerning mundane folks self-loathing in their mundane world. I run across people exited about the fantastic new sci-fi/fantasy book they just discovered or rediscovered all the time. Maybe it’s the company I keep, but I reckon something more might be going on. I can live with either.
“Way past time to shut up. Your serve.”
I hope you like Pabst Blue Ribbon, selected as America’s Best in 1893.
Freegards