But What If We're Wrong?

by Chuck Klosterman

  So here’s where we try to answer the question that can’t be answered: Who would this person be?

  [5]Just for a moment, let’s return to Kafka. Lethem notes that he had the “attention” of various peers (most notably his friend Max Brod, who ultimately published Kafka’s work posthumously, against the dead writer’s expressed wishes). Kafka delivered a few readings of his work to small local crowds, and these performances were rumored to be hilarious. Some of his shorter stories were published in small German-language literary journals, and he released two complete collections of those stories before he died. This guy was not exactly living in a cave and drinking his own urine. But Kafka did not have any semblance of a normal literary career, unless you assume “a normal literary career” constitutes dying poor and hating everything about yourself. He represents the Platonic ideal of the tortured genius who dies virtually unknown: He was paralyzed by both a hatred of his own writing and a buried arrogance over his intellectual superiority. He never got over his relationship with his tyrannical father; he was obsessed with (and insecure about) sex; his Jewishness quietly informed everything he wrote. He died in 1924, at age forty, in a sanatorium outside Vienna. Nobody cared (including Kafka, who supposedly saw no value in fame). Some estimates suggest he burned 90 percent of what he wrote. Yet the 10 percent that survived is the apotheosis of dreamlike fiction, to the point where his surname has become the adjective describing that quality. His novel The Trial defined a narrative condition that will exist in perpetuity, crossing all genres, from The Twilight Zone to Eyes Wide Shut to Sleep No More. Jonathan Franzen classifies The Metamorphosis as “the most autobiographical novella ever written,” a story so ingrained in mainstream consciousness that it was turned into a short film and broadcast on MTV throughout the early nineties. Kafka is the easiest example of a canonical writer whose life ended in anonymity, and (as Lethem notes) the uniqueness of his trajectory might be too sublime to happen again. But I am not so sure. I think it’s quite possible that no writer from this era will be remembered at all—yet if someone is embraced by the currently unborn, it will likely be a Kafka-like character. It will be someone we’re not currently aware of, which will allow this person to feel fresh to the generation that adopts him.

  So who might this person be?

  The superficial, seemingly obvious answer is, “Some person on the Internet.” That, however, misses the crux of the comparison. The conventional Internet is the ideal vessel for the acquisition of temporary fame; unpublished writers who actively amass substantial social media followings are inevitably trying to leverage those followings into a book or TV deal, on the basis of the premise that they are already relatively famous. If you are heavily involved with normal Internet culture, you are partially involved with branding (even if you’re trying to be weird and obtuse on purpose). Internet writing is, by definition, public writing. Which means our Contemporary Kafka must be doing something slightly different. Contemporary Kafka must be working in a medium that is either (a) extremely traditional, and therefore unpopular, or (b) extremely new, and therefore unseen by almost everyone else. One radical pole of this continuum would be a hermit typing his thoughts onto eight-and-a-half-by-eleven paper on a manual typewriter and storing them in a trunk, a vision almost too insane to even consider. But the opposite pole seems significantly more plausible: the so-called Deep Web.

  Beyond the Internet, there is another Internet (invisible to search engines and impracticable for 99 percent of the populace). You need to download a special proxy browser to get there, and everything is encrypted and difficult to navigate. It is “an idea more than a place,” writes Jamie Bartlett, author of The Dark Net. “Internet underworlds set apart yet connected to the Internet we inhabit, [a world] of freedom and anonymity, where users do and say what they like, often uncensored, unregulated, and outside of society’s norms.” It is, at the moment, used almost exclusively for criminal transactions: drugs, guns, prostitution, mercenary hackers, and—most problematically—child pornography (some estimates suggest 80 percent of Deep Web visits are tied to pedophilia, although that statistic seems apocryphal). The best-known extension of the Deep Web was a drug marketplace called Silk Road, which the FBI shut down in 2014. This is not a cyber realm the average person surfs; to the best of my knowledge, I don’t know anyone whose personal experience with the Deep Web extends beyond journalistic curiosity. But it presents a zone where a certain kind of faceless artist could flourish, completely detached from a mainstream society that might not accept or appreciate the work.

