Final Fridays (19 page)

Well: Worlds are always ending, are they not? Not only such catastrophically beleaguered worlds as that of the Zealots besieged by Roman legions at Masada in 73 c.e., for example, or that of European Jews before Hitler's Final Solution; not only such more gradually beleaguered worlds as that of the Algonquin Indian tribes upon the arrival of English Colonists in Virginia and Maryland, but likewise the temporarily victorious worlds that displaced these unfortunates: the worlds of Imperial Rome and the Third Reich and the prosperous
18th-century colonial tidewater tobacco plantations that supplanted the indigenous Native Americans. The small-town Maryland neighborhood in which I was born and raised during the Great Depression and World War II is a world long since gone, although most of its streets and trees and houses spookily remain in place. From the microworlds of the Harlem Renaissance and F. Scott Fitzgerald's Jazz Age to the macroworlds of Victorian England and the Soviet Union, or for that matter the worlds of Earth's Pleistocene era and its fast-fleeting successor, our very own Holocene; from MGM musical extravaganzas of the 1940s to our local solar system, whatever lives in time dies in time, and can be considered ipso facto to be always in the process of ending. So?

 

SO LET'S CONSIDER whether—or, rather,
how
—the same applies to the world in which we meet here today: the world that fetches people like me to college campuses to speak to people like you, and that fetches you from your other pleasures and concerns to come hear what I have to say. I mean, of course, the world in which
literature
, for example, is written, published, and at least occasionally read and discussed: literature in general, but more particularly prose fiction, and most particularly what we're accustomed to calling
novels
.
Printed
novels, as it used to go without saying: the dramatic interactions of imaginary characters narrated at some length by their author in language printed in ink on paper pages numbered sequentially and bound into books, to be read by presumably though not necessarily individual readers who (also presumably though not necessarily) begin on page one and proceed thence to page two, page three, et cetera, in typically though not necessarily silent transaction with the printed text. Will that do as a working definition of the form? It
is a category of art and entertainment, please permit me to remind you, that more or less developed in the 17th century, although there are notable earlier instances even before the development of print technology; that then flowered in the 18th and 19th centuries, fertilized by the Industrial Revolution and the ascendancy of a middle class with the time, means, and ability to read; and that then in the 20th century was believed in many quarters to have become more or less moribund, an endangered species, its niche in the culture's aesthetic ecology usurped by successive new technologies of narrative/ dramatic entertainment such as movies, network radio, television, videocassette recorders, and, at that century's close, by the interactive pleasures of the Internet, including online magazines, “e-books,” and even hypertextual multimedia electronic fiction, of which more presently. Toward mid-century especially—at the apex of what was called High Modernism in the arts of what was called Western Civilization, before Postmodernism and personal computers had even hit the fan—it became so fashionable for literary theorizers to titillate themselves with the subject of The Death of the Novel that I used half-seriously to warn aspiring fiction-writers, in the universities where I coached them back then, that they were apprenticing themselves in an art perhaps destined soon to become as passé as vaudeville, as quaint as the Magic Lantern and the Stereopticon, as limited and “special” in its range of audience as is equestrian dressage, say, or narrative poetry since the ascendancy of the novel. While busily writing novels myself, I took it as my coachly duty in those days to familiarize my coachees with such mordantly witty Cassandras of our medium as the European critic E. M. Cioran, from whom I would quote cautionary tidbits like this one, from his essay “Beyond the Novel”:

And then I would encourage them, and myself, with the critic Leslie Fiedler's heartening observation that the novel was, after all,
born
a-dying, like all of us (Fiedler had in mind the genre's European origins in parody and satire, such as Cervantes's transcendent satire of chivalric romances in
Don Quixote
and Henry Fielding's hilariously scathing
Shamela
, a parody of Samuel Richardson's pioneering epistolary novel
Pamela
); that it has gone on dying vigorously for several centuries since, and that we may hope to enjoy its continuing terminality for some time to come. I would suggest to my charges that like the doomed tubercular sopranos dear to 19th-century Italian opera, the Novel might be reserving its best arias for the end of Act Three, its ring-down-the-curtain swan song. And since neither I nor they had been on hand to compose Act One, mightn't it be something to score that curtain-closer?

