Long Live the Death of the Novel
Is literature in a uniquely precarious position in today's culture, or are worries about the state of books part of a grand tradition? And what can we do about it anyway?
At the dawn of the twentieth century, Vienna was in a twilight of literature, too busy with the decadence of cultural posturing to notice the decline in standards. This was not the view of Stefan Zweig, whose memoir The World of Yesterday eulogized Vienna’s golden age of culture; nor is it the view of Shane Koyczan who, in his poem Heaven, or Whatever, said his grandfather’s heaven would be “Austria before the war”. This was the view of Jakob Wasserman’s narrator in My First Wife, who quips that in pre-war Vienna the educated “feigned an enthusiasm for art”, and anything more than a “limited interest in literature” incurred ridicule. “It was,” Wasserman writes in the tone of a final judgement, “the age of paste diamonds and shallow minds.”
Four decades later, after more peaks of progress and lows of barbarism than contained in the full histories of some civilisations, we find Orwell lamenting the decline of his mother tongue. In ‘Politics and the English Language’, he claims that “most people who bother with the matter at all” know what a sorry and abused state the language is in. He decries political misuse of language “to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind”. (And he wrote this without having lived to hear the phrases “alternative facts” or “silence is violence”.)
Leaping seven decades on, past the death of books in the shadow of cinema, past the death of books in the shadow of video games, past the death of books in the shadow of the internet, past the death of books in the shadow of e-readers, and we arrive at March, 2018: Will Self has just announced that “the novel is absolutely doomed”. This is not the first time Self has played harbinger of literary extinction; he made the same claim earlier that year in January, and again four years before that, in October and in May. Double-checking these dates, I notice that Self published books in both of those years — make of that what you will.
It’s a rite of passage for the literary culture of every generation to announce its own imminent demise. These echoing plaints are similar not only in form but in content. Fear of degradation borne of decadence, a conviction that with literature dies cultural sophistication, and accusations of inferiority levelled against the usurper: these are common features of the Death Of The Novel. In this way, each generational wailing offers an alternative rendition of Horace’s “Mutato nomine et de te fabula narratur”, so we are instead cautioned, “Change only the dates and this complaint is about now.”
I’m an atheist regarding faith in the inevitability of progress, so I’m unable to convince myself that Western societies will absolutely never abandon books. Nor am I, however, a defeatist on this front. I’m prepared to fight on behalf of books, to raise the flag for literature, to be evangelical about the pleasures and benefits of reading. And perhaps this is what’s really beneath these gripes about waning interest in books: frustration that the work of promoting literature must be done at all, and that it must continue with each generation.
The responsibility bestowed on those of us concerned for the future of literature is often thankless and easy to get wrong. Too often, it devolves into the mere listing of dry, sensible gains for the intellect wrought by “serious art”. This is the approach of dour (if well meaning) parents advocating a career in finance over sex-symbol status as a pop icon, and it works just as poorly for books. Too far in the other direction — promoting reading as a sensory pleasure equal to binge-watching Netflix — leads to the diminishment of complex, nuanced forms of reading. We’re then left with sybaritic pleasure that requires the most minimal engagement.
Interviewed on the subject of education, David Foster Wallace claimed that “there are kinds of art that offer us more confrontation with our own lives”, and that these are “more difficult and less pleasant sometimes, and it takes skill and education to get good enough at reading or listening to be able to derive pleasure from it”. We need to find better methods of teaching the skills requisite to harvesting all forms of pleasure, difficult and easy, from literature. I don’t presume to have anything like a comprehensive answer to this question; this is a conversation that must include teachers, parents, politicians, theologians, journalists, celebrities, writers, artists, musicians, therapists, and anyone else invested in the future of a rich, layered, and relevant culture. For now, I hope it’s enough to bring the issue to the fore and suggest that we continue to fight the good fight.
This fight is on two fronts: in support of literature and against complacent defeatism of every kind. Nobody is born reading or loving books. We’re led there by others already infatuated with literature, those who know the secret joy of trysting with words and, paradoxically, can’t keep it to themselves. Having been passed this torch and having lived by its light, it’s a form of selfish ingratitude to then blame the rest of the world for its diminishing glow as you sit and watch it go out.
All things are engaged in a losing struggle, “for all things must die” as Tennyson wrote, but we don’t have to lose just yet. There won’t be a utopia in which the struggle can cease, where difficult art, complex literature, and beauty are no longer on the watch list for extinction. It might even be their endangered species status that reminds us to pay attention, to care about the state of our literary institutions and to spend more time with books. Crying out at the impending loss of all of this might just be a sign of health — the cause has not yet been lost. Better dying than dead.
The task of coaxing literature back to health and maintaining it is an endless one, and regular reminders of the mortality of books help prevent complacency. In any case, today’s cultural concerns always become yesterday’s, and we will always be greeted by those of tomorrow. The Death Of The Novel is dead — long live The Death Of The Novel.
References:
• My First Wife, Jakob Wasserman (1934)
• “Politics and the English Language” (1946) in Why I Write, George Orwell (2004)
• “Will Self: ‘The novel is absolutely doomed’”, in The Guardian, interview by Alex Clark (2018)
• “Will Self on the literary novel’s demise, and why Naomi Klein won’t fix the world”, in Maclean’s, interview by Mike Doherty (2018)
• “Will Self: ‘The fate of our literary culture is sealed’”, in The Guardian, Will Self (2014)
• “The novel is dead (this time it’s for real)”, in The Guardian, Will Self (May)
• David Foster Wallace, interviewed by ZDF Mediathek (2003)
• “All Things Will Die”, Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1893)