Last week The New York Review published "The Novelist's Complicity" by Zia Haider Rahman that blames the imminent demise of the novel on an imaginary Golden Age of Television, on the death of the critic, on people who don't habitually read, and on novelists themselves.
This argument, that new media will eclipse old ones, is older than some people think. In the 1920s, radio was supposed to destroy the record industry. In the '50s, television was going to end movies. In fact, neither medium was seriously affected. Radio actually boosted record sales. And movies changed to include technicolor (color television didn't arrive until the '60s) and letterbox screens.
Rahman argues - feebly - for the ascendancy of TV over fiction:
"Reading now, also, has strong competition from screens. This is a new golden age of television, we’re told, and I agree. With The Wire, The Sopranos, Madmen, Breaking Bad, the reboot of Battlestar Galactica (think “Shakespeare in Space”), and many, many other shows, there has been a steady supply of riveting dramas, with rich characterization, moral depth, and tumultuous plot lines. The boxed set and the binge-watching of viewers have freed up writers from the constraints of the weekly serial, whose intervening seven days ensured that scarcely more than a cliffhanger of the plot survived in the memory. Now TV writers can craft and develop character over time, something novels do. Binge-watching offers space, also, to introduce subordinate plot lines and ideas. Just like novels.
Television today appears to be capable of delivering many of the rewards novels might offer. There’s some research suggesting that reading fiction improves our capacity to empathize with others whose lives are very different from our own. Even on this score, television can claim some success. Who would deny that The Sopranos has inculcated in viewers a strange empathy for the New Jersey mobster or that Breaking Bad has inspired warmth toward a drug-dealing chemistry teacher?"
I'm dubious of Rahman's claims for TV when she offers as "riveting dramas" shows that offer - at best - solid entertainment. And I'm tempted to credit Rahman with sarcasm in that last sentence.
She continues: "Television might offer strong competition and attention spans might be sagging, but there may be deeper cultural trends that have led to the decline of novels. In a paper published in 2014 in the journal Administrative Science Quarterly, researchers found that winning a famous literary prize seems to be followed by a steep fall in the quality ratings of a book on the online book review site Goodreads, a limb of the Amazon behemoth. This happened after Julian Barnes won the 2011 Booker Prize for his novel The Sense of an Ending . The researchers speculate that what might be happening is that winning a famous prize draws in a great many readers who would otherwise not consider the book, many of whom have no other reason for expecting to like the book.
"Some of these readers might not even be habitual readers of fiction. Amazon and Goodreads ratings, and numerous online book-reviewing sites, have all contributed to and reflected the democratization of the arbitration of literary taste. But such democratization is not intrinsically a good thing. The arbitration of scientific evidence is not conducted under the auspices of universal suffrage; it is scientists who adjudicate on the risks of climate change, for instance, not elected politicians, and that’s exactly how it should be. The democratization of reading tastes has gone hand in hand with the demise of the critic, and with that, the idea of reading a novel because certain people with discernibly good judgment think that the book is worth reading. A writer — I think it was the novelist Claire Messud, but don’t quote me — suggested that the literary critic should aspire to be able to be able to say of a novel that “this is a great book even though I didn’t like it.”[1] The implication is that there is much more to what makes a book great and worth reading than merely one’s visceral reaction of liking it or not. Great works allow us to gather around the campfire and discuss things of importance — not least of all, our diverse subjectivities. This idea might smack of snobbery, but it’s useful to reflect that the idea retains influence in other areas of art, such as painting and sculpture — notably, areas that don’t rely on an economics involving a large number of buyers of the same product."(2)
All of this sounds to me suspiciously like a phenomenon that Hilton Kramer called "The Revenge of the Philistines" - many people (most of them with no qualifications) are now involved in evaluating works of art merely because everything is now subject to the marketplace, where the only rule is What Sells is Good.
Rahman leaves out of her argument, probably on purpose, the strong anti-intellectual streak in contemporary culture - the hostility towards what is perceived to be "elitist" or requiring a depth of experience or specialized learning that is beyond the average person's immediate grasp. She quotes remarks made by Philip Roth in a 2009 interview. Predicting that within 25 years the readership for novels will be negligible, he holds out a little optimism:
“I think people will always be reading them, but it will be a small group of people. Maybe more people than now read Latin poetry, but somewhere in that range . . . To read a novel requires a certain kind of concentration, focus, devotion to the reading. If you read a novel in more than two weeks, you don’t read the novel really. So I think that that kind of concentration, and focus, and attentiveness, is hard to come by.”