Having thus encouraged and inspirited them, however, I felt obliged to remind my young Novelist Aspirants that the art of made-up stories appears to have managed quite nicely for a very long while before the invention of
writing
, even, not to mention before the inventions of paper, ink, movable-type printing, general literacy, and mass-produced book-bound extended prose fictions borrowable from public libraries or purchasable online as well as from mega-bookmarts
along with croissants and cafe latté; and that that art would doubtless survive the supersession of any or all of those inventions. The Death of the Novel, in short—if that so-long-heralded, almost anticlimactic expiration should finally come to pass—would not likely be the end of story-making, story-transmission, and story-reception by one means or another. Even TEOTWordAWKI, the end of the word as we've known it, would not spell the doom of Storying, although it would certainly leave us old-fashioned print-novelists in an awkward position.

 

SO: IS OUR soprano still robustly melodious in her terminality, like Violetta in
La Traviata
and Mimi in
La Bohème
, or has her song all but given way to last-gasping? One notes that the literal tuberculosis that was such a grim staple of 19th-century life, and therefore of 19th-century novels as well as operas, made an ominous curtain-call toward the end of the 20th, thanks to international air travel, but that it has (at least for the present) been largely contained by antibiotics.
²
Could it be that some cultural-historical-technological equivalent of the TB-pharmaceutical Isoniazid has appeared like a
deus ex machina
to save the Novel's life, or at least to postpone The End? And why should anybody care one way or the other, except the few people who happen to devote their lives to the writing of fiction, and the slightly larger number engaged in editing, publishing, and selling it, and the larger yet but by no means overwhelming number who still read it for pleasure? What did those literary-critical Cassandras mean anyway, back there in the 20th century, by “the death of the novel”? That the likes of John Grisham and Danielle Steel and their millions of readers are dinosaurs unaware that the asteroid of their extinction has already struck? Or merely that the Heroic Age of the
novel—the age of Jane Austen and Charles Dickens, of Tolstoy and the Brontë sisters, Balzac and Victor Hugo and Mark Twain—had given way to the brilliant decadence of Modernism, to Proust and Joyce and Kafka, Virginia Woolf and Gertrude Stein and Thomas Mann (whose 1924 novel
The Magic Mountain
happens also to be the great culminating gasp of Tuberculosis as a literary and thence operatic motif)?

I shall speak to those questions, perhaps even systematically, after a classical digression—by which I mean a digression into classical lit, not a classical instance of wandering from the subject. In Spain a few years ago, by the way, my wife and I stopped in the attractive old hill-town of Úbeda, in the Andalusian foothills of the Sierra Morena, where the 11th-century soldiers of King Alfonso VI were besieged by the Moors until the legendary El Cid belatedly arrived with reinforcements to lift the siege. “What took you so long?” the exasperated king is said to have demanded of his tardy rescuer—to which El Cid is said to have replied, “I have been wandering the hills of Úbeda.” Spanish friends of ours told us subsequently that that phrase is still used to describe a lecturer, for example, who strays from his or her announced subject: “
Se marcha por los cerros de Úbeda.”
Awhile back I referred to those mid-century Death-of-the-Novel types as “Cassandras,” invoking the apocalyptic prophetess in Homer's
Iliad
who foresees the destruction of Troy but can't get anybody to take her seriously. Now that I've used the word
apocalyptic
—a much-heard word indeed at the close of the past century and millennium—it occurs to me to point out that while many of us were reminded in print and on television, as Y2K approached, that
apocalypse
comes from the Greek
apo
, meaning “reversal,” and
kalupsein
, meaning “to cover,” hence an uncovering, an unveiling, or (as every reader of the
New Testament knows) a
revelation
, perhaps fewer of us remember that the sexy sea-nymph Calypso in Homer's
Odyssey
, who detains the hero for seven lusty years on his erratic homeward voyage from ruined Troy, takes her name from the same root. Calypso is “she who conceals,” metaphorically speaking, Odysseus's proper objective from him—his return to faithful Penelope and their troubled estate—by her long-term seduction of that errant though resourceful fellow. Calypso is the alluring aspect of Melville's “great shroud of the sea,” which rolls on and covers everything at the end of
Moby-Dick
; she can also be thought of as the Goddess of Digression—to whom I have now paid more than adequate homage, and from whose embrace I now return to my apocalyptic subject: TEOTWordAWKI.

