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Let's say a hypothetical author is writing a novel destined to be a timeless classic. She or he is almost finished with it now!
It's a "culture bearing" book like much of the classic literature...ever relevant but also capturing the cultural essence of the age in which it was conceived.
What do you think would be some of the themes and situations in the novel?
...and no, I'm not a down-and-out novelist trawling for ideas. :hand:
Obviously, it would be how a person chooses to live out there final year on Earth before the Apocalypse (2012). Obviously.
Obviously...:) Lots of opportunity for irony there too..."an enduring message of impending doom". :DQuote:
Originally Posted by AlfredtheGreat
How about a novel that is written entirely in Twitter messages?
I think it will be about how an up-and-coming, folksy politician overcomes all odds and ran for senate even though she's a witch. It could be a trilogy.
is anything of our ephemeral culture possibly going to be not only cherished by future generations but even perdurably relevant or enlightening? i can't help thinking they'll look back at our realism fiction and find it all terribly shallow. of course i'm likely wrong- someone will write a devastating yet witty dystopian novel about a commercialistic ethos which will be exemplary and yet which whom are of such a generation will come to repudiate simply because it makes our salient features so despicable or vapid.
I've actually been wondering this myself - is writing dead? In the past 20 years I can't think of any novels which will be timeless except a handful, and those few are criticizing their own times.
I suppose this is at the heart of why I asked this question. The real question I have is, "What does our culture have to say about life that is enduring and filled with beauty and wisdom?"Quote:
Originally Posted by arrytus
What would the opening line be, "Call me Snooki?"
A novel can't be timeless until some time passes. We won't know if anything contemporary will be a good period piece until at least 50 years down the road, and that still isn't enough.Quote:
Originally Posted by hanzklein
Anyways, to be serious, I think some of the themes that could be used that could really capture our current culture would be technology (specifically communications technology--i.e., internet, cellphones), media created political division (or, political division in general--not a theme unique to our time, but still relevant), economic uncertainty, and mass apathy towards important issues--sure, people say they are worried about this or that, or stand for this or that, but barely anyone does anything about it. And, maybe for some humor, throw in reality TV.
It's hard to feature technology because of how rapidly it changes. Like in Imperial Bedrooms Bret Easton Ellis references Myspace and that makes the writing feel dated. So it's hard to write about how technology influences our lives because it will quickly become dated.
True, but something being dated is what makes a period piece a period piece. Everything in The Great Gatsby is dated, but that's why it's so important; it gives us a view into the Jazz Age.
To be honest themes rarely make a book great, I mean the same themes found in harry potter are found in most classic buildungromans. It is always about the quality of writing, rather than any themes, the relevance to society come naturally by it's self.
Quick question. Since "he or she is almost finished with it now," I'm curious as to what the actual chosen themes are!
Seriously, though, I was thinking along the lines of Alexander III when I jokingly suggested the form of Twitter messages for the work--this being, of course, a ha-ha mimetic device or whatever. Themes emerge on their own when you focus on humanity as you know it (your concept being shaped by your cultural milieu) and on the prose itself. I agree with Nabokov that the purpose of the novel is aesthetic bliss, but I don't believe that's all it's good for! If a human being, who is part of the stitching of this organism we call culture, is writing from within him/herself (as opposed to writing for the sole purpose of entertainment), then there is no way all that is produced is simply aesthetic bliss.
I don't entirely agree with this. It also comes down to how memorable are the characters, how memorable is the story dealing with the theme, and the approach to the theme itself. We could all write a story with a theme about the regret of growing up and we'd all not only write very different stories with very different plots with very different characters to explore that issue, we'd also all probably have sightly different things to say about the issue itself, even though, we're all technically writing about the same theme.Quote:
Originally Posted by Alexander III
I somehow doubt it will be in the novel form, perhaps in the form of film, but the novel is quite exhausted as a form.
