By Ezekiel Buchheit
Arizona Daily Wildcat
February 4, 1998

The death of great American literature

Arizona Daily Wildcat Ezekiel Buchheit

Literature in America is dead. Literature in America has been dead for some time. Long enough now that most of us can barely remember when it was alive.

Our country has regressed to the point that technology allows us to take for granted the grandeur of knowledge. Take as an example, the Internet. Here we have a tool that can instantly present you with information, allow you to explore knowledge in a fashion beyond any existing library. At your fingertips exist the greatest works produced by history, whether they be art, literature or music. Genius is preserved and made available to every human who can make their way to a computer. But when was the last time you or I web-browsed for information on, say, snails or symphonies? No, outside of essay crunch-time, we've all been glued to Big Bob's Busty College Babes and Marilyn Manson's Hut of Urine and Goat's Blood.

Today, the top selling books aren't written by the Steinbecks or the Joyces, they're written by Clancy and Grisham- authors that offer to us no more than simple entertainment. And they're so successful at it that bookstores are becoming more and more nervous about carrying any other kind of book and the publishers are getting nervous about producing them. As the large chains swallow up the independent stores, the more commercial it all gets.

We like mindless fluff. It's fun. It looks cute, does little dances for us and generally leaves us the same as we were before. Mindless fluff doesn't challenge us, it doesn't present with issues we fear and have avoided; it drives into our brains the dribble that we want to hear. Calvin of "Calvin and Hobbes" understood it when he turned on the TV, sat down and said "Pander to me." You can watch fluff and not be changed. And that's why we like it. We fear change. We fear a challenge. (Well, unless you are Nike. Nike loves challenges, but only as long as a large mountain or, at least, mountains of sweat are involved.) Anyway, we seem to have lost respect for the great works that capture a moment in time and present it to us to digest and grow from. The Great American Novel is dead.

I don't mean to say we don't have someone to write it. Genius exists everywhere and I'm sure that it has, and will again be written. I just think we, as Americans, have lost the audience. Why read The Grapes of Wrath when we have Stephen King's The Creatures that Live in Your Closet and Drink Your Brains While You Sleep?

In a country looked to by other countries to create and present the world's greatest entertainment, we have forgotten where this entertainment began. It started with the great works. The one you read for classes and groan over. The ones that are 4000-plus pages long and sometimes spend many of those pages describing each individual blade of grass in a town's small common. The novels that span hundreds of pages to tell a story that took place in the span of two days.

These novels upset us because they ask us to think. They ask us not to passively read, but to look into ourselves and see the parts that maybe we don't like. They explore human nature and reveal to us things that maybe we don't want to hear. They stalk, trap, and capture moments of history, stories of the common man, and ask us, the relaxed reader, to sit back for a moment and make something of this information.

So I have a challenge for all of us. I challenge you to go down to an independent bookstore, not some large chain, and have them recommend something different to you. Perhaps after reading it you will have gotten more than just entertainment.

Ezekiel Buchheit is a freshman majoring in English. His column, "I Like Biscuits," appears every Monday.