Literary

Is the Novel Still Dying?

/ Mark W. Tiedemann / 4 Comments

In 1955, Normal Mailer was declaring the death of the novel. A bit more than a decade later, it was John Barth’s turn.  There have now been a string of writers of a certain sort who clang the alarm and declare the imminent demise of the novel, the latest being a selection of former enfants terrible like Jonathan Franzen and David Foster Wallace.

Philip Roth did so a few years back, adding that reading is declining in America.  The irony of this is that he made such claims at a time when polls suggested exactly the opposite, as more people were reading books in 2005 (as percentage of adult population) than ever before.  In my capacity as one-time president of the Missouri Center for the Book I was happily able to address a group of bright adolescents with the fact that reading among their demographic had, for the first time since such things had been tracked, gone precipitously up in 2007.

And yet in a recent piece in the Atlantic, we see a rogues’ gallery of prominent literateurs making the claim again that the novel is dying and the art of letters is fading and we are all of us doomed.

Say what you will about statistics, such a chasm between fact and the claims of those one might expect to know has rarely been greater.  The Atlantic article goes on to point out that these are all White Males who seem to be overlooking the product of everyone but other White Males.  To a large extent, this is true, but it is also partly deceptive.  I seriously doubt if directly challenged any of them would say works by Margaret Atwood or Elizabeth Strout fall short of any of the requirements for vital, relevant fiction at novel length.  I doubt any of them would gainsay Toni Morrison, Mat Johnson, or David Anthony Durham.

But they might turn up an elitist lip at Octavia Butler, Samuel R. Delany, Tannarive Due, Nalo Hopkinson, Walter Mosley, or, for that matter, Dennis Lehane, William Gibson, and Neal Stephenson (just to throw some White Males into the mix as comparison).  Why?

Genre.

The declaration back in the 1950s that “the novel is dead” might make more sense if we capitalize The Novel.  “The Novel”—the all-encompassing, universal work that attempts to make definitive observations and pronouncements about The Human Condition has been dead since it was born, but because publishing was once constrained by technology and distribution to publishing a relative handful of works in a given year compared to today, it seemed possible to write the Big Definitive Book.  You know, The Novel.

Since the Fifties, it has become less and less possible to do so, at least in any self-conscious way.  For one thing, the Fifties saw the birth of the cheap paperback, which changed the game for many writers working in the salt mines of the genres.  The explosion of inexpensive titles that filled the demand for pleasurable reading (as opposed to “serious” reading) augured the day when genre would muscle The Novel completely onto the sidelines and eventually create a situation in which the most recent work by any self-consciously “literary” author had to compete one-on-one with the most recent work by the hot new science fiction or mystery author.

(We recognize today that Raymond Chandler was a wonderful writer, an artist, “despite” his choice of detective fiction.  No one would argue that Ursula K. Le Guin is a pulp writer because most of her work has been science fiction or fantasy.  But it is also true that the literary world tries to coopt such writers by remaking them into “serious” authors who “happened” to be writing in genre, trying ardently to hold back the idea that genre can ever be the artistic equivalent of literary fiction.)

The Novel is possible only in a homogenized culture.  Its heyday would have been when anything other than the dominant (white, male-centric, protestant) cultural model was unapologetically dismissed as inferior.  As such, The Novel was as much a meme supporting that culture as any kind of commentary upon it, and a method of maintaining a set of standards reassuring the keepers of the flame that they had a right to be snobs.

Very few of Those Novels, I think, survived the test of time.

And yet we have, always, a cadre of authors who very much want to write The Novel and when it turns out they can’t, rather than acknowledge that the form itself is too irrelevant to sustain its conceits at the level they imagine for it, they blame the reading public for bad taste.

If the function of fiction (one of its function, a meta-function, if you will) is to tell us who we are today, then just looking around it would seem apparent that the most relevant fiction today is science fiction.  When this claim was made back in the Sixties, those doing what they regarded as serious literature laughed.  But in a world that has been qualitatively as well as quantitatively changed by technologies stemming from scientific endeavors hardly imagined back then, it gets harder to laugh this off.  (Alvin Tofler, in his controversial book Future Shock, argued that science fiction would become more and more important because it taught “the anticipation of change” and buffered its devotees from the syndrome he described, future shock.)

