But What If We're Wrong? Read Online Free PDF Page B

commercial work is worthy of attention. It’s a hypothetical grounded in actuality. But there are different possibilities that are harder to parse. There are stranger—yet still plausible—outcomes that require an ability to reject the deceptively sensible. What if the greatest writer of this generation is someone who will die totally unknown? Or—stranger still—what if the greatest writer of this generation
is
a known figure, but a figure taken seriously by no one alive (including, perhaps, the writer in question)?
    [ 4 ] Before explaining how and why these things might happen, I must recognize the dissenting opinion, particularly since my opinion is nowhere near normal. I do this by quoting novelist Jonathan Lethem as he casually quotes someone else from memory: “W. Somerset Maugham had a rather dry remark somewhere, which I won’t look up, but instead paraphrase: ‘Literary posterity may often surprise us in its selections, but it almost exclusively selects 7 from among those known in their day, not the unknown.’ And I do think that’s basically true.”
    Lethem is a prolific writer of fiction and criticism, as well as the unofficial curator and public advocate for the catalog of Philip K. Dick (a sci-fi writer who embodies the possibility of seeming more consequential in retrospect than he did as an active artist). Somewhat surprisingly, Lethem’s thoughts on my premise skew conservative; he seemed intrigued by the possibility, but unable to ignore the (seemingly) more plausible probability that the future will reliably reflect some version of the present. I’ve focused on Melville, and Díaz referenced Franz Kafka. But Lethem views both of those examples as high-profile exceptions that inadvertently prove the rule.
    â€œKafka and Melville are both really weird cases, unlikely to be repeated,” Lethem explains. “And it’s worth being clear that Melville wasn’t some self-published marginal crank. He was a bestselling writer, widely reviewed and acknowledged, up to the pointwhere he began to diverge from the reading taste of his time. What’s weird is that all his greatest work came after he fell out of fashion, and also that there was such a strong dip in his reputation that he was barely remembered for a while . . . Kafka was conversant with a sophisticated literary conversation, and had, despite the strongly self-defeating tendencies to neither finish nor publish his writings, the attention of various alert colleagues. If he’d lived longer, he might very likely have become a prominent writer . . . The most canonical figure in literary history who was essentially a self-published kook would arguably be William Blake.”
    The arc of Lethem’s larger contention boils down to two points. The first is that no one is
really
remembered over the long haul, beyond a few totemic figures—Joyce, Shakespeare, Homer—and that these figures serve as placeholders for the muddled generalization of greatness (“Time is a motherfucker and it’s coming for all of us,” Lethem notes). The second is that—even if we accept the possibility that there
is
a literary canon—we’re really discussing multiple canons and multiple posterities. We are discussing what Lethem calls “rival claims”: in essence, the idea that the only reason we need a canon is so that other people can disagree with it. The work of the writers who get included becomes almost secondary, since they now exist only for the purposes of contradiction.
    â€œLet me try to generate an example of a very slapdash guess about the present situation,” Lethem writes me in an e-mail (and since it’s an especially interesting e-mail, I’m going to leave in his unorthodox parentheses and capitalizations). “The VERY most famous novelists alive (or just-dead) right now might be destined to be thought about for a good long