Coming of Age

"Here we are, Mr. Pilgrim, trapped in the amber of this moment. There is no why."
- Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse Five

A couple of months ago I caught up with a couple of classics that had somehow slipped through the cracks of my literary life: Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men and Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five. I had previously read East of Eden and really enjoyed it, and had also read Galapagos and Cat's Cradle and liked them enough, so I knew that I would not only be exposing myself to essential literature but I would probably find it pleasurable as well.

But first...

Around that time, I'd had a discussion with a couple of friends as to whether The Wire* would ever become dated. We couldn't really decide (more on that later) and our conversation moved onto other TV and films--some of which hold up and some don't. Then we discussed music for a bit, thinking how much of it (Sibelius, Ellington, Zeppelin) doesn't require listening to it with different standards. It was great when it was written and it's great now.

* And, yes, I realize I mentioned The Wire in seemingly every post. It's awesome. Deal with it.

So...

It's pretty obvious why Of Mice and Men is read in every classroom in America (except for mine apparently). It's a quick read, the language is fairly simple, the characters are complex yet relatable, and the drama is universal and timeless. The latter two are why, even though the book was written seventy years ago, it can be just as effective today. The way humans behave and interact would have to change nearly unimaginably drastically* for Steinbeck's novella to lose its brilliance. For example, and this was my favorite part about the book, when the other workers (Carlson in particular) want to kill Candy's dog (Candy is the older worker who wants to join George and Lennie) Candy begrudgingly is convinced that this is necessary--to save his dog the suffering among other things. When the deed is done and Candy feels the guilt and emptiness sweep over him he tells George, sadly, that he (Candy) should've had the decency to put down his dog himself. This episode is, obviously, a microcosm of the climax of the novel in which George will become Candy and Lennie will become his dog. In this simple, natural scene, Steinbeck manages to create a situation in which the reader can understand that George has to kill his best friend. It's a phenomenal set-up.

* And to think I'm about to criticize Steinbeck's use of adverbs.

So, why do I bring this up? Basically, the reason that Of Mice and Men holds up is that nobody can craft human drama better than he already has. The plot of Mice is so deftly constructed that it can't be topped, only equaled and explored in new ways. This is the same reason people still read Shakespeare. The human condition only changes so much over time. If one can capture it in the 1930s or the 1600s, we can still relate to it now.

We love shows like Mad Men because they recreate an era and we feel like we could actually be there. Not to sound like a high school English teacher, but this is one of the amazing things about books. We don't have to pretend what the Great Depression was like--we can read Mice and Men! He was there. He knows. It's like a primary document. This isn't Matthew Weiner doing his best job of imagining 1930s California, this is Steinbeck actually being in that time. It's a slice of history, preserved forever in this book. Exactly as it was the day it was published and the same seventy years from then.

However, that is not to say that everything about Of Mice and Men feels current. While the human story may remain mostly consistent, the way people write changes--sometimes subtly but sometimes substantially. While most of Steinbeck's writing is concise and graceful, sometimes his writing is saturated with clunky adverbs and adjectives. One paragraph early on (and I wish I'd saved the book so I could write it here) read like something that really wouldn't make it through one of my college classes. This isn't to judge him harshly, only point out that our sensibilities about what prose should and shouldn't do are malleable.

Which leads me to why Kurt Vonnegut can never be experienced the way he was originally. When a high school kid (okay, anyone) reads Vonnegut now, there really isn't anything unusual about the way he writes. He's conversational, light, funny. We can easily label his prose as such and not think much of it. Heck, almost everybody writes like that now. But, when he first started publishing books, that wasn't what the status quo was. Not even close.

Cat's Cradle, when it first came out, must have blown people's minds! Not only was it about crazy shit but it was written like rock and roll music. Where Of Mice and Men can be a beautiful snapshot of an era, Slaughterhouse Five can never be truly experienced the way it was when it was written. The literary climate in the early 60s was so different than it is now that to read Vonnegut in the present day removes one of his most gripping elements. The writing still technically functions in the same way but has become so much the norm that even though it seems normal, it is dated. Such is the price of a being a game-changer: When everybody follows you, eventually, you may get forgotten as the one who did it first*.

* I realize Vonnegut didn't do it "first" but the argument is still the same.

So this is why, sadly, even for someone who loves The Beatles, Led Zeppelin, James Brown, Pink Floyd (well, I don't love Pink Floyd), I can never feel the significance they had in their time. I can imagine it and listen to their contemporaries and approximate what it must have been like, but I can never be someone in the 60s. The fact that these amazing artists and writers are still heard and read now is further proof of their greatness, but I can't experience them in a way that is reciprocated. (Though by the same token, I suppose someone from a the past can't look over the historical landscape like I can, so we'll call it a wash.)

So what does make something dated? Finding the essence of human needs will always be a constant. That doesn't date something. The way it's executed, as both Steinbeck and Vonnegut show, can become slightly dated. But writing, along with-- I guess--classical music* are two of the best ways to not be dated, since, arguably, the greatest of those fields came long before anyone currently on this planet was even alive. The novel and the symphony have already been perfected, and that's hardly an overstatement. Through the lens of history maybe those look like they reached their apex quickly, but that's far from the case. Humans have been writing and composing for a long, long, long time. And this is why our other forms of expression that are newer (film and music-that-incorporates-technology) date so quickly.

* If I were more knowledgeable about art I could include this too, but the different art movements are beyond my ken and I'm just going to leave it out to keep from embarrassing myself or weakening my overall point.

Old, great movies hold up when the stories are genuine and the drama is real. What doesn't hold up are, often, the effects or the sets or, basically, the things we didn't know how to do yet. Technology in terms of making our films look better has come so far that even movies from ten or twenty years ago don't have the same visual impressiveness as an atrocious film like Transformers 2. (This all ties in to why Avatar is quickly becoming the most overrated film of all time too.) To tie music and films together, sometimes the most dated part of otherwise excellent 80s movies like Blade Runner or The Terminator (see? I don't always hate James Cameron) is the laughably bad, corny music that takes full advantage of the clunky synthesizers that would be out of fashion five years later.

To bring it back to what I mentioned earlier, this is why something like The Wire (aside from a couple cinematic choices like shots from the view of a security camera that looked bad to begin with) will probably hold up for another century or so. There is no music in any of the scenes so we don't have to worry about that. People talk like real people and the human drama (not to mention the bureaucracy) seems like it will be pretty timeless. I imagine it becoming more of a Of Mice and Men, a clear, precise snapshot of turn-of-the-millennium Baltimore. Stylistic things about filmmaking will shift and may strike the future Wire viewer as odd, but I really believe that the story and characters will endure for years and years to come.

It may seem almost impossible to predict the trends and preferences of the future, but, as far as we can see from here, people will always be people. And the greatest storytellers, the Steinbecks and the Shakespeares, tell us stories that are about people--they could be from today, they could be hundreds of years old. The details and the window-dressings may change, but there is no substitute for emotion. To forget this is to move into gimmicks, tricks and distractions. These disguises may work for a while, maybe fabulously so, but eventually, in the end, the winds of time will blow them away, and a story will be left with its bare bones. And, if then, it still moves us and makes us feel, then we are experiencing something truly remarkable.

Well played, Steinbeck.