Why Do We Always Proclaim That the Novel Is Dead?

Mario Vargas Llosa’s ‘Notes on the Death of Culture’ By JOSHUA COHEN

(SPOILER ALERT: Stop reading if you have never read anything by Nobel Prize for Literature recipient Mario Vargas Llosa)

At the end of a grad course in contemporary Spanish-American literature, we finished by reading and writing about “100 Year of Solitude” by García Márquez and “The City and the Dogs” by Vargas Llosa (both published in the 1960s). García Márquez is the most well-known expositor of “magical realism.” He was also a life-long communist who never let his ideology get in the way of his literature. Vargas Llosa *is* a nihilist who, for personal convenience and not because of any ideological convictions, moved to Spain and has become the darling of Spain’s leading right-wing politicians. Like Gabo, Vargas Llosa has also divorced his ideology from his literature. But this was easy since Vargas Llosa believes that nothing is worth fighting for…except the desire to feather one's own cap. So while Borges is considered by some to be founder of the style known as “magical realism”, Vargas Llosa is truly the inheritor of Borges’ ideology-free, self-centered, nihilist vision that dominates the world today.

Of course, I don't need to say this. But I will: Mario Vargas Llosa *is* the perfect example of a writers whose values are Post-Historic. García Márquez, on the other hand, was probably a magical realist because it was Gabo's way to cope with the fact for Gabo History was slipping away.

I find myself in general agreement with Bejamin Moser's ideas which t lead to the question of the many kinds of beauty that cross the threshold of general resistance. There are many kinds of novels and many kinds of beauty. Let me focus on Austrian literature in which I feel versed. The 19th century Adalbert Stifter is one of the great poetic novelists who continue to exert his influence on contemporary Austrian writers. The 20th century Austro=Hungarians have novelist as various as Tibor Dery, Robert Musil, the so social Heimito von Doderer, Joseph Roth, Franz Werfel, I Elias Canetti, Stefan Zweig, Rainer Maria Rilke, Franz Kafka, Jakov Lind, Ingeborg Bachmann, Gregor von Rezzori, and Thomas Bernhard & Peter Handke, the last of whom is a specialty of mine, and for a particular reason in that he has made his poetic texts experiential as no other writer that I know, in that his not only formally beautiful narrativess - A SLOW HOMECOING, YEAR IN THE NO-MAN'S BAY, THE ABSENCE and especially CROSSING THE SIERRA DEL GREDOS breathe and involve the real reader also in a filmic way in textual experiences. The last 150 pages of SIERRA DEL GREDOS is the most astounding roller coaster rides in literature. I would say that this achievement constitutes progress in the development of technique in the great classical tradition of Goethe, Stifter, Flaubert, until we wait a hundred year for another great one to come along.

Re: "The Death of the Novel":
Both Liesl Schillinger and Benjamin Moser testify, believably, that the news of the death of the novel is highly exaggerated. Writers in so many countries industriously produce novels and people read them. That fewer people read novels these days does not imply that the form of the novel is in its death-throes. Having time only to read a few that are published each year, how are we know which countries are producing novels of enduring value? Maybe some of them are as good as James Joyce, Proust, Kafka, Beckett, Fitzgerald, Virginia Woolf, Hemingway, and Toni Morrison.
Except the epic form, all other forms of literature have stood the test of time. Those forms still flourishing are evolving into new ones. Instead crying at the wake of the dead novel, let's encourage our students to read novels, old and new.

Oh, I thought it was painting that died.

UNLIKE MINIVER, I WON’T EVER SIGH FOR WHAT WAS NOT

Miniver sighed for what was not,
something I won’t ever;
even when I’m talking rot,
I believe I’m clever.

Miniver loved the days of old,
I will never date;
now my story must be told,
later is too late.

Miniver mourned for ripe renown
which made others fragrant;
I’m the big man in the town
since my crimes are flagrant.

Miniver loved the Medici,
Art made him feel needy;
I don’t need it, I say “Vici! ––
without veni, vidi.

Miniver scorned the commonplace,
me it brings much joy,
though I don’t much care to face
the common hoi polloi.

Miniver would scorn the gold
that all others chased;
there is nothing that I hold
closer to my taste.

Miniver had demons, drink
was the worst, he found;
he was right, I often think
I shouldn’t fool around

[email protected]

I would actually like to know how many people using this COMMENTS forum also use social media?

