Old books vs. New books

Why read 'War and Peace' when we know so much more than Tolstoy?

Written by J William Browne

‘Someone said, “The dead writers are remote from us because we know so much more than they did.” Precisely, and they are that which we know.’

T.S. Eliot, 1919

I like reading old novels. There is something about a story written by someone long dead that appeals to me as cultivated. Like enjoying red wine rather than lager. I admittedly also like lager, but look down on people who exclusively drink it as being rather base. Neck Oil may be a better drink than Fosters, but the gap between a pint of either is smaller than the middle and bottom shelf of the supermarket wine aisle. In the same way, I regard the reader that exclusively reads modern novels as a literary lager drinker. Are they afraid of tasting something?

Or so I thought until my inner snob, with its tendency towards the middle-brow and middle-shelf, started reading new novels again. 

Old vs. New is of course a very old question. I started writing this piece a few weeks ago only to fall down a rabbit hole in the introduction and end up in the 1990s for a wistful thousand words. As I found out, nostalgia tempts us back to simpler times and, in an aspirational kind of way, there is always further back to go to find the elusive glory of the past. But memory can be a corrupt postman, steaming open the letter and stealing the joy from a moment or delivering the wrong parcel entirely. And while the words of a novel by George Orwell or Jane Austen may literally read the same as the last time you read them and therefore seem more reliable than a memory, old books also have a tendency to be redrafted by time. 

Writing just after the First World War, the poet and literary critic T.S. Eliot put forward the idea that every new work of art subtly alters every piece of art that came before it:

‘What happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it. The existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them. The existing order is complete before the new work arrives; for order to persist after the supervention of novelty, the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly, altered; and so the relations, proportions, values of each work of art toward the whole are readjusted; and this is conformity between the old and the new.’

Ref: Tradition and the Individual Talent (T.S. Eliot, 1919)

Though it would be an amusing position to argue, this doesn’t hold true for all new books; the publication of Fifty Shades of Grey and The Very Hungry Caterpillar did not reframe War and Peace or In Search of Lost Time. What we are dealing with here is what Eliot considered to be the best; the European canon. It is the duty of the artist, in his view, to embody ‘the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer’, and in doing so, to subsume their individuality as a writer, or a poet, or an artist to the medium of their art. However noble, this bibliomania is ultimately an elitist ideal. Taken literarily, it would be a lifetime of reading. Fortunately Eliot qualifies this ideal in spirit for lazy middle-brows like myself, in that the past is something that we must develop a consciousness of if we are to become good writers. But even so, a lot of old books must be read if one is to finally write a line of something new. 

So why do all this reading? 

After all, we know so much more now than those great writers did then. Even at top universities, it is said that with each new academic year, Literature students arrive as freshmen increasingly less well-read, such is the pull of the screen away from the page. The same applies for the general reader and wider population who have replaced the novel with novelty, reaching for a smartphone whenever a quiet moment presents itself. According to a Kantar, in 2021, 53% of UK adults reported reading at least one book a year, with only around a third of this number being ‘heavy readers’ who had read more than 10 books in a year. This bookish group tended to be older and live alone. More dispiritingly for an aspiring writer, it seems the younger the adult, the less likely they are to read. Compare this to the amount of time we spend on our phones each day at 2 hours 55 minutes. If the average reader spent the same time each day reading Tolstoy, they would finish War and Peace in less than two weeks. 

Perhaps one can answer the question of ‘why read old books?’ with another question. To apply Rudyard Kipling’s maxim about the insular English mindset of 19^th Century to the modern mind; what do they know, that know only of the internet? For those of us that still read words on a page in the internet age, we may know more than Tolstoy, Austen and Orwell, but Eliot’s point is that this is precisely what we do know. In a way, he is arguing for a kind of progressive conservatism; of new works of literature being at their greatest when they are in a dialogue with the past, emulating the greatest of their literary heritage. It is a sophisticated notion of tradition being a living, breathing thing with a constantly shifting influence. A notion of tradition which is perhaps better thought of as a garden than a monument. 

Modern literary criticism, however, takes a narrower view of tradition that would to turn this old garden into a set of allotments. The new criticism which emerged from Literature departments across academia emphasises an intersectional rather than an aesthetic analysis, a perspective that has become influential across a wandering western culture looking for a radical new take on old questions. As such, in an age which is much more sensitive to group differences, real or perceived, the medium of the novel, which perhaps best enables a person to translate their life experience for others to live vicariously, was an obvious cultural target for ideological revision. The fierce critic and great opponent of this revolution on university and college campuses, Harold Bloom, described this body of thought as ‘The School of Resentment’. 

The culture wars are where nuanced arguments go to die, so I stray onto that battlefield reluctantly, but it is a development that cannot be ignored in the influence it is having on new books. In the 1930s and 40s George Orwell wrote scathing critiques of the ‘art for art’s sake’ movement and is remembered broadly for his works that sought to turn ‘political writing into an art’. The argument went that literature had become decadent and its subject detached from the ideological age it should have been reflecting upon with less adjectives and more alarm. Indeed, Harold Bloom was part of this dying tradition. Bloom worshiped aesthetics and what one might call ‘the difficult’ as the standard of a good novel or poem, but warned against seeking moral values from literature, itself a radical view. 

