'modern society' in literature

[dicer]

I was reading 'Walden' last month, and it was really quite sad to read Thoreau's criticism of his own materialistic society, and then to look at where we are today. Many people now argue that the Internet is a basic human right - it has apparently been recognised as such in a few countries - and you always see people on their mobile phones, or listening to their mp3 players, or even little kids using their handheld game consoles when out with their parents. I was thinking about this, and it made me wonder why you never see any of this in modern literature, and whether anyone would actually want to see it there.

I haven't read a lot of modern novels lately, but I was thinking of the few I had read, and it struck me that none of them made reference to the Internet, for example, which is apparently such an integral part of our lives. A recent book I read was 'The Thirteenth Tale', and it really read as though the author was making a concerted effort not to relate to modern society, maintaining an ambiguity that made it impossible to tell whether the novel was set today or a hundred years ago. It was also a book quite conciously cerebral, making frequent references to Victorian classics, for example, and I almost think that the two qualities of the novel are a necessary pair. Studing English in school, I remember that there was a reference to a fridge or some such thing in a poem, and one student made instant proclamation that such modern references made the poem seem ugly, alienating the reader.

I was even thinking of novels such as 'Twilight', which you would think would be quite overwhelmingly modern. But, for my part, I only recall Bella sending a few e-mails to her mother, and one google search early in the series. I'm fairly certain of these occurrences but, despite this, one friend remembered the novel as ambiguous in dating and again as clinging to slightly out-of-date ideals, e.g. Bella seems to spend most of her time reading 'Wuthering Heights' and, for all we know, might not even have registered with Facebook.

For my part, I think it would be quite awkward if the Internet - or other distinctly modern apparations - did appear in today's literature, and its absence seems, to me, to be for the same reasons you wouldn't describe a character going to the toilet, for example. I have mentioned some particularly dubious titles in this post, but I really intended this question to be for the so-called 'modern classics', thinking of authors such as Kazuo Ishiguro, Margaret Atwood, or any others you might place under that category. In the reading of such authors, I have never come across anything distinctly modern, and I wonder if works would lose their charm if you did.

So, what are your thoughts on aspects of modern society coming into today's literature? I was thinking of 'American Psycho' earlier, in that I think this novel might be the only one I can think of that reflects modern consumerism. But, of course, the book revolves around and denounces it. I'm struggling to term what I mean, but do you think that aspects of modern day-to-day life can be woven comfortably into a work of literature? Would you want it there in the first place?

[dfloyd]

However, I don't think you would call them literature. The young punk girl, Solander, in Stieg Larsson's three thrillers has no social skills, but she is a computer whiz and her internet exploits are detailed by Larsson. In one of John Grisham's law novels, a rogue lawyer uses the internet all the way through the book.- I can't remember the title. The internet has only been in existance, or only been around for the average person, for about 15 years. Give it time. As far as technology denigrating literature, the post modernists have already done that without the help of computer geeks..

[Evrviglnt]

Though I haven't read many teen books myself, I took a few minutes to talk to the teens I know and they tell me the world in their books incorporate technology pretty widely - from internet (email, texting and facebook) to modern advances. They remind me that the movies coming out also have a lot of internet technology in them - whether its action or drama (On Friday night my wife and I saw 'Inception' and watched a trailer for an upcoming movie about the inventors of Facebook called 'The Social Network'. Looks good.

Authors, modern or otherwise, seem regularly to slam the societies they're in. We're all materialistic, simplistic, and for many modern writers, unforgivably religious. Since I read everything in terms of symbolism, what would the incorporation of the internet and modern technology represent? It all matters the context. Certainly technology has made the world a smaller place - we're capable now of meeting/conversing with people any time and all over the world. On the other hand, while things might be made simpler, they are more complex, and it all is changing who we are and how we communicate, how we interpret the world around us. We're gonna need more than an instruction manual to figure it all out - we'll see that worked out in the pages of the future's most thoughtful writers...

[Homers_child]

I haven't read any of today's novels, I'm mostly engrossed in classics at the moment. But I just read Lolita by Nabokov and I found that it had very deliberate and constant description of the bland and even ugly aspects of modern life. Did it bother me? Kind of. I wasn't used to such descriptions. I was used to the emotional Victorian novels.

[laymonite]

Dicer - I believe I understand what you are saying. While there are plenty of books that incorporate technology, I agree that there is hardly any technology in literary fiction (as differentiated from genre fiction) today. In fact, when I sat down a few months ago to crank out my own short fiction about growing up with the Internet, it felt wrong and, well, ugly. Every time I typed "AIM" or "Facebook" or anything like that, I felt I was depreciating my work.

This phenomenon is very interesting. I believe Evrviglnt is correct in saying that writers always struggle with the society they're in. Perhaps we writers are afraid to incorporate it because it would be a form of acceptance.

You've really given me something to think about. I had written this feeling off as the fact that I read more works from before 1980 than after 1980, so, naturally I would write in the same manner. I think there's more to it.

[Heteronym]

I remember that Günter Grass' Crabwalk ostensively used the Internet. But it was essential to the plot. The protagonist is investigating in modern German society the expansion of Neo-Nazism, which has an important presence on the Internet. It's the only example I know.

I've noticed this too from a different perspective. Some time ago I wanted to contest the idea that literature is relevant to its times. Although I never ended posting my observations on the matter, after perusing the latest works of over a dozen renowned novelists, I reched the conclusions that: 1) they prefer to write about imaginary countries; 2) they prefer to write about the past, especially eras important for them - '50s, '60s; 3) some even prefer to write about imaginary post-apocalyptic futures before they bother to write about 2010; 4) most of the plots have nothing to do with terrorism, the erosin of civil rights, pollution, political instability, Muslims or other hot topics right now; 5) many of them are about old men lusting after young women or obsessive, decade-spanning love affairs; 6) many are comedies, strangely out of place in our grim times.

To say that great novelists are out of synch with their times is an understatement. No wonder they don't give a crap about the Internet and cell phones.