Novel, the follow-up. . . .

Now for those of you who feel it necessary to defend the Novel, as one comment already received has done let me say a few things. 

First of all the interesting thing about the comment that I received is that it unintentionally strengthens my case by pointing out that the changes made to the novels in recent years follow a kind of media pressure. In other words, they have begun to emulate television and film. Well, thank you this further strengthens my point. Novels will now always been in the position of 'chasing' the innovations that are coming from other media. In light of the argument I have made re. Jean-Paul Sartre I think the commenter undermined his/her own argument and makes my very point. 

Second, greater familiarity with the novel suggest that the innovations the commenter is talking about grew out of pre-war French literature with Surrealism and writers like Celine.(Celine's novel Journey to the End of the Night could have been written today and would still seem original) These innovations in 60s were expressed by very interesting writers like Richard Brautigan.  I think that the greatest innovation of the novel in the past 50 years or so has been magic realism.  But the real strength of these innovations were missed as the novel began to settle into the 20th century reading public which has demanded a certain group of  fairly standard formula novels of different genres such as sci-fi, fantasy, dramatic, romance, etc. The demands of the market has, in other words, limited innovations in many ways and held them in check the same way it has done to film and television. 

In the end the real issue is what status and role does the novel has play in the culture of our society.  But not just the novel - all of the arts. I believe that there is a much bigger issue at play here. I think that the arts have been falling into crisis for a very long time and this crisis is a symptom of a wider crisis concerning human meaning and identity. Nietzsche talked over a hundred years ago about the death of God and what he really was talking about was the question of how we are to live in a world where we have to create our own meaning. We have all been struggling with this in various ways in the arts, philosophy, and even science. The problem is that no one has really been able to answer the question adequately and instead the market has filled in the gap as though the only meaning we can find is commodity consumption. Thus it is not unexpected that the most vital and growing art forms will continue to be ones that can best be driven by big capital. The biggest dangers to art forms such as painting or the novel are the mechanisms of capitalism and the technologies that drive it forward. 

Problems of Literature (Part 1)

There are, I am certain, countless reasons that one might amuse oneself engaging in the conceptual endeavor to make clear to oneself or even, if blessed with greater ambition, to a larger audience, the complex process by which we imbue documents which we commonly call literature with layers of meaning that are beyond the obvious ones that present themselves in the initial process of reading. We must assume, first of all, that such is the case with average readers in the course of everyday experience, rather than such an experience being the soul purview of specialists in the field of literature where scholars, armed with excessive and intentionally complex theoretical frameworks, create meanings in the interest of some buried agenda which may be constituted as important in the broadest sense but which bears little resemblance to a sensual experience of reading. We can make this assumption, I assume, based upon the fact that it appears to be a common habit of the majority of readers to recognize, at least at a minimal level, the existence of so-called ‘sub-texts’ which they can, if only in the simplest terms, present to others and discursively redeem if called upon to do so. This is not, of course, to suggest that every ‘average’ reader takes the part of some scholarly critic over what they perceive to be their own experience or the author herself, whose intent continues to be championed by readers and critic alike. But even if there persists a disturbing weakness of the imaginative power in the majority of readers and writers, there continues to persist a simple habit of textual obfuscation which relates to a perceived ‘meaning’ emanating from a fixed document. In simpler terms, people read literature as though it contains some fixed meanings which are inherent in the text and which they, through a ‘proper’ or ‘thorough’ understanding, can illuminate.

I consider the most obvious possible motivation for such a widespread habit of reading to be found in the general desire for sociability. Literature’s ability to effect or even ‘create’ states of heightened emotions which are essentially assumed to exist at a universal level (or to be actually the same at all time and in all places), feeds an apparent drive toward a comfort to be found in common experience. Thus we are at once inspired by some inherent need to assert our unique experience as individuals and readers, but simultaneously compelled to find an underlying, one might say structural, commonality inherent in our existential condition. One might assume that such competing sympathies would generate an intolerable degree of cognitive dissonance. Subligation on the one hand and individual assertion on the other, should create a state of irretrievable disturbance.

If this is so where does this disturbance lie?