Does this mean everyone should stop writing anything else and just do science fiction?  Of course not.  Science fiction is not The Novel.  But it is a sign of where relevance might be found.  Society is not homogeneous (it never was, but there was a time we could pretend it was) and the fragmentation of fiction into genre is a reflection that all the various groups comprising society see the world in different ways, ways which often converge and coalesce, but which nevertheless retain distinctive perspectives and concerns.

A novel about an upper middle class white family disagreeing over Thanksgiving Dinner is not likely to overwhelm the demand for fiction that speaks to people who do not experience that as a significant aspect of their lives.

A similar argument can be made for the continual popularity and growing sophistication of the crime novel.  Genre conventions become important in direct proportion to the recognition of how social justice functions, especially in a world with fracturing and proliferating expectations.

Novel writing is alive and well and very healthy, thank you very much, gentlemen.  It just doesn’t happen to be going where certain self-selected arbiters of literary relevance think it should be going.  If they find contemporary literary fiction boring, the complaint should be aimed at the choice of topic or the lack of perception on the part of the writer, not on any kind of creeping morbidity in the fiction scene.

Besides, exactly what is literary fiction?  A combination of craft, salient observation, artistic integrity, and a capacity to capture truth as it reveals itself in story?  As a description, that will do.

But then what in that demands that the work eschew all attributes that might be seen as genre markers?

What this really comes down to, I suspect, is a desire on the part of certain writers to be some day named in the same breath with their idols, most of whom one assumes are long dead and basically 19th Century novelists.  Criticizing the audiences for not appreciating what they’re trying to offer is not likely to garner that recognition.

On the other hand, most of those writers—I’m thinking Dickens, Dumas, Hugo, Hardy, and the like—weren’t boring.  And some of the others—Sabatini, Conan Doyle, Wells—wrote what would be regarded today as genre.

To be fair, it may well be that writers today find it increasingly difficult to address the moving target that is modern culture.  It is difficult to write coherently about a continually fragmenting and dissolving landscape.  The speed of change keeps going up.  If such change were just novelty, and therefore essentially meaningless, then it might not be so hard, but people are being forced into new constellations of relationships and required to reassess standards almost continually, with information coming to them faster and faster, sometimes so thickly it is difficult to discern shape or detail.  The task of making pertinent and lasting observations about such a kaleidoscopic view is daunting.

To do it well also requires that that world be better understood almost down to its blueprints, which are also being redrafted all the time.

That, however, would seem to me to be nothing but opportunity to write good fiction.

But it won’t be The Novel.

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Addendum:  When I posted this, I was challenged about my claim that Mailer said any such thing. Some suggested Philip Roth, others went back even further, but as it turns out, I have been unable to track down who said exactly what and when. Yet this is a stray bit of myth that refuses to die.  Someone at sometime said (or quoted someone saying, or paraphrased something ) that the Novel Is Dying and it persists.  It has become its own thing, and finding who did—or did not—say it may be problematic at best.  It is nonetheless one of those things that seems accepted in certain circles.  It would be helpful if someone could pin it down, one way or the other.

Persistent Ghosts

/ Mark W. Tiedemann / Leave a comment

Recently I read two novels that, after some thought, work as examples of effective and ineffective sequels.  I confess up front I’m stretching things to make a point here and I in no way recommend a similar reading strategy.  I’m indulging myself in this in order to explain something.

I haven’t read Philip Roth since Portnoy’s Complaint came out in paperback.  Yes, I read it that long ago and, yes, I was probably far too young for it.  My impression of it at the time is hard to recapture, but it left me kind of stunned.  For one, I hadn’t encountered that kind of writing before (not even in some of the porn magazines I’d snuck into the house) and to see it in something on any best seller list was a shock to my 13-year-old psyche.  For another, the self-conscious analysis of an adolescent “matter in transition” surprised me.  I’m not sure it helped or just made me feel that the malaise in which I found myself then (and for a few years to come) was inevitable, which was depressing.

For whatever reason, I never went back to Roth.  From time to time I’ve thought that might have been a mistake.  He’s a Big Deal and maybe I’ve missed something.

So a month or so back I found a couple of used copies of his later novels, picked them up, and the first one I read was Exit Ghost.  For those who’ve kept up, of course, this is one of the ending books in his ongoing Zuckerman series.  From this novel, I gather Zuckerman is a kind of alter-ego for Roth himself.  A famous and successful writer (they aren’t always the same thing) moving through the travails of his fame and success, observing with his writer’s eye the changing landscapes around him.

