The crisis of narration and the future of the novel, part one

My disappointment with the contemporary novel has been an occasional feature on this blog. Fourteen years ago I asked myself whether I had a genuine interest in the novel. Later, I wondered if JM Coetzee's Jesus trilogy was an attempt to put an end to the novel and, most recently, two posts identified features that might explain what was missing: first, citing Genette's Narrative Discourse, most novels' "temporal stability", and then in A measure of forever the absence of existential consternation in the form in contrast to a non-contemporary book that broke the cycle of disappointment. But perhaps these are just symptoms of a deeper problem. Byung-Chul Han, a Korean philosopher based in Germany, insists there is and it has little to do with the ingredients I identified. He says we're living in "a post-narrative time" with proof coming in the discussion of the subject itself: "Narrative consciousness, allegedly rooted in the human brain, is a conception that is possible only...outside of the narrative spell."

The evidence suggests the exact opposite: from the #VSS hashtag on social media to multi-volume Harry Potter novels and the Marvel Cinematic Universe, not to say the rows and rows of supermarket fiction, we are saturated in narrative. But this is his point: "At the heart of all the noise of storytelling, there is a narrative vacuum that expresses itself in a lack of meaning and orientation." For Han, as it was for Walter Benjamin, the not-so-secret sharer of this volume, the earliest sign of the decline in narration is precisely the rise of the novel, a rise coinciding with the decline of faith:

Christian religion is a meta-narrative that reaches into every nook and cranny of life and anchors it in being. Time itself becomes freighted with narrative. In the Christian calendar, each day is meaningful.

This is what he means by meaning and orientation: a faith "narrates contingency away...turning being-in-the-world into being-at-home". If the Christian calendar is still followed, it has been hollowed out by commercial interests. Each festival a marketing opportunity. Narration, Han says quoting Benjamin, comes from a distance: "what gets the readiest hearing is no longer intelligence coming from afar, but the information which supplies a handle for what is nearest". The availability and accessibility of stories is presented as an unqualified good, but they act like newspaper reports upfront, in our face, battering us one after another, and we're unable to slow down to listen and to contemplate. "The modern reader has lost the long, slow, lingering gaze." 

Many contemporary novels appear to challenge the condition with engrossing and informative stories about social and political issues – Ryan Ruby calls it "narrativized punditry" – but this is only a free-form variant of audience-seeking journalism. The alternative appears to be found in monumental or 'experimental' novels noisily hailed as renewing the aura of a bygone era – "already being compared to Nabokov and Proust" – yet really only forming pyramids in the desert visited by archaeologists and puzzled tourists; essentially nostalgic. What they lack Han says is the "revolutionary pathos" and "spirit of departure" of the narratives of the early twentieth century in which a different future is permanently on the horizon. Instead, modern narratives have no future and have settled into "a mode of 'on and on'". 

BREAKING NEWS: the Booker Prize shortlist has been announced...

In general culture, narration has been replaced by rampant storytelling devoured by those desperate for a communal anchor: "Populist, nationalist and right-wing extremist or tribal narratives, including conspiracy theories, cater to this need." Even those appalled by the idiocracy remain subject to the same need:

'stories' shared on social media fill the narrative vacuum. They are merely forms of pornographic self-presentation or self-promotion. Posting, liking and sharing content are consumerist practices that intensify the narrative crisis.

The Crisis of Narration is also a passionate denunciation of digital culture. Our brains have adapted to the sensory overload by dulling perception; we should remember an addiction goes on and on, which is why Han says that taking selfies is not a sign of narcissism but of "inner emptiness". What's curious about this short book with short chapters and Han's prolific output of short books is that he appears to be intensifying the crisis, just as this blog's information-heavy discussion is more or less a selfie with the book (hey, buy me a coffee!). 

So what does Han recommend for resistance? Despite his avowed Catholicism, a return to a meta-narrative is not possible, so he advocates slowing down and contemplation, and taking risks to achieve both: "A little bit of patience for narration, please. And then: patience through narration!" This, the book's epigraph, is from Peter Handke, an author who features in Han's other books. Elsewhere Handke describes his grammar as "conservative, almost epically so":

It comes from distance, as Dante said. In his case, people approach on a kind of country road and he says of them: they walked slowly and they came as if they came from far, far away. I too want to write sentences that come from a great distance.

This may explain why Handke's novels in recent decades have been for me so difficult to read; not for any complexity or experimental obtrusions but simply their patience, in which the hamster wheel of consumption turns too slowly. While 'narration' in Han's book applies to the wider culture and not specifically to novel-writing, his injunction to take risks does. The on and on of contemporary literary fiction is due in part to it settling into recognisable forms. Han cites the fate of philosophy but it applies equally to novel production:

Once philosophy claims to be a science, an exact science even, decay sets in. Conceived as a science, philosophy denies its original narrative character and it loses its language. Philosophy falls silent. An academic philosophy that limits itself to the administration of its own history is unable to narrate. It does not run any risks; it runs a bureaucracy. 

This may be why the most stimulating writing takes place outside, evading Head Office.

Philosophy, in the form of ‘poetry’ (mythos), takes a risk, a noble risk. It narrates – even risks to suggest – a new form of life and being. Descartes’s ego cogito, ergo sum introduces a new order of things that represents the beginning of modern times. By leaving the Christian narrative of the Middle Ages behind, the radical orientation towards certainty risks something new.  

Byung-Chul Han's use of italics throughout is reminiscent of another Germanic scourge in which repeated assertions open a void in language, indicating at once narration is untimely – "all literature is the literature of the end of time" Blanchot says – and that there is possibility of something new in that void. 

If I started with disappointment, I ended with The Crisis of Narration renewing my faith in the novel. It did what most of the novels I try to read fail to do: it was unputdownable and immediately rereadable. While each page bristles with passion and ideas, merely raising the question of narration seemed to be enough. Perhaps this is what the novel of the future must do, otherwise a very short story is never short enough and a 1,000-page doorstop never long enough.