Death of the Novel. Is it really going to happen?

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"Roth Gives Novel 25 Years to Live

Forgot about this other choice bit from the Newshour interview. In case you're keeping track, Roth joins Coetzee and Naipaul in declaring the novel dead or dying.

JEFFREY BROWN: Some years ago, I know you were involved with Eastern European writers at a time when they were a kind of moral voice against a totalitarian society. What do you see as your role, or as the role of a writer in our society?

PHILIP ROTH: Your role is to write as well as you can. You're not advancing social causes as far as I'm concerned. You're not addressing social problems.

What you're advancing is... there's only one cause you're advancing; that's the cause of literature, which is one of the great lost human causes. So you do your bit, you do your bit for fiction, for the novel.

JEFFREY BROWN: Why do you think it's become one of the great lost causes of our time?

PHILIP ROTH: My goodness. Um, oh, I don't think in twenty or twenty-five years people will read these things at all.

JEFFREY BROWN: Not at all?

PHILIP ROTH: Not at all. I think it's inevitable. I think the... there are other things for people to do, other ways for them to be occupied, other ways for them to be imaginatively engaged, that are I think probably far more compelling than the novel. So I think the novel's day has come and gone, really.

JEFFREY BROWN: I would imagine you would think this is a great loss for society.

PHILIP ROTH: Yes, I do. There's a lot of brilliance locked up in all those books in the library. There's a lot of human understanding. There's a lot of language. There's a lot of imaginative genius. So, yes, it's a great shame."

Source: http://goldenrulejones.blogspot.com/2004_11_01_goldenrulejones_archive.html#110124732624587405
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/entertainment/july-dec04/roth_11-10.html

This sort of doomsaying always depresses me. Even Coetzee has predicted the death of the novel?

What will replace novels for their richness and scope? Certainly not movies or video games, as diverting and immersive as they are. Apparently, more people than ever are writing novels at a time when the novel is supposed to be fading.

What is everyone else's take on this dire prediction?

― Scallywag, Monday, 29 November 2004 22:11 (twenty years ago)

Well, until I'm dead, there's going to be somebody reading them.

Are any of these other forms as convenient and trustworthy as the novel? Mine rarely run out of batteries when I'm stuck on the el. It happens, but they seem to guzzle a lot less juice than my laptop DVD player.

― Ann Sterzinger (Ann Sterzinger), Monday, 29 November 2004 22:31 (twenty years ago)

it seems significant - and maybe too obvious to point out - that most of the people forecasting the death of the novel are people not far from death themselves. some sort of spin on that larkin line, "sex was invented in 1963," the way people always read the world's story as tracing the arc of their own life stories. i certainly hope things aren't as dire as that. there are some great young novelists working today...

― David Elinsky (David Elinsky), Monday, 29 November 2004 23:27 (twenty years ago)

I saw that interview and thought that part the most posturing piffle or proof that he's really out of touch. The reality is that, compared to some mythical golden age of the novel, people today read more of them than ever. Whether its relative place in arts & letters will stay the same is anyone's guess but the novel will not 'die'.

― Michael White (Hereward), Monday, 29 November 2004 23:52 (twenty years ago)

Not only do more people read more novels then ever now, more people are better educated about what they are reading now then ever. there is a seriously literate audience out there starved for fiction of all kinds. i don't see that going away anytime soon. maybe if roth gets a nobel prize in a year or two he will change his tune. i think he's a frontrunner. and yeah, i don't know why people of great talent are so prone to making these kinds of hyperbolic statenments, but they are!!! Maybe it's true about the twilight years, like David said, they can't imagine people reading without them.

― scott seward (scott seward), Tuesday, 30 November 2004 04:40 (twenty years ago)

Q: Is the novel dead?
A: Oh yes. Very much so.
Q: What replaces it?
A: I should think that it is replaced by what existed before it was invented.
Q: The same thing?
A: The same sort of thing.
Q: Is the bicycle dead?

― The ghost of Donald Barthelme (Jerrynipper), Tuesday, 30 November 2004 08:00 (twenty years ago)

On when people start saying: "I'm working on my film script." rather than a novel will you know that it is in its death throes.

I think David has a point, that maybe deep down they want to witness the death of the novel. Kind of like the thought that, why am I alive if it is not to witness the end of the world that pops into my head on occasion.

― Kevan (Kevan), Tuesday, 30 November 2004 10:16 (twenty years ago)

The novel isn't going anywhere. Roth is just being a crank.

― selfnoise, Tuesday, 30 November 2004 12:20 (twenty years ago)

The novel's not dead, but I think it's a far less significant cultural medium than it has been in the past, let's say up to the end of high modernism in the late fifties. The novel as a modern form developed in the 18th century and had its heydey in the 19th C., and to some extent it remains a child of that age, best suited to the type of psychological realism of Balzac, Dickens etc. It's less good at reflecting the pop/postmodern sensibility that has developed since the sixties, which relies less on the kind of interiority that the novel form excels at. Music and movies are much better at that, not to mention the Internet, video games etc.

The novel form seems to be pretty reactive these days, reflecting rather than making culture. It's hard to imagine a novel nowadays having the kind of cross-disciplinary impact that novels such as A La Recherche du Temps Perdu or L'Etranger had. I don't know what will happen to the novel but it's hardly an eternal form. It was born at a certain period and it will no doubt die at a certain period as well.

