The Literary Consequences of Power
Partly out of sheer awe at my fellow contributors and their brains, let me tilt this discussion in a slightly more homespun direction.
Power clearly has a literary consequence: when the British ruled the world, the nuances of provincial bourgeois life in, say, Leicestershire exerted (and continue to exert) a worldwide fascination. Growing up in 1970/80s Europe, as I did, nothing seemed more relevant than the spaces inhabited by Bellow or Ellison or Updike's characters: never mind that I had zero knowledge of, or much intrinsic interest in, American Jewish intellectual life or the plight of black Americans or what a WASP was. As the global economic and cultural domination of the United States is replaced, to a significant degree, by the domination of transnational capital and whatever cultural stuff sticks to it (surely we can agree on the existence of this phenomenon?), is it not inevitable that the privileges hitherto enjoyed by American fiction will follow the money and drift elsewhere? This is exactly what's happened in cricket, as Will points out, where Indians now control (and transform) a sport that was previously the fiefdom of the English. And the Chinese art market is another obvious case in point.
I already think (unoriginally) that the media and information explosion of the last 20 years has made writing novels tougher than ever, since it's very difficult for a novelist to break news (which Bellow, Updike, Ellison, Atwood, Edmund White etc used to do almost incidentally). I'm increasingly of the view (also unoriginal) that the fragmentation and deconcentration and disempowerment of national culture (particularly that of the US, which as the top dog has the most to lose) means that American novelists now face a much tougher challenge than they did historically. The question is, how to meet this challenge?
Writers live on the margins. Since I assume you are not talking about the challenge of commercial success, but rather artistic, the question you are asking is how will it change American writing to have its writers describing things from the margins of an increasingly marginalized territory.
With America no longer the mainstream de la mainstream of the modern world, what will refugees from the zeitgeist identify as the zeitgeist? Will it gel enough to give us a common touchstone? Will the world consolidate with globalization, or will it atomize, to the point where only members of your own family get your jokes?
I am not worried. If it fragments, writers can write about alienation and tribalism. And we can congregate in small, empty places, on the margins of cyberspace, at the very least.
July 30, 2008 4:32 PM | Reply | Permalink
I would think that as American culture slides away from 24/7 exposure globally, it would actually be a boon to American literature as much as a burden - perhaps the global readership would become less sick of it, and some more interesting texts might get exposure - ones less obsessed with our dominant national narrative.
I think about how southern literature in this country developed in the 20th century as a way of weaning a culture off a broken idea of nationalism, in the process generating some of the most complicated, nuanced, altogether human texts.
Or for that matter, how Oe, Mishima, Kawabata, and Abe came out of post-war Japan.
July 30, 2008 4:48 PM | Reply | Permalink
writing will become more microtribal and macrotribal
oh, and everything inbetween
I believe novels and fiction in general will soon become richer than ever, more diversified than ever, and our need to see ourselves in the mirror of the world will evolve into......... sseing the world instead of ourselves, finally
the new writers will be better than the current writers, who are usually too self-referential, too oriented to contemporary icons, and too hackneyed, programmed as if from things they've seen on TV and in the movies, with little ability to construct any character not themselves (with very few obvious exceptions of course)
the truly successful new novelists will be like(gulp) Tiger Woods, and then others will have to learn to compete. so goes golf, so goes the world
the times do produce the art, and so what if the times make it more difficult for novelists? a challenge is what's needed to break out of the consumer megacapitalism lockstep mentality
July 30, 2008 8:31 PM | Reply | Permalink
Oh stuff and nonsense. You seem to think The United States is a bath tub with the last of the water circling the drain and American authors will soon be skulking in doorways of publishing houses in Beijing with their begging bowls in one hand and their laptops in the other just hoping and praying that they can buttonhole some editor on his way to the teahouse. What makes you think it's any easier for an American writer than it is for any other writer in any country in the world? Americans don't have any inherent privileges, they don't derive power over publishing houses because they're Americans and it isn't any tougher to write a novel now than it was when Murasaki Shikibu took bamboo pen to paper and churned out "Tales of Genji" in the 11th century.
The challenge for American writers will be the same challenge it has always been for writers everywhere - trying to find a new way to say something that has been said a million times over that testifies once again to the human spirit.
July 30, 2008 11:40 PM | Reply | Permalink
Power bore down upon Dublin, colonial power and Catholic power, and birthed Bloom and Dedalus. Power took Indian peasants to Trinidad to work as indentured coolies in plantations and birthed Naipaul. Power created horror in America and gestated an Invisible Man. Paternal power in the home crept over Franz in Prague, and outside in the world, the place of German speaking Jews in a Czech outpost of an imperial power.
Forever, such fertile soil is found in the shadow of Power, in the places where the sunlight does not reach, the unexamined, the marginal places, the areas unexamined or unseen by the collaborators of power.
Power breeds between nations, between coloniser and colonised, between cultures, oppressor and oppressed. But it also breeds within; endless internal hegemonies, within the oppressed, between the oppressed, within families, within societies, between the mighty and the weak. Of the domestic sphere, and the pitiless, unrelenting power of the outer authority.
Everywhere: endless dynamic and struggle, narratives competing for validation, narratives murdering the story of the sub-culture, the oppressed; the oppressor vilified and answered in return. And unseen, in the shadow of power, where no light falls, the soil is fertile.
Joseph O'Neill examined some of the soil in shadow. Netherland has a quality of subtle revelation about it. Categorise it in a stream of the novel loosely floating around manifold Diasporas, with the eyes of the orchestrater, the narrator, or the most living character an individual of diaspora, displaced by historical forces vivid or distant, near or far, within the flows of Power. Power flows in vast ocean currents, by long river, small tributary or trickling stream, and even in shallow still lake or pond.
Those who live in the shadow, whether of nation, oppressor, hegemon, whether the tyranny of the narrative that smothers them is the tyranny of a superpower, or the tyranny of a father, all of these diasporas are shadow people, the insider / outsider people, with multi-vision, melancholy, confusion and dreams. In the shadow of Power they seek their own power by reply.
Power orientates the gaze. The Novel has always adjusted the gaze, voiced counter narratives. It has always placed by imagination on page and in mind the world unseen. Because every individual unknown life and story is a world of its own, just as within each grain of matter lies atoms and neutrons and protons circling and vibrating and within them too, by lesser and greater science and physics, further life and world and story.
And that is how the Novel will continue to replenish in subject and in form. By this convulsive, unstoppable reflex in the shadow of power. From within and from without. In family or nation, between family and nation, between sufferer and sadist, between defeated and triumphant. Through the awareness and consciousness of the power of others upon individual life. And because of the recurring realisation by individual men and women of the power of words themselves to animate through imagination and form and bring to light, from the shadow, something, a world, a narrative, a consciousness that is novel.
July 31, 2008 8:26 AM | Reply | Permalink
I admire Singh's exegesis: the novel, each as a tiny outpost that gains its own power through a focused view that runs counter to the narratives of power, a reflex that cannot be dulled by shifts in the course of the mainstream. Doesn't matter where it is, he says, the novelist will find its shadowy banks and throw stones.
July 31, 2008 9:39 AM | Reply | Permalink