I disagree. I think artists of every sort from many ages have moved forward with what they do partly in response to the feeling that everything has already been done... and they're always wrong. Even physicists in the past have stated that everything's already been done. It's possible you're right,but I'd guess for a different reason than you suppose. If the novel form is on its way out when it comes to things that achieve newness and greatness, I doubt that it's because it can't do those things; rather, it would be because fewer and fewer people are taking time to sit down with books that are anywhere on the same metaphorical continent as greatness, let alone within a few miles of it. Even then, I think enough people are still reading with enthusiasm that the novel still has the potential to be transformative and transformed.Quote:
Originally Posted by JBI
Yes I agree with you the character development is just as important as beautiful prose, however I find that characters can only be well crafted trough the writers sole tool, his prose, so it is a weird little spiral.Quote:
Originally Posted by Drkshadow03
That's the same thing which all the little academics at the end of the 19th century said, then came modernism which revolutionized the form. However in some way I agree with you, I think the more accurate saying would be:Quote:
Originally Posted by JBI
The contemporary writers we have today have exhausted their potential with the novel form
However the future generations shall re-invent and expand the beauty of the novel, or maybe thy main form shall move away from the novel to something else. But you seem to underestimate the genius of future generations.
I do however believe that metered and rhymed verse shall not return as the main form for a very long time, if it ever does return.
Nonetheless the form is minimal importance; Shakespeare used theater, Dante the epic, Keats the lyric and Proust the novel, and they all created works of genial beauty.
It isn't exactly revolutionized, in the sense that a 20th century novel in many ways doesn't resemble a 19th century, the term "anti-novel" has been used for many - the "modern" novel is not the epistolary novel of Pamela, or the romances of Walter Scott keep in mind. What we do see is a need for a new form - I simply think the novel will be remade/reconstructed/superseded, it already has headed that way, with the new big players bending the form radically (a great example is the verse-novel Autobiography of Red).
Your argument is a semantic one - my argument was that the form of fiction in the manner we have today isn't working. Quit calling me a hack like those 19th century people(who?); those 19th century people were right, writing in omniscient has been out of fashion for a while, and it is the modernist novel that we follow, Tom Jones all but abandoned in favor of newer ideas of fiction.
The whole idea of whether the bulk of "literary" novels written in the last 40 or so years even function as novels is debatable in itself anyway, according to the original definition the answer is No.
An interestng concept I came across a year or so ago was the idea of authoring your own reading. E-books can now give a kind of 3d textuality to to what was in the past a static text. It's not a radical concept - we all do this when we surf and want to find out more about what is being said. We then drill down to find this info. What might be a new idea might be for an author to provide a multi-layered text with a core narrative holding it together. It could also link out to relevant texts for more info. A reader could them read the core text and select the aspects they want to follow up.
If we add tis to JBI's comment you could then have a multimedia book uniting text and vision.
Quote:
Originally Posted by JBI
If It was insinuated in my post that you were a hack , my apologies I don't mean that at all.
I think this is an issue of semantics, as in fact we are describing the same thing. You call the evolutions of the novel new forms, I merely view them as the same form continuing and evolving.
I somehow doubt it will be in the novel form, perhaps in the form of film, but the novel is quite exhausted as a form.
I think they started announcing the death of painting sometime shortly after the birth of photography... yet amazingly it carries on.
I also remember an intriguing quote in one of John Barth's essays in which the writer bemoaned the fact that literature as a whole was exhausted. All the great books had already been written and he, unfortunately, had been born too late. And who was he? An Egyptian writer of many centuries BC.:sosp:
This is a fascinating idea. So the format for the reader AND writer is an organic layering PROCESS rather than a static, single-level book experienced from page 1 to the end?Quote:
Originally Posted by Paulclem
This seems almost a game-like architecture as opposed to narrative. Am I getting the right idea?
