Turning the Page?

There's a point in the introductory section of Joseph Bottum's The Decline of the Novel in which he offers a kind of summary statement about why the particular art form under consideration has declined. We live in a culture that more and more looks only to the natural and material for explanations about being and behavior. We didn't stop asking questions about existence, but we did stop asking them of written fiction. "The novel didn't fail us," he says. "We failed the novel."

At first glance it's the kind of plummy nose-in-the-air quote that folks who read a lot of popular fiction have grown to expect from people who still invest a lot of time in what's usually called "literary fiction." Our coarse and uninquisitive modern culture doesn't aspire to the kinds of deep exploration of what it means to be a good person. We interrogate much shallower art forms in that quest these days. Even some of the classic fields are so dominated by iconoclasts and would-be transgressors that it's tough to listen to the crude and offensive conversations they may prompt. Sure, Andres Serrano might want us to think about how cheap we have made our most precious ideas and concepts by turning them into assembly-line lowest bidder merchandise, but all we see is that he has taken a picture of a plastic crucifix in a jar of urine. The thesis statement's just a little too crude to get past and get into the discussion.

Bottum's question, though, does run deeper than that first glance suggests. The phenomenon he's investigating is tough to deny. For a big chunk of our most recent history, from sometime in the middle of the 17th century up through about the middle of the 20th, people who thought about serious things relied on written novels to spark their questions and thoughts. Many of them might indeed be members of a social and cultural elite, but not all. For these people, Bottum says, novels became the way we explained ourselves to ourselves. They addressed questions of existence: What does it mean to be a good person? How do we figure out who we are? What is the meaning of life? Prior to the Protestant Reformation, these questions were largely answered in the community of the church. The magisterium of the Roman Catholic church had fairly definitive answers to them and the authority to give those answers weight.

But as religious life and faith unmoored itself from that magisterium and grappled first of all with Scripture itself as a source of answers for those questions of life, the authority for the answers diffused a little. In Bottum's terms, we started explaining ourselves to ourselves rather than accepting the magisterium's explanations.

The novel was the vehicle for this exploration and explanation. Through crafted stories, people explored how other people handled different situations and incidents in life. Of course the answers were those of the author, but the author's goal was to create works of internal logic sound enough so that the answers could withstand examination. Pleasurable reading or what we sometimes call "mind candy" was still done, of course, but those who wanted to be taken seriously about things when talking about them imbibed serious work too.

As the 19th century turned into the 20th, authors took on other goals, such as social change. Upton Sinclair wanted to advance the cause of socialism with The Jungle, but he was less successful at that than he was in bringing about reform in the meat-packing industry. Other art forms took on the role the novel had held, especially movies and later television. When people wanted to be taken seriously in discussing the human condition, the pallette of their conversation was more and more onscreen than on the page. There weren't many novels that folks would have been expected to have read to enter those conversations, but there were movies they would have been expected to see. Today the movies have given way to television -- top-level shows such as The Wire, Breaking Bad or The Sopranos make up the language of the discussion these days.

At the same time, our confidence in the ability of science and natural explanation to offer a purpose for living eroded. The idea that a fictive imagination could provide what the evidence of our senses clearly said did not exist -- purpose -- became more quaint and old-fashioned. Sure, people still read fiction for serious reasons, such as finding the meaning of some core concepts of living or of the ways in which we deal with one another, but the inquiry is not so deep as before and the belief that serious discussion requires assimilating this or that author's perspective is not at all a given.

Decline doesn't necessarily address one way in which writers facilitated the decline of their art form: Impenetrability and reluctance to accept an open search for answers. Don DeLillo, for example, is considered by many people to be one of the foremost novelists writing today. He may be; I usually can't get more than a hundred pages into one of his non-linear narratives before returning the book to the library. He's often lauded for things like "the complexities of language" and in one of his own quotes about the purpose of what he does says, "Writers must oppose systems. It's important to write against power, corporations, the state, and the whole system of consumption and of debilitating entertainments..." If there are answers to human existence that might somehow have something positive to say about power, corporations, the state and such, well, you won't find them here.

The problem could be with me, of course. But I'm a serious person who takes seriously questions of human existence and enjoys exploring them. If novels aren't going to help me do that (and by and large there are many that do; not even everyone writing today opts for providing artificial and predetermined answers to those matters for people who already agree with them), then why read them?

That's the one gap in Bottum's otherwise interesting thesis. At only 150 pages it seems strange to suggest potential cuts, but the latter sections outlining the modern part of the decline could stand a trim, or at least a tightening up. But overall, The Decline of the Novel is a book as well as an idea that's worth some consideration and reflection.