You
woke up quite ill about one in the morning. Vomiting and diarrhea (fortunately
never at the same time). This went on until about eight this morning. It was
not a good night. Paul said to get plenty of rest and
he would not prescribe any medicine (when you had hoped he would). He says
nature of this sort has to take its course first. He was right. – Amorella
2105
hours. This was not a good day but both problems had stopped. I rested most of
the time and did not eat anything until a late supper when I had a little
chicken and rice. Earlier in the afternoon I had a glass of regular Sprite and
sipped it slowly over the course of an hour and took a few morning pills. I
took the evening pills with the chicken and rice. Carol did most of the
interaction with the boys. It was funny because when minor discipline issues
arose Carol took to her fourth grade-teaching mode. Nobody messes with Carol
when she orders time out. It was actually rather funny. Even at their early age
they know a teacher’s serious, you-better-get-with-my-program-now tone.
Evening.
You have four articles downloaded for reading and comment. The first one is
about the death of the novel by Will Self, a British novelist, journalist,
political commentator and television personality. [The other four articles are book
reviews of The Four Dimensional Human by Laurence Scott, which we’ll
save for another day.] In fact, let’s just include the first article on the
novel by Wil Self and save the commentary until tomorrow. So, drop it in and
post. - Amorella
** **
Fiction: “The
novel is dead (this time it's for real)”
By
Will Self, writer
Friday
2 May 2014 08.00 EDT
(Last
modified on Friday 20 June 2014 20.20 EDT)
If you happen to be a writer, one of the great benisons
of having children is that your personal culture-mine is equipped with its
own canaries. As you tunnel on relentlessly into the future, these little
harbingers either choke on the noxious gases released by the extraction of
decadence, or they thrive in the clean air of what we might call progress. A
few months ago, one of my canaries, who's in his mid-teens and harbours a
laudable ambition to be the world's greatest ever rock musician, was
messing about on his electric guitar. Breaking off from a particularly
jagged and angry riff, he launched into an equally jagged diatribe, the
gist of which was already familiar to me: everything in popular music had been
done before, and usually those who'd done it first had done it best. Besides,
the instant availability of almost everything that had ever been done stifled
his creativity, and made him feel it was all hopeless.
A miner, if he has any sense, treats his canary well, so I began
gently remonstrating with him. Yes, I said, it's true that the web and the
internet have created a permanent Now, eliminating our sense of musical eras;
it's also the case that the queered demographics of our longer-living,
lower-birthing population means that the middle-aged squat on top of the
pyramid of endeavour, crushing the young with our nostalgic tastes.
What's more, the decimation of the revenue streams once generated by
analogues of recorded music have put paid to many a musician's income. But
my canary had to appreciate this: if you took the long view, the advent
of the 78rpm shellac disc had also been a disaster for musicians who in
the teens and 20s of the last century made their daily bread by live
performance. I repeated one of my favourite anecdotes: when the first wax
cylinder recording of Feodor Chaliapin
singing "The Song of the Volga Boatmen" was played, its listeners, despite
a lowness of fidelity that would seem laughable to us (imagine a man holding
forth from a giant bowl of snapping, crackling and popping Rice Krispies), were
nonetheless convinced the portly Russian must be in the room, and searched
behind drapes and underneath chaise longues for him.
So recorded sound blew away the nimbus of authenticity
surrounding live performers – but it did worse things. My canaries have often
heard me tell how back in the 1970s heyday of the pop charts, all you needed
was a writing credit on some loathsome chirpy-chirpy-cheep-cheeping ditty
in order to spend the rest of your born days lying by a guitar-shaped pool
in the Hollywood Hills hoovering up cocaine. Surely if there's one thing we
have to be grateful for it's that the web has put paid to such an
egregious financial multiplier being applied to raw talentlessness. Put paid to
it, and also returned musicians to the domain of live performance and,
arguably, reinvigorated musicianship in the process. Anyway, I was saying all
of this to my canary when I was suddenly overtaken by a great wave of
noxiousness only I could smell. I faltered, I fell silent, then I
said: sod you and your creative anxieties, what about me? How do you think it
feels to have dedicated your entire adult life to an art form only to see the
bloody thing dying before your eyes?
