Date: Wed, 29 May 2002 13:46:13 -0400 From: Yoshie Furuhashi <furuhashi.1 at osu.edu> Subject: Re: State of the art The novel as an art form tends to cease to be compelling in most societies once they solve the "marriage question" in social reality (if not in ideology) via abortion, contraception, no-fault divorce, women's education, & women's de facto economic independence from men.
You can write a great novel that is not about "female troubles" (= women's troubles as well as anxieties of men troubled by women), but such a novel tends to be in some way "difficult" (e.g. _Moby-Dick_) and often unpopular. Yoshie
This is a very interesting point, and yet it is not quite correct, is it? After all the book industry is still massive and all the bookshops that I know stock about 70-80% novels. It always amazes me that people can consider themselves highly literate when they read virtually nothing but novels. I do indeed find contemporary novels less than compelling and I wonder to what extent Yoshie's point explains this. There still seem to me some genres and writers that retain some interest, though. I admit to being a huge fan of James Ellroy, for example, and I think that in a case like that what appeals to me is the extremism of the writer's social vision coupled with an almost absurdly exaggerated emphasis on all those ingredients that made novels popular in the first place.
But yes, as far as novels go, mostly I can't get started nowadays or can't get very far. I think one of the reasons why is that we have found other ways of talking about and representing the 'private life'. In earlier epochs these discourses were not possible and fiction was a legitimised way of bringing the unmentionable into the public sphere. Compare in this regard the growth and popularity of TV shows in which people are prepared to disclose intimate details about themselves to a mass audience. (Although no doubt this 'disclosure' contains a strongly histrionic aspect.) This is the novelistic function sharpened to its most essential point. I guess the novel is gradually becoming mainly a way of learning about history rather than about present reality.
Tahir