What will the future say about the arts of the 21st century?

As I talked about my favourite centuries, one person said his was the 20th century.

That’s a good answer. Just cinema and photography are good reasons to pick the 20th century. Explosive.

In music, plenty of things were happening—I myself like jazz—I love John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Clifford Brown, Charles Mingus, Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald, Nina Simone, etc. But most importantly, technology forever changed music listening. 

In literature, on this side of the Atlantic, the Modernists—especially Joyce, Proust, Woolf, T. S. Eliot—changed fiction and poetry. American literature peaked in the 20th century: Henry James, Edith Wharton, William Faulkner, Vladimir Nabokov, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Flannery O’Connor, J. D. Salinger, Toni Morrison, etc. Russian literature was no longer the Golden Age but still had great writers—I love Life and Fate. The 20th century was glorious for many countries around the world: France had Proust and many others; Japan had Soseki, Kawabata, and Akutagawa; Bohemia had Kafka; Czech literature had Milan Kundera; Austria had Robert Musil; Norway had Knut Hamsun; Colombia had Gabriel García Márquez; Argentina had Jorge Luis Borges; Yiddish literature had Isaac Bashevis Singer; Canada got Alice Munro (rest in peace); etc.  

South Vietnam also had a great burst of creativity in a very short span of time, sadly not much known internationally. My mum mentions Nhã Ca, Túy Hồng, Nguyễn Thị Ng.H, Nguyễn Thị Hoàng, Nguyễn Thị Thụy Vũ, Dương Nghiễm Mậu, Nguyễn Hương, etc. in prose fiction; Du Tử Lê, Vũ Hoàng Chương, Thanh Tâm Tuyền, Trần Dạ Từ, Nguyễn Tất Nhiên, Đinh Hùng, Trầm Tử Thiêng, etc. in poetry. I would add Bùi Giáng, one of my favourite poets. 

20th century literature was so rich. It just so happens that I feel more at home in the 19th century, that writers such as Tolstoy and Chekhov mean a lot more to me personally.

It’s the same with the visual arts. The 20th century had lots of art movements: Fauvism, Expressionism, Cubism, Futurism, Dadaism, Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism, Pop Art, Minimalism, Postmodernism, Photorealism, and so on—there are also performance art, installation art, butoh, etc. but I only like a couple of artists, like Egon Schiele and Picasso. 20th century art generally doesn’t speak to me, especially since Postmodernism, conceptual art, and performance art. Also not a fan of camp and kitsch. 

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(A piece by Jeff Koons) 

So what will the arts in the 21st century be like? What will people in the future say about this century? 

It is impossible to say what will happen in the arts, with the emergence of AI. Will it be an explosion like the Industrial Revolution? Will it change everything like the invention of cameras and music recordings? 

Or will it swallow us all, and destroy everything? 

If we talk about the arts of 2000-2024, I don’t read much contemporary fiction and can’t comment on it—some of it is safe and ideology-driven and there are harmful trends such as sensitivity readers, but I think there are plenty of great talents around. I love Alice Munro, for instance. 

The field I know the best is cinema, and generally I prefer films of the 50s-70s to contemporary films, at least when it comes to American cinema. I do like some recent films: Ballad of a White Cow (Iran), Anatomy of a Fall (France), Shoplifters (Japan), The Zone of Interest (English director), The Taste of Things (France), The Father (French director), etc. Hollywood, on the other hand, is dominated by superhero movies, franchises, and remakes, and I often dislike recent highly acclaimed American films.

I expect people in the future will say that 21st century cinema was brilliant and full of wonderful things in other countries—Japan, France, a few places in Europe, perhaps South Korea, perhaps Iran—but not in the US.

In theatre, nothing seems to be happening. The 20th century had Bertolt Brecht and Samuel Beckett doing crazy things, and there were plenty of great playwrights—the current scene pales in comparison. I’m ignorant, but I guess people who know more than me would probably say that there’s a decline in theatre—London theatres, apart from Shakespeare productions, are dominated by musical adaptations of popular films and rewritten versions of Chekhov. 

The art scene is even bleaker and more depressing. I had followed art pages and gone to contemporary art exhibitions for years, in different countries in Europe, before deciding, after a visit to Wellcome Collection last year, that I would no longer bother to keep up with it. And having decided so, I still went to Saatchi Gallery and a few months ago saw the contemporary section at Tate Britain, so I can say I do have a good idea of what’s going on in the art scene, and it’s largely rubbish. Look at the glorious 17th century! Look at the great artists of the late 19th, early 20th century! Then look at contemporary art—it’s embarrassing. 

What’s going on in music? I have no idea. I’ve got the impression that there are lots of different things, different genres, different styles, but pop music also dominates everything? 

The 21st century however will be very, very different because of AI.

What do you think? 