I don't use social media other than the NY Times COMMENTS section. I don't care what a celebrity, athlete or politician tweeted. I don't care to share my views on Facebook; all the people who would be "friends" would already know what my views are. I don't need to take and send a picture of myself via Instagram every day; everyone who knows me knows what I look like. For friends and family I email and use a telephone.

Instead of social media, I prefer reading interesting articles (like this one) and then reading what people whom I don't know and will never met think about the topic. Topics such as this one normally draw thoughtful responses.

In fact, prior to going to Morocco in 1997 the main way people chatted was via online chat rooms dedicated to a particular topic (e.g., Travel in Africa). And in such a chat room I "met" a woman, whom I never met in person, who generously offered to mail me her "Rough Guide, or Footprint Guide, to Morocco" on the promise that I would return it when I returned from Morocco, which I did. And in Morocco I lived with a young man, whom I met on the ferry (he was going home from Italy over Christmas), who acted as my guide and whose wife fed me each evening.

So I guess you can say that "I have always depended on the kindness of strangers."

"Why Do We Always Proclaim That the Novel Is Dead?"
Given that there was a "pre-novel" period (let's say the period ended with the publication of "Don Quixote" or about that time of Cervantes' novel's publication) and a "novel" period, why do many always proclaim that the novel could never die during a "post-novel" period?
It's always funny to see that many people think the culture evolves up to a certain point...and then it stops evolving.

Having read, studied and analyzed most major work of Spanish-literature written between 1492 (Colón's "Diaries") and 1982 (Allende's "House of Spirits) as grad student, I like the conclusions that I drew from reading Borges, García Márquez's "100 Years of Solitude" and Vargas Llosa's "The City and the Dogs." Every history, on the both individual and collective levels across time and space, is its own history, rooted in itself and self-referential, i.e., not really collected to or relevant to any other story. Novels were born, grew up, and got old during the period known as modern History (post-Renaissance), a time of competing and evolving ideologies. But as we move into Post-History all ideologies are converging into one ideology (based on capitalism, the only one true religion), so writing a novel to include competing ideologies doesn't really make any sense unless one is writing a historical novel from a historic perspective.

As a student of Spanish-American literature, I have read, analyzed and written about every major work written in Spanish in the Americas, from Colón’s “Diarios” (1492) to the present. In the Contemporary Lit course, the last two books were García Marquez’s magical realist novel “Cien años de soledad” and Vargas Llosa’s dystopian “La ciudad y los perros." And what struck me most is how similar both books are in spite of the authors’ differences in style and attitude; both reminded me of “The End of History?” (1989) by Francis Fukuyama:

“The end of history will be a very sad time. The struggle for recognition, the willingness to risk one's life for a purely abstract goal, the worldwide ideological struggle that called forth daring, courage, imagination, and idealism, will be replaced by economic calculation, the endless solving of technical problems, environmental concerns, and the satisfaction of sophisticated consumer demands. In the post-historical period there will be neither art nor philosophy, just the perpetual caretaking of the museum of human history. I can feel in myself, and see in others around me, a powerful nostalgia for the time when history existed...."

The novel is a product of History, and since the West is moving into Post-History, the novel is losing its connection to the values of History. However, I still find the values of History present in literature written outside the West by Mahfouz, Ben Jalloun, Mia Couto, Amadou Kourouma, etc.

Based solely on my subjective reading experience, I can say that I have not been taken by any novel I have read that has been published in the last twenty years, I reread such classics as "Middlemarch" and "Moby Dick" as well as many, many others every few years and derive immense satisfaction from them. Contemporary novels, including the prize winners, leave me considerably unsatisfied. Strange plots, uninteresting characters, a lack of a deep understanding of the nature of human experience characterize these novels. They are as easily forgettable as "Anna Karenina" is not. I make no claims about the novel being dead. Perhaps the trouble appreciating contemporary novels is in me. But the ones I've read simply do no take hold of my imagination. I read them and begin to forget them almost immediately. So I've pretty much given up on contemporary novels. There are plenty of so-called classics to reread.

What dies was not the novel, but modernity - both as a movement and as a sensibility. And of course post modernity is as dead. This means that a generation and more of lit-crit types are sports of nature; dead ends in the evolution of literature. One can only push despair, nihilism and cynicism so far before you have exhausted the artistic possibilities. Meanwhile authors content to embrace the living body of the nineteenth century novel are succeeding famously.

