What Charles Bukowski and George Mackay Brown Believed Literature Should Do

Literature of Experience vs Literature of Myth

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At first glance, Charles Bukowski and George Mackay Brown seem to occupy opposite ends of twentieth-century literature. Bukowski writes on bars, boarding houses, race tracks, and post offices; Brown writes on islands, churches, fishing villages, and imagined communal pasts. One embraces urban realism and autobiographical confession. The other cultivates myth, ritual, and artistic distance.

Yet beneath those differences lies a fascinating tension: both writers believed literature had lost something essential in the modern world. They simply disagreed about what that “something” was, and how to recover it.

Bukowski believed literature had become detached from life itself. Brown believed modern life had become detached from spiritual and cultural roots. Their opposing literary ideologies reveal two radically different answers to the same question: what should literature actually do?

Bukowski and the Revolt Against Academic Literature

Bukowski’s literary philosophy was inseparable from his hostility toward academic culture. He rejected what he saw as overly intellectual, self-conscious poetry filled with obscure references and elaborate symbolism. In Against the American Dream, Russell Harrison describes Bukowski’s opposition to the “densely textured lyric” favoured by many university poets of the period.

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For Bukowski, literature mattered only if it emerged directly from lived experience. He argued that too much modern writing had become detached from ordinary existence:

“Those who have been writing literature have not been writing life.”

That belief shaped everything about his style. The stripped-back language, short declarative sentences, minimal metaphor, and autobiographical voice were not signs of artistic limitation but deliberate aesthetic choices. Bukowski wanted poetry and fiction to sound like real speech and reflect real conditions.

He frequently attacked what he saw as sterile literary elitism. In essays such as Manifesto: A Call for Our Own Critics and House of Horrors, he mocked academic poets as insulated figures with little understanding of ordinary labour, poverty, violence, or survival. He famously declared he would rather hear about “a live American bum than a dead Greek god.”

That statement encapsulates his entire literary ethos. Literature, for Bukowski, should concern itself with the humiliations and absurdities of actual existence rather than inherited cultural prestige.

The Confessional Voice and the “Real” World

Bukowski’s admiration for confessional writing stemmed from its emphasis on direct experience. Unlike many contemporaries, he did not believe the writer should remain detached from the text. The self was not something to conceal; it was the primary material of literature.

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This philosophy explains the centrality of Henry Chinaski, Bukowski’s thinly veiled alter ego. Across novels and stories, Chinaski becomes the vehicle through which Bukowski explores work, alienation, masculinity, alcoholism, authority, and the failure of the American Dream.

In essays and interviews, Bukowski openly connected Chinaski’s worldview to his own life. Reflecting on his father and his years of manual labour, he argued that work did not ennoble people but brutalised them:

“A man could work a lifetime and still remain poor.”

That conviction drives novels such as Post Office and Factotum, where employment appears not as fulfilment but as psychological and physical degradation. Bukowski’s refusal-to-work ethic was radical because it rejected not merely exploitative labour, but the cultural mythology surrounding work itself.

In Factotum, Chinaski drifts from job to job, sabotaging employment through boredom, alcohol, or outright indifference. Yet the novel’s power lies in how casually this resistance is presented. Work intrudes upon life like an irritation rather than a moral necessity. One of the novel’s funniest moments occurs when Chinaski is simply walking peacefully through the city before someone interrupts him with the dreaded question:

“You want a job?”

The joke works because employment is treated almost like an assault on human freedom.

Bukowski’s critique becomes even sharper through his descriptions of workplaces. Factories, warehouses, and post offices are rendered as vague, mechanical spaces filled with repetitive gestures and exhausted bodies. Workers hammer objects, sort endless mail, or perform meaningless routines until individuality disappears entirely.

Importantly, Bukowski rarely moralises directly. Instead, the horror emerges through accumulation: tired faces, endless shifts, pointless bureaucracy, nervous drinking, and bodies worn down by decades of labour. His realism derives its force from understatement.

Brown and the Defence of Imagination

Where Bukowski distrusted literary distance, Brown actively embraced it.

Brown believed the writer should act less as a confessional personality and more as a guardian of cultural memory. Rather than foregrounding the self, he sought to preserve disappearing rituals, stories, landscapes, and communal traditions.

