Have Novels Won?

[lichtrausch]

When you compare the space afforded in bookstores to novels, poetry, drama and short stories, you get the impression that the novel is all-powerful. Sure there are a few people that love poetry, and once in a while an author wins the Nobel Prize for something other than novels. But these seem more like last gasps for air rather than signs of the vitality of these forms. So has the novel essentially won out over all other forms of fiction?

[stlukesguild]

Unfortunately, the way "literature" and reading is taught... at least in the US... is to stress the traditional novel... and now the education gurus are calling for a shift away from fiction and creative writing altogether and an emphasis upon non-fiction. Honestly, the majority of readers are not passionate literature lovers and not likely to be willing to explore anything outside of "self-help" books, celebrity biographies, and pulp fiction novels. The vast majority of this stuff is crap and won't be remembered. Within the realm of literature... that writing which ends up being taken seriously by academics, universities, subsequent writers, etc... there is much beyond the traditional novel. One need only look at the last several decades of Nobel Prize winners:

Nobel Prize Winners for Literature:

2013- Alice Munroe- short stories
2011- Tomas Tranströmer- poet
2010- Mario Vargas Llosa- novels and short stories
2005- Harold Pinter- playright
1999- Günter Grass- novels and short stories
1996- Wislawa Szymborska- poet
1995- Seamus Heaney- poet
1992- Derek Walcott- poet
1990- Octavio Paz- poet
1987- Joseph Brodsky- poet and essayist
1984- Jaroslav Seifert- poet
1982- Gabriel García Márquez- novels and short stories
1980- Czeslaw Milosz- poet
1979- Odysseus Elytis- poet
1978- Isaac Bashevis Singer- short stories
1977- Vicente Aleixandre- poet
1975- Eugenio Montale- poet
1971- Pablo Neruda- poet

Having said this much... the novel is certainly the current dominant literary form... even among readers at LitNet. One need only look to the limited participation in the threads on poetry... let alone drama, short story, and non-fiction.

[JCamilo]

Maybe the corpse is just too big...

[Emil Miller]

Obviously novels outsell other forms of fiction but it's true that the vast majority of them are of little literary merit. It's a depressing experience to go into a bookshop and realize that the laden shelves contain large numbers of books that are either poorly written, have dull subject matter or both. It's not a recent phenomenon but in reading the reports on new novels, they do induce an increasing 'ho hum' effect. Angst-ridden tales of family conflict and social comment have been done to death and it's pitiful to see writers struggling to say something new and failing in the attempt. So yes, the novel is still predominant but it's a pyrrhic victory.

[Snowqueen]

Yes, novel is the dominant form in literature. I admit I always prefer to buy novels when I’m in a bookstore and then short stories. I’m more into poetry when it comes to Urdu literature. But, It’s disappointing to see some of my friends love to read novels written by Stephenie Meyer.

[Lokasenna]

...I wasn't aware there was a competition.

Sure, novels are probably the most accessible form of pleasure reading for the general public - but the fact that poetry, drama, non-fiction and so forth have a place in society suggests they haven't in any sense been defeated. So long as there is a market for, and consumption of, any kind of writing then it clearly has its place in society.

[JCamilo]

I know it was not about this, but if you consider how the market works, there is a competition.

A few years I walked in the main libraries where I live (Brazil's third Biggest city, etc,etc). Of course I knew this already, but I was doing it for a small essay and wanted pictures of the "poetry section". Obviously, there is a flaw because if the author worked with both prose and poems, he wouldn't be there, but have all books mixed. Not only the space was considerable smaller, but in many places the space was marginal. Either near the ground, in a separated corner, blocked by too many shelves. It is almost as if you had to stumble there accidently or maybe after a wolf tell you to get the short cut.

Poetry sold something like 1% of the market here, how could be otherwise. Publishing houses here barelly accept poems, unless it can be labeled and promoted as children literature, so they can avoid ties with poetry. I suppose this is the reason of the poetry popularity in the internet, there is less restrains and a lot of need of expression. This also reflects the school books, etc.

[JBI]

I know it was not about this, but if you consider how the market works, there is a competition.

