Read Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives Online
Authors: John Sutherland
Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives (159 page)
The Preface claims this book to be an idiosyncratic history of fiction in English. What, having come some four hundred years, is its future history? We have not always had the novel, said the critic Walter Benjamin, and there will come a time, he bleakly foresaw, when we shall no longer have it. I should not like to live in it. But that fictionless time seems, at the present moment, thankfully distant. There are today more novels, and more kinds of novel, than ever before in literary history – too many for most readers. Trying to make sense of the novel in English, as we come into the second decade of the twenty-first century, is like sculpting with sand or paddling in a tsunami.
Some handholds can be found. The six great nineteenth-century genres – Romance, Male Action (‘Adventure’), Crime, Science Fiction, Horror, Fantasy – march on. They still map out the topography of the typical bookstore. Nowadays they are supplemented by what one can call ‘constituency’ literature: gay fiction, chicklit, ladlit, teen fiction. Constituency fiction is defined by customer affinity, not style. It thrives vigorously as new social constituencies pop up. The old vertical architecture remains obstinately in place: the literary novel, experimental fiction, middlebrow- blockbuster, pulp fiction. As to how these will be rearranged, dissolved, or redefined in the future is unknowable. The factors and pressures which will carry future changes through can, however, be defined as a set of binarisms.
Viewed through trade papers (
Publishers Weekly
, the
Bookseller
), the trend over the last fifty years would seem to be one of inexorable agglomeration. The fusion of producers (literary agents, publishers, retailers – electronic and walk-in, transnational reading publics) into ever larger structures has been remarkable and seems unstoppable. In the nineteenth century, when both firms came into being, the notion of HarperCollins, yoking Glasgow and New York, would have seemed something from
the pen of Mr H. G. Wells. It has happened. Fiction is, in the twenty-first century, a global operation. Leading practitioners conform to that globalism – see, for example, Rana Dasgupta above, or Salman Rushdie’s bold proclamation:
I suppose if you were asking me formally, I would still think of myself as a British citizen of Indian origin. But I think of myself as a New Yorker and as a Londoner. I probably think of those as being more exact definitions than the passport or the place of birth.
A main instrument of the agglomerated apparatus is the bestseller list. There will be close congruence – irrespective of the national origins of the authors – between what appears weekly in the
New York Times
and what appears in the
Sunday Times
. Is Rushdie, when he appears on those lists, a British or an American property? One thing is certain, he is not an Indian or Pakistani property, and will never be until the subcontinent develops a publishing and distributive machinery to rival that of London and New York. Novelists, like everyone else, follow the money. And the money, currently, is in two big cities.
Alongside all this skyscraper publishing, there has been a downscaling unprecedented in literary history. It originated in the mid-1990s, with nationwide internet connectivity. Most fiction which is produced nowadays will never see a printed page, but will none the less be widely read. It remains in the domain of so-called ‘fanfic’. The most read of the fanfictioneers, Cassandra Claire – famous for her
Lord of the Rings
extension,
The Very Secret Diaries
– is, effectively, self-published and expects no revenue. All that is required for Claire’s kind of novel is a keyboard, an internet connection, and accessible companions in her chosen ‘fandom’. Atomistic publishing will surely advance over the foreseeable future – already it is vast.
The novel is, conventionally, a textual form: words on the page. It is one of the things which, sadly, renders it unattractive to many young readers whose culture (via iPod, screen, Facebook, and TV game console) is audio-visual and increasingly ‘virtual’. Translating black marks on a white surface into narrative is not sexy. There has, however, been some symptomatic hybridisation. One is the growing popularity of the graphic novel, and of practitioners such as Alan Moore (
Watchmen, V for Vendetta
) and Neil Gaiman (
The Sandman
). Graphic fiction eases itself into film readily, creating a large knock-on readership. The economic rise of Japan and China, whose writing systems are substantially pictographic, will add force to this mutation, one can surmise. Put grandly, I have seen the future of the novel – and it’s something
you see, not read. At the very least a revival of the illustrated novel, so popular in the nineteenth century, may be confidently anticipated.
