Why Do We Always Proclaim That the Novel Is Dead?
Each week in Bookends, two writers take on questions about the world of books. This week, Liesl Schillinger and Benjamin Moser talk about why the novel’s demise so regularly looms.
By Liesl Schillinger
They proclaim the novel’s death in part to whip up their resolve to effect its resurrection.
As a college student in the 1980s whose major was comparative literature, I had no choice but to take a course on literary theory: It was required. The smug bloviator who taught it told us that the defining characteristic of the written word was its inability to express meaning. The act of reading a novel, which I had previously regarded as a natural process, as organic as breathing, was actually a battle in which words engulfed readers, fuddling our wits and scattering the import of the text. Truth, he added, deploying Nietzsche, was a mobile army of metaphor, metonym and anthropomorphisms . . . without a general. He himself, he said, would be that general.
Those who tell us that the novel is dead remind me of that professor. They want to assert that they alone possess the knowledge of what writing is for, what it means and how it is received. They want to be the “deciders.” It’s a conceited impulse, but it isn’t necessarily ill intentioned. Their pronouncements are made, I believe, from a position of urgent sincerity that often has two separate foundations. One is nostalgia: They yearn to find in contemporary literature the strong resonance they felt with the books that first shaped their sensibilities. The other is ambition: They themselves intend to write a novel that will show others what proper writing is.
When nostalgia motivates these arbiters, I suspect it reflects a longing not so much for a bygone book as for a bygone era, in which human connections supposedly formed with a denser weave than they do today. They feel that life itself is less adequate than before, thus less worthy of being novelized. Like Edwin Arlington Robinson’s Miniver Cheevy, they mourn, “Romance, now on the town, / And Art, a vagrant.” Yet the roundness and fullness of life persists on the street and on the page, despite the pining writer’s dudgeon.
When it is ambition that motivates them, they proclaim the novel’s death in part to whip up their resolve to effect its resurrection. They fail to perceive the profusion of richly realized fictional worlds that rise around them; or if they see them, discount them. In 1996, in his brilliant, tortured essay in Harper’s Magazine about the “disintegration of the very notion of a literary character” and the murder of the social novel (ambushed by the “hyperkinesis of modern life” and finished off by television), Jonathan Franzen made a grim calculation of how few books he was likely to read in his lifetime, given the slim crop he had managed to read in 1992. The product was a “three-digit” number, which meant the stakes for each choice were high. And it was impossible to know if the titles would be read “10 years down the line” — the “only practical standard” for distinguishing greatness from “schlock.” Nineteen ninety-two saw the publication of novels by Michael Ondaatje, Nicholson Baker, Cormac McCarthy, Toni Morrison, Ian McEwan, P.D. James, Richard Price, Susan Sontag, Paul Auster and Günter Grass, among others. Their books are still being read not just 10 but 20 years on.
It is true that literary excellence, taken as a percentage of total output, is not high. But was it ever? The demoralization that comes from assessing contemporary literary creation en bloc can be avoided by admiring the standouts. My favorite essayist, José Ortega y Gasset, made that point in 1925 in “Notes on the Novel.” “Today, in the great hour of the decline of the genre, good novels and poor ones differ very much indeed,” he wrote. This filled him with perverse optimism. As “average specimens” become more abundant, “works of highest rank” become more visible. The novel, he declared, is “one of the few fields that may still yield illustrious fruits, more exquisite ones perhaps than were ever garnered in previous harvests.”
In my view, the field of literature has thrived even more than Ortega predicted, strengthened by the novel’s new hybrid varieties. It is not a battlefield; it is an orchard, and its boughs are heavy with fruit.
Liesl Schillinger is a New York–based critic, translator, and moderator. She studied comparative literature at Yale, worked at The New Yorker for more than a decade and became a regular contributor to The New York Times Book Review in 2004. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The New Yorker, Vogue, Foreign Policy, and other publications. She is the author of “Wordbirds: An Irreverent Lexicon for the 21st Century,” and her translations include the novels “Every Day, Every Hour,” by Natasa Dragnic, and “The Lady of the Camellias,” by Alexandre Dumas, fils.
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By Benjamin Moser
The death of the novel is a rhetorical motif — all the more venerable for never having produced a corpse.
“Dying is an art,” Sylvia Plath declared: “I do it exceptionally well.” Like a great diva known for the gasping way she expires, night after night — only to replace her hair, clamber to her feet and take her curtain calls — the novel has been dying so well, and for so long, that death has become an indispensable part of its repertoire. The fakeness of the death in no way subtracts from the performance.
As at the opera, we are, in discussing “the death of the novel,” in the realm of art. In the realm of fact, we no more expect novels to stop rolling off the presses than we expect the singer to be evacuated from the theater in a hearse. A novel is a book. “The novel” is a discourse, and the death of the novel a rhetorical motif — all the more venerable for never having produced a corpse.
But to say this is to avoid the question of why there is a question. Since Rimbaud, a characteristic of literature has been contempt for literature. As popularized by Futurists, Surrealists and Dadaists, the contempt came from an idea that the novel was a 19th-century form, “19th-century” meaning “bourgeois” — and bourgeois, in turn, meaning anything lame and fusty.
As in Marxism, from which the word “bourgeois” acquired these overtones, there was, at the base of this discourse, an idea of progress. To read Madame de La Fayette’s “La Princesse de Clèves,” published in 1678, is to find characters as stylized and unmoving as on a frieze. To read Henry James’s “Daisy Miller,” published in 1878, is to find characters that are all movement, all “real life.”
The idea that novels increasingly reflected life was derived from the scientific approach to art history, which saw figures liberated from stony cathedrals and golden backgrounds and clad in increasingly believable flesh. That evolution was real, and the heroic 19th-century novelists — Balzac, Dickens, Dostoyevsky — produced portraits not only of individuals but of entire societies.
In the 20th century, progress halted. The societies writers were meant to portray either changed radically or collapsed entirely. If even the most awful events of the 19th century seemed amenable to literary form, the trenches and the gas chambers of the 20th century seemed quite deliberately to refuse any attempt at aestheticization: to refuse even language itself.
So the old novel was indeed dead. But that was “the novel.” Novels themselves were so resilient that by the 20th century, the word had almost lost its meaning. What do the 3,000-something pages of Marcel Proust’s “In Search of Lost Time” have to do with the 80-some pages of Clarice Lispector’s “Água Viva”? Both are great modernist novels. And there the resemblance ends.
A novel could, like Proust’s, have a plot and characters. Or, like Lispector’s, it could have neither. This flexibility was not invented in the 20th century. (What is “Moby-Dick” “about”?) Those books are modern because their authors were, and they proved that what makes a novel is not some fixed principle but a novelist: a person who, like anyone else, changes with the times — and dies.
As long as there are painters, there are paintings; as long as there are musicians, there is music. The paintings we see, the music we hear, are not things that Madame de La Fayette would have recognized as such. Neither are the novels that we read. But that does not mean they have improved, any more than music or painting have improved since the days of Mozart and Rembrandt.
A novel does not reflect life: It is life. Ideologies die, including ideologies of progress and definitions of “the novel.” As they fall away, what remains is the quality of the life inside a book: its beauty. Though their authors are as dead as the times that produced them, “La Princesse de Clèves” is beautiful, and so is “Água Viva,” and so is “Moby-Dick”; and it is their beauty that makes them live.
Benjamin Moser is the author of “Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector,” a finalist for the National Book Critics’ Circle Award, and the general editor of the new translations of Clarice Lispector at New Directions. A former New Books columnist at Harper’s Magazine, he is currently writing the authorized biography of Susan Sontag. He lives in the Netherlands.