A few years I walked in the main libraries where I live (Brazil's third Biggest city, etc,etc). Of course I knew this already, but I was doing it for a small essay and wanted pictures of the "poetry section". Obviously, there is a flaw because if the author worked with both prose and poems, he wouldn't be there, but have all books mixed. Not only the space was considerable smaller, but in many places the space was marginal. Either near the ground, in a separated corner, blocked by too many shelves. It is almost as if you had to stumble there accidently or maybe after a wolf tell you to get the short cut.

Poetry sold something like 1% of the market here, how could be otherwise. Publishing houses here barelly accept poems, unless it can be labeled and promoted as children literature, so they can avoid ties with poetry. I suppose this is the reason of the poetry popularity in the internet, there is less restrains and a lot of need of expression. This also reflects the school books, etc.

Your library sorts by genre? that's rather strange.

Still, better than the university library here, which orders by Library of Congress numbers, but somehow decided not to organize alphabetically, but instead by subject area. Whoever thought of this stupid idea should be shot, if you have a system, you must stick to it, or not bother at all. Still, better than the system they used to shelve the Dunhuang classics in Beijing - they listed it based on numbers in a 1000 character poem that has no recurring characters - the whole thing requires one to have memorized the entire poem to make any sense of it - what a useless idea.

You can never account for stupidity, which is why the American way, as hard as it is for me to admit, has a lot of merits. Americans are traditionally incredibly pragmatic, so their way of doing things, for the most part, seems to work based on its simplicity. If only the rest of the world could catch on that you should not create additional work that isn't necessary.

As for novels winning, television is winning. Movies are up there. In terms of the writing quality of cinema, many screenplays are far more literary than novels anyway. There is nothing for me to advocate in defending novels, which, even the classic ones, are quite overrated.

I would actually be interested into seeing how somebody could properly work new media into traditional art forms effectively. People are trying with theatre, but it just isn't working. Still, I cannot help but think that something like the BBC's History of Britain, however problematic as history, shows a good example of how a television program can properly teach a sort of historical narrative that we expect of a book. HBO has made big on doing something similar with first Mafia works (Sopranos) then Rome, then the Tudors, and so on. The writing quality quite often is up there (especially the sopranos, which is classic as a sort of literary work in itself).

What if, for instance, we were to take the originally popular English novels, lets say, Sir Walter Scott, and say, the point of the historical romance, or the Romance, or any of these sorts of works is the removal of the individual from their reality into the exegesis of the artwork. We visit medieval times in Ivanhoe, or we are drawn into Scotland - we feel like we are there with the best literature of this sort, and that is why we can feel a likeness to the characters, and become fixated to the point where the pages keep flipping. When reading the Tale of Genji, you feel like you are in Heian Japan, you seem to be peering over the curtain, seeing the superstition and clothing. TV is, in many ways, a natural progression. If we ignore the degenerate forms of the family sitcom, which with the exception of All in the Family seem to be a long line of popular garbage, Television has in many ways replaced the position of the novel. It holds many of the same features, especially in its modern form.

I think HBO in a sense caught on to the power of this quite well recently, with all these miniseries that they keep popping out. It shows a craving for a story that is not overdrawn, yet is long enough for one to enjoy without the brevity of film. Take it as a fat novel, and the comparison becomes clear. It is as engrossing, it is as overdrawn, it has its arcs - in essence, the miniseries is almost perfectly a drawn out serial novel from the 19th century.

As for traditional forms, they still have their worth, but lets face it, the novel, for the most part, is dated. Twilight or Harry Potter might be big, but cinema was the real cash ticket. Game of Thrones may have been a successful fantasy novel, whatever that's worth, but it seems far better known as a miniseries, seems better drawn, more alive. The novel's original ground was for escape and absorption - the ability for the reader to enter into the world of the book. The best fiction does that, but it is becoming dated, very quickly. All these cop shows pretty much replaced mystery novels (not that Columbo, That's All She Wrote, etc. didn't do a good job before that). We are seeing basically a genre that does not know what it is actually about. It isn't as much a game of language as it would need to be to justify itself. For the most part, novels are plot driven, and therefore, could quite easily translate better in different medium. The graphic novel, and the Manga of Japan are merely the extension of such ideas. We are done with the limitations of novels, I would argue.