My canary is a perceptive songbird – he immediately ceased his
own cheeping, except to chirrup: I see what you mean. The literary novel as an
art work and a narrative art form central to our culture is indeed dying before
our eyes. Let me refine my terms: I do not mean narrative prose fiction tout court is dying – the kidult
boywizardsroman and the soft sadomasochistic porn fantasy are clearly in rude
good health. And nor do I mean that serious novels will either cease to be
written or read. But what is already no longer the case is the situation that
obtained when I was a young man. In the early 1980s, and I would argue
throughout the second half of the last century, the literary novel was
perceived to be the prince of art forms, the cultural capstone and the
apogee of creative endeavour. The capability words have when arranged
sequentially to both mimic the free flow of human thought and investigate the
physical expressions and interactions of thinking subjects; the way they may be
shaped into a believable simulacrum of either the commonsensical world, or any
number of invented ones; and the capability of the extended prose form itself,
which, unlike any other art form, is able to enact self-analysis, to describe
other aesthetic modes and even mimic them. All this led to a general
acknowledgment: the novel was the true Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk.
This is not to say that everyone walked the streets with their
head buried in Ulysses or To
the Lighthouse, or that popular culture in all its forms didn't hold sway over
the psyches and imaginations of the great majority. Nor do I mean to
suggest that in our culture perennial John Bull-headed philistinism wasn't
alive and snorting: "I don't know much about art, but I know what I
like." However, what didn't obtain is the current dispensation, wherein
those who reject the high arts feel not merely entitled to their opinion, but
wholly justified in it. It goes further: the hallmark of our contemporary
culture is an active resistance to difficulty in all its aesthetic
manifestations, accompanied by a sense of grievance that conflates it with
political elitism. Indeed, it's arguable that tilting at this papery windmill of
artistic superiority actively prevents a great many people from confronting the
very real economic inequality and political disenfranchisement they're subject
to, exactly as being compelled to chant the mantra "choice" drowns
out the harsh background Muzak telling them they have none.
Just because you're paranoid it doesn't mean they aren't out to
get you. Simply because you've remarked a number of times on the concealed
fox gnawing its way into your vitals, it doesn't mean it hasn't at
this moment swallowed your gall bladder. Ours is an age in which
omnipresent threats of imminent extinction are also part of the
background noise – nuclear annihilation, terrorism, climate change. So we can
be blinkered when it comes to tectonic cultural shifts. The omnipresent and
deadly threat to the novel has been imminent now for a long time – getting on,
I would say, for a century – and so it's become part of culture. During that
century, more books of all kinds have been printed and read by far
than in the entire preceding half millennium since the invention
of movable-type printing. If this was death it had a weird,
pullulating way of expressing itself. The saying is that there are no
second acts in American lives; the novel, I think, has led a very American sort
of life: swaggering, confident, brash even – and ever aware of its
world-conquering manifest destiny. But unlike Ernest Hemingway or F Scott
Fitzgerald, the novel has also had a second life. The form should have been
laid to rest at about the time of Finnegans
Wake,
but in fact it has continued to stalk the corridors of our minds for a further
three-quarters of a century. Many fine novels have been written during
this period, but I would contend that these were, taking the long view, zombie
novels, instances of an undead art form that yet wouldn't lie down.
Literary critics – themselves a dying breed, a cause for
considerable schadenfreude on the part of novelists – make all sorts of
mistakes, but some of the most egregious ones result from an inability to think
outside of the papery prison within which they conduct their lives' work.
They consider the codex. They are – in Marshall McLuhan's memorable phrase
– the possessors of Gutenberg minds.
There is now an almost ceaseless murmuring about the future of
narrative prose. Most of it is at once Panglossian and melioristic: yes,
experts assert, there's no disputing the impact of digitised text on the
whole culture of the codex; fewer paper books are being sold, newspapers fold,
bookshops continue to close, libraries as well. But … but, well, there's still
no substitute for the experience of close reading as we've come to
understand and appreciate it – the capacity to imagine entire worlds from
parsing a few lines of text; the ability to achieve deep and
meditative levels of absorption in others' psyches. This circling of the
wagons comes with a number of public-spirited campaigns: children are
given free books; book bags are distributed with slogans on them urging readers
to put books in them; books are hymned for their physical attributes –
their heft, their appearance, their smell – as if they were the bodily
correlates of all those Gutenberg minds, which, of course, they are.
The seeming realists among the Gutenbergers say such things as:
well, clearly, books are going to become a minority technology, but the beau livre will survive. The populist
Gutenbergers prate on about how digital texts linked to social media will allow
readers to take part in a public conversation. What none of the Gutenbergers
are able to countenance, because it is quite literally – for once the intensifier
is justified – out of their minds, is that the advent of digital media is
not simply destructive of the codex, but of the Gutenberg mind itself.