My favourite centuries

(Saint Francis in Meditation by Francisco de Zurbarán, one of my favourite paintings at National Gallery, London)

For a long time, my favourite century has been the 19^th century. British novels were glorious: Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, the Bronte sisters, George Eliot, Vanity Fair, Lewis Carroll’s Alice books, Frankenstein, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Wilkie Collins, the Sherlock Holmes stories, etc. Romantic and Victorian poetry had many great names: John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Lord Byron, William Wordsworth, John Clare, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Robert Browning, Christina Rossetti, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Thomas Hardy, Rudyard Kipling, etc.

Russian literature had its Golden Age in the 19^th century: Pushkin, Lermontov, Gogol, Turgenev, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Leskov, Chekhov, etc. (the only one here I haven’t read is Pushkin—humiliating, I know).

American literature didn’t peak till the 20^th century—I think you would agree—but Moby Dick is one of my favourite novels.

As for French literature, I haven’t read much—two Flaubert novels, one Balzac, one Zola—but they had those three novelists, plus Alexandre Dumas, Victor Hugo, Stendhal, Jules Verne, George Sand, Guy de Maupassant…

Vietnam’s most important literary work, Truyện Kiều, is also from the 19^th century.

When I first got into serious literature, in my teens, many of my favourite writers were from the 20^th century—Kafka, Nabokov, Salinger, Fitzgerald, Toni Morrison, Marquez, and so on—but over the years, the writers who have had lasting impact and come to mean the most to me are mostly 19^th century British and Russian writers. It feels like my period, so to speak.

Most of my favourite painters, as it happens, are also from the 19^th century: Van Gogh, Monet, Cézanne, William Turner, John Singer Sargent, etc.

Anyway, today I was at the National Gallery in London again—this year is the 200^th anniversary of the gallery—and on my way to the Rembrandt paintings, I found myself in the room of the Spanish Golden Age—so far something of indifference but now a subject of interest, thanks to Don Quixote. And then I thought, how glorious the 17^th century was! English theatre at the turn of the 17^th century was largely defined by Shakespeare, but there were also John Webster, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher, etc. English poetry at this time had John Milton, John Donne, George Herbert, John Dryden, etc. Francis Bacon and Samuel Pepys are two other important figures, and The Pilgrim’s Progress is also from the 17^th century, which I recently discovered had been translated into even more languages than The Communist Manifesto, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, and Don Quixote.

The 17th century was also a magnificent period in Spain, part of the Golden Age: especially with Cervantes in literature, creating “the first modern novel”; Lope de Vega in theatre; Velázquez, Zurbarán, and Bartolomé Esteban Murillo in painting, etc. Apparently it was also a great period for Spanish sculpture, architecture, and music, though I don’t know much about these.

The same century was the Golden Age for Dutch painting—my favourites are Rembrandt and Vermeer—they also had Frans Hals, Jan Steen, Aert de Gelder, Bartholomeus van der Helst, Ambrosius Bosschaert, Willem van Aelst, Jan Weenix, etc. Flemish art had Peter Paul Rubens, Anthony van Dyck, Jacob Jordaens, etc.

What else? 17^th century in France was called Grand Siècle, though I’m a pleb—I only know about Molière, Racine, Madame de La Fayette, and Descartes. Italy had Caravaggio (I saw “The Last Caravaggio” exhibition at the National Gallery today). Japan had Basho and Chikamatsu Monzaemon. What else did I miss?

The 17th century increasingly fascinates me, especially now that I’m a fan of Shakespeare and Cervantes.

What are your favourite centuries? And why?

Update: My friend Himadri's blog post in response.

Don Quixote: “There’s much to be said as to whether or not the histories of knights-errant are fictional or not”

1/ Part 2 is even greater than Part 1. 

As written in the previous blog post, in Part 2, Cervantes plays more with the form, with unreliable narrators, with the Benengeli manuscript conceit. It is as though Cervantes, when he started writing Don Quixote, had the material and didn’t know what to do with it, so he played around and attempted different things, but by the time he got to Part 2, he had figured it out.

We see a similar thing with the characterisation—Cervantes had Don Quixote and Sancho Panza in rough outlines, but it took him some time to find their voices, their manners of speaking, especially for Sancho.

I love that scene where Pancho Panza tells someone else about his love for Don Quixote. Don Quixote is, in many ways, a madman, and the two of them are very different—we can see this very clearly at the wedding banquet, when the idealistic knight sides with Basilio and the pragmatic squire thinks it’s right for Quiteria marry the rich Camacho—but we can see why they have love for each other, and we love them both. 

The thing I find especially fascinating about the novel is that, at the most basic level, it’s about a madman who thinks chivalry romances are real, thinks fictional characters, such as Amadis de Gaula, are real, and wants to be a knight errant himself; but Cervantes has created these larger-than-life characters who feel so utterly real and who seem to exist beyond the novel itself. One cannot imagine Anna outside Anna Karenina, Natasha and Andrei and Pierre outside War and Peace, but one can imagine Don Quixote and Sancho Panza on the streets.

