Animals Wait on Winter; Writers on Decline (?) of Novel

Respite from the election

Wild turkey on the Konza at dawn. Photo Sophie Westbrook. Konza is one of the many spellings for the “People of the South Wind,” after whom Kansas is named. This stretch of prairie is managed by Kansas State, where Sophie is a biologist.

Greetings, friends and colleagues,

Sometimes it’s good to remember that this news cycle is unlikely to be all that crucial. This election matters, but I doubt the folks involve understand, much less are in a position to address, our crucial problems. We’ve had some snow, here in the high country, snow which still melts. I’m in a nightmarish fight over a difficult book, and have taken a few hours to talk to computer scientists and send you pictures of animals. Transitional time. The light is low, the brights and darks can be stunning. For an image theme, I was going to do something fancy with light/dark/dusk, maybe next time. For now, I went with some recent images of animals, some our daughter’s, some mine, instead.

Last week I wrote a small poem, which raised an interesting little problem.

Late Fall

Cold rain finally.
The peaks dusted,
fire risk down.
We all wait.
People start fires
against the chill.

I originally wrote “People” as “The men.” I was making a fire as the weather drew in, fires around here are set by men, etc. So that’s how the poem came to me, and “the men” had a sort of Kipling-esque ring to it, as an animal might speak of men. The problem was that if “men” were setting the fires, then “we all” would be read as “men, women, and children,” in the minds of most readers. And what I wanted was “we animals, all waiting on the winter.” That seemed the more important meaning, even if it required the somewhat anodyne “people.” Not entirely sure I got it right.

Feeding the fuzzy cows (bison) on the Konza. Image Sophie Westbrook.

Is the novel gone? What do writers think?

Not so long ago,

Ted Gioia

posted The Decline of the Novel: It's Worse than You Think.  He used Amazon sales data to argue that, whatever Americans are reading, it isn’t contemporary novels. 

As it happens, Substack is teeming with writers, successful and not yet as recognized as they should/will be.  I asked some of some of the literary folks I have engaged on Substack what they thought about Ted Goia’s discussion of the (we mean it this time) death of the novel.

What follows is a pastiche, a mashup that I thought would be fun.  I haven’t added names, because this stuff was written off the cuff, chat, essentially, and I wanted it to be plausibly deniable.  As you will see, though, some really interesting thoughts.  And these are some very interesting writers.  Please feel encouraged to check out, in no order

Ross Barkan

,

ARX-Han

,

Hyun Woo Kim

,

Contarini

,

Thalia Toha

,

Aaron Lake Smith

,

James’s Substack

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Colloquy on the Novel

. . . just off the top, I wonder if the categorization of what constitutes a novel also hasn’t been reconsidered? Does it include strictly audiobooks? I know some of my younger friends never read hardcovers or paperbacks anymore. Just audiobooks. It’s also a question of saturation of multiple types of entertainment menu. When books used to be one of just a handful of entertainment options, they had a greater priority in our lives. Now, there are just so many more options. And I’m not sure if the population number has caught up with the potential oversupply of entertainment.

I love this kind of talk, btw. I think a novel has to be read, or at least structured to be read. The edge case is reading aloud, an audiobook. But surely a novel that gets turned into a film, we don’t think of the film as the novel. It works differently, so we put it in a different category in our minds, call it film or movie. I also have had students tell me they do not buy a book until they have listened to it. That’s partially why I started doing audiobooks. For myself, I rarely listen when I can read (unless I’m actually at the theater).

I feel “serious” (to quote the article’s expression) novels have become a very tribal matter over the past ten years or so. While I am not happy with some artistic/political traits of certain social tribes, I don’t think novels becoming so in itself is necessarily a bad thing. Even at the peak of his career, moneywise, Dostoevsky could sell only a few thousand copies of his self-published novel (his wife told him it would be better to go full indie) and that was enough for him to pay back his debts. In this sense, I believe there is a need for a new distribution model in the market of literature.  (Substack could become one, but I’m not sure about it yet.)  Say, I would rather have a thousand readers who will pay $300 for a copy of my book than a hundred thousand readers who will pay $3 for an ebook. $300 for a copy of a novel might sound crazy, but books were around that price in the late 18th century, and Jane Austen grew up fine in such a world (and hey, look at the college textbooks haha). I n other words, I wouldn’t say less readers is the same thing as the decline of the novel. It will be more profitable to think about what to do with less yet deeply engaged readers.

