In Defense of the Novel, Yet Again 

At the centenary conference of the British Publishers’ Association recently, Professor George Steiner said a mouthful: 

We are getting very tired in our novels.... Genres rise, genres fall, the epic, the verse epic, the formal verse tragedy. Great moments, then they ebb. Novels will continue to be written for quite a while but, increasingly the search is on for hybrid forms, what we will call rather crassly fact/fiction.... What novel can today quite compete with the best of reportage, with the very best of immediate narrative?...

Pindar [was] the first man on record to say, this poem will be sung when the city which commissioned it has ceased to exist. Literature’s immense boast against death. To say this today even the greatest poet, I dare venture, would be profoundly embarrassed... The great classical vainglory - but what a wonderful vainglory - of literature. “I am stronger than death, I can speak about death in poetry, drama, the novel, because I have overcome it, because I more or less permanent.” That is no longer available.

So here it is once more, wrapped up in the finest, shiniest rhetoric: I mean of course, that tasty old chestnut, the death of the Novel. To which, Professor Steiner adds, for good measure, the death (or at least, the radical transformation) of the Reader, into some sort of computer whiz-kid, some sort of super-nerd; and the death (or at least the radical transformation, into electronic form) of the Book itself. The death of the Author having been announced several years ago in France— and the death of Tragedy by Professor Steiner himself in an earlier obituary—that leaves the stage strewn with more bodies than the end of Hamlet.

Still standing in the midst of the carnage, however, is a lone, commanding figure, a veritable Fortinbras, before whom all of us, writers of authorless texts, post-literate readers, the House of Usher that is the publishing industry—the Denmark, with something rotten in it, that is the publishing industry-and indeed books themselves, must bow our heads: viz., naturally, the Critic. 

One prominent writer has also in recent weeks announced the demise of the form of which he has been so celebrated a practitioner. Not only has V S. Naipaul ceased to write novels: the word "novel" itself, he tells us, now makes him feel ill. Like Professor Steiner, the author of A House for Mr. Biswas feels that the novel has outlived its historical moment, no longer fulfills any useful role, and will be replaced by factual writing. Mr. Naipaul, it will surprise no one to learn, is presently to be found at the leading edge of history, creating this new post-fictional literature.* 

Another major British writer has this to say "It hardly needs pointing out that at this moment the prestige of the novel is extremely low, so low that the words 'I never read novels,' which even a dozen years ago were generally uttered with a hint of apology, are now always uttered in a tone of pride ... the novel is likely, if the best literary brains cannot be induced to return to it, to survive in some perfunctory, despised, and hopelessly degenerate form, like modern tomb-stones, or the Punch and Judy Show."

That is George Orwell, writing in 1936. It would appear—as Professor Steiner in fact concedes—that literature has never had a future. Even the Iliad and Odyssey received bad early reviews. Good writing has always been attacked, notably by other good writers. The most cursory glance at literary history reveals that no masterpiece has been safe from assault at the time of its publication, no writer's reputation unassailed by his contemporaries: Aristophanes called Euripides "a cliche anthologist… 

* Mr Naipaul - now Sir Vidia-published a new novel, Haifa Life, five years after making this statement. We must thank him for bringing the dead form back to life. 

... and maker of ragamuffin manikins"; Samuel Pepys thought A Midsummer Night's Dream "insipid and ridiculous"; Charlotte Bronte
dismissed the work of Jane Austen; Zola pooh-poohed Les Fleurs du Mal; Henry James trashed Middlemarch, Wuthering Heights, and Our Mutual Friend. Everybody sneered at Moby-Dick. Le Figaro announced, when Madame Bovary was published, that "M. Flaubert is not a writer"; Virginia Woolf called Ulysses "underbred"; and the Odessa Courier wrote of Anna Karenina, Sentimental rubbish. . . . Show me one page that contains an idea." 

