A gloomy writer in the Guardian UK says the Novel is essentially dead, thanks to digital media and the fact that writers and readers would rather chase squirrels on the internet than consider serious literature.
I think people have been saying the "Novel is Dead" for hundreds of years. So let's just say I'm skeptical. Jane Austen is as popular as ever. But as in her day, perhaps we are on the cusp of the new age of Poetry, for instance. Would that be so bad? There is new poetry on Twitter and Tumblr, and people are reading and posting just as many quotes from great writers as ever.
Or maybe this is the age of great screenwriters? Look at what TV is doing with shows like True Detective, combining literary symbols with visual art and performance. Would that be so bad? So I think the written word is alive and well, and if the novel suffers for a while, it is perhaps to let the light shine elsewhere. After all, Shakespeare wasn't a novelist - just a great poet and playwright. Beowulf was written in verse. The Bible is part narrative with lots of symbolism and poetry.
Just saying. I think Literature will survive in some form, or perhaps new forms.
And while I share this author's skepticism about the value of Creative Writing Programs, having been enrolled in one myself many years ago, I do recall people getting published on a regular basis. And for the vast majority of writers throughout history, there has never been one clear path to a writing life. Most writers in this world do something else to earn money, and any sweet moolah they get from their words is icing on the cake. It may be thin icing without sprinkles, but putting the cake on the table is the important thing.
See, I thought Children's Literature was "dead" until I discovered Harry Potter, written by an unknown author who was on welfare at the time, and look what happened with that. In fact, gloomy writer Will Self has to slam Harry Potter to make his diatribe possible. *eyeroll* Well, just as many adults read Harry Potter, and the form is the novel. So yeah, if you dismiss the most popular novels of our time, then yeah ~ death to the novel. Or not.
Will Self in Guardian UK
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 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.
. . . 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.
. . . 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.
comes out on September 27, which is next Thursday.
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