There is one question alone that you must ask yourself in order to establish
whether the serious novel will still retain cultural primacy and centrality in
another 20 years. This is the question: if you accept that by then the vast
majority of text will be read in digital form on devices linked to the web,
do you also believe that those readers will voluntarily choose to disable
that connectivity? If your answer to this is no, then the death of the
novel is sealed out of your own mouth.
We don't know when the form of reading that supported the rise
of the novel form began, but there were certain obvious and important way-stations.
We think of Augustine of Hippo coming upon Bishop Ambrose in his study and
being amazed to see the prelate reading silently while moving his lips. We can
cite the introduction of word spaces in seventh-century Ireland, and punctuation
throughout medieval Europe – then comes standardised spelling with the arrival
of printing, and finally the education reforms of the early 1900s, which meant
the British Expeditionary Force of 1914 was probably the first universally
literate army to take to the field. Just one of the ironies that danced macabre
attendance on this most awful of conflicts was that the conditions necessary
for the toppling of solitary and silent reading as the most powerful and
important medium were already waiting in the wings while Sassoon, Graves and
Rosenberg dipped their pens in their dugouts.
In Understanding
Media,
Marshall McLuhan writes about what he terms the "unified electrical
field". This manifestation of technology allows people to "hold"
and "release" information at a distance; it provides for
the instantaneous two‑way transmission of data; and
it radically transforms the relationship between producers and consumers –
or, if you prefer, writers and readers. If you read McLuhan without
knowing he was writing in the late 1950s, you could be forgiven for assuming he
was describing the interrelated phenomena of the web and the internet that are
currently revolutionising human communications. When he characterises
"the global village" as an omni-located community where vast
distances pose no barrier to the sharing of intimate trivia, it is hard not to
believe he himself regularly tweeted. In fact, McLuhan saw the electric light
and the telegraph as the founding technologies of the "unified electrical
field", and, rather than being uncommonly prescient, he believed all
the media necessary for its constitution – broadcast radio, film,
television, the telephone – were securely in place by the time of, say, the
publication of Finnegans Wake.
McLuhan, having enjoyed his regulation 15 minutes of fame in the
unified electrical field of the 1960s has fallen out of fashion; his
rigorous insistence that the content of any given medium is an irrelevance when
it comes to understanding its psychological impact is unpopular with the very
people who first took him up: cultural workers. No one likes to be told their
play/novel/poem/film/TV programme/concept double-album is wholly analysable in
terms of its means of transmission. Understanding Media tells us little about what media necessarily will arise, only
what impact on the collective psyche they must have. In the late 20th century,
a culture typified by a consumerist ethic was convinced that it – that we –
could have it all. This "having it all" was even ascribed its own
cultural era: the postmodern. We weren't overtaken by new technologies, we
simply took what we wanted from them and collaged these fragments together, using
the styles and modes of the past as a framework of ironic distancing: hence the
primacy of the message was reasserted over its medium.
The main objection to this is, I think, at once profoundly
commonsensical and curiously subtle. The literary critic Robert Adams observed
that if postmodernism was to be regarded as a genuine cultural era, then
it made modernism itself a strangely abbreviated one. After all, if we consider
that all other western cultural eras – classicism, medieval, the Renaissance –
seem to average about half a millennium a piece, it hardly matters whether
you date modernism's onset to Rousseau, Sturm und Drang or Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, it clearly still has a long way to
go. By the same token, if – as many seem keen to assert – postmodernism has already
run its course, then what should we say has replaced it, post-postmodernism,
perhaps? It would seem better all round to accept the truth, which is that we
are still solidly within the modernist era, and that the crisis registered in
the novel form in the early 1900s by the inception of new and more
powerful media technologies continues apace. The use of montage for transition;
the telescoping of fictional characters into their streams of consciousness;
the abandonment of the omniscient narrator; the inability to suspend disbelief
in the artificialities of plot – these were always latent in the problematic of
the novel form, but in the early 20th century, under pressure from other,
juvenescent, narrative forms, the novel began to founder. The polymorphous
multilingual perversities of the later Joyce, and the extreme existential
asperities of his fellow exile, Beckett, are both registered as authentic
responses to the taedium vitae of the form, and so accorded tremendous, guarded
respect – if not affection.