― Jonathan Z. (Joanthan Z.), Tuesday, 30 November 2004 12:48 (twenty years ago)

I wouldn't mind if it died, actually. i've already got waaaaaaay too much to read for the rest of my life. Any more being written and printed is just overkill.

― scott seward (scott seward), Tuesday, 30 November 2004 14:30 (twenty years ago)

storytelling will never die though. it might become something else, but the impulse is as old as the hills.

― scott seward (scott seward), Tuesday, 30 November 2004 14:31 (twenty years ago)

Long live the novel!

― Fred (Fred), Tuesday, 30 November 2004 15:25 (twenty years ago)

C'mon, stick a man in a room with food, drink and typewriter- sorry, word-processor- close door, open in a few months and presto! you have a novel. Pretty cheap to make, like rock and roll. How you gonna stop that?

― Ken L (Ken L), Tuesday, 30 November 2004 19:18 (twenty years ago)

On when people start saying: "I'm working on my film script." rather than a novel will you know that it is in its death throes.

I've heard that more often than "I'm working on my novel" (NaNoWriMo aside).

― Casuistry (Chris P), Tuesday, 30 November 2004 22:32 (twenty years ago)

If the novel is so dead, surpassed by film and tv, etc., then why is every crap-tastic movie out there based on a novel?

― tomlang (tom), Wednesday, 1 December 2004 00:32 (twenty years ago)

Actually, take craptastic has nothing to do with it- i just wanted to use that word in a post. sorry.

― tomlang (tom), Wednesday, 1 December 2004 00:33 (twenty years ago)

i don't know why people of great talent are so prone to making these kinds of hyperbolic statenments, but they are!!!

The same reason Timbaland says hip-hop is boring now and he doesn't listen to it (i.e., they're jaded by spending massive amounts of time on one thing and by very good at it).

― Jordan (Jordan), Wednesday, 1 December 2004 01:51 (twenty years ago)

"The novel as a modern form developed in the 18th century and had its heydey in the 19th C."

That's sort of chauvanism for the present. Prose narrative's been around thousands of years. See Lucian and Apuleis. Rabelais and Cervantes wrote "proto-novels" our own current writers (Roth included) could only dream about.

"storytelling will never die though. it might become something else, but the impulse is as old as the hills."

We'll stop telling (and writing) stories when we stop dreaming or start communicating telepathically or something.

― Erich Auerbach, Wednesday, 1 December 2004 17:05 (twenty years ago)

I agree with Roth - most of the posters to ILB live (and read) very differently to the rest of the world's population. I read less than at any other period in my life and it's to do with competing demands on time: 3 hours a week at the gym, 4 hours a week driving the kids around. Then there's the vicious dumbing down cycle, my 14 yr old daughter in English this year studied one book and at least two movies (Star Wars & Edward Scissorhands!) are these kids going to want to be novelists?

― sandy mc (sandy mc), Wednesday, 1 December 2004 20:05 (twenty years ago)

Hmmm. The 'death' of the novel? Well, it depends on what you call 'death', I suppose. Novels will still be published and read for a long time. Tens of millions of romance novels are sold every year.

But there was a time, not too many decades ago, when literary novels enjoyed not mere prestige, but real influence in society. That state of affairs is dead and there's no reason to believe it's ever coming back. Authors like Phillip Roth are old enough to compare then and now. That's what he means by novels being 'dead', I opine.

― Aimless (Aimless), Thursday, 2 December 2004 04:29 (twenty years ago)

I guess I agree with the ghost.

Is it about a bicycle?

― the bellefox, Thursday, 2 December 2004 15:07 (twenty years ago)

I've heard that more often than "I'm working on my novel" (NaNoWriMo aside).

I'll get my shovel.

― Kevan (Kevan), Thursday, 2 December 2004 20:04 (twenty years ago)

film script
"Script who needs script? I'm shopping my treatment."

― Ken L (Ken L), Thursday, 2 December 2004 20:10 (twenty years ago)

I've probably heard "I'm working on a poetry manuscript" more often than either, of course, but that's the kind of circle I run in and doesn't count. I meant among random people.

― Casuistry (Chris P), Thursday, 2 December 2004 20:42 (twenty years ago)

I'm working on a novella.

― cºzen (Cozen), Thursday, 2 December 2004 20:51 (twenty years ago)

"I'm catching up on my reading."

― Ken L (Ken L), Thursday, 2 December 2004 21:05 (twenty years ago)

That was a joke. I've never heard that.

― Ken L (Ken L), Thursday, 2 December 2004 21:07 (twenty years ago)

I should be advancing (on) my reading.

― the bellefox, Thursday, 2 December 2004 21:21 (twenty years ago)

I'm working on a sentence.

― cºzen (Cozen), Thursday, 2 December 2004 22:00 (twenty years ago)

I'm polishing up my punctuation.

― Ken L (Ken L), Thursday, 2 December 2004 22:24 (twenty years ago)

I am eating a persimmon.

― cºzen (Cozen), Thursday, 2 December 2004 23:15 (twenty years ago)

I scintillate my synapses with syntax.

― Ken L (Ken L), Thursday, 2 December 2004 23:29 (twenty years ago)

careful now.

― cºzen (Cozen), Thursday, 2 December 2004 23:41 (twenty years ago)

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