Author: Yennaedo Balloo
If you’re as much of an English dork as I am, then you may have noticed the recent shift in years past towards Ernest Hemingway being the favorite of the Lost Generation authors. Or maybe you haven’t. Either way, as I was growing up through grade school it was never so. Ernest Hemingway and my favorite author of all time, F. Scott Fitzgerald, were always brought up with the same reverence as archetypes of the two sides of their era. The Lost Generation, an era of our recent and entirely retrievable past, is looked back on mostly for entertainment purposes. If we can learn from our past though, we may as well learn from the past we can identify with most closely. There are all sorts of lessons from our precursors that we can learn, but as a society, the experiences of the Lost Generation hold the kinds of lessons that we should learn.
As far as the recent shift is concerned, I’m fairly certain it’s the state of world affairs. Hemingway concerned himself with war, even in peace. His writing, for the most part, either focused on what we do in the face of war and terror or how we recuperate. Now, there are many who have delved much more extensively into Hemingway than I have, but that generality I’ve made applies well enough that there are only a few exceptions among the bulk of his work that would disprove my point. We look at our literature for things that we can identify with both as individuals but also as a society. When I was “growing up” it was during a period of time when our nation’s economy was flourishing, tensions with Iraq existed but were far from daily or even weekly concerns in the news and life was good. There was a general decadence to the country as a whole, with a President whose worst offense was marital infidelity. We could identify strongly with Fitzgerald and his eye turned to decadence and the flapper lifestyle. In more recent years, our President’s worst offenses are lying to start wars and leading us on campaigns into the Middle East in the name of high virtue, but, quite possibly, in the name of something more sinister. Suffice to say, as a society we can find more in Hemingway to identify with if we’re to look back on that era.
I wonder, though, that if history is doomed to repeat itself then we can count on recurring voices to emerge in society. We have an era that needs to be remembered for all its noise and confusion in years to come. Even if we’re a decidedly lazy generation, or unintelligent, apathetic or what have you, the memory and preservation of this is still of importance. I wonder whom we will look back upon for our generational definition. All I can think of in the contemporary writers are people celebrating absurdity, a catharsis within something that limits its scope or turns away from society. Thinking of the last few books by contemporary authors I was recommended or pulled off of the Times Bestsellers rack, they were all either absurd fairy tales (Christopher Moore’s madcap stories continually attain this rank) or an odd stream of consciousness stories that present such a limited experience that it neither speaks to our generation or the population as a whole but is so wildly imaginative that people don’t seem to care about how unreal it may be.
We have essayists that cover our generation’s teenage wasteland, like Chuck Klosterman. If you haven’t read any of his work, start with “Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs” and go from there. The man has an obsessive compulsive desire and thoroughness at societal analysis. All the same, he’s an essayist; that’s a very different breed from fiction writing as far as prolific status is concerned. We’re short one Fitzgerald and Hemingway in our generation and we’re definitely hearing the calls for both. One thing I’ve realized with these sorts of calls though is that they usually aren’t answered in our or the writer’s lifetime. F. Scott was not as widely popular in his lifetime as he is today, far from it. His writing was good and appreciated, but as far as greatness is concerned, Zelda was actually seen as a more prolific writer at the time. As far as greatness is concerned, we need people to make the attempt, to be willing to turn the lens of focus honestly on our own experiences as opposed to absurd satire and frivolity. There’s more to our generation than absurd styles and our iPods, someone just needs to capture it.
Yenneado Balloo is a sophomore ECLS major and Opinions Co-Editor for The Weekly. he can be reached at yballoo@oxy.edu
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