His Orkney, or its disguised counterpart, Norday, functions almost as a mythic landscape outside modernity. Brown repeatedly described Orkney as a “microcosm” capable of expressing universal truths through local experience. For him, the island’s fishermen, crofters, churches, tides, and oral traditions possessed symbolic depth that industrial modernity lacked.

Unlike Bukowski, Brown distrusted realism. He explicitly argued that realism narrowed the imaginative possibilities of literature:

“Realism is the enemy of the creative imagination.”

Instead, he favoured suggestion, symbolism, rhythm, ritual, and atmosphere. His work draws heavily from Romanticism, especially the traditions associated with Walter Scott and Robert Burns, while also reflecting the influence of Catholic mysticism and Orcadian folklore.

Brown believed poetry should recover spiritual meaning from a modern world increasingly dominated by materialism and technological “progress.” In many ways, his project was restorative rather than revolutionary.

Religion, Ceremony, and the Lost Past

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Brown’s literary worldview was profoundly shaped by religion. His conversion to Catholicism became inseparable from his broader rejection of modernity, industrialisation, and what he saw as the spiritual barrenness of post-Reformation Scotland.

Influenced heavily by Edwin Muir, Brown developed an intensely romantic view of pre-Reformation Scotland as a culture rooted in ritual, mystery, and continuity. Protestantism, by contrast, often appears in his work as harsh, joyless, and spiritually empty.

This tension is especially visible in A Treading of the Grapes, where Brown presents three sermons delivered across different historical periods. The contrast is unmistakable. Modern Protestantism is depicted as rational, dry, and emotionally sterile, while pre-Reformation Catholicism appears rich with symbolism, ceremony, and transcendence.

Brown’s interest here is not theology in any rigorous sense. Rather, he is drawn to aesthetic and spiritual atmosphere. Catholic ritual becomes a defence against what he perceived as the flattening effects of modern rationalism.

That same impulse explains his hostility toward “progress.” Throughout works such as An Orkney Tapestry and The Tarn and the Rosary, Brown repeatedly warns that technological modernity erodes storytelling, local identity, and communal memory. Radios, machinery, newspapers, and mass culture are often presented as forces that sever people from older forms of meaning.

The Confessional Exception: The Tarn and the Rosary

Despite Brown’s insistence on artistic distance, one work stands apart: The Tarn and the Rosary.

The novella is perhaps Brown’s closest approach to Bukowskian confession. Its protagonist, Colm Sinclair, mirrors Brown in striking ways: illness, Catholic conversion, Edinburgh lodgings, literary ambitions, and hostility toward modernity. Even Norday itself functions as a barely disguised Orkney.

Here Brown abandons some of his usual detachment and openly defends his worldview. Colm laments the disappearance of storytelling traditions and condemns the cult of “Progress” consuming island life. Machinery, modern media, and material comfort are depicted not as achievements but as forms of spiritual erosion.

Most revealing is the novella’s concluding letter, where Colm defends religious ceremony against accusations of superstition. The passage effectively serves as Brown’s own artistic manifesto. Ritual, symbolism, and mystery become necessary ways of confronting human existence itself.

In this sense, Brown briefly moves closer to Bukowski than he might have admitted. Both writers ultimately project their deepest beliefs into their fiction. The difference lies not in whether they insert themselves into the text, but in how openly they do it.

Two Writers, Two Visions of Truth

Northern face of the Brough of Bigging, Orkney: image by Claire Pegrum via under license

Bukowski and Brown represent opposing literary instincts.

Bukowski believes truth emerges through exposure: direct experience, personal humiliation, ugly realities, and unfiltered speech. Brown believes truth emerges through preservation: ritual, myth, symbolism, memory, and communal continuity.

Bukowski strips literature down until only life remains. Brown transforms life into something symbolic and enduring.

Yet despite their differences, both writers are reacting against the same anxiety: the fear that modern society has produced a spiritually diminished world. Bukowski sees emptiness in labour, bureaucracy, and capitalist mythology. Brown sees emptiness in secularisation, technological progress, and cultural amnesia.

Their solutions diverge completely. But both insist literature must resist the forces that deaden human experience.

That shared resistance may ultimately explain why these seemingly incompatible writers belong in conversation together.