Why did Art Disappear? Literature is no more what it used to be

Cover of “The Little Miner”, by Maria Avitabile, 1958.

“Even in the world of art, film , entertainment, the society in which we live is literally devouring the carcass of the fathers. The U.S. can no longer get out of the spiral of superheroes, shootings, violence, and pornography into which it has slipped. Europe keeps coming up with imitations of French movies (A fucks B, B fucks C, C fucks D, in the end they all fuck together), or Italian (the shit that's out there is beautiful and everyone should love it because if it exists then it's interesting), German movies (we had Zyklon B but now we have cinema that's more effective), and so on. Fashion keeps cycling to the point that with a big enough closet it's possible to wait for old clothes to come back into fashion. Of art, honestly, you don't see any more.”

From Das Bose Buro, by Uriel

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While relocating, you find plenty of weird things you didn’t know you had. One was a curious book, dated 1958, that must have been a gift to me when I was a child. “Il Piccolo Minatore” (The Little Miner) by Maria Avitabile, an author today completely unknown. Maybe I read it, but it left no impression in my mind, and when I read it again, it seemed completely new to me.

It came from a time when there existed such a thing as “young adult fiction,” supposed to be read by teenagers. There were two kinds, for boys and for girls, supposed to provide examples of virtue for young people. Often, they were excellent novels. I think the very first novel I ever read was “Rocket Ship Galileo” (1947) by Robert Heinlein, a typical young adult fiction describing how three American teenagers went to the Moon with a rocket built by a scientist friend. That novel shaped my life!

Among other things, “The Little Miner” shows how different the approach was in the US and Italy. In the US, young adults were supposed to be prepared to conquer space. In Italy, to respect the law and the Church. “The Little Miner” tells the story of an honest and laborious young Italian boy who risks his life in a coal mine in England to make enough money to save his sick sister. Edifying, surely, and, of course, there is no mention of how Italian miners were exploited as cheap labor for dangerous jobs by the British at that time (they still are, but no more in coal mines). But it is a good novel, a good story, well told, even gripping, although a little too — how to say? In Italian, I would define it as “mielosa,” probably translatable into English as “sappy.”

The time of young adult fiction is probably gone forever. You can’t even imagine that our teenagers, glued to their mobile phones, would sit down and read a book; no way. That has to be one of the reasons why literature has declined to the abysmal levels of today. People still write novels, but the results are normally disheartening. Most new authors lack the basis for creating a plot, arranging the events, maintaining the reader’s interest, and more. Young adult fiction was a sort of writing school; authors could use it to exercise their skills to move to the enterprise we call “literature,” one of the noblest human arts. Think of how one of the masterpieces of 20th-century literature, the Earthsea Cycle by Ursula Le Guin, started as a novel for young adults. But a true genius, as Le Guin was, transcends genres and creates universes. Literature is a tool for doing exactly that.

But why don’t teenagers read anymore? Not so surprising because today, you have much more appealing fiction in the form of movies, games, and TV series. So, why hasn’t creativity moved to these new forms of fiction? Probably, it is for the simple reason that they are much more expensive than novels. To write a novel, you need only to sit at your desk and blaze away with your keyboard. But think of the “Avatar” movie; it is reported to have cost 237 million dollars and was an unacknowledged rendition of Le Guin’s novel, “The World for Word is Forest.” It was a good movie because it started from a good novel that a genius writer created alone.

But when you have budgets of the order of hundreds of millions of dollars, creating a story becomes a collective enterprise. You can’t risk betting that kind of money on a single person who might be a genius, but maybe not. The problem is that great art is not collective: it is the result of a single genius working mostly alone. Dante, Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Hemingway, LeGuin, and many others worked alone.

And so, that’s the problem. You can have creative art only when someone is given a free hand in doing what he/she thinks is a good idea. You can’t do that anymore for financial reasons, and then, now art is nearly dead. Nothing creative anymore. As Uriel noted, “the society in which we live is literally devouring the carcass of the fathers.”

There are only a few exceptions where a single genius is given a free hand to create. One is Hayao Miyazaki, who, in his productive life, put together an incredible string of masterpieces. The latest one is “The Boy and the Heron,” maybe not as good as the others, but still a stunning masterpiece created. But if you look at the plot, you can’t imagine how such a creative story would have passed the screening of a committee charged to evaluate it for its potential commercial success.

Above: from “The Boy and the Heron” by Hayao Miyazaki, 2024.

But so is life. There is still space for creating masterpieces if you don’t care about their commercial success. The latest novel I read is “Anichneftis” by Gabriele Lamanna.

By no means a commercial book; it has defects. It is unequal, sometimes verbose, and sometimes the plot gets stuck in a labyrinth of philosophical considerations. It is the author’s first novel, and we have irremediably lost the kind of editorial support that helps young authors to smooth and optimize their texts. But it is a stunningly creative story that echoes Dante’s “Comedy.” It shows that it is still possible to do certain things.

And, as usual, onward we go, head-on, blindfolded, into the future