In my first post on Arcade I’d like to respond to the important questions about time that Lee raises in his introduction to the contemporary novel colloquy. He writes: “We have long presumed that synchrony conceals a cultural logic--an episteme, a Zeitgeist, a generational affiliation, whatever collective term we wish to employ to describe a moment--in need of analysis or exposure by the astute critic.” This impulse is, of course, almost irresistible and a central function of literary history—to draw a text outside itself and make it a symbol for broader meaning. Responding to the expansive spirit of Lee’s post, this is a freewheeling take on the novel in Internet time.
When we talk about the contemporary novel, we first need to think hard about our sense of time in the present. While the experience of reading a print novel has not changed significantly for well over a century, our sense of temporal place, the horizon of the Zeitgeist, has shifted dramatically with the advent of the Internet.
I’ve been interested in this question for quite a while in my own work on perceptions of the contemporary novel. I started from the observation that we are living more and more of our literary lives through online media: shopping for books, reading criticism and engaging in discussion on websites like Amazon, NYTimes.com, and even Arcade itself. We’re all familiar with the deluge of information now available, but what we rarely consider is how these changes redefine the concept of the “new.” On Amazon (or Oprah), readers looking for books might find Jonathan Franzen and Leo Tolstoy situated in the same context; books spanning decades and genres are regularly linked together. The “long tail” extends the space of cultural possibility, making millions of cultural works newly available. Most of us in the academy have had this experience before—the first time we started using a large research library. Terry Pratchett had it right when he described the potent “L-space” that emerges when enough books are shelved together, creating an immediate context that spans centuries or millennia.
In fact, the increasingly social nature of these new virtual catalogs, with their recommendation engines and review systems, is leading to an active, collective investment in the newness of things that goes well beyond the library’s static rhetoric. When we add our own thoughts and ratings to a book on GoodReads or Amazon, we lend it a little bit of contemporaneity, drawing it back into the present no matter how old it is. A teenager exploring Austen for the first time can easily discover a textual community of others going through the same experience in the accumulated reviews of Pride and Prejudice. The asynchronous, ubiquitous archives of the web bring us the aggregated new experiences of thousands, channeled into products and topics organized so that we will encounter novelty everywhere.
This system effectively reorders literary encounters with the new. Sure, in the pre-Web days you could always dig up critical reviews of a novel that was published ten years ago. But those periodicals and reviewing publications would themselves be dated, perhaps even weathered, and their interpretations would be physically and conceptually bound to the past. Now, between blogs, reviews and our own continually extending social media conversations, it is possible to create clusters and conversations of newness around any book, no matter how old. The moment of initial surprise and inspiration is captured (well, a pale shadow of it anyway) through those architectures of literary connection, and then reproduced for the next browser in search of, well, the novel.
Right: novelty everywhere, but what about the novel? Near the end of his introduction Lee asks if “newer technologies, media, and genres more effectively give us a taste of the Zeitgeist than the stale conventions of realism and metafiction?” I’ll take a stand here to say that novels will rise above new technologies and media just as they will rise above those stale conventions, for one simple reason. Novels are always new. That is their defining characteristic (maybe this is really the stand I’m taking). Just like the accumulated reviews on Amazon, they are characterized by their sustained engagement with new experience. To be sure, some accomplish this better than others…there are horribly dated novels, unreadable texts filled with archaic jargon, romans à clef whose keys have been lost. But thousands, millions rise above, floating in the eternal consumer present of the web. As digital reading platforms evolve I think the novel will change with them, and I hope we can discuss those possibilities here, but at the outset it seems important to remember that the “contemporary” is a much bigger place than it used to be.
I’m going to stop here, on the precipice, but I look forward to expanding on what this shifting sense of novelty means for contemporary fiction, where time is, more than ever, something we cannot take for granted.
Thanks for your response to my Colloquium essaylet, Ed! I just wanted to chime in to say that I quite agree -- the Internet is very much changing what we mean by "now"... and the ability to acquire older texts with great ease most certainly shapes how we experience the present. Indeed, many writers specify that they tend not to read living writers. Their aesthetic formation was shaped by their dead forebears more than their calendrical contemporaries.
