The sad fact of it is that any idiot can write a book. If you write two hundred words a day for a year, taking off on the weekends (don’t want to strain the system), at the end you will have a manuscript of respectable proportions that you can inflict on contest judges, agents’ slush piles, and so forth. It’s comparable to becoming fit; but, unlike becoming fit, I’ve actually done the book thing a few times. It is not so exciting as you’d expect; it’s something akin to finishing an unusually large and annoying crossword. (I imagine it’s different if you ever get one published.) And like crosswords, the more you do, the less it feels like a diversion and the more it feels like an embarrassing compulsion.
Especially now. Bakhtin assures us that the novel is the indispensable genre because (among other things) it is the only genre that resists formal convention and can constantly renew itself from the wells of the contemporary. I think that’s true, so far as it goes; I don’t think the old boy considered what I genuinely think the near future will hold, which is the near-complete annihilation of literature in any form longer than a bar receipt.
It is not that the novel will become a dead, ossified form like epic or tragedy; it’s that the whole enterprise of reading will go the way of madrigals, smoking indoors, Greek prose comp, spectator shoes, dog racing, correspondence using an honorific and last name, the Latin Mass, and any number of yesteryear’s other delights. It will become the province of a few frankly socially unattractive maniacs, some of whom will be very gifted, most of whom won’t be, and all of whom will be irrelevant. (You may think I’m joking about smoking indoors, but, on my word of honor, there was a group in the neighborhood of my college, “Cambridge Citizens for Smokers’ Rights,” which devoted itself to expanding smoking zones and abolishing tobacco taxes with the singleminded zeal of trainspotters and amateur radio enthusiasts. They even had a local-access television show.) Being an editor and writer today is like being one of those Restoration-era stage actors who specialized in portraying women, soon to be blasted from the stage by a revolution in public mores that will render them inconsequential, insolvent, and, in retrospect for most people, somewhat silly.
The anxieties about A.I., the degrading effects of media on attention spans and reading comprehension, and the rest are all old hat. So is the abysmal state of publishing, both books and journalism. (Please subscribe, by the way.) And, of course, it’s a two-way street: The suppliers of writing are themselves far from innocent in the collapse in reading. That doesn’t make the anxieties less well-founded. Young people are becoming visibly, measurably stupider, which is saying something: I speak as a formerly young person who was breathtakingly stupid. It’s not just test scores. I have recently noticed in my editing that people have started to write in a strange way: unfinished parallelisms, strange parenthetical irruptions of the authorial voice in the middle of straightforward informative passages, a cavalier approach to verb transitivity, odd repetitions and messy subordinations. I realized that they are writing in the open-ended, elliptical syntax of podcast hosts. Civilization in its late stages is, like a dementia patient performing the daily routines of his nursery school years, reverting to orality.
It isn’t especially clear that mass literacy at a high level is especially necessary for the functioning of a society; we got along well enough without it for however many centuries. But it is gloomy. For two hundred years we have had a very fine thing going. Bakhtin argues that the novel is a way of examining language itself, the very stuff of individual thought and expression, playing it off its surroundings and itself. For two centuries, anyone off the street could engage in daring flights of the intellectual life that were all but inaccessible in most eras. Now we have memes, some of which, admittedly, are extremely funny.
Most things are never meant.
This won’t be, most likely; but greeds
And garbage are too thick-strewn
To be swept up now, or invent
Excuses that make them all needs.
I just think it will happen, soon.
