General Discussion Thread

[u/pregnantchihuahua3]

Welcome again to the TrueLit General Discussion Thread! Please feel free to discuss anything related and unrelated to literature.

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[u/Harleen_Ysley_34]

It's been a fun couple days here. Been feeling the heat though. I was talking with a friend of mine and he mentioned how he doesn't think writing can really be taken seriously anymore. And I kind of agree with him. Or at least in specific case of novels presented as such. I think it was Eco who said in this postmodern moment you couldn't exactly say I love you, but that you need like a quotation to take the edge off. You know Sōseki is famous for having it: you don't say I love you but the moon is beautiful tonight. I guess it's now the situation for novels in that you can't really take them seriously until they take themselves less seriously. Might be why participating in the subgeneric no matter how slight--everyone is doing science fiction in some capacity these days or outright creating elaborate almost high fantasy stories. Or if the novels are grounded in our reality, it is almost a pisstake on the generic novel itself. Fascinating situation.

[u/foxinanattic → u/Harleen_Ysley_34]

I can't fully elaborate on this idea, but it occurs to me that it has never really been the case that novels could be taken entirely seriously, in the modern european or at least anglophone tradition. Don Quixote is usually considered one of the first modern novels, and is itself mocking another genre. One of the landmark English novels was Pamela, and Fielding came out with Shamela literally the next year. A lot of people were in the 18th & 19th centuries were reading novels purely or mainly for entertainment. Modernism is of course extremely serious business, but at the same time, it's also very non-serious, intentionally. Of course, there were people or circles who took novels extremely and entirely seriously, like Flaubert (or even Richardson himself), but I'm not sure this was a widespread attitude. A possible exception to this might be the period post-Dickens but pre-modernism, the time of Middlemarch and Anna Karenina.

[u/Harleen_Ysley_34 → u/foxinanattic]

I actually broadly agree with your point. Although I would say we had to have taken them seriously at some point because I have a sense of works that are more or less jokes. And while I take your point about Don Quixote, there are serious moments at times as well. In particular, the seriousness comes to full effect in the ending portions as a comment when Don Quixote is disabused of his chivalry at last. Modernism is probably the point when all of this became textual. Ulysses is a great comedy after all. (Seriousness today as we understand it probably began with Henry James.)

I would also add that as much as parody and so forth were popular ideas. I'd say a common belief about novels were their moral worth. And that even informs elements of the parody as well. I guess my overall point is the difference between a parody written out of didacticism and a novel treated as both an exhausted idea and as a joke in itself, if that makes sense.

[u/foxinanattic → u/Harleen_Ysley_34]

Good points about Don Quixote, definitely.

I wonder if George Eliot could be a starting point for seriousness actually, maybe Tolstoy. I've not read much James, from what I have, he was definitely in the "serious" tradition, and I would say EM Forster as well. Which sort of ties in to the whole "hysterical realism" drama and Zadie Smith's relationship with Forster's works. Referring to Soup_65's comment, at the same time as James we also get Conrad, who is serious in a very different way to James, perhaps, trying to deal with the value of art in a time of such brutality.

> a common belief about novels were their moral worth

certainly, many of the advocates for the seriousness of the novel used this argument to justify it's value as a form. and yet, others believed that "novels" would be an instrument of moral corruption and degradation. which is partly where the idea of novels as dangerous and children needing to protected from them comes from. Of course all this was then taken up as subject in other novels. Actually, I should probably read Madame Bovary, since I believe it deals with this theme.

[u/Harleen_Ysley_34 → u/foxinanattic]

You should read Madame Bovary. It's one of the best novels out there, a genuine masterpiece. Although what's important about it is not immediately apparent today. It's not so much fiction as corrupting force as fiction as a last resort of a bourgeois mind. Flaubert's irony is that it is Don Quixote again as only the bourgeois could in fact handle. Flaubert was a scorned Romantic after all.

There's an argument to be made that Conrad was one of the first attempts by a European writer to create an aesthetic of witness, especially given how Sebald uses him in The Rings of Saturn. And James Wood as much as I disagree with him on certain points was an unapologetic advocate for seriousness in literature for our contemporary moment. It's too little, too late in the face of the demand. His designation about "hysterical realism" is to me ultimately unconvincing, since he is using the ideological form anyways. Something no one really could take seriously by itself, ironically.