I might only add that as the literary field becomes larger -- as it becomes increasingly impossible even to read a small slice of what is published in one year, the project of generalizing about literature becomes both harder and easier. Harder because it becomes increasingly impossible to read what is published (a lifetime could be spent reading just what was published in Sept. of 2011). Easier because, perhaps, there are significant regularities in the literary field, and a larger sample size arguably tends to drown out eccentric voices or make them seem less unique than they might otherwise.
What to do? Hire more literary scholars is clearly the right answer!
I like your optimism at the end of your post, Ed. I would like to share it but I am not sure ultimately.
We should not forget that the novel, as genre, is historical determined like all art forms. While there were novels in the Hellenistic period and in the time of (Roman) late antiquity, the novel is really a construct of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It is a product of the age of print and is largely associated with that medium. Can it survive in the liquid context of electronic writing?
I would like to think so but I am not as optimistic.
Hi Ed,
Your post is very nicely written. But it may also suffer from the most horrifying (for us writers) quality that the internet has brought to the reading of all texts. What is that quality, you ask?
TL; DR.
(Google it if you haven't come across the phrase.)
I apologize for the low blow. I realize I've indulged in a form of blunt rhetoric more akin to a punch in the face than a gentle engagement. But I couldn't help feel the pull of other more briskly written sites while reading it, hundreds of them just a mouse click away.
That, in brief, describes the problem texts have in the competitive digital landscape. But I, too, echo Gregory's pessimism and would like to build on Lee's response -- specifically (1) his point that many current writers (and I'd say, scholars) ignore contemporary work & that (2) the sheer bulk of published materials today makes Zeitgeist formation impossible.
What I find missing in your post & many writings talking optimistically about the future of the novel are *examples* of *specific* works that could possibly bear generations of future commentary. What literary texts currently being produced will stand the test of time & be subject to the kind of meta-commentary you (and I) hope can be sustained?
Sure, it seems like people will always read certain authors, be it Hemingway for his briskness & crispness, or Proust and Joyce and Beckett for the way they entertain endless readings & interpretations. But what currently produced novelistic works will be able to snowball together that magic combination of (1) enough critical commentary to give them scholarly standing *and* (2) enough popular support to gain historical inevitability and keep them in print? I'd like to hear examples.
Maybe (maybe) David Foster Wallace? But Franzen? After the Oprah debacle and the wan indie rock fantasias of his last book, I don't think so.
At the end of the day, art is about the specific instance not the general idea. If we at Arcade can't name novels that will endure, who can?
PS - This is also a convenient way for me to assemble a great winter reading list. Please speak up!
xAHB
***
My Arcade blog is simulcast at http://ahb.brassland.org
More info at http://alechanleybemis.com
By way of response, permit me to trespass on your aversion to reading by quoting an editorial from the Journal of the American Medical Association in 1935 (yup, JAMA occasionally editorialized on modernist literature):
The answer, of course, is JAMA; a casual search on the string "gertrude stein" since 1883 reveals JAMA articles that quote her in 1963, 1964, 1972, 1985, and 1999 (not counting the 1934 article that hilariously diagnoses Stein with "palilalia," a speech disorder marked by compulsive repetition, nor the 1996 guest piece by Stein biographer Brenda Wineapple). The JAMA editorialist's invocation of Shakespeare, Tennyson, and the Bible as the time-tested superiors of modernist authors anticipates your own invocation of modernist authors as the time-tested superiors of Wallace and Franzen—but as always, Gertrude Stein has the last laugh.
Making predictions is a dodgy game, and refraining from it is no sin—not that playing can't be entertaining. We read things now that no one ever thought would stand "the test of time" at the moment of their publication. Sometimes this is through the conscious work of recovery: the (wonderful) high school and college standby Their Eyes Were Watching God fell out of print, and Hurston died penniless, before black feminists did us all the favor of rediscovering it and it became what is surely as reliable a generator of revenue as HarperCollins has (a "Harper Perennial," no less). And who in 1968 felt certain that Philip K. Dick would get his own Library of America volume?
And that's really the larger point of Ed's response (should have read to that last paragraph, Alec!): the age of the long tail means the age of rediscovering older novels, or weird ones, or fanfiction—and all at the same time. The long tail in some degree obviates the "test of time," because chronology no longer so clearly delimits the horizon of our exposure to "new" novels.
