A new modern …

… A Magus of the North by A.S. Byatt | The New York Review of Books. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

We are bedeviled in our time by a muddle about the words “modern” and “modernism.” Modernism is by now not modern at all—we are told a story about it that says if we have understood Sterne and James Joyce all sorts of writing become impossible. We have had postmodernism and its game-playing, which are also no longer modern. We need a word for modern which is not the same as “contemporary,” something to do with the nature of literary forms. I feel that Sjón’s use of very many interwoven stories, old and new, is a new modern phenomenon. In an interview with The Coffin Factory he declared that he is “almost immune to the realist novel. I have a hard time reading a realist novel,…and I’m, of course, always very happy when I discover somewhere in the realist novel that the novelist has given in to some sort of folkish element.”