COVER -> DAY ONE
 |
Ever since the death of Henry Fielding the novel has been on the slide; it declined with Jane Austen and fell with George Eliot which makes me wonder how to classify Henry James, James Joyce and John Steinbeck, not to mention Marcel Proust, Thomas Mann and Leo Tolstoy.
I thought of them all recently when I deliberately stopped reading a novel that was so well written that I could not bear to end the affair by finishing it.
If proof is needed that the tradition of the novel flourishes and even blooms then you need go no further than A.S. Byatt's series of which Babel Tower is the latest.
This debate, like those which caricature modern art as incoherent, modern music as alienating and modern architecture as ugly, conflates two issues, namely, whether the works are well conceived and well wrought and whether they are 'relevant' to our times.
I do not think there is much doubt about conception and craftsmanship in any of our contemporary arts so I have to suppose that the core of the discussion concerns 'relevance'. Of course the contemporary novel does not inform our social discourse in the way that Dickens or Mrs. Gaskell informed thinking in the middle of the 19th Century. There is no reason why we should labour through long and sometimes tedious books (Trollope springs to mind) if we can involve ourselves in the moral arguments which are the staple diet of soap operas. There is not much point either in turning to painters for realistic landscape when we own high definition cameras and there is no point in turning to contemporary neo-classical composers for tunes to hum when they are being turned out by the thousand every year by gifted singer/songwriters.
The relevance lies in the power of works of art to alter our perception.
A sense of altered perspective is easily demonstrated in painting and architecture and even in the way that the simple set of notes is used to make music but our very familiarity with words can easily deceive us into believing that very little has happened to the way they are used since the great age of the novel.
Look again and ask, for better or worse (mostly worse), what Freudian analysis did for the novel. Little Dorritt and Little Nell were as impossible after Freud as Stephen Daedalus and Gatsby would have been before him. Equally, the intellectual switch from Newtonian clockwork physics to Heisenberg's uncertainty principle has had a powerful effect on the way we see our universe. Above all, however, the novel has changed from being a platform for fixed moral principles (from the frightening Madam Bovary to the playful, but still deeply moral, Wind in the Willows) to being the chief forum for a discussion of what constitutes morality --- which, in turn, is based on a much deeper discussion, the product of 20th Century philosophy, of what constitutes reality.
So when people say that they like a good story, that they like to know where they are, that they want something with a beginning, a middle and an end, they are asking for something which no serious novelist can offer; they are asking for a lie between hard covers and, without a sharp twist of irony subversively to undo it, that is not possible for a good novelist. If you want easy nostrums, as opposed to answers, for difficult questions, then forget the novel and watch television or a movie.
Not long ago our Editor here at G21 wondered aloud whether I might not be sending you too often to your dictionaries --- to which my reply was that as you are reading on-line you can consult works of reference on line. But below that superficial banter there was a deeper point. Like novelists in their sphere, my aim with words is to alter perceptions but I neither hope nor even intend to make this a matter of popular culture.
If I want to change something I target decision-makers. I am unashamedly an elitist talking to an elite. This does not make me better or worse than my fellow human beings, it simply acknowledges a reality. Conversely, if I wanted a mob I would not look for it on the Upper East Side of Central Park.
The real state of words in our time, then, is that mass communication has forced us to use an identical set of basic vocabulary but we vary in our precision and in the extra words we bring to bear in our discourse. Up until the democratisation of 'talkies' and two world wars, different classes not only had different accents they also had different vocabularies. Now that this distinctiveness is much more blurred it is proper for writers to define the seriousness of what they have to say by means other than grandeur or loquacity which is why there is so much interest in genre and form. If words have really lost their power - and I doubt this - then the power has to be generated by some other means.
At a deeper level still the sentiment over the trajectory of the novel is based on the myth of a bygone age when the common people were much more moral than they are today. There is no evidence for this.
As far back as we know, the 'common people' have been moralists and moralisers but this has not made them virtuous. As far as one can tell there has always be a majority in England and America for judicial revenge, violence and murder and what the novel could not amend in its time the movies certainly cannot now.
I am shocked not so much by the flatness of diction and the frequency of expletives as by the lack of restraint in utterance, the failure to distinguish between private and public space. It may be a small price for the death of deference but it is one that I find it hard to pay.
Such obligations equally confine my vocabulary in general discussion, there being a point at which my need to be articulate may humiliate a neighbour, and this explains why the novel still has relevance. It has divided itself into a number of genres and defined a number of audiences. Over time what it says informs more popular culture but one of its main tasks is to preserve itself as a medium for integrity in moral and philosophical discussion. Integrity in a blandly cruel, morally complex, psychologically recursive, naively knowing, apparently polyglot, superficially tolerant society is difficult to achieve and even more difficult to express. To that extent, the novel is, necessarily, not relevant to the lives of most people; and long may that remain.