Well, you are right at one level, clearly. Number of readers doesn’t mean good readers. But it’s a handy metric, especially in a commercial society like the US. Remember, we call film “industry,” and sports are “programs.”  Maybe Gioia’s rhetoric is distracting to poets!  But I don’t think numbers are his central point.  Doestoevsky’s Russia had a LOT of serious readers, not just numerous, but serious. The US had a lot of serious readers, or at least semi-serious, in living memory. You give the game away with your conclusion, how to engage the less engaged.

But the question I was asking you to engage, particularly given your formal interests, is whether the years in which the novel as such made sense has passed.  There was a time before novels. You have urged “blowing it up.” Are we entering the time after novels?

If by “novel” we are thinking more of works like Oliver Twist rather than Tristram Shandy, I do think it has to go.  And novels like Tristram Shandy are already gone… Now that you mention America being a commercial society, I think the last century was a strange era in the human history, and it was not just an American phenomenon.  For thousands of years, the vast majority of humanity has never cared to read anything at all (yes, most of them had no choice, but think of modern people who could read as much as they want in theory), and it is rather peculiar that literature could be commercialized enough to form a market supported by the popular demand, starting from the 19th century and peaking in the 20th century.  While I sympathize with those who lament the general decline in readership, it seems to me the world is simply getting back to normal.

The real question is, does literature truly require a popular demand?  I believe we are entering an ancient future.  John Donne was dirt poor and had kids to be fed (his fault, as he had wasted his inherited fortune away.)  Did he constantly worry about how to sell more publications of his, then?  No.  Instead, he was running around London, busy looking for patrons.  In contrast, Charles Dickens serialized his novels and had to make sure he sold enough magazines and copies, not much knowing who were reading his works.  Novels work when you want to sell your literature to the people, the populi, and enough people want to pay relatively small sums for it.  However, the problem is that you cannot expect the populi to be literati.  I wish, but you can’t engage with literature in a serious manner with a wishful premise. Again, the last century was an exceptional time in human history. Romans wouldn’t have imagined their empire would fall either.

From the way I see it, not only is relying on popular demand for literature a wishful thinking, it also restricts an artist’s freedom much more than dealing with a handful of lords and ladies. (Of course, in our age, I predict that writers will be patronized by dozens or hundreds of “small” patrons, rather than aiming for one or two big shots like King James the First.) This is another reason why I think novel (according to popular definition) has to go, and will go.

Now, I believe, you will be able to understand why I don’t really care about how to “engage the less engaged.”  If books are to be commercialized, I would rather live in a world where they are very niche luxury goods. Let them watch Youtube.  It’s not like every household in fourteenth century Florence had a copy of Divine Comedy.

Tristam Shandy?  Oliver Twist?  Pick your favorite late 20th early 21st century authors. Ted’s point is they seem to have almost disappeared.  At least in the anglosphere there seems to be a kind of collapse of a discourse, like hive death in bees.  And sometimes artistic forms arise, and sometimes they disappear. Not just the audiences, but the conditions for their creation, not so much the Marxian material conditions, more the conditions of consciousness. Tragedy, symphony, gothic architecture, art nouveau.  My question is whether or not that is happening to even contemporary versions of the serious novel?

Young buck. A certain vulnerability, a certain strength. I took a lot of images of this guy, including some “prettier” ones. I prize images in which the animal is relaxed.

Ben Judah

has an incredible piece on reading Thomas Mann during Covid, when the world was temporally returned to an older rhythm.  The Magic Mountain Will Consume You. The question is whether contemporary conditions can sustain such writing, can sustain such reading. Judah thinks not.

What about modern novelists from other countries? Llosa, Houllebecq, Eco just to throw out some names. Do “contemporary novels” (however we might wish to define) remain viable elsewhere?

As a word of caution, I would say that there has been a renaissance of fairly traditional representational painting, which for a while also seemed impossible. It isn’t as culturally central as it once was, but . . .

From the way I see it, the last great defender of the traditional novel in the Anglosphere was Jhumpa Lahiri, or she could have been one. If we go a bit further back, we have Cormac McCarthy, but he is less traditional than Lahiri when it comes to novels. And yes, I think it’s happening with novel.