Back to the burning questions, beginning with whether the novel is toast as a major mode of popular narrative entertainment in what we call the advanced industrialized world or merely passé as a major genre of literary art. I myself would say “Neither,” although the answer obviously depends on what's meant by Major. Indisputably, most people in the world we're speaking of spend more time spectating stories via television and movies nowadays than reading them off the printed page or the pixelated computer monitor. And indisputably the popular audience for the noble genre of the
short story
has all but disappeared by comparison to the palmy days of periodicals like
The Saturday Evening Post
, when an Edna Ferber or an “O. Henry” could acquire an enormous readership on the basis of magazine publication alone—quite apart, in Ms. Ferber's case, from her success as a popular novelist. But the short story is a whole'nother story. Back at Barnes & Noble and
Amazon.com
, however, the commerce in printed book-length fiction evidently remains brisk, although the institutions of trade fiction publishing, distribution,
and sale are less kind than they were half a century ago to non-blockbuster, “mid-list” novelists of high literary quality. One still sees occasionally, though perhaps less often than once upon a time, novels of impressive literary merit and low advance promotion, written by previously unknown authors, make their way onto the bestseller lists by sheer word-of-mouth advertising: Charles Frazier's admirable
Cold Mountain
(1998) comes hearteningly to mind. And I believe that the aesthetics of literary Modernism, with its notorious tendency to divide novels, for example, into either High Art on the one hand or pop entertainment on the other, is far enough behind us now so that I, for one, am gratified at the sight of people still reading
any
kind of fiction for pleasure, in airports and airplanes and on beaches and for all I know in the privacy of their homes as well, between surfing the Web and surfing the cable channels. Competition from glitzy and convenient alternative media has no doubt reduced the novel's share of literate-audience attention (I mean “literate” here in both senses of that adjective); but the fiction alcoves of our public libraries remain fairly busy still, with wait-lists for popular titles; one hears that community book-clubs are on the rise; and even noncommercial fictors like me may learn to their surprise that there exist websites for our books out there in Cyberland. On a continuum of species-imperilment extending from starlings and rabbits on the safe end to pygmy owls and rhinoceri on the other, I'm inclined to position the capital-N Novel somewhere in the neighborhood of the bald eagle or maybe even the osprey, its numbers unquestionably reduced from its glory-days by habitat loss and other ecological pressures, but its status still considerable and its reasonably vigorous continuation in no apparent short-term danger. I'll return to this zoological analogy later.

Very well: But if that is the case, where, then, are the Charles Dickenses and the Mark Twains of our postmodern era; our novelists at once popular and excellent, acclaimed widely in their own time by critics and lay readers alike and likely to be so by generations to come? If the genre's Golden Age extended some 100-plus years, from Fielding to Flaubert, let's say,
Tom Jones
to
Madame Bovary
, and its more self-conscious Silver age through the big Modernists—certainly excellent, though scarcely popular—from Proust and Joyce to Nabokov and Beckett, aren't we by comparison Bronze-Agers at best, maybe even (biodegradable) plastic? My reply is that I don't know, really, although several considerations come to mind. Alternative media really have altered the audience for printed fiction, not only since Dickens and Twain, who didn't have movies to compete with, but since Hemingway and Faulkner as well, who weren't in the ring with television, really, not to mention with VCRs and the Internet. And we ought to remember, e.g., that while Twain was indeed a popular success, the novel of his that we most treasure nowadays had a rough critical lift-off indeed, and is still found offensive by distressingly many Americans. We should remember too that the likes of Cervantes and Dickens and Tolstoy and Twain are not common in any era—pre-modern, modern, or postmodern. And that in J. D. Salinger's
The Catcher in the Rye
, for instance, Joseph Heller's
Catch-22
and Gabriel García Márquez's
One Hundred Years of Solitude
(even in translation), we have after all at least three classics from the past half-century that meet our criteria: a not-inconsiderable number, to which other novel-aficionados will certainly rush to make additions or substitutions. So maybe things are just fine, anyhow quite okay, though less so than formerly?