What Natalia said.
This is a lovely post, Ed, that deserves serious responses. (Also three cheers for citing Terry Pratchett. Will amazon soon be able to distort space and time?)
I've at last had a chance to read your Lit Lab Pamphlet. Stunning work. It's really thought-provoking; it opens up so much space for further work and further discussion. I'm very happy to see your writing here on Arcade too. Two random thoughts, by no means coherent, in response mostly to your post, but with the pamphlet in the background:
It seems to me that we've had a whole century of preparation for amazon's reach into the deep backlist and its recreation of an extended contemporaneity. The idea that a novel might pick and choose among all available historical styles, that there isn't just one contemporary style---isn't this an early-twentieth-century idea? Joycean pastiche, Poundian archaism, Mary Webb's old-time-Shropshire bestseller Precious Bane... At the same we have the develpment of the novel into an acceptable school subject (as you say in your pamphlet, there are important causal connections, even homologies, between recommendation lists and course syllabuses). Of course it also marks the moment when the novel's capacity for novelty and contemporaneity comes into question, precisely because it is no longer self-evidently of the present in either matter or manner.
I also think we should try to discern the emerging principles of hierarchy and selection that operate in the new economics of books, rather than thinking (as I'm sure you don't) that the whole Great Unread (or Long Tail) is now potentially available. Perhaps there will be more niches, subcultures of taste with their own private canons, liberated by the gradual decline of literary study in the school and its standardizing influence. But amazon is no friend to the underdog. It may be worth its while to stock a certain amount of backlist, but it will always be attracted to the big profits in bestsellers. By the same token, readers' social-network sites will always care most about the best-connected nodes in their networks, the ones most likely to generate traffic (and clickthroughs to book-buying sites). What do you think?
I think we can find some precedent for the long-tail (if not the endurance of the long tale down the centuries) by looking at the history of film, what the coming of video tapes did to that history, and how much TV and DVDs (pre-streaming) contributed to the preservation of the culture's engagement with films from previous generations. Which makes me agree with your hopefulness.
Thanks for all the great comments here! There are a few points I’d like to pick up on. Alec, this comment is too long and you should definitely skip it.
TL; DR! Critics lament this attention deficit problem all the time when they talk about reading and digital culture, but they conveniently ignore the incredible investments people today make in the cultural entertainment they value. Yes, this includes millions of person-hours poured into World of Warcraft, but it also involves a great deal of time spent reading and writing on places like Twitter and Facebook, not to mention email, Wikipedia and fan encyclopedias. Now these things are not quite fiction yet, but many of them encourage us to put a fictive frame over reality, compressing and editing ourselves for a better digital reception. The epistolary begets epistemology. I fully expect to see some sophisticated pieces of literary fiction emerge in social media over the next decade or two.
If that seems outlandish to you, rest assured that even in the context of old-fashioned books the desert of the contemporary is not so desolate as Alec imagines, nor is it as intractable. Taking up Gregory and Natalia: Some living authors have already been elevated to the pantheon—Toni Morrison and Thomas Pynchon spring to mind. I think future English majors will take classes on the late-20th century long-form novel as well, anchored by Infinite Jest, House of Leaves, and, who knows, maybe The Corrections. And from my research I’ve learned that writing one book is nice but writing lots of books is better when it comes to establishing yourself in literary networks. For that reason I’d like to say The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao will stay in print, but I think it might depend on the rest of Junot Díaz’s literary career.
Andrew, thanks very much for your comment. You make an important point about the cultural complexity that the novel engaged in the early 20th century—I’d respond that now we’re seeing that kind of multiplicity spilling out from the work of art and into the systems of production. Amazon is just one of a number of cultural mechanisms (and often explicitly textual mechanisms, like the Kindle’s shared highlighting feature) for algorithmically fueled mashups of readers, writers, critics and their cultural styles.
I also agree that we need to study the emergence of new cultural hierarchies. What’s interesting to me is the tension between, on the one hand, companies like Amazon and Apple, which are striving to create a world in which you would have no reason to buy (or read or think, eventually) anything outside their carefully tended gardens, and on the other hand, the unruly customers. We are always bending these systems to our own will just as they are bending us, so people will create all sorts of niche groups and canons within and against corporate taxonomies.