“Fiction was king”

The other day, in his excellent blog at the American Conservative, Alan Jacobs quoted the Australian novelist Thomas Keneally, who recalls with nostalgia when “Fiction was king.”

Color Jacobs skeptical:[I]f there was an age when “fiction was king,” surely it was the Victorian era, when writers like Dickens and George Eliot and (in a very different American context) Harriet Beecher Stowe were treated as profound social critics and moral sages. Almost all major novelists since then have at least occasionally suffered from the feeling that they came on the scene too late.Keneally, however, seems to have been thinking back upon his own career, which began in 1964 with The Place at Whitton, a mystery about a string of murders in a monastery. He had written fourteen novels by the time he struck it rich in 1982 with Schindler’s Ark, his docu-novel or historical novel about the German businessman who saved nearly a thousand Jews from Hitler’s war upon them. Keneally went on to write fourteen more novels, but something had fundamentally changed.

Stephen Spielberg’s film Schindler’s List, released eleven years after the novel, was only partly to blame. The main problem was that Keneally’s achievement was historical, not literary. In bringing Oskar Schindler’s story to wider notice, he added to historical knowledge—even though his original intention was not knowledge alone, but also the excitement of pain and danger, the rousing of the strongest emotions the heart is capable of. Most everyone now knows the story, but not everyone has experienced the emotions.

A young man or woman, just starting out, is unlikely to share any such grandiose conception of the novel. A source of knowledge and emotional power? You’ve got to be kidding! What has changed, as Cynthia Ozick wrote in her Afterword to the 2004 reprinting of Trust, is “the nature of ambition.” The Great American Novel has been replaced by what she calls “prompt gratifications and high-velocity fame”—the Great American Blog Post! “The sworn novelists, who, despite the devourings of the hour, continue to revere the novel,” Ozick says—“these novelists remain on the scene, if not on the rise.” But the conception of the novel as “the holy vessel of imagination,” a conception that passed from the Victorians to the Modernists, had become undone by the ’seventies. What has disappeared since then are not the novelists, but the institutionalized religion of the novel:The altars are gone. The priests are dead. Writers and artists of all kind are no longer publicly or privately abashed by the rewards of commerce. The arbiters of literary culture have either departed (few remember Irving Howe, say, or Randall Jarrell) or have devolved into popular celebrities, half sage, half buffoon.Ozick presses on “in homage to the old ambition.” But she, like Keneally, began her career prior to the ’seventies. (Trust, her first novel, was published in 1966 and begun even earlier.) And if the old ambition continues to be shared by some of her readers, they are likely to be graying too. Sworn readers are now even more rare than sworn novelists:[A]s the old ambition has faded, so has readers’ craving: recognizable bookish voluptuaries and print-cannibals are rare. Readers nowadays will hardly tolerate long blocks of print unbroken by dialogue or action, and if there are to be long blocks of print at all, they must be in familiar, speedy, colloquial, undemanding prose.Ozick does not blame television and film, which have themselves been affected by the same impatience and wilting ambition. What else, she asks, is the camera technique of “panning” than a jitteriness with the slow development of character and setting?

If fiction is no longer king the reason is not, as Tom Wolfe once prophesied, that something else has superseded it as “the number one genre.” There are no more genres (a concept as square as the novel). There are mashups; there are porous boundaries between high and low, popular and serious, literature and its negation; but there are no longer any distinct kinds. Indeed, there is a creeping horror of distinctions as such. If fiction is no longer king the reason is that the faith which sustained it for so long, the belief system which led writers and readers alike to defer to its supremacy, has disappeared. What has disappeared is any confidence in the power of the word.