The weight of the proclamation that the novel is "dead" is contingent on the proclaimer and her rationale behind the proclamation. At the beginning of the 21st century, novelist, travel writer and Nobel laureate, V.S. Naipaul, had said that the genre might just become irrelevant in a world whose reality is complex, harsh and sometimes too mordant to be subjected to "invention." He had a point; the point hinged on the ethical responsibilities of the writer. Given the upheavals in the world, ranging from civil wars to myriad forms of violence and violations of human rights, is it ethical on the part of writers to convert these realities that upend lives, to subject matters for the novel? That was the question Naipaul asked. Since his declaration of the inadequacy of the novel as a form fit for the 21st century realities, Naipaul had gone on to write non-fiction.

The novel arose when the discipline of rhetoric was displaced by mathematics with the rise of the modern university. It has been "dying" ever since and is the reflection of a great loss felt by a "dying" culture.

The death of the novel implies its death as a literary artform in which a deficiency of esthetic awareness is what the reader may fear in the development of 21st Century literature, as we look for new titles which reaffirm our faith in the esthetic ideals of the new generation. In The Death of the Novel and Other Stories (1969) by Ronald Sukenick the title story begins with this logical proposition.

Fiction constitutes a way of looking at the world. Therefore I will begin by considering how the world looks in what I think we may now begin to call the contemporary post-realistic novel.

Post-realism is what the novelists of the 1960s, and more recent decades, have produced as a style of metafiction in which the art of novel writing is itself the subject of fiction. Surrealism is also a more sophisticated approach to post-realism in which the ultramodern structure of the novel becomes visible, as the novel is envisioned as a work of typographical design.

Therefore the literary novel is a rare genre in which a few masterworks become our subject of study, novels like Ulysses by James Joyce, Composition No. 1 by Marc Saporta, Zettels Traum by Arno Schmidt, the new translation of H by Philippe Sollers, Only Revolutions by Mark Z. Danielewski, or Theories of Forgetting by Lance Olsen, reaffirm our faith in the development of human culture.

My first encounter with critical theory came with a wonderful professor of Romantic literature who was a creative writer wannabe and told our poetry-writing class that before we could write poetry, we needed, of course, to read the King James Bible that so informed our language. Crushed by the ensuing neuroticism, I found release in Ulysses, which seemed surely the death of the novel - since what was left to explore? Knowing one could never supersede Joyce, I still felt love and urges toward the language he had apparently "exhausted," as do all the great novelists that have somehow persevered since.

As the saying goes: What's this 'we' stuff?

The recurring proclamation of the 'death of the novel' is a shibboleth. It marks you as a member of the intelligentsia, or the literati, or the intellectual coterie. It's not political; both left and right indulge in it. But it's simple dogma. And snobbery - 'none of the novels being produced today are worthy of my rarefied taste.' WS Gilbert nailed it:

'Of course you will pooh-pooh whatever's fresh and new, and declare it's crude and mean,
For Art stopped short in the cultivated court of the Empress Josephine.
And ev'ryone will say,
As you walk your mystic way,
"If that's not good enough for him which is good enough for me,
Why, what a very cultivated kind of youth this kind of youth must be!" '

Defining terms: An art form is 'dead' only when no one either creates it or partakes of it anymore. The book review list of bestsellers indicate the novel is still very much alive. Someone needs to tell the poor deluded souls who keep churning out these corpses, not to mention the readers who refuse to bury them. And by that definition there is no such thing as a truly dead art form. (A looser definition - a dead art form as one in which past works are still consumed, but which no one produces anymore - might include epic poetry and verse drama. Attempts have been made to revive both but haven't really gotten off the ground.)

"Why Do We Always Proclaim The Novel is Dead?" We do this when we are trying to pitch a feature ("dead" or "murder" always resonate) to an editor. And he/she, harried with 1000 tasks and familiar with the cliche, says "yes" without reflection.

Flaubert consulted a dozen books to provide background for a single paragraph in L’Éducation sentimentale. Franzen can’t bring himself to read a thousand novels in his lifetime.

I think we’ve found the problem…

Paul Werner
WOID

The novel is dead because Freud killed it. People now understand that human behavior is more complex than any novelist could possibly describe.

Boredom with the themes and techniques available to fiction?

