Benjamin Kunkel, Benedict Anderson, and the Fate of the Novel
by David Backer
Posted on September 21st, 2010 at 12:59 am
The first sections of Imagined Communities by Benedict Anderson read like an unknowing echo to Benjamin Kunkel’s recent piece in n+1, “Goodbye to the Graphosphere,” regarding the fate of the novel. In that essay, appearing in a forthcoming collection about the future of books from Soft Skull Press, Kunkel recounts the publishing industry’s past and juxtaposes it with the digital present. His conclusion is that the novel is on its way out.
While Kunkel uses Regis Debray as his theoretical launchpad, Anderson is a different—but just as helpful—resource.
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Glossing on Fevbre and Martin’s work The Coming of the Book, Anderson points to the emergence of the novel as the emergence of a particular kind of consciousness, one that indicates the birth of an imagination capable of imagining a nation.
The Coming is a history of printing and full-length manuscript publishing. It gives us facts like this: Martin Luther’s theses could be found all over Germany in 15 days because of print-capitalism.
Anderson says the proliferation of the printed word in the form that it proliferated—the novel and the newspaper—show the birth of a ”meanwhile” consciousness, one that is aware of multiple story lines occurring in time simultaneously but in different places. He opposes this to a consciousness that sees different events inhabiting the same place at the same time. The distinction comes from Walter Benjamin’s Illuminations. Benjamin calls “meanwhile” time “homogenous, empty” time and calls the latter “deific.”
Deific time reigned in antiquity. Anderson gives two clear examples of it. (1) A 14th century depiction of the birth of Christ where Mary is dressed like a peasant girl from the 14th century. Here Christ’s birth happens at year 0 but also, it seems, in the 14th century. (2) Christ’s crucifixion and Isaac’s sacrifice, the latter viewed as a prequil to the former. God sees all these events ocurring without timeline, without linear chronology—Abraham and Christ, Mary and 14th century fashion—and so does deific time.
Evidence of homogenous-empty (meanwhile) time is first seen in novels. A character does this and that and, meanwhile, another character does that and this. Then they meet. (It’s also seen in newspapers, where stories are told of events all over the world connected only by the day they occur.)
Anderson argues this kind of storytelling, homogeneous-empty, wasn’t happening in longer literary works before the novel. It was this kind of thinking, among other historical factors, that allowed our species to conceive of ourselves as belonging to a group composed of people we don’t actually know.
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A big question mark punctuates the fate of the novel. The economic crisis hit the mammoth, aging publishing industry in ways it’s not recovering from. Technologies are evolving that present words in new ways. Instead of the printed word we have the digitized word. Fiction lives and breathes on the Internet and in e-books and e-readers and iPhones. If Luther were to write his theses now, they would be everywhere in the world in 15 seconds. What does this mean for the novel?
This is where Anderson is helpful. We can use his application of Benjamin’s time distinctions as a lens to look at the novel’s fate.
Our main question might be: Do these technologies constitute another change in our consciousness of time? Do they indicate a third kind of consciousness, different from deific and homogeneous-empty? Or are they just evidence that we’ve carried homogenous-empty time out to its fullest extent?
Lets say “Yes,” tentatively. If the emergence of the Internet and related digitizations indicate a new consciousness of time, then maybe the novel will become obsolete, just as other cultural artifacts underwent radical changes during the transition from deific time to homogenous-empty time. In this scenario, the novel becomes a stepped-upon rung of the ladder of our evolution, replaced as an art form in the popular mind like the orchestra was replaced by the band and the painted portrait by the photo and theater by film.
But even if we say “No” we get a similar answer. Lets say these technologies don’t indicate a new consciousness, but rather they’re just a full flourishing of homogeneous-empty time. In this case the novel still has a predominantly historical role to play. The novel indicated the birth of homogeneous, empty consciousness, and now that that consciousness has matured. We may have to build a monument to the novel’s importance, say our goodbyes, and expect a future that excludes it from the main stage though it helped to build the stage itself.
Either way you look at it, applying Anderson’s distinction yields what may be a disturbing concept: It’s neither the publishing industry nor its product but rather us, the human being, that’s changing as our technologies advance. Kunkel quotes Jonathan Franzen to this effect,
Haven’t we all secretly sort of come to an agreement, in the last year or two or three, that novels belonged to the age of newspapers and are going the way of newspapers, only faster?
Our digitization is evidence of a change in our consciousness, so it makes sense that the novel and its role in our lives must change with us.
This is really interesting, David.
I am unconvinced that Mr. Franzen’s quote, in context, means anything like it’s taken here. It’s from his lovely essay on the value of Christina Stead’s novel “The Man Who Loved Children,” that appeared in the Sunday Times Book Review, where he discusses why Ms. Stead has been excluded from the canon, and by extension, what the value of a novel is, what it does, what it is for and not for. There is an implicit criticism of a culture and world that has no place for novels… of course there is, coming from our supposed ‘new great American novelist.’ He says of TMWLC, “As the narrator remarks, matter-of-factly, “That was family life.” And telling the story of this inner life is what novels, and only novels, are for. Or used to be, at least. Because haven’t we left this stuff behind us? High-mindedly domineering males? Children as accessories to their parents’ narcissism? The nuclear family as a free-for-all of psychic abuse? We’re tired of the war between the sexes and the war between the generations, because these wars are so ugly, and who wants to look into the mirror of a novel and see such ugliness? How much better about ourselves we’ll feel when we stop speaking our embarrassing private family languages! The absence of literary swans seems like a small price to pay for a world in which ugly ducklings grow up to be big ugly ducks whom we can then agree to call beautiful.”
If you took that at face value, and didn’t unpack the obvious answer coming from the man who just wrote an unflinching and nuanced novel about family and culture, you could come away with the idea that Mr. Franzen thinks the novel a relic of the days of newspaper. But that’s a clear distortion.
Perhaps new media indeed allows us new ways to consume print, new expectations and altered attention spans, greater connectivity, new kinds of community. Perhaps it will eventually give rise to new forms, though for me, as a novelist and short story writer and essayist, I can imagine no form I cherish more, that can accomplish more at saying something that matters. Regardless, I see little evidence of the novel’s decline– reports of its unprominence, let alone its imminent cultural irrelevance, are greatly overstated. Why, even consider the modest short story, that much-maligned form that commercial publishers have long refused to publish collections of. A great deal of attention and buzz has been paid to Electric Literature for their new delivery model and methods, their cost effectiveness. But the fiction that they publish is more than anything else classically (and finely, even brilliantly, I might add) crafted, and represents mostly the most celebrated and established fiction writers of our day. Delivery of an old form in ways you can interact with differently and consume differently is not a paradigmatic shift, let alone an evolution of mankind or of our culture. It is an affirmation of the old form’s significance, a quicker, easier, glossier access, a reassertion of form’s merit.
But I guess I am old-fashioned.