So, when today's German critics attack Glinter Grass, when today's Italian literati are "surprised," as the French novelist and critic Guy Scarpetta tells us, to learn of Italo Calvino's and Leonardo Scascia's high international reputations, when the cannons of American political correctness are turned on Saul Bellow, when Anthony Burgess belittles Graham Greene moments after Greene's death, and when Professor Steiner, ambitious as ever, takes on not just a few individual writers but the whole literary output of post-war Europe, they may all be suffering from culturally endemic golden-ageism: that recurring, bilious nostalgia for a literary past which never, at the time, seemed that much better than the present does now. Professor Steiner says, "It is almost axiomatic that today the great novels are coming from the far rim, from India, from the Caribbean, from Latin America," and some will find it surprising that I should take issue with this vision of an exhausted center and vital periphery. If I do so, it is in part because it is such a very Eurocentric lament. Only a Western European intellectual would compose a lament for an entire art form on the basis that the literatures of, say, England, France, Germany, Spain, and Italy were no longer the most interesting on earth. (It is unclear whether Professor Steiner considers the United States to be in the center or on the far rim; the geography of this flat-earther vision of literature is a little hard to follow. From where I sit, American literature looks to be in good shape.) What does it matter where the great novels come from, as long as they keep coming? What is this flat earth on which the good professor lives, with jaded Romans at the center and frightfully gifted Hottentots and Anthropophagi lurking at the edges?

The map in Professor Steiner's head is an imperial map, and Europe's empires are long gone. The half century whose literary output proves, for Steiner and Naipaul, the novel's decline is also the first half century of the post-colonial period. Might it not simply be that a new novel is emerging, a post-colonial novel, a de-centered, transnational, inter-lingual, cross-cultural novel; and that in this new world order, or disorder, we find a better explanation of the contemporary novel's health than Professor Steiner's somewhat patronizingly Hegelian view that the reason for the creativity of the "far rim" is that these are areas "which are in an earlier stage of the bourgeois culture, which are in an earlier, rougher, more problematic form." It was, after all. the Franco regime's success in stifling decade after decade of Spanish literature that shifted the spotlight to the fine writers working in Latin America. The so-called Latin American boom was, accordingly, as much the result of the corruption of the old bourgeois world as of the allegedly primitive creativity of the new. And the description of India's ancient, sophisticated culture as existing in an "earlier, rougher" state than the West is bizarre. India, with its great mercantile classes, its sprawling bureaucracies, its exploding economy, possesses one of the largest and most dynamic bourgeoisies in the world, and has done so for at least as long as Europe. Great literature and a class of literate readers are nothing new in India. What is new is the emergence of a gifted generation of Indian writers working in English. What is new is that the "center" has deigned to notice the "rim," because the "rim" has begun to speak in its myriad versions of a language the West can more easily understand. Even Professor Steiner's portrait of an exhausted Europe is, in my view, simply and demonstrably false. The last fifty years have given us the oeuvres of, to name just a few, Albert Camus, Graham Greene, Doris Lessing, Samuel Beckett, Italo Calvino, Elsa Morante, Vladimir Nabokov, Gunter Grass, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Milan Kundera, Danilo Kis, Thomas Bernhard, Marguerite Yourcenar. We can all make our own lists. If we include writers from beyond the frontiers of Europe, it becomes clear that the world has rarely seen so rich a crop of great novelists living and working at the same time—that the easy gloom of the Steiner-Naipaul position is not just depressing but unjusified. If V.S. Naipaul no longer wishes, or is no longer able, to write novels, it is our loss. But the art of the novel will undoubtedly survive without him.
There is, in my view, no crisis in the art of the novel. The novel is precisely that "hybrid form" for which Professor Steiner yearns. It is part social inquiry, part fantasy, part confessional. It crosses frontiers of knowledge as well as topographical boundaries. He is right, however, that many good writers have blurred the boundaries between fact and fiction. Ryszard Kapuscinski's magnificent book about Haile Selassie, The Emperor, is an example of this creative blurring. The so-called New Journalism developed in America by Tom Wolfe and others was a straightforward attempt to steal the novel's clothes, and in the case of Wolfe's own Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers, or The Right Stuff, the attempt was persuasively successful. The category of "travel writing" has expanded to include works of profound cultural meditation: Claudio Magris's Danube, say, or Neal Ascherson's Black Sea. And in the face of a brilliant non-fictional tour de force such as Roberto Calasso's The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, in which a re-examination of the Greek myths achieves all the tension and intellec-tual excitement of the best fiction, one can only applaud the arrival of a new kind of imaginative essay writing—or, better, the return of the en-cyclopedic playfulness of Diderot or Montaigne. The novel can wel-come these developments without feeling threatened. There's room for all of us in here.

