Why Do We Have to Read Such Depressing Literature?

This was a question from a student in a 20th Century Lit. class long ago at College for Creative Studies. I have to confess that I had not keyed in on the consistent darkness. Maybe I was inured to it from having been to those books several times.

But her question woke me up on the spot, and I realized some important things: the 20th century was a pretty dreadful time: an Armenian genocide, two world wars, the Holocaust, the dropping of the atomic bomb, mass deaths, all continuing into the 21st century with fanaticism, terrorism, the facing off of world views, the continual threat of coercion, either by force or by the manipulation of democratic processes.

The student in question said she'd lived with enough ugliness and horror in her life, and she didn't want to read about it too. But it's hard to find great writers who are also blithely happy, or even grudgingly happy. There's Hemingway, and the great disillusion of expatriotism. There is Beckett--well, there's anguish for you. There's Faulkner, living among the ruined lives of the south. There's Pynchon and the imminence of nuclear devastation. Where does one look? Romances? Westerns? Detective novels? Books where justice prevails and people live happily ever after? Those are escapist books.

And now, one of the great books of the beginning of the 21st century--Roberto Bolano's 2666. Random murders, quests that come to nothing. The book feels like real life, but it makes real life feel pretty dark. Fate's (a journalist sent to Mexico to cover a boxing match) journey south is made to sound like a descent into Hell, and Santa Teresa seems to be a metaphor for the worst imaginable existence--murder, lethargic, ineffectual police, innocent people vanishing, bodies found with horrific mutilations. Hard in a short paragraph to explore everything in the book, but it's like looking into the void in any number of ways. Its redeeming character is the writer at its center, the object of the initial quests, the one character who survives unbelievable experiences and turns them into works of literary art--as though this is where salvation lies, in the creation of art out of, or in spite of, life. Maybe this is where Beckett, Faulkner, Pynchon, et al, found their salvation.