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

Byung-Chul Han says in The Crisis of Narration that modernity "is animated by a belief in progress" and its narratives "radiate an aura because the future is a phenomenon of distance". This is evident in our reverence for the monuments of modernism, a reverence formed by wonder and anxiety inherent to distance. A new world remains on the horizon. We lack distance in contemporary narration because, Han says, we live "outside of the narrative spell". If we lived inside it, we would not recognise those monuments. According to Han, and Benjamin before him, the rise of the novel marks the undoing of the spell, with the modernist novel emerging in the tension of one world slowly and then very quickly becoming another. The promise of a new world with all its possibilities – scientific rationality, new technologies, political emancipation, and the waning of religious metanarratives essential to all three – determines the tension. What makes the great modernist novels great then is due less to formal or material distinction than a revelation of distance enveloped in aura of the future as the centuries of stony sleep come to an end. Now that new-world promises have been realised, memory of what came before have been erased, hence the interminable fuss about the accessibility of difficult novels and the marketplace dominance of epigonal infantilising narratives. The crisis of narration has arisen in late modernity because it "knows no longing, no vision, no distance". As critical readers we cannot sense distance because we do not know any tension. Instead, formal and material originality have been placed in the foreground and, if appealing to the "experimental" is not enough, we seek an aura in the authority of cultural excrescences such as the Nobel Prize for Literature.

As contemporary narration lacks a future, it has settled into "a mode of 'on and on'". Simon Okotie's The Future of the Novel published a year after Han's book suggests a paradoxical exploration of the future of no future, and this appears to be confirmed when the book lists several other works published from 1927 to 2012 with very similar titles. The first, John Carruthers' essay Scheherazade, or the Future of the English Novel presents a crisis borne in the novels of Joyce and Woolf. They endanger the novel by moving away from "objectivity and towards increasingly minute and analytic explorations of inner life". Okotie sketches Arnold Bennett's support for this opinion and Woolf's responses. Criticism of what is now considered to be both a low-point and high-point for the novel reveals an obvious point: the novel's natural state is one of crisis, written on the crest of an era's wave and constantly debated as a vital sign of cultural health. 

The crisis for the novel in our time is that there is no crisis. There is no sense of one in Okotie's account of its history, which begins for him in the aftermath of the Great War and its first theorist, György Lukács. This may come as a surprise to readers of Michael Schmidt's The Novel: A Biography and Steven Moore's The Novel: An Alternative History both of which trace it back centuries. However, a crisis can be detected in Okotie's occasional digressions into autobiography. Inspired by "a vision of infinite possibilities" whilst listening to a performance of Bach cantatas and then reading Kerouac's On the Road, he resigns his office job and moves to Barcelona to pursue the life of a novelist. Against the desk-bound formality of the on and on routine of theory and criticism, there is here the whiff of an existential crisis in the imperative to write. This is always the future of the novel.

The only way we can recognise a crisis (and thereby welcome it) is in attempts to resist the on and on, for example when Giles Foden dismissed JM Coetzee's Diary of a Bad Year as "a piece of radical literary theory" which, he blusters, "is not fiction" (a crisis in literary reviewing is plain as day). Okotie includes Coetzee's earlier novel Elizabeth Costello, which received similar pushback, as an example (alongside some dubious others) of a new mode for the novel. I would have preferred a more polemical approach full of longing, visions and the invocation of distance, such as Lars Iyer's Nude in your hot tub, facing the abyss, or at least more of the personal digressions, but there is plenty of value in The Future of the Novel for its singular chronology and reference points. Coetzee's novel is discussed with quotations from Timothy Bewes' Free Indirect: The Novel in a Postfictional Age, which I did not know about before and would have been put off by its title anyway, as I assumed it is a regular academic study of the dominant style of Literary Fiction, whose criticism has driven this blog for twenty years. But on reading, I discovered it really is "a piece of radical literary theory" and perhaps one of the most vital literary studies of our time, deserving of posts of its own. Watch this space.

See also part one.