After Joyce, we continue to read; we read a great deal –
after all, that's what you do when you're wheeled out into the sun porch of a
care home: you read. You may find it difficult to concentrate, given the
vagaries of your own ageing Gutenberg mind, while your reading material itself
may also have a senescent feel, what with its greying stock and bleeding type –
the equivalent, in codex form, of old copies of the Reader's Digest left lying
around in dentists' waiting rooms. Yet read you do, closing your ears
obstinately to the nattering of radio and television, squinting so as to shut
out the bluey light from the screens that surround you, turning your head in
order to block out the agitation of your neighbours' fingers as they tweezer
info panels into being. I've often thought that western European socialism
survived as a credible ideological alternative up until 1989 purely because of
the Soviet counterexample: those on the left were able to point east and say, I
may not altogether know how socialism can be achieved, but I do know it's not
like this. So it was with the novel: we may not have known altogether how to
make it novel again, but we knew it couldn't go the way of Hollywood. Now film,
too, is losing its narrative hegemony, and so the novel – the cultural Greece
to its world-girdling Rome – is also in ineluctable decline.
I repeat: just because you're paranoid it doesn't mean they
aren't out to get you. When I finished my first work of fiction in 1990 and
went looking for a publisher, I was offered an advance of £1,700 for
a paperback original edition. I was affronted, not so much by the money
(although pro rata it meant I was being paid considerably less than I would
have working in McDonald's), but by not receiving the sanctification of hard covers.
The agent I consulted told me to accept without demur: it was, he said, nigh-on
impossible for new writers to get published – let alone paid. At that time the
reconfiguration of the medium was being felt through the ending of the Net Book
Agreement, the one-time price cartel that shored up publishers' profits by
outlawing retailer discounting. In retrospect, the ending of the agreement was
simply a localised example of a much wider phenomenon: the concertinaing
of the textual distribution network into a short, wide pipe. It would be
amusing to read the meliorism of the Panglosses if it weren't also so
irritating; writing a few months ago in the New Statesman, Nicholas Clee, a former editor of the
Bookseller, no less, surveyed all of the changes wrought by digital media
– changes that funnel together into the tumultuous wordstream
of Jeff Bezos's Amazon – before ending his excursus where he began,
with the best of all possible facts implying we were in the best of all
possible worlds: "I like," Clee wrote, "buying books
on Amazon."
Groucho Marx once said to a man with six children taking part in
his TV show: "I like my cigar, but I know when to take it out."
By the same token: I also like buying books on Amazon, but I'm under no
illusion that this means either the physical codex, or the novel – a form of
content specifically adapted to it – will survive as a result of my
preferences. Because I'm also very partial to sourcing digital texts from
Project Gutenberg, then wordsearching them for a quotation I want to use.
I like my typewriter as well, a Groma Kolibri manufactured in the German
Democratic Republic in the early 1960s, but I'm under no illusion
that it's anything but old technology. I switched to writing the first drafts
of my fictions on a manual typewriter about a decade ago because of the
inception of broadband internet. Even before this, the impulse to check email,
buy something you didn't need, or goggle at images of the unattainable was
there – but at least there was the annoying tocsin of dial-up connection
to awake you to your time-wasting. With broadband it became seamless: one
second you were struggling over a sentence, the next you were buying oven
gloves. Worse, if, as a writer, you reached an impasse where you couldn't
imagine what something looked or sounded like, the web was there to provide
instant literalism: the work of the imagination, which needs must be
fanciful, was at a few keystrokes reduced to factualism. All the opinions and
conceptions of the new media amount to nothing set beside the way they're
actually used.
While I may have registered the effect of digital media on my
sense perception, I by no means feel immune from them; on the contrary, I've
come to realise that the kind of psyche implicit in the production and
consumption of serious novels (which are what, after all, serious artists
produce), depends on a medium that has inbuilt privacy: we must all be
Ambroses. In a recent and rather less optimistic article
in the New Yorker on the Amazon phenomenon, George Packer acknowledges the
impact on the publishing industry of digital text: the decline in physical
sales; and the removal of what might be termed
the "gatekeepers", the editors and critics who sifted the great
ocean of literary content for works of value. He foresees a more polarised
world emerging: with big bestsellers commanding still more sales, while down
below the digital ocean seethes with instantly accessible and almost free
texts. Packer observes that this development parallels others in the neoliberal
economy, which sees market choice as the only human desideratum. The US court's
ruling against the big five publishers in the English-speaking world and in
favour of Amazon was predicated on this: their desperate attempt to resist
Amazon's imposition of punitive discounting constituted a price cartel. But,
really, this was only the latest skirmish in a long war; the battles of the
1990s, when both here and in the US chain bookstores began to gobble up the
independents, were part of the same conflict: one between the medium and the
message, and as I think I've already made clear, in the long run it's always
the medium that wins.