"We" always proclaim the death of the novel because the "we" is a group of smug or disingenuous hucksters anxious for attention who can only receive it through dire predictions, much like the politicians announcing the "Death of America as we know it" or the financial blowhards proclaiming the next great boom or recession being perpetually about to happen.

If you actually read the finalists for the National Book Award, Man Booker Prize or regularly read the book reviews in the Times, you will annually find unfamiliar novelists with formidable skills. If you expand your horizons to books translated into English or books in such often critically dismissed genres as mysteries, you will find even more.

Conversely, if you write an essay entitled "The Novels of the Past Few Years Were About As Good As those of the Previous Few Years", you should not hope for notoriety or clicks. Write about "Why There Are No Great Films Anymore" instead.

Another name for the genuine novel is “literary fiction,” and the genre is certainly in sad decline. It’s almost impossible to find a story written today that has the depth and beauty of stories of times past. Great thrillers? Yes. Fun dystopian YA literature? Sure. But I can count on two fingers the people turning out literary fiction on a par with the artists of old.

One of these is Michael Hurley. The other is Elizabeth Strout, author of the Pulitzer Prize-Winning “Olive Kitteridge.” Strout has achieved international acclaim. Hurley has won a few book awards. His work, so far, is an undiscovered jewel.

Here is a line from his novel “The Vineyard”:
“She lived in a small but well-kept trailer on the edge of a place that seemed less a town than a collection of unloved shacks and well-loved boats.”

And from “The Prodigal”:
“The water of the Atlantic was bracingly cold, even in August. Off the outer banks, the frigid Labrador Current, heading south, meets her younger and more promiscuous sister, the Gulf Stream—just up from a drunken lark in Mexico—and rudely slaps her in the face.”

The originality of his images reminds me of F. Scott Fitzgerald. Though I’ve edited books for Trump and other luminaries, no manuscript ever came across my desk on a par with Hurley’s.

Check out this article from his blog, which provides another perspective on the future of the novel and of the publishing industry: http://www.mchurley.com/the-coming-thermal-inversion-in-publishing/

Language evolved to serve people and that evolution has in no way diminished with time. Why should it be different for the novel?

When I think in terms of "the death of the novel," I am referring to a particular genre that reflects a particular historical period and mode of thought. However, the novel has always been loosely defined, so that it has morphed with our changing historical circumstances. However, my greatest concern is the loss of a reading public that can sit at length and digest a novel in its complexity.

Mr. Schillinger is still bitter about a critical theory course from thirty years ago! But she went into it resistant and came out a convinced, lifelong enemy of what she seems to recall about it, which seems to be Nietszche's bitter little prose poem "Of Truth and Lying in an Extra-Moral Sense"-- and a snotty professor. That's too bad. Thinking theoretically about writing and reading can be be a liberating as well as a punishing thing. In fact, Schlllinger is herself drawing on theory, the Romantic notion of organicism, which she offers in opposition to Nietzsche, one of the founders of the modernism. So even her defense of reading is critical theory. Organicism, however, is not organic! People like Rousseau and Wordsworth invented it. It's a shame that a newspaper with such a wide readership should print such a jaundiced view of an inevitable aspect of thinking, writing, and reading.

Reading is its own realm, and the novel offers its own kind of experience. It's not an experience offered by other art forms. And so, I'd venture, the novel, in its many guises, will be with us for quite a while yet.

Thanks for this superb pair of essays. I love Liesl Schillinger's jaundiced view of unimaginative or dishonest critics—which matches my own.

She writes so well. It's a pity she hasn't written a novel herself. I'd love to read it, in spite of her disability of being a critic. Her translations will have to do for now.

What, more words?

So long as there are souls searching for expression, so long as there are artists searching for beauty, so long as there are thinkers searching for truth, and so long as there are philosophers searching for meaning, there will be writers writing and readers reading the nearly limitless novel that embraces all these longings, embodies all these strivings, and emboldens all our forebodings.

Cordially,
S.A. Traina

A novel requires conflict, and there is no conflict more present in human culture than moral conflict. And there is no moral conflict present in our times greater than the present, every day, relentless takeover of our individual lives by corporations in their relentless pursuit of profit at the expense of our deaths and suffering occasioned by that pursuit. Big Pharma leads that conflict in our American lives and novels that "increasingly reflect' that societal impact are an important part of today's life. As is stated, "A novel does not reflect life: It is life." Now , let me tell you about my most recent, yet unpublished, work . . .Safe Nowhere.

