Literature as a performative, conceptual, uncreative art

November 20, 2024 12:22 PM

In the sixteenth century, new printing technology meant that the works of one author could be bound, identified, and replicated. The idea of an autonomous, original creator became central to our culture. Gone were the collaborative days of monks accreting their manuscripts collectively. A century or more of audio-visual technology has slowly eroded that idea. Ever since radio, we have become increasingly less bound to books, and created a more multifaceted oral culture. Wikipedia is our new monkish collaboration. And this means, as Jarvis says, that what had once been public conversations in print now became radio programmes, talk shows, and Twitter. “Conversation became content.” from The modern discourse novel [The Common Reader]
posted by chavenet (6 comments total)

I appreciate this. It expresses indirectly why I, personally, find it so much more difficult to write in the age of the internet. It’s not really about the presence of distractions or research; it’s being dwarfed, being robbed of identity by the “cataract of words.”
posted by Countess Elena at 12:42 PM on November 20 [4 favorites]

I thought the author wasn’t sufficiently analytical inside the “new fiction” to explain it to me as an outsider; I wanted more reasoning and fewer précis. Examples can’t show what a form can’t do. (I am so immersed in the Victorians that Joyce always seems new. I wanted more Hazlitt. I think the take on silver-fork novels was very weak! )

Also this confused me:

In Fake Accounts, the narrator wants to break up with Felix not because he is a pathological liar, but because he has bad politics. No interest is shown in why he was running that conspiracy theory account. What matters is not life, people, or events, but not stepping outside the acceptable discourse.

This seems like another case of being itself in “the discourse”, in that it makes sense to me only if it frames politics as being entirely in the discourse and not at all in real life.

The one new novel it likes, near the end:

They stop sending each other opinions about the culture wars and instead they get married, have children: they find love and religion.

Politics sure gets in the way of some people’s love, religion, and children. We don’t get any hints in the essay of whether the characters are some people.
posted by clew at 1:17 PM on November 20 [2 favorites]

It's weird how Sally Rooney is the only person who has written a book in the past ten years.
posted by mittens at 2:06 PM on November 20 [2 favorites]

"Conversation became content." from The modern discourse novel

This is almost exactly how I felt about Metafilter from the start:

A couple of months ago, I found that page from another MetaTalk post (the one about a big increase for Metafilter in some kind of website ranking index), noticed that there was no recent review, and submitted one as follows:

WO(world)RLD

A vast, unendable, impossibly brilliant stream of conscious[ness] novel written by God!

Which is pretty much how I feel about this place.
They were not amused.
posted by jamjam at 4:06 PM on August 15, 2006 [

posted by jamjam at 2:36 PM on November 20 [1 favorite]

Was there a point after the Silver Fork novel where people stopped writing novels about the fashions and topics of the day, like hunting and sporting novels by Surtees and Whyte-Melville or late Victorian 'New Woman' novels by Victoria Cross on up to Douglas Coupland from Generation X through Microserfs and JPod? The essay seems to argue that a bunch of people today--mostly women--are writing novels incorrectly, with blame to be placed on the influence of social media, echo chambers, and 'the discourse,' but I don't see the author rushing to read post-Silver Fork novels about fox-hunting or about being a slacker in the early 90s either. Sometimes a popular novel has a topic / social milieu that just isn't your thing. They're not all supposed to be "beyond such niceties" or whatever.

It's also funny that the essay starts off with a note about how an upcoming "Western Canon salon series" will be about The Sorrows of Young Werther, a novel where a guy hangs out playing parlor games, crushing on a woman who's engaged, having feelings about the landscape, and ultimately being really dramatic about it. If it did anything to "express the opposing ideas" (Goethe later did say classicism was healthy, romanticism weak, morbid, and sickly), it was through being a negative example that a lot of readers really didn't get. Instead it captured a vibe people were into and did a lot to kick off Romanticism, so again I'm left wondering if reflecting 'the discourse' of the time is really a problem if it's something you happen to groove on, ironically or otherwise.
posted by Wobbuffet at 3:13 PM on November 20 [4 favorites]

This sums up a lot of why bourgeois-realist literature bores me so much.
posted by signal at 5:45 PM on November 20 [1 favorite]