Literature has scarcely begun to do minimal homework. Hence it’s thinness and domesticity; hence the belief that adultery in Long Island is an interesting subject. It has scarcely begun to be serious. There has been a small number of very great writers who have not been lazy, who’ve actually tried to find out what the world is now about – Thomas Mann, who worked two years with a tutor before doing the magnificent chapters on astrophysics in Felix Krull; Robert Musil, who was, of course, a trained mathematician and engineer; and perhaps Pynchon and the masters of science fiction, whom we tend not to take seriously but whose vision has been clairvoyant, terrifyingly prophetic. In essence, the novel inhabits a nineteenth century cosmology. We tend to forget that the heroic verse epic continued for many centuries until it came to its dismal end, having totally outlived the mythological and cosmological structures that had generated its validity.

The second subversive element of any classic literacy is even more radical and difficult to define. I may have this totally wrong. In the West, the status of death is undergoing a sea change. We are in the midst of what may be the deepest reaching tectonic-plate shock in Western history. From 1914 onward, we see bewildering new worlds of mass death on a wholly unprecedented scale. Remember Passchendaele, when on the first day in 1916 an estimated 45,000 people died. The new worlds of cloning, of genetic manipulation, of transplant, are what Foucault called “the abolition of the self.” This is now taking on biological potentiality. “Death, where will be thy sting?” This is an immensely perplexing and fascinating mutation of consciousness that I can only allude to, but it bears directly on our subject. Western literacy has been one of the strategies, one of the master strategies contra death. It has harboured intimations, as Wordsworth would have it, of immortality, aspirations to immortality, from its origins on. Magnificently, Pindar says, "The city for which I am writing this ode will perish. The language in which I am writing it may perish but my poetry will live forever." Horace and Ovid were translated into what every child still had to learn in my time. Tougher than brass, stronger than marble, these lines will live. That fine, Stalinist poet, Paul Éluard, puts it in a single phrase, “le dur désir de duré”: The harsh desire to last. That is the mechanism of all attempts at great literature. Today already a certain embarrassment attaches to this commanding motion. If you want to be funny in France you cite the title given to themselves by members of the French Academy, Les Immortels. This fills everyone, except the gentlemen in question, with embarrassment.