"to reshape our sense of ourselves and our societies across generations"
March 31, 2021 8:53 AM   Subscribe

"The culture has given up on the novel as a central art in part because we’ve given up on metaphysical stakes: It has to matter to the universe, or it won’t long matter to us." says Joseph Bottum in a conversation with Phil Klay about whether the novel is in decline, on Pairagraph (a set of structured conversations). Klay replies: "as long as humans need not only a metaphysics but also a sense of belonging in structures larger than ourselves, whether those be communities or churches or nations, humans will seek out those art forms that help us to knit together our disparate, broken solitudes." Even if the topic doesn't particularly interest you, you may find Bottum's introduction funny; I laughed out loud.
posted by brainwane (21 comments total) 13 users marked this as a favorite
 
Do you think writers of epic poems scratched out poems about how the culture had given up on 'metaphysical stakes' when their own pet form of personal expression fell by the wayside?
posted by jordantwodelta at 9:15 AM on March 31, 2021 [2 favorites]


The absence of metaphysical stakes is itself an important theme in the contemporary novel. Ishiguro's work in particular delves in this area. The novel and other art forms remain important for a smallish portion of the population. Perhaps the problem is just that the metaphysical stakes are now too high for most people to deal with.
posted by No Robots at 9:31 AM on March 31, 2021 [1 favorite]


The Spectator did, jordantwodelta, or even more ambitiously tried to have the new form meet the old stakes.
posted by clew at 9:43 AM on March 31, 2021 [1 favorite]


Reading the Amazon excerpt, it seems like The Decline of the Novel is meant as sort of a counterpart to Ian Watt's The Rise of the Novel, which is a common place to start in thinking about the history of the novel in English. But it's a starting point contested by, like, tons of people. As a few alternative starting points, I'd suggest Steven Moore's 2-volume The Novel: An Alternative History, which takes a pretty expansive view of what counts as a novel. Or Mary Doody's True Story of the Novel, which among other things covers how particular definitions of the novel are ethnocentric / exclusionary. Or Srinivas Aravamudan's Enlightenment Orientalism: Resisting the Rise of the Novel, which sticks with basically the same timeframe as Watt but looks at the neglected genealogy of 18th C. Orientalist literature and its place in the rise of the novel and the Enlightenment in general.

Setting that aside, one specific point Bottum makes that jumps out at me is how different Don Quixote is from Clarissa and how the latter suggests Protestantism was crucial to the rise of the novel. I don't see how the claim is reconcilable with Madame de Lafayette's The Princess of Clèves (at best tolerant of Protestantism), if not other French novels (Scarron's Roman Comique, Madame de Villedieu's epistolary novel Memoirs of the Life of Henriette-Sylvie de Molière, etc.) which also have plenty of psychological depth, self-consciousness, and realism distinguishable from Don Quixote. Putting so much emphasis on Protestantism feels like doubling down on the ethnocentrism of "English literature." Like, if someone wants to ignore the fact that there's no criterion for the novel that The Plum in the Golden Vase didn't also meet more than a century before Clarissa, I'd buy that is it at least a distinct tradition. But early novelists in England were for sure reading work from all over Europe. I wouldn't give up on Don Quixote as a crucial source in English either--it had been translated multiple times before Clarissa appeared and was well-known enough for Charlotte Lennox to just call one of her novels The Female Quixote a few years later.

I guess I don't know how much of that he covers in the book, but it seems like this all matters to a claim that "we have lost the metaphysical and religious confidence that made the novel the central art-form of the modern age," since maybe we never had it in the form he suggests? I agree that's a funny intro at the link though, and what do I know since I've only read an excerpt.
posted by Wobbuffet at 11:11 AM on March 31, 2021 [8 favorites]


Adding Richard Burton’s Masters of the English Novel, which iirc also discusses non-English novelists the English novelists read.
posted by clew at 11:30 AM on March 31, 2021


Seconding the suggestion for the Steven Moore books. Anything by him is wonderful. Not only is he remarkably widely-read, he is an enthusiastic evangelist for reading. I defy anyone to read his "My Back Pages" and not come out of it with a too-long-for-the-rest-of-your-life TBR list.
posted by chavenet at 12:02 PM on March 31, 2021 [1 favorite]


I guess I don't know how much of that he covers in the book, but it seems like this all matters to a claim that "we have lost the metaphysical and religious confidence that made the novel the central art-form of the modern age," since maybe we never had it in the form he suggests?