There is a Don Quixote Museum in Castilla–La Mancha, as though he’s real. There’s even a Dulcinea del Toboso House-Museum, when she doesn’t even exist in the novel itself. 

Cervantes raises interesting questions about our relationship with fictional characters. After all, in London there’s a Sherlock Holmes Museum, and people queue to take photos next to the 9 ¾ platform at Kings Cross. 

The quote in the post title comes from P.2, ch.16, said by the knight (translated by Tom Lathrop). 

2/ I like this speech from Sancho: 

““In truth, señor,” responded Sancho, “you don’t have to depend on the fleshless one. I mean Death, who eats lambs as well as sheep, and I’ve heard our priest say that she treads with equal feet in the high towers of kings as she does the humble huts of the poor. This lady has more power than reluctance, and she’s not at all squeamish. She eats everything and fills her saddlebags with people of all ages and rank. She’s not a reaper who takes siestas, because she reaps all the time, and she cuts dry grass as well as green, and it seems that she doesn’t chew, but just gorges and swallows everything placed before her, because she has the hunger of a dog, and they never stop eating. And though she has no stomach, she still swells up, and thirsts for the lives of all living creatures, just like a person would drink a jug of cold water.”” (P.2, ch.20) 

3/ Look at the moment when Don Quixote is pulled out of the Cave of Montesinos: 

“… But Don Quixote said nothing in response, and when they had taken him completely out, they saw that his eyes were closed, revealing that he was asleep. They stretched him out on the ground and untied him, yet with all this he didn’t wake up. But they turned him from side to side and shook him for a good while until he came to, stretching as if he’d been woken out of a very deep and heavy slumber. Looking all around as if he were distressed, he said: “May God forgive you, my friends, for you’ve plucked me from the most delicious and agreeable life and spectacle that any human being has ever seen or lived. Now I finally understand that all of the joys of this life are just shadows and dreams, or wither like a wildflower. Oh, unfortunate Montesinos! Oh, badly wounded Durandarte! Oh, unfortunate Belerma! Oh, tearful Guadiana and you unfortunate daughters of Ruidera, whose waters are the tears that your beautiful eyes cried!”” (P.2, ch.22) 

Where does the idea of life as a dream first come from?

Anyway, that moment made me think about Bottom’s soliloquy in A Midsummer Night’s Dream: 

“I have had a most rare vision. I have had a dream—past the wit of man to say what dream it was. Man is but an ass if he go about to expound this dream. Methought I was—there is no man can tell what. Methought I was, and methought I had—but man is but a patched fool if he will offer to say what methought I had. The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen, man’s hand is not able to taste, his tongue to conceive, nor his heart to report what my dream was. I will get Peter Quince to write a ballad of this dream. It shall be called “Bottom’s Dream” because it hath no bottom. And I will sing it in the latter end of a play before the duke. Peradventure, to make it the more gracious, I shall sing it at her death.” 

Don Quixote is such a rich, complex work of literature. I must delve into the writings about Cervantes’s book. 

4/ Cervantes plays some dazzling game with the layers of narrators in Don Quixote: 

“The person who translated this great history from the original that its first author, Cide Hamete Benengeli, wrote, says that when he got to the chapter about the adventure of the Cave of Montesinos, he found in the margin and in Hamete’s own handwriting, these words:

I cannot convince or persuade myself that what the previous chapter relates about what happened to the brave don Quixote really happened exactly as written. The reason is that all the other adventures met with so far have been possible and credible; but I can find no way I can accept this one about the cave as true because it’s so far beyond the bounds of reason. […] If this adventure seems apocryphal, I’m not to blame; I write it without confirming it as either true or false…” (P.2, ch.24) 

5/ Here is what Dostoyevsky wrote about Don Quixote: 

“I don’t know what is now being taught in courses of literature, but a knowledge of this most splendid and sad of all books created by human genius would certainly elevate the soul of a young person with a great idea, give rise to profound questions in his heart, and work toward diverting his mind from worship of the eternal and foolish idol of mediocrity, self-satisfied conceit, and cheap prudence. Man will not forget to take this saddest of all books with him to God’s last judgment. He will point to the most profound and fateful mystery of humans and humankind that the book conveys.”

Read the full thing here.

Much as I love Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky is a much more insightful reader and critic (Tolstoy’s comments on other writers were just revealing about himself).

Don Quixote: “mixing one truth with a thousand lies”

1/ I love Cervantes’s wit.

Quite early on in Part 2, he doesn’t just have Don Quixote and Sancho Panza talk about existence of Part 1, but he also writes a scene where another character, Sansón, discuss its faults, such as the insertion of the Anselmo-Lotario-Camilla story. 