In this one, Zuckerman has been living as an isolate in the country for several years, especially after prostate surgery which has left him both incontinent and impotent.  He returns to New York on the promise of a new procedure that may at least address his incontinence.  Roth vividly allows the reader to feel the misery of Zuckerman’s condition.  While in New York, Zuckerman meets a young couple who wish to leave (this is the aftermath year of 9/11) for some place Not New York, and offer to swap their apartment for his cabin for a year.

Zuckerman falls headlong into lust for the wife.

He begins working on a fictionalized treatment of their potential liaison, cleverly counterpointing it with what actually happens, at least in their conversations, which he (fictionally) idealizes.  The fictional treatment makes her more self-possessed and himself cleverer.  While all this is going on, Zuckerman finds himself dealing with resurrected ghosts of his literary (and erotic) past and the fact that he no longer knows how to function in this New York after having been away so long.

The writing is beautiful.  There are sentences here superbly crafted, achingly fraught with meaning.  I can see why Philip Roth is considered so highly.

But there is, in the end, only one ghost present which is seeking exit.  Portnoy.  It seems he is still writing about the problems of wanting to get laid, not getting laid, and wishing ardently to not feel guilty about either condition.  Fifty plus years after my last Philip Roth novel, I find that the work is still, at least in part, about the same things.  At least, in this instance.

Portnoy, however, is rather pathetic as a ghost.  He doesn’t disturb much other than the memory of erections no longer possible.  He moves around in the ruins of what was once a vital life, trying to find a way of accepting things as they are, not quite succeeding, and changing nothing.

Tim Powers, however, gives us much more tangible—and dangerous—ghosts in his Hide Me Among The Graves, which is at least a thematic sequel to his The Stress of Her Regard.  As in the previous novel, Powers gives us vampires, but not of the usual sort.  Powers’ vampires are not half-rotted corpses rising, undead, from graves, former humans with a thirst for their living cousins’ blood and a desire to replicate themselves.  Rather, Powers gives us the Nephilim, the remnants of a race that once dominated the Earth before the rise of the oyxgen-breathing, fast-living creatures of a Cambrian eco-system with no place for silicate-based life.  For Powers, these holdovers are the Lamiae, and they feed on iron and love in a grotesque symbiosis, one byproduct of which is artistic brilliance.  Among their captive suitors are Lord Byron, Percy Shelley, John Keats, Coleridge.

With their attention comes madness and the destruction of all competitors for the obsessive love they seem to crave.  Long life, genius, and ultimately a kind of moral corruption that ends up justifying any destruction in the name of…

Well, continuation, really.  These are ghosts that seek actively to persist.

While they come from outside the psyché, they are profoundly dependent on it.  On the willingness of their human partners, on their devotion, their protection, really, and therefore, for Powers, everything comes down to a matter of will.

In The Stress of Her Regard, the artistic center is represented by Byron and Shelley.  In this new novel, that center is the Rossettis—Dante Gabriel and Christina, specifically, with Swindburne as a sort of fifth wheel who learns about the lamiae and very much wants their attention, pining for the brilliance that results from it.

And as in the previous novel, it is those on the sidelines who are instrumental in ending the possessions of the ghosts.

As in the Roth, sex is very much at the heart of the infection.  There is spiritual V.D. in the relations Powers depicts.  We all bring our ghosts along to bed with us, but in the case of the Nephilim these are ghosts with lingering, almost incurable consequences.  And yet, celibacy is no guarantor of health.  Those with whom one’s cousin sleeps could kill you just because.

The brilliance that is a symptom of their infection strikes one as kin to the apparent genius unlocked by syphilis, as in people like Nietzsche. 

Powers’ ghosts move amid ruins as well, in this case the ancient tumbledowns of a London burned by Boadicea, who is herself become one of the Nephilim.  The new London often seems not much more than an incipient ruin itself as the protagonists, John Crawford and Adelaide McKee—both collateral damage in their own ways of the bigger game being played among these ancient monsters—strive to defeat them so they can save their daughter and try to have something like a normal life in which simple love dominates.

