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Blogs by Richard French
Does the Novel Have a Future? 8/31/2016 7:46:54 PM
I've admired the novels of V. S. Naipaul for quite a while, so I was happy to discover his last two, which some critics said are weaker than his earlier work, but I found them worth reading and interesting for the post-Conradian motifs he explores. Still, the effort of writing novels prompted Naipaul to tell an interviewer that the novel is dead.
I didn't want to let that statement pass me by without examining it. For one thing, no one can predict the future with certainty, and for another our culture changes rapidly. and if it should happen that there are no more novels, that would be a symptom of a larger phenomenon.
Looking at the question another way, we can say that the novel has died many times already.The novels that Balzac and Dickens, George Eliot and the nineteenth century Russians whose name everyone knows have no successors. The works of Joyce and Mann and Proust are products of a particular time and place. It stands ot reason that present-day post-modern novels will give way to something else.
The way of life that surrounds us offers numerous distractions, and there may be more worry in the western world than in years past. People may not have the time and the powers of concentration to read long novels, never mind write them, but stories will always exist in some form even as technology changes and writers and their representatives will probably discover creative ways to find readers.
Novels describe people in society and the concerns of the generation that a particular novel exists in. It would be a debased age that had no interest in imaginative interpretations of their problems and achievements.
We can turn the question around again and say instead that some of the best novels have yet to be written, stories set in communities made of many different kinds of people, stories about living in a mass society stories about the struggle to maintain spiritual values in a society that prizes money and prestige, stories about overcoming the tyranny that exists in many part of the world, stories resisting the temptation to self-seeking that can occur anywhere, and so on.
No one can predict the future, but the art of the novel fills a unique need, there are hundreds of nillions of people in North America and Europe, where the novel has flourished, and even if only one percent of those people are interested in the art of fiction, that is still a lot of people. What's more, there are bound to be writers brave and industrious enough to transform their experience of new times into creative adaptations of the novel form. They will find readers and readers will find them. That's what I think will happen.
