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…