The Novel is Not Dead

So reports the Boston Review.

From the story...

What is most astonishing is not the similarity between conservative and insurgent versions of the same argument but the near-hysterical urgency attested by otherwise-reasonable people, the belief that this is a question that must be solved. Where does this urgency lie? Look again at “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown,” and what you will see, palpably obvious though easy to ignore, is Woolf’s discomfort at the shifting of her upstairs, downstairs world, the possibility that her Georgian cook might not just borrow the Daily Herald but start writing a column for it. She is describing not a crisis of style but the anxiety of her own social position. Even amid her praise for her contemporaries, she worries about what their efforts mean for her own pampered class: referring to Joyce and Eliot, she writes, “their sincerity is desperate, and their courage tremendous; it is only that they do not know which to use, a fork or their fingers.” She frets over the “comparative poverty” of Joyce’s mind, the “sordidity” and “indecency” of his subject matter. Is it any wonder, then, that she appears so desperate to change the subject, to redirect our attention from the exacting observation and sociological heft of the Edwardians toward a literature of highly cultivated sensibility?

This is the autochthony principle at work. It changes the discourse in order to own it, to dictate the very terms of what counts as experience and contrivance, “real” and “false”: reasserting this or that critic’s right to declare what deserves our attention, what matters, in the deepest, most self-interested, sense of the word. What’s even more troubling is that so often the principle manifests itself—with its contrived sense of urgency and panic—at moments when actual power lies in the balance. Woolf knew, though perhaps she wouldn’t have said so, that soon enough people like her would do their own laundry and boil their own pots of tea. Her generation faced its own obsolescence, the circling-in, the tightening, of its sphere of influence.

Today, too, in the literary world, a certain aristocracy sees its sun setting: the aristocracy of critics, editors, publishers, and tastemakers, still overwhelmingly white, if slightly less overwhelmingly male, who may be just beginning to realize that—for simple demographic reasons, if nothing else—the future does not belong to them. And so over the last decade, all the features of “Modern Fiction”—the relentless need to bifurcate; the urgent declaration of the new; the overblown, almost apocalyptic, need for a single definition, a final answer—have returned with a vengeance.