A new chapter,but it is far from the end for the novel
Is the novel heading to its death? Day 3 at the Jaipur Literature Festival tackled this question in a session titled The Crisis of American Fiction.
A critical and popular commonplace these days is the doomsday forecast for the novel. Is the novel heading to its death? Day 3 at the Jaipur Literature Festival tackled this question head-on in a session titled The Crisis of American Fiction,moderated by British novelist Martin Amis and featuring American writers Richard Ford,Jay McInerney and Junot Diaz.
Beginning on the cautionary note that a crisis of the novel everywhere is a very difficult,nebulous subject,Amis added the perspective that fears of the decline or death of the novel are as old as the novel itself. When the second volume of Don Quixote,the first modern or even post-modern novel,appeared,people said the novel was in decline. This,Amis said,is called the Myth of Decline. All through the 19th century a grand phase for the English novel the English novel felt itself behind the French and Russian. When Britain lost its global dominance,the confidence of the people that wrote itself into English fiction died. If theres a crisis in American fiction today,why was the American novel ascendant in the first place?
The answer is the very mantle of global power that passed to the United States post-World War II. Yet,today,with the passing of the senior generation of American novelists Saul Bellow,Norman Mailer,John Updike,all following each other in close succession the scene has changed. But is there a sense of panic felt by these three poor,panicking American novelists as Amis bantered?
Ford,author of The Sportswriter,was supported by McInerney Bright Lights and Diaz The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao in his observation that the last 20 years,if not exactly a period of ascendancy for the American novel,have been a time of foment. What the novel in America has witnessed is a diversification due to Latino,Asian and African immigrant writers.
McInerney referred to the crisis felt in the 1960s and 1970s about the future of the novel,famously captured by Tom Wolfe in his essay The New Journalism,which claimed the novel was finished and the torch had passed to journalists,as exemplified by the change in Norman Mailers fictional direction. As New Journalism enjoyed its brief spotlight,the novels problem became one of realism. Post-modernism was the order of the day. And yet the novel was bubbling along. In my lifetime,the American novel has grown much diverse and come to be claimed by marginal people… who have found readership most importantly,said McInerney.
Migrating from the Dominican Republic as a six-year-old,Diaz is himself an exemplar of that diversification. He added the minimalist necessity as long as one reader discovers a book and falls in love with it,the novel cannot be dead.
But its a lie to deny that things have changed. Socio-economic changes have speeded up,history has speeded up,feels Amis. If The New York Review of Books carries a long Iran piece and at the bottom of the page theres a poem,the reader,who would rather stay in the present,might wonder what the poems doing there. Because lyric poetry,like the contemplative novel,stops time. The reader too has changed.
The novels challenge remains realism,concluded Amis. Realism not as a genre but a strategy with things changing so fast,how does the writer handle the world around? Diaz dismissed the adequacy of realism to approach,say,something as big as the experience of slavery. Science fiction and fantasy,as they are written today,are a truly powerful genre,capturing anxieties and imaginings that would always beat realism.
A few hours after encountering the crisis of the novel,Nobel Laureate J M Coetzee demonstrated why the novel matters and why it will survive. In a session chaired by Patrick French,Coetzee offered no opinion but read his The Old Woman and the Cats. He just read. Not dramatically but slowly,softly,emphasising emotively,with pauses and slight rise and ebb of his voice,what he as the writer would underscore in his narrative. The story an Elizabeth Costello lecture debates over the neutering of cats the worldview inherited from Roman Catholicism on both sides of the contraception debate through a mother-son relationship. Coetzee chose this piece to read in India because he felt Hinduism has always wondered where the soul goes,which is more than can be said about the secular West.
As a writer,Coetzee said he had his own opinions too. But he doesnt think them interesting enough. French noted that in his introductory address if one of the biggest crowds gathered at the Jaipur Literature Festival to hear Coetzee only read,then J M Coetzee,who only writes,must be doing something right. The novel has a future because it has a present.
Share