This gives me an idea for a 21st century epic poem which is a tale and an omniverse in which anyone could add content. The content could be prose, video, poetry, audio, or multi-player game. As its mythology, symbolism and thematic character evolves, it becomes like a cultural mirror that we hold up to ourselves.
An individual can provide their own literary "path" through the tale via social media for example. It would say, "this is who I am in relation to the tale."
Wow, this French Roast coffee is good stuff. :crazy: Sorry for the digression.
Fantastic. It sounds like a literary version of World of Warcraft. Imagine: a Sims version of Jane Austin; a Sci Fi space opera that you can also play as a space shooter; a First Person Chandler.Quote:
Originally Posted by TacoButt
Even without the game element I think the textual layering would be good.
I'll stick with Yeats:
“Sex and death are the only things that can interest a serious mind.”:D
It will be about how poor we all are :)
Forgive me my ignorance, but who are the "big players" and how are they bending the form?Quote:
Originally Posted by JBI
This is gonna sound pretentious perhaps but my last novel I tried to write it with amphibolies throughout and with ambiguous events so that the reader would have to decide for himself what actually happened. It also would show prejudices in reading as there were 'obvious' ways at times to read the amphibolies yet which a more descrying eye would see could be interpreted another, perhaps thusly deeper way.... but for all that, I'm still not a very good writer and it's more the idea of the biases we bring which seems to pre-textually determine the content for most people.Quote:
Originally Posted by TacoButt
I think it would take skill on both sides to become used to a new textuality. If you compare the narrative method of Dumas with say Salman Rushdie, Rushdie's is much more compex and makes the reader work harder. One of Dumas' contemporaries would have trouble following Rushdie, yet we can cope with it as we have developed on from a simple narrative style. It would just take a bit of time.Quote:
Originally Posted by arrytus
Well, the first big players are the modernists, who basically destroyed the 19th century form, and created the serious novel - but the structure itself had an echo, so we still call works like Ulysses novels, even though they lack in resembles to the original novels of Tom Jones. From there we hit the post-WW2 world, where gimmicks became fashionable, so you have people as early as the 60s writing anti-novels, which basically destroy the trajectory of the novel narrative form - namely, hero goes into society, has a struggle, and emerges, or dies - the construct we have since the 18th century. resolution, climax, plot, character - all of these were eventually broken down, much of the time by meh artists.Quote:
Originally Posted by Mutatis-Mutandi
Into the last decades of the 20th century though, there were 3 movements really from what I can gather - popular fiction, namely best-sellers which adhere to a sort of limited third person narration most of the time, and stick to a simple trajectory by means of cliff hangers, what I would call tier two books, in that they are good novels, but lack any sort of structural advancement, namely books that are good, perhaps win a Pulitzer or the equivalent, and then people forget about them, not because they are bad, but because they aren't new enough, or innovative enough to make any real progress in the form. Then you have your third type of novelists who write in extremely experimental styles most of the time, who really take a crack at the structure of the novel itself - the best example would be the introduction of metafiction as a central trope, which undermines the credibility of the novel itself, something detrimental to the structure of the narrative as a whole - something like Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle would be an early example of this rather hit and miss mode, but something like Blood Meridian, or even Pale Fire are equally as valid. There is not much novel in Pale Fire, for instance, and in something like Calvino's mature work, or even in Marquez's Hundred Years of Solitude - the question of the novel has been bending for a long time now - the old Tom Jones, or even the old Cervantes model has been pretty much broken out of.
Ok St. Lukes, you make the argument about painting, but is painting in the traditional sense still there, or have new modes totally broken it apart? Arguably photography did bring the death of realism, and a sort of death to portrait painting, but that fallacy is derived I think from our idea of portraits being the least bit true, which is not the case.
I beg to question though, who is reading novels in the traditional sense of the word and calling them classics, and, at what point does a prose narrative become, or cease to be a novel? We clearly aren't really reading in the same way we used to, and we certainly do not take novels as seriously as we used to (Zola even claimed to be "scientific" in his writing,something which we clearly do not take seriously) so what is left of the novel even now? We have just renamed works novel, and stopped reading what we once called novels.