But if we take a step back, acknowledging their supreme intellects, is there anything to be said for democratising literary criticism away from the elites like Bloom and Eliot, and in turn making literature more accessible and applicable to more people? I have always found ‘the personal is political’ to be a fairly glib mantra, but making enough undergraduates repeat it has perhaps made it ring a little more true in a culture increasingly shaped by identity politics. Either way, an approach to the novel from the extremes of aestheticism or ideology rarely delivers fine literature. The two combined well, however, can make for very good reading. Orwell died a staunch opponent of decadent art and the Marxist critique of culture, whilst also being a writer who proved the effectiveness of the dual attack of art and politics in the most influential novel of the 20^th century, Nineteen Eighty-four. 

In the last few decades, this campus experiment and its influence on the contemporary culture that novels are now being written in turn has highlighted a growing gap between theory and reality. The shift reveals a new form of decadence which may be summarised as a pursuit of virtue for virtue’s sake. We are reaping the failed harvest of a radical overcorrection of ‘art for art’s sake’ which has forgotten where ideological purity leads, of the academic thought that at its worst teaches today’s students that aesthetic quality is an archaic conspiracy and that modern literature should primarily serve to emancipate society from the shackles of tradition. Knowing so much more than the great writers of the past, we needn’t read William Shakespeare or Leo Tolstoy. Our enlightened modern culture is in the act of rejecting Eliot’s monumental view of tradition in favour of rebuilding itself upon a foundation of shifting sands.

The ambition is admirable like much campus idealism. European literature is by no means the last word on fine literature and to search for a wider range of influences in modern literature would be no bad thing - the western canon is admittedly dominated by a currently unfashionable demographic that reflected their era - providing the high standard of quality for these new voices and their ideas is maintained. For the shift is becoming a significant one for what we read today. The revision from the primacy of what a writer writes to who a writer is doesn’t simply turn Eliot’s standard for great literature’s greatness upon its head; it chops that head off in a fit of revolutionary outrage. A great work of modern art is no longer to be judged primarily as the aesthetic achievement of an artist, but in their achievement of overcoming tyranny through their art. It is a bold and somewhat incoherent assertion to transcend the past and redefine tradition simultaneously. 

As such, the redrafting of time for a new novel is quite different to an old one.

I do not get the sense when I read George Orwell, or Jane Austen, or Leo Tolstoy that these writers feared the opinions of the future. They wrote entrenched in the tradition T.S. Eliot declared essential, and in doing so, spoke to an audience of their time with an authentic voice and common humanism which keeps them in print. Considering the new books one sees in the windows of bookshops today, the industry appears to greatly fear offending anyone. We read of the Orwellian spectre of ‘sensitivity readers’ and of staff in certain publishing houses refusing to work on a book that doesn’t align their political views. One ought to worry where this leads, whether the industry will eventually come to a point of censoring content that may offend future readers even if present sensitivities are satisfied.

Yet it remains a common piece of advice to young writers to not give a damn for what people think and write honestly. It is something you tend to hear from published authors rather than publishing houses, but the advice presumably holds true for your future audience as much as it does for a present one. The recommendation varies from Neil Gaiman’s ‘you have to be a little more honest that you are comfortable with’, to Philip Roth’s advice to a young Ian McEwan ‘you must write as though your parents are dead’. 

Considering modern writers today, of those that I have read a few books of, three authors seem to conform to both this standard of honesty and Eliot’s standard of tradition. The first is the Norwegian novelist Karl Ove Knausgård, who writes as if everyone he knows is dead, given how frank his work is about himself, his friends and his family. The second is France’s enfant terrible Michel Houellebecq, who writes as if everyone in Europe is dead and which seems to broadly be his point. The third is the late Cormac McCarthy, who seemed to write from beyond the grave even while he was alive. I welcome alternative suggestions to this list as, I admit, it isn’t a very diverse sample, nor one based on nearly enough reading. Which authors writing now are still worth reading?

As I have found in writing this piece, the answer to ‘old books versus new’ is as much about the reader as it is about the books themselves. Some of us have an old soul that seeks company in the past, while other readers would better understand how they relate to the present through the eyes of writers that still see the world around them. Good intentions in both camps have led to a mistrust of the other that is tempted to disregard the old or the new in its entirely, but the haughty old snob is as bad as the lazy new radical. 

I have failed to present anything like the balanced argument I set out to write. More reading of books, both new and old, is a constant demand. But perhaps the lesson from my reading of old books as I begin to read more modern authors is that, for readers, the past is often the only place to start to better understand the present. Time is the greatest critic there is; for good writers stay in print while the bad are soon forgotten. And it is only by knowing the best that you can truly know if a new voice is worth listening to beyond the first few pages. 

T.S. Eliot, in his characteristically discerning way, balanced the scale of old books and new through his idea of tradition. New works that are published today speak to us most clearly and authentically when they are in touch with their literary heritage, preserving the past on one side and accommodating the new on the other. But the only way to maintain this balance is by applying equal weight to our judgements. To tip the scale one way or the other would betray both the readers of the past and the readers of the future.