Themes for a 2011 Masterpiece

[Hyacinthine]

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.

[Alexander III]

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.

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.

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.

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:

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.

[JBI]

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.

[Paulclem]

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.

[Alexander III]

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.

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.

[stlukesguild]

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.

[TacoButt]

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.

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?

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. Sorry for the digression.

[Paulclem]

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?

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. 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.

Even without the game element I think the textual layering would be good.

[stlukesguild]

I'll stick with Yeats:

“Sex and death are the only things that can interest a serious mind.”

[kelby_lake]

It will be about how poor we all are

[Mutatis-Mutandis]

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).

Forgive me my ignorance, but who are the "big players" and how are they bending the form?

[arrytus]

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?

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. Sorry for the digression.

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.

[Paulclem]

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.

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.

[JBI]

Forgive me my ignorance, but who are the "big players" and how are they bending the form?

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.

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.

[stlukesguild]

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:



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:



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:



... and John Currin who embraces all that is taboo: sexual fantasies ala cartoons in men's magazines, Norman Rockwell, and Mannerism:



Other major realist painters, such as Daniel Ludwig, continue in the tradition of Modernist fragmentation and Expressionist distortions:



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:





Like Lucian Freud, any number of major painters insist upon painting from life... including Avigdor Arikha:



Antonio Lopez-Garcia:



Painters such as Bo Bartlett:



and Eric Fischl:



... 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:



Where Abstract Expressionism once dominated, figurative painters of the era such as Giorgio Morandi:



Balthus:



and Francis Bacon:



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.