The name of the form suggests newness, or ‘novelty’. But unlike other new lines of product – the latest models of car, TV or computer, for example – fiction does not disappear once consumed and is no longer used. Fiction keeps piling up, like cultural plaque. How many novels in English are there in the dusty vaults of the British and North American copyright libraries? Probably, using Dewey Decimal calculation, around two million. While they are lying in the dust they do not much trouble the novel of the day in its appeal to the customer. But when the Google Library Project makes all those millions of novels, in highly readable form, cheap or free of charge, instantly available on one’s electronic reader (iPad, Sony, Kindle), how will that affect reading practices?
Within the short historical space of half a century, British and American literary culture has moved from managed shortage (symbolised in the public library waiting list) to unmanageable surplus. Whatever else, one can foresee a Darwinist struggle for space (‘exposure’) and the disposable time of the reading public. Shall I read the latest Julian Barnes or go back and read Laurence Sterne? – a couple of brushes of the finger on the keyboard will decide the matter. Ideally what will happen will be a better sense and utilisation of the whole territory of fiction. The worst that will happen is that readers, as a whole, will feel utterly swamped and surrender to whatever ephemeral pressures come their way – word of mouth, importunate advertising, celebrity endorsement (of the kind pioneered by Oprah Winfrey).
For the moment we can, and should, revel in the plenty which we, unlike all previous generations, enjoy. Long live the novel, and Walter Benjamin be damned.
A
Abbott, Edward
746
Achebe, Christie (née Okoli)
638
Ackerley, Joe
311
Ackerman, Forrest J.
564
al-Ad, Muhammad
311
Adams, Katherine (Mrs Louis L’Amour)
497
Addams, Charles
515
Addison, Joseph
106
Aiken, Clarissa
504
Aiken, Conrad
504
Ainsworth, Fanny (née Ebers)
89
Alain-Fournier (Henri Alban-Fournier)
620
Alaya, F.
211
Aldrich, Robert
545
Alger, Augusta
157
Alger, Horatio, Sr.
156
Algren, Nelson
601
Allardice, Lisa
243
Allen, Annette (née Andrews)
356
–7
Allen, Fred
529
Allen, Grant
190
–91
Allen, Penny
782
Allen, V.
201
Allingham, Herbert
448
Allingham, Margery Louise (later Youngman Carter)
448
–9
Ambler, Joan Mary (née Harrison)
500
Ambler, Louise (née Crombie)
499
Amis, Sir Kingsley William
441
,
476
,
477
,
494
,
550
,
553
,
554
,
571
,
580
–83
,
604
,
667
,
729
,
752
,
771
,
784
Andersen, Hans Christian
746
Anderson, D. D.
394
Anderson, Kate Baird
279
Anderson, N. F.
138
Anderson, Sherwood
403
Andrews, Lucilla
782
Andrews, Sarah
17
Andrews, Virginia Cleo (born Cleo Virginia Andrews)
594
–6
Anka, Paul
526
Anstey, F.
240
Aquinas, St Thomas
610
Arbuckle, Fatty
380
Archer, Jeffrey Howard (Baron Archer of Weston-super-Mare)
450
,
725
–7
Arendt, Hannah
652
Armstrong, Neil
68
Arnold, Julia
197
Arnold, Dr Thomas
708
Arran, Earls of
75
Ashbery, John
459
Ashcroft, Dame Peggy
387
Ashford, Daisy (Margaret Mary Julia Ashford; later Devlin)
313
–15
Asquith, Lady Cynthia
235
Atlas, Charles
705
Attlee, Clement
499
Attwell, D.
730
Atwood, Carl
720
Austen, Cassandra
598
Austen, Revd George
59
Austen, Henry
59
Austen, Jane
37
,
38
,
40
,
44
,
47
,
57
–9
,
61
,
75
,
80
,
142
,
309
–10,
313
,
364
,
654
,
686