In an article published in the ‘New Republic’ magazine in 2003, James Wood posed the basic question, “Can Literature Be Simple?”, concluding that it certainly used to be, but most definitely isn’t any more. Which is bad - and it’s all Flaubert’s fault, incidentally. Like our anthropologists in Mesa Verde who pine for a simpler age which had greater meaning, Wood longs for a time before we knew too much about literature - and, more specifically, before writers knew too much about what they were doing and paid more attention to what they were writing, and not how they were writing it. Because, according to Wood, this has resulted in a dilution of meaning from which he doubts we’ll ever recover. If he’s right, (and we’ll see if he is momentarily), maybe we can’t go back towards Meaning on our Meaning Line, because Recent Literature Is Killing Literary Meaning. And there’s no turning back, because you can’t un-learn what you already know, short of having a lobotomy. And Wood isn’t the lone voice crying in the wilderness. He’s already been joined by Norman Mailer, who writes of Jonathan Frantzen’s novel ‘The Corrections’; It is too full of language, even as the nouveaux riches are too full of money . . . Franzen is an intellectual dredging machine. Everything of novelistic use to him that came up on the internet seems to have bypassed the higher reaches of his imagination - it is as if he offers us more human experience than he has literally mastered . . . So to Mailer, Franzen is regurgitating reality without having digested it. And if the writer hasn’t successfully metabolized his diet, he can’t get any nourishment from it. So his books have no meaning. He might as well be a collector,or perhaps even a hoarder, as an author, squirrelling away material to try and get as comprehensive a ‘take’ on reality as possible. Wood longs for Chekhov, who not only keeps it simple, but keeps his style on a tight leash too, making the creation and communication of meaning that much easier. And here’s another dissenter - the English novelist and critic Gordon Burn, who’s actually come out and said what I’ve been thinking for years about Don DeLillo, but could never get anyone to agree with me. Watching DeLillo reading from his novel ‘Cosmopolis’ at the 2003 Hay-on-Wye literary festival, Burn makes these observations; DeLillo’s face flickered in close-up on a large screen on the stage behind him. He was wearing a Brooks Brothers button-down, a v-neck sweater, a professorial houndstooth jacket. DeLillo is 67 now, fit-looking and trim, probably a jogger . . . These stray thoughts shouldn’t have been intruding, but they were because to be in the same room as Don DeLillo, and although the words he was reading were smart, beautifully put-together ones, they were just words - not words telling a story, or describing any kind of emotion, just unspooling words, abstract, drifting on the air like a piece of free-form jazz. And I can think of no more damning comparison than having your work likened to a piece of free-form jazz, with all its squeaks, random beats, shouting and “farting into saxophones”, as Spike Milligan once described it. I too find DeLillo’s writing interesting yet utterly soulless. And the trouble is, I don’t think there’s an artistic point to this soullessness; you could argue, and some critics have, that DeLillo’s “coldness” is his take on the world - a symbol of how it lacks value and substance. Only I don’t think that’s true. I’m of the opinion that he knows far too much about the craft of writing, about art and meaning, and that it’s getting in the way of him communicating with his audience. There’s a super-surfeit of activity in his head as he’s writing. OK, dammit, there’s too much LIT CRIT swimming around up there - so what ends up on the page comes over as all a bit calculated - and therefore coldly unengaging. It’s almost as if he’s scared that his books won’t be considered sufficiently smart by the modern breed of Lit Critters. There won’t be enough in them, either in style or content, to keep his industry audience satisfied. So the wider DeLillo and his peers cast their nets, the bigger the catch, but the more detritus they haul in along with the fish. Only they don’t throw the detritus away. And this is essentially what Burn is saying; the hallmark of these “boffin-writers”, he notes, is their tendency to “pump up the sense of discontinuity and chaos by homing in on life’s particulate elements in the expectation of making connections and forging patterns whose existence nobody expected before.” It’s funny how some people can articulate what you’ve been thinking, yet were never able to force into the front of your brain for more detailed inspection. Because there it was in black and white. The nightmare fact that CERTAIN WRITERS HAVE METAMORPHOSED INTO LITERARY CRITICS. AAAAAAAAAAAAARGH!!! Let me explain. The distinguished essayist CLR James once wrote, “What do they know of cricket, that only cricket know?” Now substitute “literature” for “cricket”. And there’s your point. Burn’s beef with the boffins is that these guys (and they do seem to be mainly guys) are maybe not writing for the general reader or for widespread comprehension. They’ve taken their eye off the ball and are playing to the grandstand of professional readers, whose number includes themselves. Like those tedious film directors who routinely include dozens of knowing nods to other movies in their work, it’s all rather smug. They’re so damn smug or else insecure they’re insisting on showing you their homework so you’ll know how clever they are. Or at least, showing those who are similarly equipped to get the references how clever they are. And then they can all be clever together. So in his novel ‘The Gold Bug Variations’, Richard Powers seeks to unite Bach’s use of four notes in the ‘Goldberg Variations’, the four nucleotides in DNA, and the tetragrammaton (the four letters in the Hebrew name of God); Geoffrey Eugenides’s Pulitzer Prize-winning ‘Middlesex’ brings together genetics, ancient and modern visions of human destiny and the motor trade; And ‘The Corrections’ features the political history of the Baltic states, a treatise on the catering industry and quotations from Lacan. To which I could add practically anything by Thomas Pynchon, who links everything from entropy to coprophagy in his doorstep novel ’Gravity’s Rainbow.’ Woo, what a bunch of polymaths. Now there’s been writer-critics almost from the word go; in Part 1, we encountered Sir Philip Sidney in the Elizabethan era, and, closer to home, TS Eliot. But this is a new breed altogether who carry their knowledge of How Literature Works over into their writing. Which, as CLR James’s quotation implies, is all rather inward-looking. It’s often more subtly realized than the doctrinal Postmodernists (or the “metafictionists” as Burn calls any writer whose primary concern is with style not narrative), and may be even more annoying for this insidiousness. But it still wreaks of self-indulgence. As I’m sure you remember, this is the point at which this book started with those execrable attempts by a contemporary critic to find “adaptive models” and patterns of “food acquisition” in literature at the expense of what it actually means - only on that occasion I think I used the word “anal”. Now some writers have joined the rush to bury their heads in their backsides. Here’s Burn again: What all these novels tend to have in common is that the people in them risk becoming barely corporeal cerebral entities: there is no character who is securely there in the traditional sense, that is to say, a character with whom the reader can identify. Abstract concepts result in tundras of dead abstract language which, having so busily foraged for, the writers are often reluctant to toss away. So the parallels with modern Lit Crit are drawing closer as the twenty-first century gets going: the writer is finding ever more abstruse pathways through reality in much the same way as the critic is now hacking through the meaning of literature, seeking ever more narrow and untrodden tracks to reach his destination. This intellectualization of meaning seems to be currently de rigueur at the cutting edge of fiction, and it’s anybody’s guess how long it’ll last. Until the little boy remarks on the absence of the Emperor’s New Clothes, perhaps. Or we have a conservative backlash resurrecting the kitchen sink novel. But whatever happens next, it’s important to remember that all this doesn’t necessarily affect the Recreational Reader (except if he buys a copy of ‘the next big complex novel’ on the recommendation of a gushing review, then actually tries to read it for enjoyment). The fact is, Lit Crit has now completely abandoned the Recreational Reader, something it’s been in the process of doing for the last sixty years or so. And if certain novelists want to join them in their intellectual isolation, then fair enough. There’ll be plenty of others who don’t, who understand that meaning is a collaborative process and not a lecture - and certainly not randomly assembled bits of flotsam and jetsam from an encyclopaedia. As Walt Whitman once claimed, great writers need great audiences, and that’s of course true or literature would never move forward. But let’s upend and update that argument by acknowledging that truly great art cannot exist completely divorced from a general audience. Because, as we saw in Part 2, meaning that will stand the test of time needs more widespread validation than a rubber stamp from critics, reviewers or cliques of cognoscenti. Meaning, I argued back there, is just as much about resonance as artistic deftness. So, on the whole, I’m with Nora (wife of James) Joyce on this issue; it’s as well to write books that people can read. And unless you insist on being one of those poor, stunted, intellectually crippled Jealous Arts Fans we first met in Part 2, there’s never been a healthier time to be a reader, as long as your government at least pays lip service to freedom of expression. There’s never been more titles on the market, and they’ve never been easier to get hold of. And there’s a gradual acknowledgement (of which I hope this book forms a part), that we don’t all emerge from the womb as ravenous consumers of literature who understand, by some principle of literary osmosis, everything that we read. Help is more widely available in the form of websites and reading groups than there’s ever been. And while there may be obvious exceptions to this general optimism (successive UK governments’ criminal neglect of the library system for example), I’m still prepared to be upbeat about the future of literature. We seem to need it more than ever. But we must always be on our guard; reading is a right, not a privilege, and it must be cherished and defended as such. And bearing that in mind (well, you didn’t think I’d let you leave without at least some homework to do, did you?) let’s end as we began, with the sage words of Susan Sontag, who noted in her acceptance speech for the 2003 Freidenspreis peace prize in Frankfurt: “Especially in a time in which the values of reading and inwardness are so strenuously challenged, literature is freedom.” And it is. It’s our ticket and passport to ourselves and our lives. There’s a world of great literature out there. Go get it, tiger.