I've no doubt that a revenue stream for digitised factual text
will be established: information in this form is simply too useful for it not
to be assigned monetary value. It is novels that will be the victims of the
loss of effective copyright (a system of licensing and revenue collection
that depended both on the objective form of the text, and defined national
legal jurisdictions); novels and the people who write them. Fortunately,
institutions are already in existence to look after us. The creative writing
programmes burgeoning throughout our universities are exactly this; another way
of looking at them is that they're a self-perpetuating and self-financing
literary set-aside scheme purpose built to accommodate writers who can no
longer make a living from their work. In these care homes, erstwhile novelists
induct still more and younger writers into their own reflexive career paths, so
that in time they too can become novelists who cannot make a living from
their work and so become teachers of creative writing.
In case you think I'm exaggerating, I have just supervised
a doctoral thesis in creative writing: this consists in the submission
of a novel written by the candidate, together with a 35,000-word
dissertation on the themes explored by that novel. My student, although
having published several other genre works, and despite a number of
ringing endorsements from his eminent creative-writing teachers, has been
unable to find a publisher for this, his first serious novel. The
novel isn't bad – although nor is it Turgenev. The dissertation is interesting
– although it isn't a piece of original scholarship. Neither of
them will, in all likelihood, ever be read again after he has been
examined. The student wished to bring the date of his viva forward –
why? Well, so he could use his qualification to apply for a post teaching
– you guessed it – creative writing. Not that he's a neophyte: he
already teaches creative writing, he just wants to be paid more highly for
the midwifery of stillborn novels.
If you'll forgive a metaphoric ouroboros: it shouldn't surprise
us that this is the convulsive form taken by the literary novel during its
senescence; some of the same factors implicated in its extinction are also
responsible for the rise of the creative writing programme; specifically a
wider culture whose political economy prizes exchange value over use value, and
which valorises group consciousness at the expense of the individual mind.
Whenever tyro novelists ask me for career advice I always say the
same thing to them: think hard about whether you wish to spend anything up
to 20 or 30 years of your adult life in solitary confinement; if you don't
like the sound of that silence, abandon the idea right away. But nowadays many
people who sign up for creative-writing programmes have only the dimmest
understanding of what's actually involved in the writing life; the programme
offers them comity and sympathetic readers for their fledgling efforts – it
acts, it essence, as a therapy group for the creatively misunderstood. What
these people are aware of – although again, usually only hazily – is that
some writers have indeed had it all; if by this is meant that they are
able to create as they see fit, and make a living from what they produce. In
a society where almost everyone is subject to the appropriation of their
time, and a vast majority of that time is spent undertaking work that has
little human or spiritual value, the ideal form of the writing life appears
gilded with a sort of wonderment. The savage irony is that even as these
aspirants sign up for the promise of such a golden career, so the possibility
of their actually pursuing it steadily diminishes; a still more savage irony
is that the very form their instruction takes militates against the
culture of the texts they desire to produce. WB Yeats attributed to his
father the remark that "Poetry is the social act of the solitary
man"; with the creative-writing programmes and the Facebook links embedded
in digitised texts encouraging readers to "share" their insights,
writing and reading have become the solitary acts of social beings. And we all
know how social beings tend to regard solitary acts – as perversities, if not
outright perversions.
As I said at the outset: I believe the serious novel will
continue to be written and read, but it will be an art form on a par with easel
painting or classical music: confined to a defined social and demographic
group, requiring a degree of subsidy, a subject for historical scholarship
rather than public discourse. The current resistance of a lot of the
literate public to difficulty in the form is only a subconscious response to
having a moribund message pushed at them. As a practising novelist, do I feel
depressed about this? No, not particularly, except on those occasions when I
breathe in too deeply and choke on my own decadence. I've no intention of
writing fictions in the form of tweets or text messages – nor do I see my
future in computer-games design. My apprenticeship as a novelist has
lasted a long time now, and I still cherish hopes of eventually qualifying.
Besides, as the possessor of a Gutenberg mind, it is quite impossible for
me to foretell what the new dominant narrative art form will be – if, that
is, there is to be one at all.
What I can do is observe my canary: he doesn't read much in the
way of what I'd call serious novels, but there's no doubting that he's alive,
breathing deep of a rich and varied culture, and shows every sign of being a
very intelligent and thoughtful songbird. On that basis, I think it's
safe for us both to go on mining.
• This is an edited version of this
year's Richard Hillary memorial lecture, which will be given by Will Self
on 6 May at the Gulbenkian theatre, St Cross Building, Oxford.
** **
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