I think that's a fair point to worry as the linked dialogue doesn't go into the details of the argument enough to know what Bottum is fully arguing, either in better defining what he means by "metaphysical and religious confidence" and who exactly is the "we" who may have lost it. The dialogue emphasizes more the novel as central art-form part of the question, with Bottum asserting it no longer has that status, somewhat convincingly as Klay mostly responds in asserting the individual importance can still be felt, which kinda sidesteps the point.

While I can see an argument for the novel being the central art-form of the modern age, I think the question being centered around the novel might be leaving out the bigger question of whether any art holds the same metaphysical place as it once did anymore. The last couple decades make that seem a bit doubtful in a number of ways.
posted by gusottertrout at 12:04 PM on March 31, 2021


jordantwodelta: "Do you think writers of epic poems scratched out poems about how the culture had given up on 'metaphysical stakes' when their own pet form of personal expression fell by the wayside?"

Yes, obviously.
Is this a trick question?
posted by signal at 12:08 PM on March 31, 2021 [1 favorite]


feels like doubling down on the ethnocentrism of "English literature."
Agreed. The British novel is such a strange creature, so belated, compared with the rest of the world, and with its unusual focus on realism and some lower class folks.

Also agree that "Citing “Cat People” won’t help," simply because it's a short story, not a novel.

The link between nationalism and the novel is interesting. COVID-19 has taught us that humans tend to prefer to see the world in national, rather than global, terms. If that continues, there's one slot for book-length fiction.
posted by doctornemo at 1:05 PM on March 31, 2021


An entertaining exchange, even though I suspect I disagree with the Bottum almost entirely about nearly everything. But, of course, I haven't read the book.
posted by eotvos at 1:09 PM on March 31, 2021


I'd say that movies have become the dominant art form, but damned if I know what it means. Maybe that people are really visual.

Maybe that I don't have enough gall to come up with an overarching theory.
posted by Nancy Lebovitz at 4:16 PM on March 31, 2021


Tik Tok.

Tik Tok is the dominant art form.

At least this month.
posted by signal at 6:57 PM on March 31, 2021


I think what Bottum is referring to isn't so much dominant in the popular sense, but central to how we look to art for a better understanding of the individual within the social order. In that sense, for the US at least, hip-hop and its adjacent works seem to be the closest current analog to how Bottum is thinking of the novel's place in former times.

Think, for example, of the response, both public and critically, to things like Beyoncé's Lemonade, Kendrick Lamar's Damn, or Childish Gambino's This is America. Those works are what are being examined for what they say about our times in ways that used to be more the realm of the novel. That hip-hop has overwhelming global reach, used around the world by the younger generations as their chosen form of address to social issues makes it the most likely contender for central art form.

But there is also some sense I have that art in general has a different kind of place now for how it, in some ways, failed or showed its limitations by being the voice of an "elite" and for how we seem to now be questioning a lot of assumptions about the universality of art and over boundaries between "taste" and "timelessness" in how we assess aesthetics and importance for a variety of reasons.
posted by gusottertrout at 12:47 AM on April 1, 2021 [3 favorites]


