In this morning's paper I came across this quote from novelist Cormac McCarthy:
A: The director had the notion that he could put the entire book up on the screen. Well, you can't do that.You have to pick out the story that you want to tell and put that on the screen. And so he made this four-hour film and then he found that if he was actually going to get it released, he would have to cut it down to two hours.
Q: Does this issue of length apply to books, too? Is a 1,000-page book somehow too much?
A: For modern readers, yeah. People apparently only read mystery stories of any length. With mysteries, the longer the better and people will read any damn thing. But the indulgent, 800-page books that were written a hundred years ago are just not going to be written anymore and people need to get used to that. If you think you're going to write something like The Brothers Karamazov or Moby-Dick, go ahead. Nobody will read it. I don't care how good it is, or how smart the readers are. Their intentions, their brains are different.
(Photo via Jim Herrington)
I've spent a fair time thinking about how mediums relate to different eras. I recall a favorite quote wherein artist Marcel Duchamp said he had no patience for books over 100 pages long. (I don't have the quote. Make do with the summary.) Always a future teller, I suspect he understood how the 20th century would erode our attention spans.
Recently an acquaintance queried me why none of our Ivy League peers had ambitions toward tackling The Novel.
"Well, no one reads anymore," I said. "Why would they write books when they could just as easily start a rock band?"
I floated this by another acquaintance recently, a slightly younger individual with a background similar to my own. Why aren't kids these days aspiring to create literature? Will music claim them all?
"I've seen the best minds of my generation destroyed by organic farming," he said.
End of quote.
UPDATED NOVEMBER 23, 2009: This post inspired an unusual level of response which continues on Clusterflock & my simulcast at Teenage Kicks.
If you're committed to this story of decline, you'll have to explain away the actual continued presence of big novels. Not just Infinite Jest or Harry Potter -- when a book like Kavalier and Clay appears, nobody seems to complain of its length (656 pp). It'll be easy to find an explanation, I'm sure, but I question the need. Yes, triple-deckers are not the characteristic cultural product of this era, but they're not obsolete like carbon paper or mews.
And as for the constraints of adaptation, that's nothing new. How much of I Promessi Sposi do you suppose made it into any of the operas, or any other medium until the age of the miniseries?
Hi Mr. Maverick-
You make an interesting point. Though to be fair, neither I nor Mr. McCarthy are saying that big novels are in decline, really, so much as we're saying they're not as relevant to the cultural conversation as more trim works. This might be a bit shocking for me to say, but I imagine one of the reasons David Foster Wallace was so unhappy was that he was committed to a form in deep cultural decline.
RE: my committment: Sadly, I am committed to nothing except the committment to pose questions & make people think. I also have never heard of I Promessi Sposi until your post, and I can count the number of operas I've seen in my life on one hand (unless you count movies like Star Wars or Quadrophenia).
You obviously have a very wide frame of reference. Go on with your bad self. I appreciate your committment to lucid quesitoning of provocateurs like myself!
PS - For more on this topic, the version of this post on my blog has some more discussion of the thrown off "organic farming" comment at the end of the post.
-Alec
This blog will be simulcast at http://ahb.brassland.org
More info at http://alechanleybemis.com
We're in agreement, of course, that the big novel is less of a big deal than it was. I wouldn't have been so quick to argue against adumbrations of decline if I weren't already arguing about them in my own mind. I tend to beef less about whether big novels are being produced and received than whether the authors' prose chops are up to the task.
And I'm afraid I exaggerate my frame of reference -- Manzoni's Italian defeated me the one time I tried. I just wondered, "what big classic novel would have been adapted as an opera back in the heyday?", and that came to mind.
And thanks, I'll hang around and heckle until a proper commentariat precipitates.
What about Bolaño's work? 2666 isn't exactly a concise piece of literature... although of course it's arguable that Bolaño himself had wanted the novel published in pieces; also arguable how many readers actually finished that novel, especially given the eminently unreadable "Part about the Crimes." Or...hmm...there's always Pynchon, who's been much read and discussed, if not venerated by the literary establishment. And Byatt writes excessively long novels that people read, although I'm certainly not her biggest fan. Or then: what about The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles? Murakami's only long form work? (Now that I'm writing all this, I'm wondering if they couldn't somehow be lumped together as mystery writers in a sort of perverse way...)
McCarthy's probably right to say that long form novels are not now the norm; but I'm not sure they ever were, notwithstanding a handful of discursive classics (Dickens may be excused for writing for serials). Of course, I think length can be at times of real value. Novels of great length have a particular immersive (or even submersive) quality to them; the language becomes seemingly inescapable. Byatt has a quote vaguely about it in Possession:
"This curiosity was a kind of predictive familiarity; he knew the workings of the other man's mind, he had read what he had read, he was possessed of his characteristic habits of syntax and stress. His mind could leap ahead and hear the rhythm of the unread as though he were the writer, hearing in his brain the ghostly-rhythms of the as yet un-written."
There does seem to be a predictive familiarity that comes with reading a novel of great length, which must come from submersion in the particular fictive language that runs through it. Of course, something akin to it is possible in shorter novels, or from reading many novels by the same author writing in something like the same style, but I'm not sure it's the same (this is less an argument than a possibility).
Anyhow, it might explain why I find it so unbearable reading dfw (one of Mr. Maverick's examples). The man's work is trash as far as I'm concerned. He was a prefrontal mess and he writes like one. Reading him is like having a headache. He was brilliant, sure, and manic more so than that; but his work is less art than lack of restraint. Being submersed in him, in his thoughts and constructions, in his language, is... awful, frankly.