I am not familiar with Houellebecq’s works, but my impression is that the discourses surrounding him have been more political than literary. Regarding Llosa and Eco, I think they are more of anti-novelists, as Llosa turns novel into “absurd” fiction like many other Latin American writers have done while for Eco novel is a formal camouflage to convey certain semiotic problems. Of course, I’m not saying that their works are bad.

Man you are old school! Love it. So, then, and letting the lawyer in me come out a little: you aren’t giving me an example of contemporary serious novelist writing in the non-anglosphere? So if the historical/cultural circumstances have changed, that’s not a US thing . . . that may be true. I think this is a fascinating exchange, btw, might actually publish it (with your permission).

This was a hard question to answer, to be honest. I consider myself to be a fundamentalist than old school. I’m not against something new at all. I’m just saying what is as what is, and what is not as what is not. It is very likely that I am not so well-read (who can see at once contemporary global literature anyhow?), but it might be that this “decline” is a global phenomenon. I can’t think of writers other than Zhang Wei, Valentin Rasputin, Viktoriya Tokareva, and Emmanuel Carrère, and the latter two aren’t even known mostly as novelists while Rasputin died in 2015. And please publish it if you’d like!

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Too busy writing a novel at the moment to read Ted’s piece! Will try to read it and respond over the weekend.

[Somewhat later]

The novel can no more die than any other art form. It may become less popular or consequential. But as long as someone is willing to write one, and someone is willing to read it, it lives on. The existing industry that publishes novels may die off. That may not be a bad thing.

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The literary novel is now a conservatory form, and that’s okay.

It’s possible; the problem is that the deflation of the publishing industry makes it difficult to discern between that, and the potential deflation of the novel.

Accepting the premise for a moment, I love novels but it’s not for certain that their future is absolute, and I’m not convinced it’s the superior reading format. So, I’m unconcerned because storytelling is far, far older and will certainly persist regardless.

I agree that the tale will survive. I remember an incredible essay on this, maybe from Mary McCarthy? Anyway, I’m currently struggling with Cervantes, which is often called the original novel. It could be argued, I’m sure somebody has argued, that the reason (nonobvious) that Quixote is a novel is that the tales (too many tales) are not really important as such, but as ways of developing the characters and relationships, especially of Quixote and Sancho Panza. Otherwise, a tale might be told for its own sake, or to teach a lesson (a fable) or even for its moral instruction (a parable). It is this concern for the ambiguous individual that makes Quixote, and more generally the novel, modern.

If any of that makes sense, what does it mean that the novel is, if not disappearing, in retreat? Does it matter that since the Godfather and the present, movie adaptations have literally moved from novels to comic books? Anyway, thanks for the thoughtful response.

Mule deer with elk in the background. They don’t hang together, I’ve never seen together, and so this is a pretty special image. And very late fall.

Ted is a really great writer and he covers the topic very well. I also appreciate that he doesn’t pull any punches when it comes to pessimism. He’s right that several things are converging at once: the society is moving to something like post-literacy, novels barely even touch mass culture, and the publishing industry is by the day turning into an embarrassment.

I would just add to the discussion the idea of cultural centrality, which is very close to Benedict Anderson’s ‘imagined communities.’ Basically, a culture isn’t some monolithic entity that we all have to be part of. The borders of a culture are constantly in flux and so is its center. We happen to have been in the era of national mass cultures for some time, but that kind of cultural radius can go away - and, in any case, doesn’t particularly serve the novel.

I think the novel peaked around 1850 when rival news services would sent boats out from New York Harbor so that sailors could shout the plot points of the Old Curiosity Shop from their ships, and the mass media culture peaked around 1980 when everybody was watching Dallas together. The culture as a whole has fractured since then and there’s almost no unified national culture that novels should feel they have to be a part of.

I think that should be liberating for novel-writers and novel-readers, actually. It makes us a small caste of people who actually care about this form, who don’t have to worry about what the ‘center’ of the culture thinks and can just support each other in our little archipelagoes. As the society continues to move towards post-literacy, we become something like medieval monks or Renaissance humanists, keeping a flame alive. For that to work, our mindsets and our priorities have to change. At some level we should be completely indifferent to what’s going on at the center of the culture. Our responsibility is to each other and to the form, and we need to be very tough-minded and very mutually-supportive for it to survive.

. . . others have taken a similar monkish, candle in the darkness (Irish?) stance. Rather than quibble, let me ask two questions that seem to follow.