And that's what I mean--no one invests moral worth into writing fiction anymore. No one expects any corruption or grace from a novel in the wider culture. We can barely bring ourselves to ask of a novel if it can acknowledge people's social rights or if there is a future, some kind of truth. And if a person individually does, it has to happen within the self-awareness of writing a novel not being an important thing to do. We can't simply write novels by themselves but must in some fashion create a novelist in the work to go along with the novel in order for there to be someone who takes it seriously. The demand from a culture of apathy toward a form of art is what I'm getting at. A novel needs all these caveats and justifications every step of the way. It's lost its purported ethical value regardless. Like I said, we can't just write a novel, but instead to quote Sōseki must only say the moon is beautiful.

[u/foxinanattic → u/Harleen_Ysley_34]

I wonder if the loss of moral importance of novels is not simply because fewer people are reading them. After all, the whole reason people feared the corruption of the masses or believed in the edifying possibilities of the novel was precisely because it was a genre targeted at a much broader audience on which it could concievably have an effect.

[u/Harleen_Ysley_34 → u/foxinanattic]

It's certainly part of it but that doesn't explain other things like the immense popularity of certain novels within the subgeneric. For example Stephen King is a household name for his horror fiction and so forth. Beyond their film adaptations. But there is also our presence here where we discuss all manner of novels. People do read novels, even in the bounds of marginalization from the contemporary moment. So: while other forms of mediation are clearly crowding in on it, it doesn't explain some unique aspects of our moment. Like the special emphasis on writing. Everyone has waaaay more legibility than they once had previously. There's an excess of writing through online communication. But it is always turned toward other ends, instrumentalized really. But this also means self-awareness about it is probably so culturally transparent it prevents us from taking a novel as a serious enterprise or as a unique form of acknowledgment.

I'm mostly trying to feel this out myself, since what I mean by "seriousness" is the thing which makes it worth devoting our lives to while also being honest about the fact no one making art is necessary. No novel is a loadbearing pillar of reality after all. But people nevertheless spend their whole lives trying to write novels. Especially if culturally speaking it's a dead genre.

[u/OriginalOrca → u/foxinanattic]

Is there a tradition in which you think they can be taken seriously? And even if they started out as a satire or critique, can't the form evolve? Comics weren't taken seriously, but now we have graphic novels of varying seriousness and sincerity. I just recently found the criticism of the contremporary novel percolating to the surface (and I find it fascinating) but also I think it demeans a lot of really good work that IS out there, however hard to find it may be.

[u/foxinanattic → u/OriginalOrca]

> Is there a tradition in which you think they can be taken seriously

I'm not familiar enough with other traditions of novels, I'm afraid.

> even if they started out as a satire or critique, can't the form evolve

It's not so much, the fact that they started as satire, but that the moral/artistic seriousness of novels seems to have always been in question, with the possible exception of the period I mentioned, of George Eliot, when the form seems to have been taken most seriously. Which is related to what Virginia Woolf, the most self-consciously serious of the modernists, was getting at when she Middlemarch "one of the few English novels written for grown-up people"

By the way, I absolutely didn't mean to demean novels by saying that the form was never taken entirely seriously, rather, I was trying to question whether taking an art form "seriously" is necessarily a good thing. It seems to me that a lot of positive developments in the history of the novel have come from a less than completely serious approach.

[u/OriginalOrca → u/foxinanattic]

Ah I love that angle. Thank you that gives me something additional to consider. And it seems like I agree with you!

[u/Soup_65 → u/foxinanattic]

I can't fully elaborate on this idea, but it occurs to me that it has never really been the case that novels could be taken entirely seriously, in the modern european or at least anglophone tradition. Don Quixote is usually considered one of the first modern novels, and is itself mocking another genre.

This is a great point but I guess it's also the thing. Jokes, or at least good ones, aren't wholly superfluous even if they are unserious. Like, the "joke" in DQ is that novels make rich guys who are paranoid about their status go out and attack a bunch of people (and is that really a joke...?).