Forty years before Roth's remarks, John Cheever, in his Paris Review interview, had a better - if considerably dated - explanation:
INTERVIEWER: What about the beginning of stories? Yours start off very quickly. It's striking.
CHEEVER: Well, if you're trying as a storyteller to establish some rapport with your reader, you don't open by telling him that you have a headache and indigestion and that you picked up a gravelly rash at Jones Beach. One of the reasons is that advertising in magazines is much more common today than it was twenty years ago. In publishing in a magazine you are competing against girdle advertisements, travel advertisements, nakedness, cartoons, even poetry. The competition almost makes it hopeless. There's a stock beginning that I've always had in mind. Someone is coming back from a year in Italy on a Fulbright Scholarship. His trunk is opened in customs, and instead of his clothing and souvenirs, they find the mutilated body of an Italan seaman, everything there but the head. Another opening sentence I often think of is, "The first day I robbed Tiffany's it was raining." Of course, you can open a short story that way, but that's not how one should function with fiction. One is tempted because there has been a genuine loss of serenity, not only in the reading public, but in all our lives. Patience, perhaps, or even the ability to concentrate. At one point when television first came in one was publishing an article that couldn't be read during a commercial. But fiction is durable enough to survive all of this.
I have had the pleasure over several decades to see some outstanding things on television, a few of which exploited the special qualities and limitations of the medium. But it has never seemed to me that television has ever really distinguished itself as a medium. The outstanding television programs that I have encountered in the past forty years have been documentaries like Claude Lanzmann's Shoah (which was made for television but also had a theatrical release) or Ken Burns's The Civil War, multi-episode dramatizations of literary novels like the BBC's War and Peace (with Anthony Hopkins as Pierre Bezuhov), and original productions like Dennis Potter's brilliant Pennies from Heaven. The impact of these programs derived from the fact that viewers experienced them in the privacy and intimacy of their homes.
A novel is even more of a private and intimate experience, since it uses words alone to identify characters and settings. The "interiority" of the novel comes naturally since everything the author presents to the reader takes place in his mind.
Rahman argues that novels and television shows function differently and that novels have a great advantage when it comes to "interiority". The weakest part of her argument is blaming novelists themselves for anticipating film adaptations of their work by deliberately avoiding a first-person narrative or by striving to maintain a visual perspective to facilitate their novel's translation to the screen.
I also found Rahman's aim to be scattershot. In the middle of her essay, she switches from discussing the decline of the novel to that of the "literary" novel, which is a very different matter. If the numbers of readers for fiction is in precipitous decline (23% in the past five years), then literary novels must be in danger of total extinction. I'm always dubious of such worries, since I have known from the beginning that reading literature is a pursuit of a very few. A few years ago on this blog I addressed the claim that poetry was dead, for the same reasons that fiction is on the skids.
Literature will continue to live, I think, because what it gives the reader is something that nothing else can give him. In his 1951 essay on Anna Karenina, Lionel Trilling wrote:
"It is a subtle triumph of Tolstoi's art that it induces us to lend ourselves with enthusiasm to its representation of the way things are. We so happily give our assent to what Tolstoi shows us and so willingly call it reality because we have something to gain from its being reality. For it is the hope of every decent, reasonably honest person to be judged under the aspect of Tolstoi's representation of human nature. Perhaps, indeed, what Tolstoi has done is to constitute as reality the judgement which every decent, reasonably honest person is likely to make of himself - as someone not wholly good and not wholly bad, not heroic yet not without heroism, not splendid yet not without moments of light, not to be comprehended by any formula yet having his principke of being, and managing, somehow, and despite conventional notions, to maintain an unexpected dignity."(3)
Ironically, Rahman's essay was originally broadcast on BBC Radio 4's "A Point of View." Wasn't television supposed to have killed radio ages ago?
(1) It was, in fact, George Orwell, who wrote in 1944, 'Obviously one mustn't say "X agrees with me: therefore he is a good writer," and for the last ten years honest literary criticism has largely consisted in combating this outlook.' "As I Please," Tribune, 28 January 1944. Orwell also provides us with a useful definition of the novel: "A novel ... is a story which attempts to describe credible human beings, and - to show them acting on everyday motives and not merely undergoing strings of improbable adventures." ("George Gissing," May-June 1948?, Essays, Everyman Edition, 2002, p. 1288)
(2) http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2018/01/05/the-novelists-complicity/
(3) "Anna Karenina," The Opposing Self: Nine Essays in Criticism (London: Secker and Warburg, 1955).
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