  Look: It’s not like any (honest) writer wants no one to see what he’s writing. If he did, he’d just sit in a dark room and imagine that he wrote it already. Even the self-loathing Kafka sent Brod a copy of The Trial, insisting that Brod destroy it, likely aware that Brod never would. No matter what they may claim, even the most transgressive of writers don’t want to work in a total vacuum; they simply want to control the composition of their audience. If you operate in the regular world, this is almost impossible. But it could work on the Deep Web.8 An unknown genius could create a space where his or her work is seen very selectively, only by those who are like-minded and similarly invested, and without any relationship to the rest of society (and without any risk of the content going viral). Behind an invisible digital wall, our Contemporary Kafka could interact with a Contemporary Brod, and virtually no one else would know this exchange was even happening. The work itself might not emerge for decades, sitting stagnant until the Deep Web is (eventually) explored by technological archaeologists. And that social separation is the critical detail. For this exaltation to happen, our writer needs to be unknown to all the established kingmakers who will eventually embrace the work. That component is more essential than anything else. There’s no question that what we know about Kafka’s life is part of what makes him “great,” and no present-day person reading his novels is unaware that he died in total obscurity. The confusion experienced by his character K is not received as a creative construct, but as a way to lock into the depressing alienation within any simple, private, painful life. The fact that we know that Kafka’s brilliance was not recognized during his time on earth magnifies his existential despair in a way that words alone never could. And we believe his voice can be trusted, because he (seemingly) had no ulterior motive. He was just typing into the abyss. Which is pretty much the definition of writing on a version of the Internet nobody sees.

  So this is the venue. This is where our candidate lives.

  But who will that person be, and what will that person write about?

  [6]Here’s where we encounter our first collision with the hammer of overthinking, which—according to a 2013 neuroscience study at UC Santa Barbara—actually impedes mental performance. There’s real potential for diminishing returns. But I guess I’ll have to take that risk, since overthinking is the only way to figure out the opposite of something that hasn’t actually happened. That argument Junot Díaz made four thousand words ago? His assertion that our future literary canon will be populated with the types of people who currently tend to be excluded from it? That will happen. Such an evolution will occur. And the inevitability of that evolution makes deducing the profile of our hypothetical outlier that much harder.

  For most of the twentieth century, there was an ever-growing realization (at least among intellectuals) that the only way to understand the deeper truth about anything complicated was through “shadow histories”: those underreported, countercultural chronicles that had been hidden by the conformist monoculture and emerge only in retrospect. Things that seem obvious now—the conscious racism of Nixon’s “Southern Strategy,” the role the CIA played in the destabilization of Iran, how payola controlled what was on FM radio, the explanation behind America’s reliance on privately owned cars instead of public transportation, et al.—were all discussed while they were happening . . . but only on the marginalized periphery. They were not taken that seriously. Over time, these shadow
ideas—or at least the ones that proved factually irrefutable—slowly became the mainstream view. Howard Zinn’s 1980 depiction of how America was built in A People’s History of the United States is no longer a counterbalance to a conventional high school history text; in many cases, it is the text. This kind of transition has become a normal part of learning about anything. In literature, there were the established (white, male) classics that everyone was forced to identify as a senior in high school. But once you went to college—and especially if you went to an expensive school—you learned about the equally important works that were mostly hidden (and usually for nonliterary reasons). That was the secret history of literature.

