One of our regular customers is a retired male escort who moonlights selling cheap Chinese ‘adult pleasure toys’ on Facebook. He’s also a bit of an amateur historian but somehow convinced himself that books were invented in England. Books go way back. Before England. Before Europe.
“Here, Shakespeare invented literature, didn’t he,” he tells me in that rhetorical question that’s really a statement way he likes to talk, “Sure the fuzzy wuzzies were drawing on the sides of pyramids with ducks blood but that don’t count, does it!”
The retired male escort sex toy entrepreneur historian is also a bit of a racist. For narrative ease we'll call him Eddie. Eddie the Escort.
It’s difficult to know where literature began. No doubt works of antiquity have been lost with the collapses of early civilisations, wars of conquests and the disastrous destruction of the Library of Alexandria. Most experts agree that, with the evidence currently available to us, literature began with the Epic of Gilgamesh, which probably predates 2,000 BC. Gilgamesh is essentially the story of a global cataclysmic flood. Think like a Roland Emmerich blockbuster in papyrus scroll format.
Shortly after this, around 1,800 BC, we get the Egyptian Book of the Dead. It’s thought that the earliest parts of the Torah were written down about 1,000 BC. Indian sruti texts and the Hindu epics probably came even before this.
“Sure that’s all religious stuff,” Eddie the Escort cries, “Here, for all you know, they could be true stories, ya blasted heeden. Literature is all made up so that’s not literature, is it!”
The Chinese Classic of Poetry or Shijing is a collection of 305 anonymous poems compiled between the 11th and 7th century BC. The age of Classical Antiquity is said to have began with Homers creation of the Iliad and the Odyssey in the 8th century BC. This, the emergence of great thinkers in a growing civilisation and the construction of the Library of Alexandria made Ancient Greece the first true powerhouse of Literature.
Aeschylus was arguably the world’s first playwright defining dialogue and interaction between characters, creating drama in the process. Sophocles invented irony as a literary technique in his play ‘Oedipus Rex'. Euripedes used his writings to challenge social norms while Plato’s dialogues saw philosophical ideas enter literature. Aristophanes created the model for comedy.
“Here, those Greeks had too much time on their hands, didn’t they,” Eddie the Escort tells me, “Towel wearing curs.”
The Romans followed in Ancient Greeces footsteps. Virgils Aeneid copied Homers Iliad while Ovids Metamorphosis explored the Greek myths in detail. Ovid also introduced the stream of consciousness, later used so gracefully by James Joyce, into literature. Horace introduced Satire and Juvenal honed it into a weapon. For the first time, the pen became mightier than the sword.
“Here, I heard the Romans spent most of their time in public baths slapping each other’s bare arses with warm towels. Dirty feckers.”
After the fall of Rome, the Dark Ages descended and literature faced extermination. Incredibly it endured, partially through to the actions of various religious orders and monastic settlements.
The Hagiographies or ‘Lives of the Saints’ were popular early medieval texts. Geoffrey of Monmouth also wrote popular pseudo histories about Arthur and Merlin during this period. Beowulf and the Norse Sagas were produced, Dantes Divine Comedy and Chaucers Canterbury Tales. Islamic literature also bloomed with the creation of the Arabian Nights.
“All that stuff was propaganda though, wasn’t it. Here, it was the religions and little fat kings mad on syphilis that forced scribes to create those stories. You’ve told me nothing to convince me Shakespeare didn’t invent literature.”
Well we’re getting to big Willy. In the 15th century Johannes Gutenberg invented the first proper printing press. No longer would books have to be copied by scribes. The expense of Literature and the limited number of literate people in the world was about to change rapidly.
William Caxton was the first English printed. Among his big hits were Le Morte d'Arthur and the Canterbury Tales. William Shakespeare also burst onto the scene at this time and is widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world’s preeminent dramatist. He was not, however, the father of Literature.
“Here, that’s your opinion like, nothing else,” Eddie the Escort squeals.
Edmund Spenser released ‘The Faerie Queene’ in 1590. A Spaniard called Miguel de Cervantes wrote ‘Don Quixote’ during this time and it is now recognised by many as being the world’s first novel. Early novelists include Daniel Defoe, born in 1660, and Jonathan Swift, born in 1667. The 17th century also saw the rise of metaphysical poets like John Donne, expanding the written word to a new level.
The Age of Enlightenment was ushered in during the 18th century through the works of people like Voltaire, Kant, Rousseau, Goethe and Adam Smith.
The 19th century saw the rise of speculative fiction beginning with the Dane Hans Christian Anderson and developed further by Alexander Dumas, Mark Twain, Jules Verne, Robert Louis Stevenson, Lewis Carroll and HG Wells. The 19th century was also a golden age of the novel with writers like Charles Dickens, Jane Austen, Thomas Hardy, The Brontes, Leo Tolstoy, Emile Zola, George Eliot, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Herman Melville and Jack London all coming to prominence.
The 20th century is generally divided up into two great periods of Literature, the modernist period (1900 – 1940) and the post modernist period (1960 – 1990). Early proponents of the modernist movement were Rudyard Kipling, Joseph Conrad, Henry James, George Bernard Shaw and DH Lawrence. James Joyce was a somewhat dissident of the movement creating the epic Ulysses after World War 1 and finding it banned in many nations including Ireland.
Among the post modernists are William Burroughs, Flann O' Brien, Jorge Luis Borges, Muriel Spark, Joseph Heller, Anthony Burgress, Vladmir Nabakov, Thomas Pynchon, Kurt Vonnegut, Toni Morrison, Zadie Smith, Haruki Murakami and Douglas Coupland.
The 20th century also saw the true birth of genre fiction, from Arthur Conan Doyle’s mysteries morphing into the modern thriller explosion to the growth of speculative fiction and the birth of sci-fi through writers like Arthur C Clarke, Isaac Asimov, Philip K Dick and Ursula Le Guin.
In five and a half thousand years we’ve gone from papyrus scrolls to print on demand and ebooks but literature still keeps developing, mutating where necessary to stay relevant and at the centre of the cultural zeitgeist.
Eddie the Escort just looks at me and yawns. A long, extended, two fingers up yawn. “Do you sell DVDs?” he asks at last.
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