Ok St. Lukes, you make the argument about painting, but is painting in the traditional sense still there, or have new modes totally broken it apart? Arguably photography did bring the death of realism, and a sort of death to portrait painting, but that fallacy is derived I think from our idea of portraits being the least bit true, which is not the case.
Yes, painting as it was known in the 19th century imploded with the 20th and we get Cubism, Abstraction, and then non-painting (along the lines of Rauschenberg) that challenge the very notion of painting as paint applied on a flat surface. But parallel to this there were always those artists producing very good works in a more traditional manner (Andrew Wyeth, George Tooker, Edward Hopper, etc...). For a while the narrative of art history was dominated by those at the forefront of formalist innovation (the Modernist). Modernism, however, has itself imploded and under Post-Modernism the whole of art history is seen as equally valid... a palette from which to pick and choose. Many of the leading figures in painting today are clearly working within older traditions... realism:
Lucian Freud is quite possibly the leading painter today. His canvases demand $5 million each with a waiting list and his influence is seen in any number of talented younger painters:
http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5126/...beaba4a8_z.jpg
In spite of this, in many ways Rembrandt, Velasquez, Frans Hals, and Courbet would fully appreciate his work.
Odd Nerdrum is perhaps surpassed in influence only by Freud. He has been painting Max Max Post-Apocalyptic scenes for several decades employing an old-masterly facility:
http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5044/...90c999dc_z.jpg
He has challenged the hegemony of Modernism by declaring (tongue-in-cheek) that if turds in a can are ART then he is not an artist, but rather a "Kitsch artist". Just as the Impressionists proudly wore the name given them in derision by the academy, Nerdrum is proud of the term bestowed upon him by academicized Modernism, and dozens of artists have followed him and his "kitsch" movement.
Other artists who embrace that which Modernism has deemed "kitsch" and taboo include Will Cotton who paints candy-coated, pseudo-Rococo sexual fantasies:
http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5003/...0e129acf_z.jpg
... and John Currin who embraces all that is taboo: sexual fantasies ala cartoons in men's magazines, Norman Rockwell, and Mannerism:
http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5170/...b503c7f3_b.jpg
Other major realist painters, such as Daniel Ludwig, continue in the tradition of Modernist fragmentation and Expressionist distortions:
http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5130/...81fb2ed5_z.jpg
Still other realists began in complete rejection of Modernist distortions, abstractions, and irony. Caudio Bravo and Chuck Close both rejected Modernist Abstraction as it was taught to them in school, and instead strove to achieve the greatest photographic realism they could attain:
http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5081/...e0de22aa_z.jpg
http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5005/...b43f292e75.jpg
Like Lucian Freud, any number of major painters insist upon painting from life... including Avigdor Arikha:
http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5169/...3e3f5e2c_z.jpg
Antonio Lopez-Garcia:
http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5287/...9a02c790_z.jpg
Painters such as Bo Bartlett:
http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5248/...194cc7ce_z.jpg
and Eric Fischl:
http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5005/...55626f9dd0.jpg
... ultimately ignored Modernist formalist innovations and turned instead to realist traditions of painters such as Andrew Wyeth and Edward Hopper... as well as photography and film.
Concurrent with the shift toward realism, many earlier painters have been re-evaluated. Hopper and Wyeth, who were once dismissed as sentimental and illustrative, are now recognized as being among the strongest painters of their time. The Abstract Expressionist Philip Guston rose to even greater influence following his rejection of abstraction and his return to a figuration rooted in German Expressionism, comic books, Mexican Muralists, and various other earlier sources:
http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5206/...86155bee_z.jpg
Where Abstract Expressionism once dominated, figurative painters of the era such as Giorgio Morandi:
http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5290/...8906d7c1_z.jpg
Balthus:
http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5006/...ed91cdb966.jpg
and Francis Bacon:
http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5004/...d7ed47cc_z.jpg
are recognized as being no less important... and in many ways are far more influential on the new crop of painters.