  But this process is fading (and while it’s too easy to say it’s all because of the Internet, that’s inarguably the main explanation). The reason shadow histories remained in the shadows lay in the centralization of information: If an idea wasn’t discussed on one of three major networks or on the pages of a major daily newspaper or national magazine, it was almost impossible for that idea to gain traction with anyone who wasn’t consciously searching for alternative perspectives. That era is now over. There is no centralized information, so every idea has the same potential for distribution and acceptance. Researching the events of the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center is no harder or easier than absorbing the avalanche of arguments from those who believe 9/11 was orchestrated by the US government. There will be no shadow history of the 2008 financial crisis or the 2014 New England Patriots’ “Deflategate” scandal, because every possible narrative and motive was discussed in public, in real time, across a mass audience, as the events transpired. Competing modes of discourse no longer “compete.” They coexist. And the same thing is happening in the arts. The diverse literary canon Díaz imagines is not something that will be reengineered retroactively. We won’t have to go back and reinsert marginalized writers who were ignored by the establishment, because the establishment is now a multisphere collective; those marginalized writers will be recognized as they emerge, and their marginalized status will serve as a canonical advantage.

  So what does that tell us about our Contemporary Kafka?

  It tells us that Contemporary Kafka will need to be a person so profoundly marginalized that almost no one currently views his or her marginalization as a viable talking point.

  Take, for example, the plight of Native Americans. What American subculture has suffered more irrevocably? Prior to Columbus’s landing in the New World, the Native American population approached one hundred million. Now it’s a little over three million, two-thirds of whom are relegated to fifty delineated reservations on mostly undesirable land. Still, that equates to roughly 1 percent of the total US population. Yet Native Americans are essentially voiceless, even in conversations that specifically decry the lack of minority representation. Who is the most prominent Native American media figure or politician? Sherman Alexie? Louise Erdrich? Tom Cole or Markwayne Mullin, both of whom are from the same state? Who, for that matter, is the most famous Native American athlete, or rapper, or reality star? Maybe Sam Bradford? Maybe Sacheen Littlefeather, who’s been virtually invisible since the seventies? When the Academy Awards committee next announces the nominations for Best Picture, how many complaints will focus on the lack of films reflecting the Native American experience? Outside the anguish expressed over the use of the term “Redskin” by the Washington football franchise, it’s hard to find conversation about the biases facing Native Americans; outside the TV show Fargo, you almost never see it reflected in the popular culture. Everyone concedes it exists, but it’s not a popular prejudice (at least not among the mostly white liberals who drive these conversations). Their marginalization is ignored, thus creating a fertile factory for the kind of brilliant outsider who won’t be recognized until that artist is dead and gone. So this is one possibility—a Navajo Kafka.

  But here’s where we taste the insecure blood from Klosterman’s Razor: The mere fact that I can imagine this scenario forces me to assume that it won’t happen. It’s a reasonable conclusion to draw from the facts that presently exist, but the future is a teenage crackhead who makes shit up as he goes along. The uncomfortable, omnipresent reality within any conversation about representation is that the most underrepresented subcultures are the ones that don’t even enter into the conversation. They are, by definition, impossible to quantify. They are groups of people whom—right now, in the present tense—it is still acceptable to dislike or discount or ignore. They are groups who are not seen as needing protection or support, which makes them vulnerable to ridicule and attack. Who are they? As already stated in this paragraph, I am in no position to say. If I try, I can only be wrong. Any argument in their favor is an argument against my premise.

  Still, the history of ideas tells us that there are many collections of current humans we do not currently humanize. They exist. So find them right now, inside your own head: Imagine a certain kind of person or a political faction or a religious sect or a sexual orientation or a social group you have no ethical problem disliking, to the point where you could safely ridicule it in public without fear of censure.

  Whatever you imagined is the potential identity of the Contemporary Kafka. And if your fabricated answer seems especially improbable, it just means you might actually be close.

  [7]So what will this impossible-to-visualize person write about? Or—more accurately—what will this person have written about, since the comprehension of its consequence won’t occur until he (or she) has already vamoosed? The first clue can be extrapolated from a single line in Kurt Vonnegut’s A Man Without a Country: “I think that novels that leave out technology misrepresent life as badly as Victorians misrepresented life by leaving out sex.” In the context of day-to-day publishing, that sentiment is 100 percent true. But when you’re trying to isolate unique transcendence, it’s not quite that simple.

