And in the Other Corner …

Posted 20 November, 2007 in Writing Life |

… with a contrarian take on yesterday’s advocacy of the mastery writers develop late in their careers, Melissa Katsoulis argues that the fires of youth are what really inspire great literature:

Not that ageing can’t be a wonderful subject. But it is not what literature is about. Literature is about change. Revolution, revelation, challenge and unrest. It is about forcing us to do things differently. About making things new and seeing them for the first time. This is what every generation must do, in every walk of life, but writing is (and always has been, since Chaucer, since Sophocles) the crucible in which our future selves are formed.

Now, it may be a function of my demographic (I’m no longer in that coveted eighteen-to-thirty-four age bracket), but it seems to me Katsoulis is confusing literature with rock ‘n’ roll. But even taken at face value, her argument doesn’t hold up: if literature is all about “[r]evolution, revelation, challenge and unrest,” and these things are only available to the young, how would she explain Zola, who was forty-five when he published Germinal?* And although she lionizes the youthful excesses of the Romantics (the poets, not the rock band), she elides the fact that John Milton was fifty-nine when he published Paradise Lost.**

As though to preempt her critics, Katsoulis points out that “[i]t’s not that old people write only about pipes and slippers — all too often they write about sex, death and all the extreme situations between. But there’s no getting away from it — it’s so far from being fresh as to be yukky.” I don’t know how old Katsoulis is, but I’d venture to guess that she might revise this opinion if questioned about it twenty-five years hence.

*Not that forty-five qualifies as “old age,” but Katsoulis is talking about writers in their early- to mid-twenties, and she appears to adhere to the old sixties’ radical warning not to trust anyone over thirty.

**And before anyone jumps down my throat about this (possibly awkward) wording: yes, I am fully aware that Milton was not one of the Romantics (either the poets or the rock band). I was trying to make a point.

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