Thinking About Literary Lineages

 Indiana, the Midwest, has its literary history. Hoosiers have Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., Booth Tarkington, Ross Lockridge, Jr, George Ade, Gene Stratton Porter, and a few more known more now by name than by their work. I should add Theodore Dreiser, but I do not think he really liked Indiana and, in my opinion, belongs more to Chicago, if not to himself. The Midwest has, broadly, Toni Morrison, Jonathon Franzen, Nelson Algren, James T. Farrell, Sinclair Lewis, and more whom I cannot recall.  Yes, Ernest Hemingway was from Chicago and wrote about Michigan in his Nick Adams stories; yes, F. Scott Fitzgerald was from Minneapolis and The Great Gatsby has characters from the Midwest; but neither made much of their roots and really do belong to some place else.

I have no idea where I fit into these lineages. Excepting George Ade and Gene Stratton Porter, I have read them all. Morrison amazes me and feels untouchable for this white, old man. Franzen is to me the cool kid who thinks too highly of himself. Dreiser, too grumpy, too remote for me to do much more than admire. Tarkington is too sentimental, too prone to turn a blind eye to what Dreiser stares with fascination. Vonnegut, I admire, but I know he is too singular to do more than pay attention to his humanism.

In the past two years, I found Lockridge influences me, has influenced me, and utterly terrifies me in his attainment in his one novel. I wasted too many years to follow him too far. His depth lies beyond me.

Orhan Pamuk led me to an interest in Turkish writers, so I read LitHub's Ayşegül Savaş on the Work and Career of Turkish Writer Tezer Özlü. This paragraph for that essay inspired this post:

All writers are part of a literary lineage, of course, though these lineages are rarely neatly marked, even if it appears that way in retrospect, from texts that constitute a national canon. If literature is also a map of human experience, then certain experiences are conspicuously absent from the canonical landscape.

The first work of Özlü’s I read—in my “free” time from class reading—was her second novel, Journey to the Edge of Life, a metaphysical travelogue in the footsteps of Özlü’s favorite writers: Italo Svevo, Franz Kafka and Cesare Pavese. I found it refreshing that this Turkish author had chosen her own writers to follow, breaking away from the great wall of texts. When I read Cold Nights of Childhood next, it confirmed for me that her work didn’t belong to any school or style, that her voice was uniquely her own: consciousness distilled into narrative form.

When younger, I had ambitions to be an Indiana writer, the one writer that caught my attention was William Faulkner. Thinking I could never attain his level of skill, that I lacked anyway to write of my history as he had done, led me to give up writing until nothing else remained for me in this life. Sometime influences can stifle. Ayşegül Savaş's essay makes this point quite well. 

Would that I had read something like what Ms. Savaş writes here 40 years ago:

I had enrolled in the Turkish literature classes hoping to find out what sort of topics I should inherit, not knowing yet that the greatest challenge for a writer was the ability to discern her own curiosities. In my first encounters with Özlü’s work, I considered that it was an outlier, a one-off voice that had broken away from the great wall to follow its writer’s obsessions. Yet, this is also the mark with which all literature must be distinguished: the unique investigation of what it is to be alive, riding the current with open eyes.

 Prison gave my writing two things. First, time to work on my writing. Secondly, I took the opportunity to read as widely as possible with the intent to learn from what I wrote. There I found Alasdair Gray and Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Philip Roth and Joyce Carol Oates and Milan Kundera and Carlos Fuentes and Ralph Ellison and Marcel Proust and Thomas Mann and Haruki Murakami and Kenzaburō Ōe and J.M. Coetzee and Zora Neale Hurston and Toni Morrison and Marttin Amis and Ian McEwan and Salman Rushdie and Orhan Pamuk and the Russians. And whatever lineage I belong to includes them, too. We must make our path, have our own guides.

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