Now, as for poetry, that form cannot be exhausted yet, as it never was popular. Poetry is more of a conversation than an escape, it is a game that only the people that know the rules can play.I'm yet to meet someone who understands poetry who dislikes it. The general notion is that only the people who understand it actually can appreciate it. And people generally only appreciate certain works that kick in their level of understanding. This form cannot be said to be in a decline, despite what nonsense people yell around, since it never was popular to begin with. Still, poetry has been, until recently, a vocal rather than written form. Novels are purely written, whereas poetry seems to be read out-loud most of the time, if not sung or set to music in times of old. I like modern poetry as much as the next person, but I have a suspicion that the next direction of poetry is a movement away from this "textual" heavy nonsense that dominates post-modernity, toward a more traditional understanding of musicality, simplicity, and concrete imagery. The rehabilitation of formalism is just one of early signs that poets are trying to back away from the great fear of lack of form and substance - free verse is the least free verse, in that you have nothing to actually run with - there is no constraint, so in order to write good verse, you need to find ways to constrain yourself.

As for prose, we are still divided between the manual, the memoir, the journalistic, and the critical. Generally speaking self-help and political-news junk gets the front page. In terms of literary arts, personal essays seem to be in decline, and epistolary art seems all but dead, people today cannot even properly write a good email. We generally are, from what I can tell, in decline. Still, we have a greater network of information age communications, which, though not literary, still have a sort of greater involvement in the public.

So where do we stand right now, in terms of literature? Well, the internet has definitely become the major mode of transfer, whether to and from kindle's, or in online formats. The old classics are as dead as ever, and new forms (TV, Cinema, which are just as literary as Shakespeare) have taken over from where novels left off (novels having taken over in part from other genre). We seem also to be more interested in lengthier works, we seem more in need of distraction. That is generally how I see the new market and new ideas of literature. The internet is such a big distraction that literature in the novel sense has lost much of its ground. It no longer has its original function, and seems unable to get a new one.

[JCamilo]

I was mentioning commercial libraries, bookshops, they adopt a mixed system. Topics, so you have a part for "literature", but you also have for "Poetry", "children literature", then brazilian literature and foreign (with divisions for country) and of course, the releases or even for special formats (pocket books, etc). But even public or university libraries have strange logic.

The one i used to go more, the public one, had for a long time a part for Policial Literature such as Sherlock Holmes, Agatha Christie. I assumed it was due to their popularity. But the odd thing, they were in the last corner, behind the last popular books (specific stuff such as sports, economics - this is the section for reading and not study, so academic topics were of course, not popular). There, they did in topics, inside the topics there is genre, such as literary criticism and then for country. But even inside the country there is usually the poetry apart and also drama. But then, Goethe had all books in the same place (in the german section) while Becket was split in france or english (english which seemed to consider all island, not the language, but they do not put together canada or australia)... which in the end caused a bit of strange things.

I think one of the things of TV and Novels is that both need something similar: characters you can follow. The adaptations go this way. You need a character, TV need places for actors. It is easy to understand this way. They also need something from short stories, which are after the imediate effect.

As Internet and short works, I think short works are raising in importance for quite awhile. Since Poe, who basically said short stories are better in a world with newspaper with readers that will get small pieces fast as they can, because journalism is pretty much a short story. This didnt change with comic strips, I doubt will change with internet, where the kind of long effort that a novel demands - both to read and write - is rare. You know, 90% of people here stopped reading your last post in the second paragraph. Few, would even bother to read the thread to know what about you are talking - even this small thread. It is not because people are lazy, it is more that people want to have a lot of colored seashells at the sametime. It is not the fragmentation of the modernism, It is something more pratical, a selective view, misguided because the end of references, where readers (audience even) put the effort for what they can immediate use and in this age, people consider that useful also means pleasant.

[Eman Resu]

Having said this much... the novel is certainly the current dominant literary form... even among readers at LitNet. One need only look to the limited participation in the threads on poetry... let alone drama, short story, and non-fiction.


You're being kind using the word, "current." Since 1901, we've had three Nobel-winning authors whose work was primarily non-fiction - Mommsen (1902), Russell* (1950) and Churchill (1953). One might stretch that to include Solzhenitsyn (1970) on the merit of The Gulag Archipelago had the Nobel Committee not actually used the phrase, "...the traditions of Russian literature," and one could almost shoehorn Sartre (1964) in were it not for the impact of the Roads to Freedom trilogy (and the fact that Sartre declined to accept the Nobel Prize), but as for fiction in general - and novels in particular - it's pretty much *turtles all the way down.