  The reason Vonnegut’s writing advice remains (mostly) correct has to do with the myth of universal timeliness. There is a misguided belief—often promoted by creative writing programs—that producing fiction excessively tied to technology or popular culture cheapens the work and detracts from its value over time. If, for example, you create a plot twist that hinges on the use of an iPad, that story will (allegedly) become irrelevant once iPads are replaced by a new form of technology. If a character in your story is obsessed with watching Cheers reruns, the meaning of that obsession will (supposedly) evaporate once Cheers disappears from syndication. If your late-nineties novel is consumed with Monica Lewinsky, the rest of the story (purportedly) devolves into period piece. The goal, according to advocates of this philosophy, is to build a narrative that has no irretraceable connection to the temporary world. But that’s idiotic, for at least two reasons. The first is that it’s impossible to generate deep verisimilitude without specificity.9 The second is that if you hide the temporary world and the work somehow does beat the odds and become timeless, the temporary world you hid will become the only thing anyone cares about.

  Vonnegut’s reference to the Victorians is the superlative example. Jane Austen (as timeless a writer as there will ever be) wrote about courtship and matrimony in an essentially sexless universe. As a result, the unspoken sexual undercurrents are the main gravitational pull for modern readers. “When a character in an Austen novel walks into a room and starts speaking,” wrote Victorian scholar Susan Zlotnick, “we understand the words . . . but not always the layers of meaning compressed into those words.” Reading Pride and Prejudice requires the reader to unpack the sex—and if you love Austen, the unpacking process is a big part of what you love. A book becomes popular because of its text, but it’s the subtext that makes it live forever. For the true obsessive, whatever an author doesn’t explicitly explain ends up becoming everything that matters most (and since it’s inevitably the obsessives who keep art alive, they make the rules). Take Beowulf: While there is a limited discussion to have about Grendel and his mother, there’s a limi
tless discussion to be had about ninth-century England, the nature and origin of storytelling, and how early Christians viewed heroism and damnation. Consumed today, Beowulf is mostly about what isn’t there. And that will be the same for whatever 2016 text survives into 3016.

  Now, here’s where things get hard.

  On the one hand, we must accept Vonnegut’s larger argument. We must concede that important writing finds a way to accurately represent life, and that the writing that does so will consciously intermingle with the meaningful culture of the time (impermanent though it may be). What that constitutes in our present culture is debatable, but here’s a partial, plausible list . . .

  The psychological impact of the Internet on day-to-day living.

  The prevailing acceptance of nontraditional sexual identities.

  The (seemingly regular) deaths of unarmed black men at the hands of white police officers.

  An unclear definition of privacy.

  An impotent, unspecified hatred of the wealthiest “one percent.”

  The artistic elevation of television.

  The cultural recession of rock and the cultural ascension of hip-hop.

  The prolonging of adolescence and the avoidance of adulthood.

  A distrust of objective storytelling.

  The intermittent rebooting of normalcy in the years following 9/11.

  I’m not saying an important book must include one of these ideas, or even an idea that would comfortably fit on this list. But it needs to include something that taps into what matters about the world now. There has to be something at stake that involves modernity. It can’t just be well written or smartly plotted; a well-written, smartly plotted book can absolutely be “great,” but—within the context of this debate—“great” is not enough. (A list of great books that have been forgotten completely would be exponentially longer than the book you’re reading right now.) In order to overcome such impossible odds and defeat the unrelenting ravages of time, the book has to offer more. It has to offer a window into a world that can no longer be accessed, insulated by a sense that this particular work is the best way to do so. It must do what Vonnegut requests—reflect reality. And this is done by writing about the things that matter today, even if they won’t necessarily matter tomorrow.