On the zeitgeist – Tim Parks in TLS:

‘Certainly, there are endless books being written. Worldwide, more than 100,000 novels are published in English each year. Even the prize-winners run into scores. So the first challenge is which authors to teach – the celebrities, those who sold most? – and the second what to say about them. “Here, if we could recognize it”, wrote Virginia Woolf. contemplating new titles in a bookshop, “lies some poem, or novel, or history which will stand up and speak with other ages about our age when we lie prone and silent…”. But it was “oddly difficult”, she continued, to say “which are the real books and what it is that they are telling us, and which are the stuffed books which will come to pieces when they have lain about for a year or two”.
So, if we teach contemporary literature, we must do so with the sobering awareness that we may well be teaching also-rans. Any number of authors as celebrated in their day as Salman Rushdie or Zadie Smith are today have long been forgotten. Who was reputed “the most published man of the nineteenth century” and “the most popular writer of his time”? Not Dickens, but G. M. W. Reynolds.’

(…)

‘How much of a contemporary author’s celebrity has to do with their alignment with the zeitgeist? With identity politics, ethnicity, gender? It is hard not to sympathize with those teachers, the vast majority in Italy, who choose to wrap things up before the Second World War or to have the story end over a Victory Gin with Winston Smith. On the other hand, if we give the impression that literature is a thing of the past, deprived of contemporary relevance, our subject is dead.
Turn the problem on its head. That’s the only solution I can see. From day one. Prepare students for the chaos of the contemporary by reminding them it was ever thus. It was never clear which were the real books and which the stuffed. Debate was always fierce.’

Read the column here.

In other words, it’s hard to see, what will be the classics in fifty or hundred years from now if you are surrounded by the fog of the zeitgeist.

Debate was always fierce. The hope is that it will remain fierce.

And the zeitgeist, it shall pass as well.