http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/may/02/will-self-novel-dead-literary-fiction/print
The novel is dead (this time it's for real)
Will Self
The Guardian, Friday 2 May 2014 13.00 BST
If you happen to be a writer, one of the great benisons of having
children is that your personal culture-mine is equipped with its own
canaries. As you tunnel on relentlessly into the future, these
little harbingers either choke on the noxious gases released by the
extraction of decadence, or they thrive in the clean air of what we
might call progress. A few months ago, one of my canaries, who's in
his mid-teens and harbours a laudable ambition to be the world's
greatest ever rock musician, was messing about on his electric
guitar. Breaking off from a particularly jagged and angry riff,
he launched into an equally jagged diatribe, the gist of which was
already familiar to me: everything in popular music had been done
before, and usually those who'd done it first had done it best.
Besides, the instant availability of almost everything that had ever
been done stifled his creativity, and made him feel it was all
hopeless.
A miner, if he has any sense, treats his canary well, so I began
gently remonstrating with him. Yes, I said, it's true that the web
and the internet have created a permanent Now, eliminating our sense
of musical eras; it's also the case that the queered demographics of
our longer-living, lower-birthing population means that the
middle-aged squat on top of the pyramid of endeavour, crushing
the young with our nostalgic tastes. What's more, the decimation of
the revenue streams once generated by analogues of recorded music
have put paid to many a musician's income. But my canary had to
appreciate this: if you took the long view, the advent of the 78rpm
shellac disc had also been a disaster for musicians who in the teens
and 20s of the last century made their daily bread by live
performance. I repeated one of my favourite anecdotes: when the
first wax cylinder recording of Feodor Chaliapin singing The Song
of the Volga Boatmen was played, its listeners, despite a lowness
of fidelity that would seem laughable to us (imagine a man holding
forth from a giant bowl of snapping, crackling and popping Rice
Krispies), were nonetheless convinced the portly Russian must be in
the room, and searched behind drapes and underneath chaise longues
for him.
So recorded sound blew away the nimbus of authenticity surrounding
live performers -- but it did worse things. My canaries have often
heard me tell how back in the 1970s heyday of the pop charts, all
you needed was a writing credit on some loathsome
chirpy-chirpy-cheep-cheeping ditty in order to spend the rest of
your born days lying by a guitar-shaped pool in the Hollywood Hills
hoovering up cocaine. Surely if there's one thing we have to be
grateful for it's that the web has put paid to such an egregious
financial multiplier being applied to raw talentlessness. Put paid
to it, and also returned musicians to the domain of live performance
and, arguably, reinvigorated musicianship in the process. Anyway, I
was saying all of this to my canary when I was suddenly overtaken by
a great wave of noxiousness only I could smell. I faltered,
I fell silent, then I said: sod you and your creative anxieties,
what about me? How do you think it feels to have dedicated your
entire adult life to an art form only to see the bloody thing dying
before your eyes?
My canary is a perceptive songbird -- he immediately ceased his own
cheeping, except to chirrup: I see what you mean. The literary novel
as an art work and a narrative art form central to our culture is
indeed dying before our eyes. Let me refine my terms: I do not mean
narrative prose fiction tout court is dying -- the kidult
boywizardsroman and the soft sadomasochistic porn fantasy are
clearly in rude good health. And nor do I mean that serious novels
will either cease to be written or read. But what is already no
longer the case is the situation that obtained when I was a young
man. In the early 1980s, and I would argue throughout the second
half of the last century, the literary novel was perceived to be the
prince of art forms, the cultural capstone and the apogee of
creative endeavour. The capability words have when arranged
sequentially to both mimic the free flow of human thought and
investigate the physical expressions and interactions of thinking
subjects; the way they may be shaped into a believable simulacrum of
either the commonsensical world, or any number of invented ones; and
the capability of the extended prose form itself, which, unlike any
other art form, is able to enact self-analysis, to describe other
aesthetic modes and even mimic them. All this led to a general
acknowledgment: the novel was the true Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk.
This is not to say that everyone walked the streets with their head
buried in Ulysses or To the Lighthouse, or
