October 11, 2004
The Age of Nonfiction?
I'm not sure if it's due to sunspots or historical circumstances, and I know my friends who write fiction and poetry will be unhappy that I'm saying this, but it seems to me that nonfiction is sometimes more exciting than fiction right now. Certainly the stastistics show a decline in fiction sales even while publishers are putting out 17% more titles. (Bowker has the full story.) Biography, history and religion showed double-digit increases for 2003. Some account for this as a post-September 11 reaction - unprecedented American interest in the outside world. It is also possible to view the trend aesthetically and suggest that perhaps fiction hasn't been keeping pace with current events. (Indeed, how can it?) If this turns out to be the Age of Nonfiction - for talent follows the money - then this could explain the increasing interest in what is detestably called "Creative Nonfiction." (Detestable because all writing ought to be "creative," and because "creative" is a cruel term for good writing, so that the phrase "Creative Nonfiction" is doubly appalling from an artistic point of view.) Aldaily.com recently posted a link to an essay called "The Age of the Essay" by Paul Graham. Graham, famous for his work on Spam and Spam filters, has this to say about writing essays:
"What should you think about? My guess is that it doesn't matter - that anything can be interesting if you get deeply enough into it. One possible exception might be things that have deliberately had all the variation sucked out of them, like working in fast food. In retrospect, was there anything interesting about working at Baskin-Robbins?"
Read the whole essay here.
Posted by J. M. Tyree at 01:04 AM | Permalink
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Comments
Great post. And you know that I've had similar thoughts. The one piece that I would say you have to take account of is Salman Rushdie's "In Defense of the Novel Yet Again," which is published in Step Across This Line, my current favorite book. Unfortunately, the essay does not seem to be available anywhere online.
Posted by: morgan meis | Oct 12, 2004 4:13:56 PM
It is a brilliant book of essays, particularly notable for its defense of America after September 11 - which makes his recent political activism even more compelling. Not to be glib, but notice how you didn't say that "Fury" or "The Ground Beneath Her Feet" is your current favorite book? That's not meant as a dig or a jibe; I'm just saying it seems like a sign of the times.
Posted by: J. M. Tyree | Oct 12, 2004 4:44:35 PM
He, he. Nicely said. But it isn't all that hard to convince me, since I have been more interested in essays and 'creative non-fiction' for some time now. Still, to his credit, and perhaps recognizing that he'll never match Midnight's Children, Rushdie isn't defending his more recent mediocre novels but the work of others.
So, I guess I have to spend a few minutes transcribing to get Rushdie's best points out on the web. He writes,
"Professor Steiner says 'It is almost axiomatic that today the great novels are coming from the far rim, from India, from the Caribbean, from Latin America', and some will find it surprising that I should take issue with this vision of an exhausted center and vital periphery. If I do so, it is in part because it such a very Eurocentric lament. Only a Western European intellectual would compose a lmaent for an entire art form on the basis that the literatures of, say, England, France, Germany, Spain, and Italy were no longer the most interesting on earth. (It is unclear whether Professor Steiner considers the United States to be in the center or on the far rim; the heography of this falt-earth vision of literature is a little hard to follow. From where I sit, American literature looks to be in good shape.) What does it matter where the great novels come from, as long as they keep coming? What is this flat earth on which the good professor lives, with jaded Romans at the center and frightfully gifted Hottentots and Anthropophagi lurking at the edges? The map in Professor Steiner's head is an imperial map, and Europe's empires are long gone. The half century whose literary output proves, for Steiner and Naipaul, the novel's decline is also the first half century of the post-colonial period. Might it not simply be that a new novel is emerging, a post-colonial novel, a de-centered, transnational, interlingual, cross-cultural novel; and that in this new world order, or disorder, we find a better explanation of the contemporary novel's health than Professor Steiner's somewhat patronizingly Hegelian view that the reason for the creativity of the 'far rim' is that these are areas 'which are in an earlier stage of the bourgeois culture, which are in an earlier, rougher, more problematic form."
Posted by: morgan meis | Oct 12, 2004 6:23:54 PM
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