«the death of “the death of”» by Jared Marcel Pollen
For decades now, essays spelling “the death of…” have become a cottage industry, almost a subgenre within the critical essay. Yes, it seems that things have been dying for quite a long time now... Musicians, filmmakers, photographers, all talk this way. But fiction writers seem to be uniquely obsessed with this belief. Indeed, literature is the only medium that actively, neurotically insists on its own obsolescence.
Many of these obsequies have been penned by some of the best and most successful writers. Jonathan Franzen’s “Why Bother?” (Harper’s 1996); Tom McCarthy’s “The Death of Writing--if James Joyce were alive today he’d be working for Google” (Guardian 2015); Will Self’s “The Novel is Dead (this time it’s for real)” (Guardian, 2014) are just a few.
…The novel’s saving grace though, is in its ability to allow us access to another conscious person’s loneliness in a way that Facebook, Twitter, et al. can never deliver (this is where the empathy model comes in).
If the culture can elevate a clinical psychologist like Peterson, or a spitting Slovenian Marxist like Slavoj Žižek to the level of celebrity, what excuse do novelists have for failing to engage the public? I’m not suggesting that writers go out there and start opposing controversial legislation to get attention, or start their own YouTube channels. But barricading themselves in the halls of the academy and nurturing an antipathy towards the culture that has left them behind almost certainly isn’t the answer either. Writers, for their part, have asked for it. Writers tend to be solitary, anti-social and sometimes reactionary creatures who find themselves more comfortable at the margins of society. And this is the reputation they’ve cultivated. The last novelist to appear on the cover of TIME magazine, for example, was Jonathan Franzen, whose reputation (through no fault of his own) is that of an over-opinionated curmudgeon who despises all things popular. David Foster Wallace too, was wary of appearing on television because it was too loaded with irony and self-image.
Writers don’t need to get on the social media bandwagon to get relevant (which is the only thing publishers have come up with)--nor do they need to shrink from their adversarial role in the culture. Literature is well on its way--like everything else--to becoming niche. The internet is furnishing for us an endless catacomb--like Borges’ Library of Babel--where everything will be buried and nothing will ever die. A permanent afterlife that is forever now. In this world there is no “the death of…” And can a thing like the novel ever really be laid to rest there?
Still, writers have a reason to be worried. In the last century, we’ve witnessed the fall of poetry from popular art into almost total obscurity. There’s no reason to believe this won’t also happen to the novel. But the novel, unlike poetry, is a social form. If poetry is the social art for the solitary being, the novel is the solitary art for the social. And this requires that the novelist must be, in the words of Auden: “the whole of boredom… among the Just/ Be just, among the Filthy, filthy too.” That is to say that the novel is--like its apparent enemy, image culture--a form for the everyman/woman. It works high and low.
Since the height of modernism, which was a “nothing new under the sun” time for its writers as well, the novel has proven remarkably flexible and resilient, and the arrival of the new mediums that challenged it, like television, saw it expand its narrative capabilities. It’s possible that the internet will do the same, though it’s too early to tell. Since the same time, writers have been anxious about the death of literature, either from within or without. Death is unlikely. That it will become marginal is almost certain, if not already a fait accompli. The reasons to keep on writing in lieu of this should go unchanged. The 2,000-year-old mandate to “teach and delight” has always been good enough. It was good enough for the Greeks, for the renaissance humanists, and it should be good enough for us postmoderns living in a time of asymptotic decline.
How writers choose to adapt to this new status might be a matter of style: literature can be like the opera, or it can be like indie rock (this writer prefers the latter). Occasionally some might make it big, but most will hover about the middle, doing interesting work that’s still worth doing, for not much money, to a small but devoted community. Again, I believe this will be the fate of every art form, eventually. It’s not great news, but things could be worse.
Many of these obsequies have been penned by some of the best and most successful writers. Jonathan Franzen’s “Why Bother?” (Harper’s 1996); Tom McCarthy’s “The Death of Writing--if James Joyce were alive today he’d be working for Google” (Guardian 2015); Will Self’s “The Novel is Dead (this time it’s for real)” (Guardian, 2014) are just a few.
…The novel’s saving grace though, is in its ability to allow us access to another conscious person’s loneliness in a way that Facebook, Twitter, et al. can never deliver (this is where the empathy model comes in).
If the culture can elevate a clinical psychologist like Peterson, or a spitting Slovenian Marxist like Slavoj Žižek to the level of celebrity, what excuse do novelists have for failing to engage the public? I’m not suggesting that writers go out there and start opposing controversial legislation to get attention, or start their own YouTube channels. But barricading themselves in the halls of the academy and nurturing an antipathy towards the culture that has left them behind almost certainly isn’t the answer either. Writers, for their part, have asked for it. Writers tend to be solitary, anti-social and sometimes reactionary creatures who find themselves more comfortable at the margins of society. And this is the reputation they’ve cultivated. The last novelist to appear on the cover of TIME magazine, for example, was Jonathan Franzen, whose reputation (through no fault of his own) is that of an over-opinionated curmudgeon who despises all things popular. David Foster Wallace too, was wary of appearing on television because it was too loaded with irony and self-image.
Writers don’t need to get on the social media bandwagon to get relevant (which is the only thing publishers have come up with)--nor do they need to shrink from their adversarial role in the culture. Literature is well on its way--like everything else--to becoming niche. The internet is furnishing for us an endless catacomb--like Borges’ Library of Babel--where everything will be buried and nothing will ever die. A permanent afterlife that is forever now. In this world there is no “the death of…” And can a thing like the novel ever really be laid to rest there?
Still, writers have a reason to be worried. In the last century, we’ve witnessed the fall of poetry from popular art into almost total obscurity. There’s no reason to believe this won’t also happen to the novel. But the novel, unlike poetry, is a social form. If poetry is the social art for the solitary being, the novel is the solitary art for the social. And this requires that the novelist must be, in the words of Auden: “the whole of boredom… among the Just/ Be just, among the Filthy, filthy too.” That is to say that the novel is--like its apparent enemy, image culture--a form for the everyman/woman. It works high and low.
Since the height of modernism, which was a “nothing new under the sun” time for its writers as well, the novel has proven remarkably flexible and resilient, and the arrival of the new mediums that challenged it, like television, saw it expand its narrative capabilities. It’s possible that the internet will do the same, though it’s too early to tell. Since the same time, writers have been anxious about the death of literature, either from within or without. Death is unlikely. That it will become marginal is almost certain, if not already a fait accompli. The reasons to keep on writing in lieu of this should go unchanged. The 2,000-year-old mandate to “teach and delight” has always been good enough. It was good enough for the Greeks, for the renaissance humanists, and it should be good enough for us postmoderns living in a time of asymptotic decline.
How writers choose to adapt to this new status might be a matter of style: literature can be like the opera, or it can be like indie rock (this writer prefers the latter). Occasionally some might make it big, but most will hover about the middle, doing interesting work that’s still worth doing, for not much money, to a small but devoted community. Again, I believe this will be the fate of every art form, eventually. It’s not great news, but things could be worse.