I don't think it's possible to lend any coherence to his argument without reference to religion and white supremacy, because I'm pretty sure that's what he's saying "we" have really lost. After reading the parts of the book on Amazon, I noticed a good chunk of that material was based on this essay: "The Novel as Protestant Art"--which seems more fair to criticize as a whole and which incidentally is pretty bad. Like, I get the sense he's read maybe an undergrad course worth of 18th C. lit to connect with Watt. But I very much more get the sense he's a religious pundit projecting his feelings onto a potted literary history that is super incomplete to make grandiose claims that don't make any sense. Well, they do make sense as what anthropologists call a charter myth--a made-up origin story ("Modernity's ... sense of self owes even more to the novel as an art form—a form created, defined, and sent on its way, everywhere in the world, by English-language authors confidently breathing a Protestant air") leading to conclusions like how "the atmosphere grows thinner and thinner in the West." WTF?
posted by Wobbuffet at 4:48 AM on April 1, 2021 [2 favorites]


Yeah, my assumption is that Bottum is narrowly "right" in the sense the novel has lost some of its standing in the current era, but he's more broadly wrong about the reasons and possible effects of that rather unexceptional claim. My hope is that he was using the idea of religion to stand in as part of the old argument over art's moral component being at the core of what makes it important. A variation of the Tolstoy argument, where we're losing our way, or some such, by ignoring the importance of how art and the novel can provide a type of moral guidance.

If he limited his argument to some more specific religious aim or value, then the whole thing is teetering over the edge of wackyland, so I assumed some more general concept was involved to have him participate in the dialogue, especially since that nothing of that direct line arose in the conversation.

I think the way he's wrong, assuming my first guess on his overall argument is even vaguely near right, is kinda fascinating for our current moment being caught up in arguments specifically over morality and art, but from the perspective it had failed and now it needs to be made right. The current era is one of heightened judgement over morality in art, in both how its made and how it "reads", so any argument suggesting a moral decline would have to be based on misunderstanding of the moment and favoring of values that have little to do with metaphysics of any acceptable sort.
posted by gusottertrout at 5:46 AM on April 1, 2021


Besides, everyone knows the real reason for the novel's decline is David Foster Wallace.
posted by gusottertrout at 5:55 AM on April 1, 2021 [3 favorites]


The important thing to remember about arguments like this is it's not novels or books in general that he's talking about, because novels are more pervasive than ever. However, those don't count because they aren't the right sort of novels, and many of them aren't done by the right sort of people.

It always boils down to "Why aren't books by upper class white men about things they are important to upper class white men more popular?”
posted by happyroach at 9:51 AM on April 1, 2021 [7 favorites]


happyroach: "It always boils down to "Why aren't books by upper class white men about things they are important to upper class white men more popular?”"

You forgot to mention their erections, and the causes and effects of said erections. Even better if it's attached to a middle-aged professor/author and the cause is a student.
posted by signal at 11:05 AM on April 1, 2021 [4 favorites]


Well, if it's all over, did you declare a winner of "The Great American Novel"?
posted by k3ninho at 12:41 PM on April 1, 2021 [1 favorite]


Well, if it's all over, did you declare a winner of "The Great American Novel"?

They did! Surprisingly the winner was License to Drive by A.L. Singer. It's a title that escaped notice from a lot of the snooty literary fiction types at the time, being a novelization of the Coreys Haim and Feldman movie, but those who came to read it later found it rich in subtext, a symbolic triumph that speaks to the ages. How much the association with those two great stars helped make more vivid the settings and themes of the book, can't really be known, but that kind of cross medium artistic success is just another testament to the greatness of the era.
posted by gusottertrout at 6:15 AM on April 2, 2021 [2 favorites]


there’s essentially a whole sub-field in english and literary studies devoted to the study of the novel-form and its role in subject-formation, nation-building, ideology, etc. that this guy apparently overlooked because he has his own mythologized idea about what it once was/meant that would appear to be based more generally in some kind of (Harold) Bloom-inflected notion of cultural degeneracy or at least the delegitimization of “High Art” as having a central claim on the expression of the human spirit or whatever. just seems to be lacking in awareness...
posted by LeviQayin at 11:22 PM on April 4, 2021 [2 favorites]


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