Why the Novel Persists (And Will Continue to Do So)
For as long as I can remember, there have always been these highbrow literary authors proclaiming one thing: THE NOVEL IS DEAD. Apparently, this subject has been quite a popular topic of complaint for longer than my brief existence since it has its own Wikipedia Page. The most recent iteration of this proclamation, of course, came from noted journalist and "high-brow" author Will Self (you can, if you want, read his complaint here).
The main argument for present beliefs in this idea, the death of the novel and literature in general, as of right now is the number of distractions now available that keep people from reading. You recognize some of the supposed culprits:
TV.
The Internet.
Social Media.
Streaming Services.
Computers.
Smart Phones.
Tablets.
etc.
Yet, here we are, nearly two decades into the 21st Century, and people still read. Yes, funding for libraries has been cut. Yes, the STEM programs and vocational work are being pushed more than the Humanities and the Arts. But people are still reading--and eBooks, Tablets, and E-Readers, three products of our tech-savvy age, are only insuring that more.
So why is that? And, why has the novel in particular been able to hang in there--and will continue to do so--despite the supposed ever increasing number of distractions and growing disregard? As far as I can tell, it comes down to qualities innate to the literary form itself.
To begin with, the novel is, and always has been, a popular form. People--women in particular--if they read anything, besides social media posts and news reports, very likely read novels. Now, also very likely, they're not reading Finnegan's Wake (because, why would you?). Instead, they're probably reading a James Patterson, a John Grisham, a Danielle Steele, a Dan Brown, a Nicholas Sparks, or--if they're a little twisted--a Stephen King. And what do all these writers write? Novels. More specifically, they read novels that are meant, before anything else, to entertain, to enthrall, to hold the reader with a good story.
And the novel has always been like that. In fact, it was because of those entertainment roots, that people used to think the novel was a lesser form of writing (that, and the fact that it was largely women who read them). Back in the days before electricity, if you were a serious person (meaning a "man"), you didn't read novels or fiction of any kind. You read and wrote poetry. It took Henry James' famous essay The Art of Fiction, for the novel to begin to rise from being a form of entertainment to being an "art form." And with that rise came a feeling of sacredness and pretentiousness, two words that can still be used to describe many--not all, but many--works of literary fiction produced in the past and today (e.g. Finnegan's Wake).
Still, the best novels, popular or literary, still retain that essential entertaining quality needed to hold a reader's attention. And thank god (or whoever's in charge), for that.
Now, speaking of the works of James Joyce, another quality that's allowed the novel to survive is its mailability.
The word novel literally means "new." A novel idea is a new idea. A novel work is a new work. And that's what a novel is. It's a new story, with new characters, new events, and new setting, all of which hopefully have something new to say about the human condition (in theory, at least). Those essential elements of fiction aside, the novel has also been able to withstand change from one era to another regarding what a novel should be and how it should tell its story. But this is getting a little abstract, so lets make things more concrete.
Take this list of titles:
Tom Jones
Nicholas Nickleby
To the Lighthouse
The Great Gatsby
The Lord of the Rings
To Kill a Mockingbird
Now, ask yourself one question. Besides the fact that all of these works are novels, what the hell do any of them have in common? Fielding's Tom Jones is a capacious, digression-filled, baggy monster of a picaresque novel from the early 18th Century. Dickens' Nicholas Nickleby is romance and coming-of-age story written in the 19th Century. In Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf spins a tale about change in culture in England before and after the First World War while concurrently creating an example of high modernist, stream-of-consciousness writing. Gatsby of course is Fitzgerald's slender tragic masterpiece that epitomizes the era it depicts: America in the 1920s. LOTR is the first modern secondary-world fantasy work, composed and published after the Second World War and published in three volumes. And Mockingbird is a picture of the pre-integration and pre-civil rights American South in the late 1930s published originally in the 1960s.
All of these books are called novels. Yet, in terms of style, subject matter, and the eras in which they were written, they have nothing in common save for one trait: they're works of long fiction. But even with that, none of them are even similar to each other in length. Each is trying to accomplish something different, tell a different story in a different way. That aside though, there's little common ground.
And that's fantastic. The idea that the novel has never been just one thing--besides a work of long fiction--means that, save for that one caveat, the possibilities of the form are endless. The only thing a writer has to heed is that their story must keep the reader hooked, no matter the length.
Finally (yes, we're at last there), the reason the novel has lasted, more so than either of the two reasons I've explained before, is that its an form capable of doing one thing that no other storytelling form can do.
TV and movies are also vehicles for storytelling--and as of late, both mediums have been showing that more and more. And certainly more people watch movies and TV than read. They're today's popular entertainment. But, neither film nor television have ever successfully been able to do one thing:
The main argument for present beliefs in this idea, the death of the novel and literature in general, as of right now is the number of distractions now available that keep people from reading. You recognize some of the supposed culprits:
TV.The Internet.
Social Media.
Streaming Services.
Computers.
Smart Phones.
