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.