People have been saying the novel is dead for a while now. When I Googled that phrase I got results going back at least as far as 1999 with an interesting article in the New Statesman. It's one of those declarations that demands attention. And I like the chutzpah it takes to say something like that. To go on record and posit that some mainstay of our culture is deceased. I'm going to try it now, just to see what it's like. Here we go: Drinking coffee is dead! Porn: gone the way of the dodo! Pretending to enjoy looking at somebody else's vacation photos: finished! Yes...yes, oh my god, yes! It makes me feel so...alive! My pulse is literally racing right now. I'm actually tingling.

Even though I've had the thought from time to time that the novel might be, you know...(I still feel the need to lower my voice when I say this)...dying. It's always been a secret thought, something I think in the early hours of the morning, when my psyche is vulnerable and shivering and just barely waking up to its first espresso while Honey takes her poo. But it's getting harder to repress the thought as I go about working on my own novel project, which continues to drag along like some personal Big Dig, an excavation of every demon I've ever buried.

It's terrible to think about this novel-death business. And so I would never come out and say it myself, for a couple of reasons. First, I have a vested interest in the novel not dying. If there were a life insurance policy for the novel, I would take one out. Second, it's just not in my nature to go public with that sort of statement. It's way too radical an assertion for the middle-of-the-road, debate-both-sides-of-an-issue-at-the-same-time kind of guy I am. I did once say that blogging was dead. And I remember that really shook things up around here. And by "around here" I of course mean "inside my head." I didn't speak to myself for weeks.

The truth is I don't believe the novel is dead. Or more accurately, I won't believe it. But having said that, I will now waffle unapologetically and say I think David Shields is onto something in his essay, Long Live the Anti-Novel, Built from Scraps. He doesn't quite come to the conclusion that the novel is dead, just evolving. He lays out the problem: "We live in a post-narrative, post-novel world. Plots are for dead people. Novelly novels exist, of course, and whenever I'm on a plane, it's all I see everyone reading, but they function for us as nostalgia: when we read traditional novels, we get to pretend that life is still coherent."

But what, then, is the alternative? If novels with plots are on their way out, what's to replace them? He comes to a sort of ah-ha moment as he's talking about a rubric of material he put together for a creative writing course he was teaching. As he made this literary "mash-up" he came to a realization about what this thing was:

It wasn't the novel. And it wasn't memoir. It was something else. Hard to define, but it had to do with the idea that all great works of literature either dissolve a genre or invent one; if you want to write serious books, you must be ready to break the forms; it's a commonplace that every book needs to find its own form, but how many really do?

And here was the big break: I realized how perfectly the appropriated and remixed words embodied my argument: just as I was arguing for work that occupied a liminal space between genres, so, too, I wanted the reader to experience in my mash-up the dubiety of the first-person pronoun; I wanted the reader to not quite be able to tell who was talking—was it me or Sonny Rollins or Emerson or Nietzsche or Frank Rich or, weirdly, none of us or all of us at the same time?

I can relate to what Shields is saying. I tend to read less "novelly novels" myself. I gravitate more to "literary vignettes," pieces that may contain elements of plot and character, but which are mostly about ideas or maybe just words or scenes. I love the idea of a first-person narrator who is always shifting. I love when there are multiple voices. Multiple plots points, some of which go unresolved. It mirrors the world we live in today and the stuff we read, especially online—the disjointed reading experiences we have anytime we sit down in front of a computer. And maybe I love this idea for purely selfish reasons...because it's what I originally set out to do on this blog (something I'll hopefully get back to eventually!) So while my equivocating self would never go all out and say the novel has bought the farm, I do think we're on the verge of a new form of popular writing that is unfolding before us and which we don't exactly have words for yet. Something that might exist alongside the novel on the bookshelves. Something that's sort of part "novel as we know it" and part something else. Something we may even call "novel" eventually.

But hasn't this always been the case, this shifting of the novel? Look at something like Infinite Jest next to Pride and Prejudice. In substance, these are quite different beasts. But we call each of them a "novel." Wittgenstein might say this is a great example of us playing the language-game "novel." We know what we mean when we use the word "novel." And we know when it is used correctly and when it isn't. But the rules of the game are always changing. They aren't hard and fast. We know where the boundaries are usually only when they've been crossed.

Modern novels read differently than novels written in, say, the 19th century. And the language-game for "novel" has changed along with it. All I'm saying, which I think is pretty much in agreement with what Shields is saying, is that the language-game will continue to evolve and will continue to include types of writing we have yet to encounter. And that's a good thing. And it's important.

In the New Statesman article referenced above, Jason Cowley writes about the "robustness of the novel's survival instinct." He says, "The key to the longevity of the novel[...]is that it offers a stylised insight into one of the great human mysteries: that of consciousness. No other artistic medium rivals this privilege of inwardness, this access to interiority and the loneliness of the self."

The novel as we've come to know it, this thing we consider the dominant and most important vehicle for literature today, has only been around for a couple hundred years. That's a pretty short amount of time. Before that, we had plays and extended essays and sermons. The novel is still a newborn. And yet we're so reverent when speaking of it. We are so strangely nostalgic for a thing so recently conceived.

But the novel has mostly kept the same form all this time. It's comprised of pages and broken up into chapters. And it has a start and a finish. The emergence of digital literature could change that up a bit. For instance, why do we need a beginning and an end? What if, instead, authors created worlds and casts of characters that just existed along with the reader, indefinitely.

So far, attempts at bringing the novel "online" have been kind of lame and they're destined to fail. We can't take an old concept and slap it onto a new form. It seems ridiculous to me to tweet a novel, for instance. Or even to post one as as series of blog posts and call it a "blook." Christ. Are you kidding me? The online medium calls for new ways of writing, not repackaging the old. That said, as more writing happens online or takes the form of an e-book, I think it will make more and more sense to refer to this writing using traditional language. We don't need a separate word for a text just because it's digital. Whether the thing happens online or in print, we can use the language-game we've always used to describe it. We can just call it a "novel." It might not be be a "novelly novel" but it could still speak, perhaps more than ever to a modern audience, to this issue of consciousness and inwardness and "the loneliness of the self."

Category: Chewing