In this, Powers shows us a place of solace, a resolution, a condition wherein the ghosts can quieten finally, and peace has a chance to succeed.  The ghosts are recognizably Outside and putting them back outside offers a chance to go on wholly according to one’s self will.

Roth, on the other hand, shows us someone whose ghosts are completely of his own contrivance who treats them as if they are (or should be) something Outside—that can be run from, hidden from, denied.  The failure to recognize them for what they are—ultimately failures of will—condemns Zuckerman to a sophisticated kind of adolescent denial of reality.  Success—however it is defined, no matter how modest—is impossible.

In this, curiously, there is one other similarity between the subtexts of the two works, and that is that genius can be a trap.  What we might sacrifice for it can cut us off from kinder choices, saner trajectories, blind us to certain obvious realities, and give us a justification to cause harm without acknowledging that its expression, too, is a matter of will.  Powers, of the two, shows us clearly that genius is no excuse for embracing monsters or giving our lives over to ghosts.  I’m not altogether sure Roth would accept that formulation.

Veering Into The Present

/ Mark W. Tiedemann / Leave a comment

An attractive pitfall of popular history is the Pivotal Moment.  The writer centers on an event or an idea that signals a shift in the course of history, leading somewhere other than where it had been heading.  The Donation of Constantine, the First Crusade,  the invention of moveable type, Galileo’s confrontation with the Church, Newton’s codification of the law of gravity, things like that.  The point being made is that these events are so tectonic that Everything Changes.

The pitfall is not so much that they are wrong but that they are taken as solely responsible, isolated moments, forks in the road.  It is easy to ignore or forget everything else around them.  Focusing only on the Emperor Constantine can suggest that without him, Christianity might not have become the official religion of Rome and thus history might have taken a different course.  (Personally, I think Constantine’s moving the capital of the empire east was far more significant as something he alone could have done, or caused to be done.)  It overlooks the fact that Christianity had become a tremendous movement by then.  Had Constantine been of a mind to resist it, he might have delayed its ascension for another emperor, but it would have become what it did in any event.  Constantine was being politically astute.  (After all, he left Rome to the Church even as he moved the center of imperial power to the new city of Constantinople.  It’s telling that he chose to isolate them geographically.)  The Crusades were important as expressions of political currents leading to a contraction of Rome’s vision of itself and certainly set the stage for subsequent events in the Levant, but not even the death of Richard the Lionheart changed all that much in even British history.

Newton might be arguably more important, at least for the calculus, but such things were in the wind.  Leibniz, rival and competitor to Newton, invented a calculus, and while the debate goes on as to who was first and which was better, such a mathematical tool was going to emerge.

Picking pivotal events, therefore, is a challenge.  Placing them in context is a duty and one it is often tempting to underplay.  It makes a better story if the singular event is the hero, as it were.  But it can sometimes make for bad history.

Stephen Greenblatt avoids that problem admirably in The Swerve: How The World Became Modern.  Even though the title is a bit hyperbolic and suggests the kind of history more consistent with a tabloid approach, what one finds within it first-rate history written for a general audience about a rather arcane subject:  the way ideas can change entire cultures.

The story is about the discovery of a manuscript, De Natura Rerum, an epic poem by the Roman Lucretius (99 B.C.E. to 55 B.C.E.), an acolyte of Epicurean philosophy who died just before Rome became an Empire instead of a Republic.  De Natura Rerum—“On the Nature of Things”—is a a surprising work in that it espouses ideas which we think of now as wholly modern.  That the universe is composed of atoms, that time and space are unbounded, that life evolves, that matter is all there is.  If one squints, one sees the foundational ideas of contemporary physics in all this.  Physics and cosmology.

But it continued on to suggest that pleasure is the highest moral purpose, that doing that in life that increases one’s pleasure and the pleasure of those around us, is the primary aim of a moral life.

It’s easy to see how this might run afoul the kind of moral philosophy that has dominated Western culture since before the rise of Christianity.  But Lucretius was not advocating hedonism, but the more constrained program of Epicurus, the 4th Century B.C.E.  Greek philosopher who advocated philosophy based on the two standards of ataraxia and aponia, namely peace and freedom from fear (ataraxia) and the absence of pain (aponia).  To do this, one must lead a self-sufficient life surrounded by friends and occupying the mind with constructive and pleasing contemplations and treating the body to that which brings pleasure.  Though the name has been linked to self-indulgence, hedonistic abandon, and all the ills of unrestrained pleasure-seeking, what Epicurus had in mind was something very different, and defined by moderation.  The kind of self-indulgence we assume attends such a life he did not see as peaceful, pleasurable, or free from pain.