I suspect that there is just as strong of a "realist" or "traditionalist" strain among the leading novelists as in any other genre. Yes, Georges Perec and Alain Robbe-Grillet offer some intriguing formal innovations... but somehow I doubt they will outlast Saul Bellow, Gunter Grass, or Philip Roth. Nor do I believe that the Post-Modern innovations wrought by Nabokov, John Barth, Italo Calvino, or even J.L. Borges spell a break with the past. In many ways, these innovations are firmly rooted in the writing of the past... in Jonathan Swift, Cervantes, Lawrence Stern, the Arabian Nights, etc... and the manner of playing with genre, employing layers of fiction: the frame story... or the fiction within another fiction within another fiction.
Of course there will always be elements that are new... of ones time. Freud, for all his realism, is clearly not a 19th century, let alone a Baroque painter, and Gore Vidal and Gunter Grass are clearly not writing as if the 20th century never happened.
I am proud to say I knew all of this. This not to belittle what you wrote in any way, JBI. I just didn't know if there was something going on contemporarily with novelistic form that I didn't know about.Quote:
Originally Posted by JBI
And, Stlukes, I gotta say I always appreciate when you take the time to put together these mini-lessons on art. Always very fascinating.
There is much going on, but I am rather limited in my knowledge of contemporary novels outside of Canada, and to a lesser extent, China, so I did not feel comfortable going more in depth on that.Quote:
Originally Posted by Mutatis-Mutandi
Three echos of advice from the past:
1. "I wish to keep my reader in the company of flesh and blood" William Wordsworth.
2."Do not fire too much over the heads of your readers." Anthony Trollope.
3."Novelists who write for the public are, in my opinion, no good; they've discovered who their readers are and, in submitting to their judgement, they're dishing things up like short order cooks." Graham Greene.
1) agreeQuote:
Originally Posted by MANICHAEAN
2) disagree, for no reason should a writer dumb his work down, if the masses wont get it who cares. Joyce strived for the stars and he didn't let the fact that the average reader wasn't gonna get it, why should he care or write for the average reader when he is by no means an average writer..
3)"No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money" - S.J
AIII
1. I'll take it further. Books can sometimes be a pretty bloodless substitute for life. But then, thats not much consulation for those stuck with bankers hours, a stable marriage and a pension scheme.
2. Interesting point & I suppose I actually agree with you. I was thinking more of the lower strata of dumbing down. Sorry, that all sounds a bit elitist and superior. I'm reading works now in my late 60's that I found impossibe in my 20's and am thoroughly enjoying them.
3.And?
He doesn't refute that, only, his idea was to have the public instead mold their tastes around the innovations of his fiction, rather than mold his fiction around their tastes.Quote:
Originally Posted by Alexander III
There are all kinds of ways to write intelligently while maintaining accessibility. Witness the success of Homer, Dante, and Shakespeare.
Shakespeare is accessible? I mean, sure it is for literary folk, but the layman?
Sure, 5th Grade inner city kids, some who can barely speak English, do it every year.Quote:
Originally Posted by Mutatis-Mutandi
The only problem I see with Shakespeare is that he writes in verse no prose, so one must learn how to read poetry to read Shakespeare. Other than that he writes in a simple yet beautiful manner which was specifically create so it could be understood by the low classes of 15th century england. I suppose the use of archaic words might complicate matters, and a sexual pun every 10 lines on average might get repetitive but nonetheless he is a rather easier read than most symbolist or modernist poets, not to say they are better simply they take more time to read in order to understand.Quote:
Originally Posted by Mutatis-Mutandi
But yea to summarize, everyone finds Shakespeare difficult at first not because he is difficult but simply because most everyone only knows prose.