Tablets.
etc.
Yet, here we are, nearly two decades into the 21st Century, and people still read. Yes, funding for libraries has been cut. Yes, the STEM programs and vocational work are being pushed more than the Humanities and the Arts. But people are still reading--and eBooks, Tablets, and E-Readers, three products of our tech-savvy age, are only insuring that more.
So why is that? And, why has the novel in particular been able to hang in there--and will continue to do so--despite the supposed ever increasing number of distractions and growing disregard? As far as I can tell, it comes down to qualities innate to the literary form itself.
 |
Yeah, just don't. Leave it to the literary critics. |
And the novel has always been like that. In fact, it was because of those entertainment roots, that people used to think the novel was a lesser form of writing (that, and the fact that it was largely women who read them). Back in the days before electricity, if you were a serious person (meaning a "man"), you didn't read novels or fiction of any kind. You read and wrote poetry. It took Henry James' famous essay The Art of Fiction, for the novel to begin to rise from being a form of entertainment to being an "art form." And with that rise came a feeling of sacredness and pretentiousness, two words that can still be used to describe many--not all, but many--works of literary fiction produced in the past and today (e.g. Finnegan's Wake).
Still, the best novels, popular or literary, still retain that essential entertaining quality needed to hold a reader's attention. And thank god (or whoever's in charge), for that.
Now, speaking of the works of James Joyce, another quality that's allowed the novel to survive is its mailability.
The word novel literally means "new." A novel idea is a new idea. A novel work is a new work. And that's what a novel is. It's a new story, with new characters, new events, and new setting, all of which hopefully have something new to say about the human condition (in theory, at least). Those essential elements of fiction aside, the novel has also been able to withstand change from one era to another regarding what a novel should be and how it should tell its story. But this is getting a little abstract, so lets make things more concrete.
Take this list of titles:
Tom Jones
Nicholas Nickleby
To the Lighthouse
The Great Gatsby
The Lord of the Rings
To Kill a Mockingbird
Now, ask yourself one question. Besides the fact that all of these works are novels, what the hell do any of them have in common? Fielding's Tom Jones is a capacious, digression-filled, baggy monster of a picaresque novel from the early 18th Century. Dickens' Nicholas Nickleby is romance and coming-of-age story written in the 19th Century. In Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf spins a tale about change in culture in England before and after the First World War while concurrently creating an example of high modernist, stream-of-consciousness writing. Gatsby of course is Fitzgerald's slender tragic masterpiece that epitomizes the era it depicts: America in the 1920s. LOTR is the first modern secondary-world fantasy work, composed and published after the Second World War and published in three volumes. And Mockingbird is a picture of the pre-integration and pre-civil rights American South in the late 1930s published originally in the 1960s.
All of these books are called novels. Yet, in terms of style, subject matter, and the eras in which they were written, they have nothing in common save for one trait: they're works of long fiction. But even with that, none of them are even similar to each other in length. Each is trying to accomplish something different, tell a different story in a different way. That aside though, there's little common ground.
And that's fantastic. The idea that the novel has never been just one thing--besides a work of long fiction--means that, save for that one caveat, the possibilities of the form are endless. The only thing a writer has to heed is that their story must keep the reader hooked, no matter the length.
Finally (yes, we're at last there), the reason the novel has lasted, more so than either of the two reasons I've explained before, is that its an form capable of doing one thing that no other storytelling form can do.
TV and movies are also vehicles for storytelling--and as of late, both mediums have been showing that more and more. And certainly more people watch movies and TV than read. They're today's popular entertainment. But, neither film nor television have ever successfully been able to do one thing:
Let People Inside Each Others Heads.
In our everyday lives, we often wonder what other people are thinking or doing when we're not around. Usually, they're not thinking much, and what they're doing is probably very similar to what you do in your day-to-day life. (And let's face it, much of everyday life is just boring.)
With film and TV, you watch other people do things. Often, they're very exciting, sometimes impossible to fathom things. And you get to see things that other characters who are actually in the story aren't privy to (that's called dramatic irony).
But you're merely a spectator. You watch other people, and you react to what they do. You don't experience it with them. Fiction, and the novel especially, however, lets you go peer into the minds of other people.
In writing, there's is a technique called interior monologue. Filmmakers try, at times, to employ something similar to this via clumsy voiceovers, but the experience is never the same.
If a writer is particularly skilled at their craft, most of the prose that you, the reader, reads is well filtered through the mind of the character. What you read reflects what the character is actually thinking. Some of the best wordsmiths, like Jane Austen, George R.R. Martin, and, yes, Stephen King, can fill page after page with the thoughts of their character and make readers feel exactly what the character feels and even think what they think about the situation their in. It activates and generates you inner empathy. No other art form does this. Not even short fiction (simply because of its brevity). Only the novel can get you to feel along with the characters.
And until they come up with some kind of new gizmo or form of entertainment that can cause you to feel empathy (maybe via VR), the novel is not going anywhere.
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