He also believed that when we die, nothing survives.  The soul is an aspect of our physical existence like anything else and fades to nothing once the container ceases to function.

Lucretius wrote a poem of purportedly great beauty in support of this philosophy.

It is a common misapprehension that the Greco-Roman world of that time would have embraced all this eagerly.  The fact is, Christianity rather easily took root in the Roman Empire because it bore much in common with ordinary Roman morality.  Epicurus was almost as disdained under the Caesars as his ideas were later despised under the popes.  Christianity succeeded largely because of its commonalities with pagan culture, a culture which found Epicurean ideas almost as off-putting as any later devout Catholic might.

A culture which fully embraced the spiritual side of attitudes toward the material world that relegated this life to a condition of transient, burdensome necessity, pain, and suffering which must be borne with the faith and dignity of an acolyte who seeks a better existence in an afterlife, fully convinced that nothing in this realm matters.  A culture that had no use for the idea of atoms, that believed the universe to be bound tightly in a very local set of spheres, and with a time limit on its existence that was easily comprehensible—a few thousands of years.  People wanted the comfort of believing existence to be closely bound, finite, with a way out.

Lucretius’ poem faded from memory.  Rome’s collapse was as much a result of neglect as of catastrophe, and by the 9th century, much of the written legacy was sequestered in monasteries, scattered, mouldering, often ignored, certainly unstudied.  It required that civilization rise back to a certain material level before interest in ideas, old manuscripts, and the past could matter.

Enter Poggio Bracciolini, Florentine, scholar, humanist.

Humanist meant something a bit different in the 14th and 15th centuries than it does today, but it is possible to see the connection.  Poggio was one of that group of avid collectors who scoured the monastic libraries for old books.  Most of them were copies of even older books, the remnants of a vast ancient world epitomized by the Library of Alexandria, most of which seemed to offer glimpses into a Golden Age.  Aristotle had long been seen as the basis for rationalizing certain troublesome aspects of Christian theology.  The flood of recovered books from the Reconquista has been both benefit to a slowly recovering European civilization and troublesome bane to a Church that saw itself as the final arbiter of what it was proper to know, to consider, to believe.

Poggio worked for a succession of popes.  In his “spare” time, he hunted manuscripts, and helped return them to circulation.  He found Lucretius’ tome in Germany, a 9th century copy.  According to Greenblatt, he may not even have realized what it was.  He’d only heard it mentioned with respect and some reverence in other ancient manuscripts.

The Swerve reveals the events surrounding the poem’s creation, loss, rediscovery, and subsequent dissemination throughout a culture that was on the verge of becoming something other than what it had been.  The ideas embraced in the eloquent lines are ideas with which we are more than familiar today.  Indeed, they are common coin in debates on the right and the good and resonate in the foundations of modern science.  Greenblatt suggests that it was this book—its reintroduction to a wide audience—that caused the veer into what has become a secular civilization.

He is careful, however, to contextualize his assertions.  Something like this, it seems, would have had to be invented if it hadn’t been found.  Its arrival at the onset of the Renaissance was fortuitous.  Coming along when it did—when science was beginning to coalesce out of the mish-mash of alchemy and reactions to Aristotelianism, when people like Bruno, Galileo, Newton, and many others were present to respond—hastened events, gave focus to certain schools of thought, fed the furnace that was recasting conceptualizations of nature and the universe.  It lent the weight of a more complete philosophical conception to the fragmented components of what would one day become the modern world.

It is perhaps surprising (and somewhat disillusioning) that the arguments spawned by De Natura Rerum are still being waged today.  Reading Greenblatt’s examination of the central ideas of the poem and the subsequent responses to it is itself a lesson in historical context, because we can look around and find exactly the same kinds of debates—and sometimes bitter battles—going on around us.

But it is also encouraging.  Ideas survive.  People keep them alive, even over centuries, millennia.  Greenblatt is, in his own way, continuing that fragile, necessary, and yet astonishingly powerful tradition, passing on to the future what is important not only for today but what has been important all along.