 (1) It can be argued (that the novel is concerned with the idea, complexities, development, of the individual. This focus on the individual, up for grabs if perhaps not entirely autonomous, makes the novel a democratic form. (And here, perhaps, is the break with the past.)  But if, as you say, the novel is retreating to the equivalent of Irish monasteries, what does that say about democracy? Is it over, in this post literate era you saw we are entering?

(2) Speaking of the monastery, your idea that the form will be kept alive by a small crowd of devotees. You say that might be liberating. Might it also consign the novel to people who have, or considered getting, an MFA? All Iowa, all the time?

I guess I would just break this up into a) what we hope will happen and b) what we can realistically do ourselves.

What I hope would happen is what John Rawls called “aristocracy for all,” where we have a super-literate public where everybody engages with their rich inner life. The emergence of the novel, as you pointed out, seemed to point in that direction - towards ‘democratic vistas,’ towards this astonishing combination of individuality and mass appeal that emerged around the 1850s.

But that’s just not really the direction the world has gone in. Democracy has tended to mean ‘mass culture,’ where people ‘express’ themselves in vicarious living through celebrities. Why this is I don’t really know, but it seems to be a very deep layer of human psychology.

I think for those of us who are interested in forms like the novel - which are all about a very complex understanding of human psychology - we have to choose our priorities. For me, the priority is to honor the craft, to try to write novels and to acknowledge novels that have real complexity and sophistication to them - even if that means they don’t cross over to anything like commercial success.

I wouldn’t say that that’s an elite, or particularly monkish, way of thinking - it’s just a way of choosing priorities in less-than-ideal conditions. As for MFAs, I have nothing against MFAs in principle. A writers’ workshop sounds lovely to me. It’s just that the dependence on the university system introduces an apparently-inevitable corruption into the programs. The MFAs become dependent on university funding and get sucked into university politics and myopia, and the work that comes out of them suffer as a result. It seems to be very hard for anybody to maintain anything like real individuality through an MFA program - and then, meanwhile, the MFAs, which are very well organized, end up unfairly dominating the market.

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I agree with Ted's piece on the novel in general but I'm sort of tired of hearing it - it was a piece in my view that was a waste of time

I like Ted a lot, but I don't know what the point of going on Amazon rankings and declaring the novel dead. It's like, no shit - what do you want me to do about it? I can't get myself to care anymore because it has nothing to do with whether I will make great works of art. I will make art I care about - I care greatly about the novel - and that's all. I hope people will read but I'm under no illusions, and I don't expect to have a Mario Puzo-style blockbuster

I am deeply troubled by the lack of reading in Amerca, by the screen dominance, by the stupidity. But I treat reading and writing like a monk would. I do it for its own sake. I expect no mass buy-in. It's like someone who practices calligraphy. They don't expect to get rich or famous doing it.

Yes, the death of the novel is an old argument, just seems to have accellerated.  I think as writer, you're monkish response is commendable.  Sam wasn't responding to Ted, though.  He was talking about the NYT, though there is a connection.  Maybe you are thinking of Hyun Woo, responding to me responding to Ted?  That conversation has gone back and forth.  As you'll see, the question is not what should the writer do, but what, from the perspective of the social critic, does this all mean?  And don't both the novel and the sort of journalism you do (and decry the Dems for not doing) presume a literate audience?  Anyway, that's the sort of question I'm musing upon.  Enjoy fall in the City.  I'm teaching there this spring, and looking forward to that.

I presume a literary audience but I also can't worry about it at a certain point. If my work is good, it'll find people who care, and if it gets bigger, that'd be great. But Ted's piece and others lack the follow up element - what is it should we do? For artists, it's creation. In addition, I try to curate what audience I can.

That said, I'm fascinated about history/art.  We may be at inflection point.  That's what I'm trying to tease out of you.  So far without much success!

We might be at an inflection point, or even entering a post-literate society, which is terrible. I guess what I am looking for is writers who do these pieces to suggest remedies.

. . . I'd argue for reading as discipline, like practicing a sport - literally forcing children and adolescents to do it, to stop coddling them in the Zoom era, to build up their stamina again. This is a lost generation but not all generations have to be lost.

Old dog, Pyrenees mix. They wait, and watch.

Safe travels, Pilgrims.

— David A. Westbrook