A few years ago the British novelist Will Self published a funny short story called "The Quantity Theory of Insanity," which suggested that the sum total of sanity available to the human race might be fixed, might be a constant; so that the attempt to cure the insane was useless, as the effect of one individual regaining his sanity would inevitably be that someone somewhere else would lose theirs, as if we were all sleep- ing in a bed covered by a blanket—of sanity—that wasn't quite big enough to cover us all. One of us pulls the blanket toward us; another's toes are instantly exposed. It is a richly comic idea, and it recurs in Professor Steiner's zaniest argument, which he offers with a perfectly straight face—that at any given moment, there exists a total quantum of creative talent, and at present the lure of the cinema, television, andeven of advertising is pulling the blanket of genius away from the novel, which consequently lies exposed, shivering in its pajamas in the depths of our cultural winter. The trouble with the theory is that it supposes all creative talent to be of the same kind. Apply this notion to athletics and its absurdity be- comes apparent. The supply of marathon runners is not diminished by the popularity of sprint events. The quality of high jumpers is unrelated to the number of great exponents of the pole vault. It is more likely that the advent of new art forms allows new groups of people to enter the creative arena. I know of very few great filmmakers who might have been good novelists— Satyajit Ray, Ingmar Bergman, Woody Alien, Jean Renoir, and that's about it. How many pages of Quentin Tarantino's snappy material, his gangsters' riffs about eating Big Macs in Paris, could you read if you didn't have Samuel Jack-son or John Travolta speaking them for you? The best screenwriters are the best precisely because they think not novelistically but pictorially. 

I am, in short, much less worried than Steiner about the threat posed to the novel by these newer, high-tech forms. It is perhaps the low-tech nature of the act of writing that will save it. Means of artistic expression that require large quantities of finance and sophisticated technology-films, plays, records—become, by virtue of that dependence, easy to censor and to control. But what one writer can make in the solitude of one room is something no power can easily destroy. I agree with Professor Steiner's celebration of modern science— "today that is where the joy is, that is where the hope is, the energy, the formidable sense of world upon world opening up," but this burst of scientific creativity is, ironically, the best riposte to his "quantity theory of creativity." The idea that potential great novelists have been lost to the study of sub-atomic physics or black holes is as implausible as its opposite: that the great writers of history—Jane Austen, say, or James Joyce—might easily, had they but taken a different turning, have been the Newtons and Einsteins of their day.
In questioning the quality of creativity to be found in the modern novel, Professor Steiner points us in the wrong direction. If there is a crisis in present-day literature, it is of a somewhat different kind. The novelist Paul Auster recently told me that all American writers had to accept that they were involved in an activity which was, in the United States, no more than a minority interest, like, say, soccer. This observation chimes with Milan Kundera's complaint, in his new vol- ume of essays, Testaments Betrayed, of "Europe's incapacity to defend and explain (explain patiently to itself and to others) that most European of arts, the art of the novel; in other words, to explain and defend its own culture. The 'children of the novel,' " Kundera argues, "have abandoned the art that shaped them. Europe, the society of the novel, has abandoned its own self."

Auster is talking about the death of the American reader's interest in this kind of reading matter; Kundera, about the death of the European reader's sense of cultural connection with this kind of cultural product. Add these to Steiner's illiterate, computer- obsessed child of tomorrow, and perhaps we are talking about some- thing like the death of reading itself. Or perhaps not. For literature, good literature, has always been a mi- nority interest. Its cultural importance derives not from its success in some sort of ratings war but from its success in telling us things about ourselves that we hear from no other quarter. And that minority—the minority that is prepared to read and buy good books—has in truth ever been larger than it is now. The problem is to interest it. What is happening is not so much the death as the bewilderment of the reader.

