I often ask myself, why do I spend time writing mystery books? I suppose it is because the novel is the most perfect form of literature. Poets might disagree, but let’s face it: no one reads poetry much, except for other poets. The story of your life is too large to be confined to a poem, even if the poem is as grand as Longfellow’s Evangeline: A Tale of Acadie.
Has any writer ever written a great work, or any work at all, while trying to predict the hearts and minds of future generations?
Poetry notwithstanding, the tragic tale of Evangeline in search of her lost lover would never have been told had it not been for Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, who has fallen out of favor among early 21st Century literati. There is no explaining why great storytellers who are held to be iconic in one era fall out of favor for not having the same life experience and mindset of generations far off into the future. Has any writer ever written a great work, or any work at all, while trying to predict the hearts and minds of future generations?
Mark Twain wrote passionately within the context of his life and times in the post-Civil War Era. Huck Finn’s adventures with runaway slave Jim might be one of the most definitive works ever written about racism and social justice. Even though Mark Twain wrote about the world he knew with humor and a candor rarely expressed, today he is in danger of being branded a racist. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin is written off as racist scat that relegates the black man to be as shameful and as groveling as an Oreo. (A traditional Oreo cookie, black on the outside, white inside!)
Writers of today are often coerced into writing for a specific audience by literati. What an absurd idea it is to ask an artist to create art for an audience! Did Longfellow write Evangeline for an audience composed of only poets? Even more absurd, writers must write for an audience that has not yet been born. Writers must be soothsayers, by golly, who live and write what they see as the truth in their own era but are required to pander to the interests of a reigning few far off into the distant future. So little has been gained for the monumental heritage of great art that has been lost!
Styles change, new trends emerge; why that happens is quite a mystery. Books, like fashion, are mere objects, the silly things you and I show outwardly to define who we are. We wear what celebrities wear, albeit the knockoffs on sale online. We read what we are told by others to read. People say they want to be as strong as the world around them, but what they really want is for the world to be as weak as the most emotionally fragile and irrational human being among us. We have become prisoners of our own inability to think, lacking the courage to muster original thought of our own making and design. We’ve turned into a world full of Uncle Toms capitulating to the wrath and stranglehold of Simon Legree!