The funniest bit is when Sansón says: “… it seems to me that there will be no nation or language that will not have its own translation.” (P.2, ch.3) 

Not very modest, is Miguel? But Don Quixote has indeed turned out to be one of the most translated books in the world. 

I also like that Cervantes plays around with the form, so his novel feels more modern than many novels that came out in the 19th or 20th century. For example, in Part 1, he creates the conceit that the story of Don Quixote is written by a Moor named Cide Mahamate Benengeli, then the manuscript is found by an unnamed narrator (the joke, of course, is that that’s Cervantes) and then translated; the story moves between Benengeli’s narrative voice and Cervantes’s, but Cervantes the author doesn’t make much use of that conceit. In Part 2, he plays around more with it and has the translator commenting on the writing of Cide Mahamate Benengeli, and the comments are reported, in indirect speech, by Cervantes the narrator. 

Cervantes plays more with the concept of unreliable narrators. For example:

“He also put a cape of good gray material on. First of all, he washed his head and face with five—or maybe six (because there’s a difference of opinion about the number)—buckets of water, and even with that, the water was still the color of whey, thanks to the gluttony of Sancho and the purchase of his black cottage cheese that made his master so white.” (P.2, ch.18) 

(translated by Tom Lathrop) 

And he goes further—Don Quixote says: 

““… I fear that in the history they say is circulating about my deeds, if by chance the author was an enchanter who is my enemy, he may have written one thing for another, mixing one truth with a thousand lies, and amusing himself by telling idle tales that are not related to the truth of the history. Oh, envy, root of infinite wickedness and destroyer of virtue! All vices, Sancho, take along with them a bit of pleasure, but envy brings only disgust, animosity, and rage.”

“That’s what I say, too,” responded Sancho, “and I think that this legend or history that the bachelor Sansón Carrasco has seen must have dragged my honor through the dirt, as they say, from pillar to post, here and there, sweeping the streets with it…”” (P.2, ch.8)

The Don Quixote and Sancho Panza of Part 2 are not the same as the Don Quixote and Sancho Panza of Part 1: they’re now conscious they have been in a book, and will be in another. 

The other characters may also be different in that they may know the two of them from the text of Part 1: there’s an episode, for example, in which Don Quixote meets a reader who mirrors his actions and echoes his language. 

2/ Shakespeare regularly compares life to the stage, Cervantes also makes the same comparison in the novel—I like that conversation between Don Quixote and Sancho Panza: 

“… “Well, the same thing,” said Don Quixote, “that happens in plays happens in life—some are emperors, others popes, and all the characters that there are in a play. But when the end comes, which is when life ends, Death takes away all the clothing that differentiates them and they become equal in the grave.”

“A fine comparison,” said Sancho, “although not so new that I haven’t heard it many, many times, like the business of the game of chess—while it’s being played, each piece has its particular function, and when the game is over, they’re all mixed up and jumbled together, and they’re put into a bag, which is like finishing one’s life in the grave.”” (P.2, ch.12) 

Same bag. 

Your fat king and your lean beggar is but variable service – two dishes, but to one table. That’s the end. 

3/ Again on the concept of unreliable narrators: 

“And it should be said that when the author got to this point in this true history, he exclaims: “Oh, strong and beyond all exaggeration dauntless Don Quixote de La Mancha, mirror in which all of the valiant men in the world may see themselves, a second and new Manuel de León, who was the glory and honor of Spanish knights! What words can I use to describe this so frightening deed, or with what words can I make future ages believe it, or what praise is there that will not be fitting, no matter how much exaggeration is used? You on foot, alone, intrepid, heroic, with a single sword—and not one of those really sharp ones from Toledo—with a none too shiny or clean steel shield, are waiting for the two fiercest lions that were ever born in the African jungles. Let your own deeds serve as praise, you brave Manchegan—for here I’ll leave your deeds at their height, lacking the words to describe them.”

Here the exclamation of the author ends and he continues, getting back to the thread of his story, saying:…” (P.2, ch.17) 

This is the episode with the lions.

This passage makes me wonder if (the conceit is that) Cide Mahamate Benengeli writes the book in a different tone—earnest, like the chivalry romances—then the story is retold ironically by the unnamed narrator (Cervantes). 

4/ It seems to me that many of my favourite novels are either about everything (Anna Karenina, War and Peace, The Tale of Genji, Hong lou meng…) or about an obsession (Wuthering Heights, Lolita, Kokoro, Rebecca…). 

Moby Dick is both.

Don Quixote is also both. 

In P.2, ch.18, there’s a fascinating conversation where Don Quixote talks about the vast knowledge and virtues of knights errant. He’s obsessed with knights errant like Ishmael’s obsessed with whales.