 

In America, in 1999, over five thousand new novels were published. Five thousand! It would be a miracle if five hundred publishable novels had been written in a year. It would be extraordinary if fifty of them were good. It would be cause for universal celebration if five of them— if one of them!—were great. Publishers are over-publishing because, in house after house, good editors have been fired or not replaced, and an obsession with turnover has replaced the ability to distinguish good books from bad. Let the market decide, too many publishers seem to think. Let's just put this stuff out there. Something's bound to click. So out to the stores they go, into the valley of death go the five thousand, with publicity ma-chines providing inadequate covering fire. This approach is fabulously self-destructive. As Orwell said in 1936—you see that there is nothing new under the sun—"the novel is being shouted out of existence." Readers, unable to hack their way through the rain-forest of junk fic- tion, made cynical by the debased language of hyperbole with which every book is garlanded, give up. They buy a couple of prizewinners a year, perhaps one or two books by writers whose names they recognize, and flee. Over-publishing and over-hyping creates under-reading. It is not just a question of too many novels chasing too few readers but a question of too many novels actually chasing readers away. If publish- ing a first novel has become, as Professor Steiner suggests, a "gamble against reality," it is in large part because of this non-discriminatory, scatter-gun approach. We hear a lot, these days, about a new, business- like spirit of financial ruthlessness in publishing. What we need, however, is the best kind of editorial ruthlessness. We need a return to judgment. 

And there is another great danger facing literature, and of this Professor Steiner makes no mention: that is, the attack on intellectual liberty itself; intellectual liberty, without which there can be no literature. This is not a new danger, either. Once again, George Orwell, writing in 1945, offers us much remarkably contemporary wisdom, and you will forgive me if I quote him at some length: 

“In our age, the idea of intellectual liberty is under attack from two directions. On the one hand are its theoretical enemies, the apologists of totalitarianism [today one might say, fanaticism], and on the other its immediate practical enemies, monopoly and bureaucracy. In the past... the idea of rebellion and the idea of intellectual integrity were mixed up. A heretic—political, moral, religious, or aesthetic—was one who refused to outrage his own conscience.
[Nowadays] the dangerous proposition [is] that freedom is undesirable and that intellectual honesty is a form of anti-social selfishness. The enemies of intellectual liberty always try to present their case as a plea for discipline versus individualism. The writer who refuses to sell his opinions is always branded as a mere egoist. He is accused, that is, either of wanting to shut himself up in an ivory tower, or of making an exhibitionist display of his own personality or of resisting the inevitable current of history in an attempt to cling to unjustified privileges. [But] to write in plain language one has to think fearlessly and if one thinks fearlessly one cannot be politically orthodox.” 

The pressures of monopoly and bureaucracy, of corporatism and conservatism, limiting and narrowing the range and quality of what gets published, are known to every working writer. Of the pressures of intolerance and censorship, I personally have in these past years gained perhaps too much knowledge. There are many such struggles taking place in the world today: in Algeria, in China, in Iran, in Turkey, in Egypt, in Nigeria, writers are being censored, harassed, jailed, and even murdered. Even in Europe and the United States, the storm troopers of various "sensitivities" seek to limit our freedom of speech. It has never been more important to continue to defend those values that make the art of literature possible. The death of the novel may be far off, but the violent death of many contemporary novelists is, alas, an inescapable fact. In spite of this, I do not believe that writers have given up on posterity. What George Steiner beautifully calls the "wonderful vainglory" of literature still fires us, even if, as he suggests, we are too embarrassed to say so in public. The poet Ovid sets these great, confident lines at the end of his Metamorphoses: 

But, with the better part of me, I'll gain
a place that's higher than the stars: my name,
indelible, eternal, will remain.* 

I am sure the same ambition still resides in every writer's heart: to be thought of, in times to come, as Rilke thought of Orpheus:
He is one of the staying messengers,
who still holds far into the doors of the dead
bowls with fruits worthy of praise.!**

 May 2000

 Salman Rushdie

 *Allen Mandelbaum’s translation of the Metamorphoses of Ovid (Hartcourt Brace, 1993)

 ** M.D. Herter Norton’s translation, from Translations from the Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke (W.W. Norton, 1993 reissue).