The mediocre quality of what are touted as American novels of quality is to no small extent thanks to the corporate ownership of US imprints – the owners being mainly foreigners: the German billionaire Möhn family, who through several tax-dodging entities, own Random House et al; the German billionaire von Holtzbrinck family who own FSG et al; the French Lagardère who made billions in aeronautical weaponry & now own Hachette which owns Little Brown et al; the billionaire Aussie Murdoch who owns HarperCollins; and finally the US billionaire Sumner Redstone who owns Simon & Schuster, Scribner et al. They're killing good literature.

"Just saw some film where some woman was putting an American flag on a bar mitzvah cake!! (Greer Garson would never have stooped so low.) Then caught ten seconds of an interview Diane Sawyer did with Ahmadinejad and you'd swear the translator attended the Mel Blanc school of Arab translation.

Can only assume snake wrestler on the nature channel was wearing a Brandeis t-shirt."

malvernthenovel.com

The novel is dead? My life is a novel, one that may have ended a while ago, and at the moment I am reading a memoir by an aunt past 100, which may give me some insight as to my maternal grandmother, born in Perpignan, the femme fatale of the family.

I am about to turn the page that says my mother, a harmless baby at the time, became very ill on their arrival in France. What I am really trying to find out is whether there is anything my aunt is about to reveal, while I keep mum about some secrets of my own, discovered in old newspapers on the web about scandals.

There is a whole row of books here written by authors whom I have known quite well, like my father, an uncle, an artistic cousin, a great aunt who won an award for a scientific breakthrough before women had the right to vote, and at least seven friends and four acquaintances, but I have not read a single one of them although this is a treasure chest of richness. I can only read in novel form.

It started when a friend was struggling with history at school in Paris and I told her pretend it's a novel and just memorize the dates. She flunked, but then she got 'coal mining resources in Germany', while I got 'Mademoiselle No. 872456, New York!'. This goes to show that a lot in life hinges on timing and good luck.

There is no so thing as an original story, all have been written, but you can often find them in a novel form and with this in mind, 'Let Me Tell You', I am off to read Shirley Jackson.

Oh, yes, it's dead, very dead, as dead as painting and serious music, neither of which exist now (remember "painting" and "serious music?") In any case, I don't believe that the novel was ever more than popular entertainment of a rather low order. Those who bemoan it's demise think the novel is "art." It is not, it never was art. Half a century ago, gifted and creative young people dreamed of writing a novel. Today they dream of writing and directing a film. So much the better. The problem is that all you need to write novel is a laptop or typewriter whereas to make film you need someone else's $30 million. With the exception of "The Garden of Eden" by Hemingway I cannot think of a single novel published in the last twenty years that I would waste my time reading. In fact, "The Garden of Eden" was completed many years before its publication. To a large extent it is the last novel ever written. Perhaps Hemingway sensed that - it took him forty years to write it. Instead of reading a novel I suggest that you take a fast hike around the block or watch a good movie. Or you might enjoy my novel, "Raging Light," available on Amazon.

Interesting thoughts. However, both writers address the question of the Novel's death as a function of the potential exhaustion of the form, or the suggested absence of talent in its practitioners. The oft-proclaimed death of the Novel is not necessarily a contention that there are no longer any talented novelists, or that there is nothing more to say with a Novel. Observing that the Novel is dead is more an admission that any given novel, however sharp the genius of its author or wide and penetrating its scope or ingenious in its execution or immediate and lasting its message, is now a secondary work; novels no longer command the cultural and social significance or influence that once they did.

When someone says, 'the Novel is dead,' they don't mean, 'there are no longer good or important novels being written.' They mean, 'Novels are no longer the literature of the age.'

Bewail it as you will, television and cinema are the literature of the age. Novels are nice. And they're important. And necessary. And fun. But, like Restoration stage drama, they are not fresh. Or alive.

Brilliant, thought-provoking observations; many thanks for this contribution. Novels are always open to interpretation (particularly ones that employ unreliable narrators), even if the author intended a very clear meaning that may not prove to be the majority opinion immediately after publishing and/or long thereafter. The novel is very much alive, in part because new writers in new eras (even ones ostensibly writing about the past) keep it that way. And it would seem impossible to produce any new work without being heavily influenced by what has come before, whether the author admits it or not. In that sense the new writers keep the old writers very much alive, perhaps even inspiring their readers to read what they read or even to begin writing themselves.