A Country Of Distant Voices

/ Mark W. Tiedemann / 2 Comments

In the opening scene of his new novel, And the Mountains Echoed,  Khaled Hosseini shows an Afghan father telling his children a story. The story is about life’s fragility in the face of an unpredictable and unnegotiable universe, the loss of children, and the tenacity of memory. In the story, the father is offered a choice—having a lost child returned to him to live a life he knows will never be more than difficult, often harsh, or leaving the child in the relative paradise to which it had been spirited while the father is granted the gift of forgetfulness, so he might return home with no memory of loss. The father chooses the latter.

But all around him, when he returns, memory remains, part of the landscape, continually troubling his life with fleeting moments of doubt about something he cannot name.

He has left his memories far away, in the mountains.  But the mountains are always there.

So, it turns out, are the memories, recognized or not. The real mountains in the novel are the tectonic accumulations of intersecting lives, which in some ways seem to have no real point to their connections, but over time—generations, really—build into massively instantiating forms, repositories of meaning.  Some of these characters climb over them, others live at their roots, still others move away from them, trying to lessen their dominance. But every word they speak echoes back laden with the textures of their beginnings.

The novel begins with the story of Abdullah and Pari, brother and sister who share a deep bond. Pari collects bird feather in a tin box, feathers Abdullah helps gather for her, and their playground is the village of Shadbagh. Life is crushingly hard for their parents. The father is a laborer. His first wife, Abdullah’s and Pari’s mother, died giving birth to Pari. His second wife has given him another son, Iqballah. Her brother, Nabi, lives in Kabul, the personal servant to a man of wealth who is married to  a woman more at home in Parisian society than in her native Afghanistan. The necessities and desires of these people bring them into association with each other in the most unexpected way, resulting in the separation of Abdullah and Pari.

Thus the series of separations which are the echoes of the novel.

Pari is taken into her new home, much too young for the memories of her time spent with Abdullah to be retained in other than a lifelong sense of hollowness.  The woman who becomes her mother is a poet, herself severed from the connections to home and family that might supply a sense of welcome in the world through which she moves.  Talented, beautiful, she is nevertheless a refugee even in her own country.  When her husband suffers a stroke, she takes the opportunity to flee, back to Paris.  With Pari, who over time forgets almost everything and is left with a persistent feeling of separation she cannot quite explain or ignore.

The trajectories all these people follow seem at a glance to have little to do with each other, even though certain events lie at the start of their paths.  Their lives settle into orbits that are tethered by those events, and no matter how far they go or where they settle in, a constellation forms of which each of them represents the rough boundary of a country that, while it seems to have no place on any map, claims them as native.  The echoes from that initiating event form the borders.

Which makes And the Mountains Echoed an exploration of that country, through the eyes of its unwitting inhabitants, all of whom, regardless of their point of origin, are native to a specific topography, bound by common experiences—of loss, abandonment, and escape.  He takes us on an expedition of a place of which the only maps are in the psyches of its residents.  Along the way he works a variation on the old aphorism “You can never go home” by showing that, in profound ways, we never leave it.

On another level, there is a very real country at the center of these explorations. Hosseini is writing, as always, about Afghanistan—its wonders, its tragedies, its costs, and its possibilities.  It is, he seems to tell us, a land of incredible potential, but to date the only possibility to realize it is for those with the talents and will to leave it, go where their particular gifts—themselves—can manifest, beyond the overwhelming gravity of a past that too often has no history of a future, no memory of what could be different that is not bound up in forgetting.

Like the story Abdullah’s and Pari’s father tells at the start.

At least one of his characters recognizes the innate conflict:

It saddens me because of what it reveals to me about Mama’s own neediness, her own anxiety, her feat of loneliness, her dread of being stranded, abandoned.  And what does it say about me that I know this about my mother, that I know precisely what she needs and yet how deliberately and unswervingly I have denied her, taking care to keep an ocean, a continent—or, preferably, both—between us for the better part of three decades?

Hosseini writes with an unflinching clarity of what Afghanistan is, tempered by hope for what it could be.  It is not that this potential Afghanistan does not exist—it does, he shows us, just not there.  It exists in the imaginations of those who have left and are nevertheless citizens of the country of their heart. That country is nascent in the echoes that will some day return from their journey.