Progress?

One of our culture's errors is to assume what is new is better, which is at the foundation of our notion of progress. I have a vivid memory of how this played out in literature.

My first office mate at Portland State University was a retiring professor emeritus and American Literature scholar. His specialty was John Dos Passos.

He was a bitter, unhappy man. Dos Passos was no longer required in the Amer Lit curriculum. I felt for him because I agreed with him that the USA Trilogy was "the Great American Novel." Dos Passos should not be forgotten, though he was (in part, I think, because he became a conservative in old age, out of fashion with the liberal academy).

A recent appreciation.

I’m not sure that any writer today is writing fiction as contemporary in substance as that which John Dos Passos was writing in the 1920’s and 30’s. Precarious, exploited youth; economic catastrophes; senseless warmongering; cynical self-promoters; feckless media beholden to entrepreneurial myths: the U.S.A. trilogy has it all. Dos Passos died in 1970, but behind his prose a reader can sense the presence of an intelligence that somehow, anachronistically, understands our maddening yet hopeful times. Unfortunately, U.S.A. has suffered its share of high-profile detractors, and the reputation of the novelist that Jean-Paul Sartre called “the greatest writer of our time” isn’t what it once was.

And so it goes, in literature and everything else, the new replacing the old, which is natural, and an assumption that this is progress, which is not natural and often wrong.

The music I listen to today is by and large the same music I listened to in high school and all the years since, west coast jazz, and I listen to it because in all these decades I have not heard anything that I like better. Q.E.D.

Mulligan and Baker