In my last post I argued that highly creative literature is practically dead, and that part of this foretold death is due to the dominance of the novel written by authors who do not care for literary prose. A few days later, Domingo Ródenas de Moya published in the culture supplement of El País, Babelia, an article called “¿Quién teme a la literatura experimental?” [Who fears the experimental novel?] in which he basically argued that the confluence of commercial interests and the readers’ disinterest had killed experimental fiction. By experimental he meant in essence the Modernist fiction culminating in James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), now the object of a centennial celebration.

Ródenas’s notion of the experimental was criticized in the readers’ comments as an elitist position which did not take into account the scant interest that Modernist novels elicited at the time of publication, nor the fact that experimentalism can be found in other texts, including the popular ones. This is indeed the case. Gothic novels, for instance, were often experimental narratives because the authors needed to maintain the illusion that the preposterous events they narrated had actually happened. Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), for instance, is a prodigy in that sense, consisting of an assemblage of documents from the phonographic recordings of Dr. Seward’s diary to newspapers cuttings. R.L. Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), a novella rather than a novel, also astonishes for how the tale is built, from the outside to the inside, beginning with the observations of the good doctor’s friends and ending with his own record of the catastrophe that engulfs him.

Stoker and Stevenson were very different kinds of writers, but their shared popularity shows that common readers are open to experimentation as long as the story narrated is engaging, which is not at all the case in Ulysses. This is, on the other hand, a much purer literary text since Joyce was not writing primarily as a narrator, or as a novelist, but as a literary experimentalist trying to create a new kind of artefact. He succeeded mightily in that endeavour but, of course, nobody approaching him as a narrator or a novelist can be satisfied with his storytelling skills (I won’t even mention Finnegan’s Wake, 1939, which almost killed the literary novel for good).

Among the comments to Ródenas’s text, one signed by a person calling themselves ‘Lola Montes’ caught my attention. ‘She’ showed a peculiar misunderstanding of the role of computers in writing (“Today books are written in batches like ‘churros’ thanks to computers, which demands little effort and scarce meditation on what is written”), a boutade suggesting ‘she’ must be either a technophobe or an elderly person, or both. However, I found another passage by ‘her’ absolutely relevant: “The difficulty of a reading is directly proportional to the relationship between the cognitive level of the author and the reality and context that it presents. And that requires also high cognitive levels in readers. It’s not a question of experimenting with just the semicolons. Today, Great Classical Literature should be considered experimental because very few address and understand it”). This comment can be tackled in two ways: no, Lola, very sophisticated readers of high cognitive skills can find experimental and/or classical fiction tedious, too and, yes, Lola, the more basic readers’ skills are, the less likely they are to choose fiction beyond the basic binge-in-a-few-hours standard.

A question that is not habitually addressed in relation to reading habits is leisure. The novel was born in the 18th century as a genre designed to fill in the spare time of leisured women of middle and upper-class backgrounds, who had received no formal education beyond mere literacy. Gentlemen also read novels (even the Prince Regent had read Jane Austen’s novels) but being associated with novel writing and novel reading was frowned upon as a lowly ‘feminine’ pursuit. When in Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848), the servant Rachel tries to warn her mistress Helen about her husband’s misbehaviour, Helen upbraids her: “What then, Rachel? Have you been reading novels?”

The idea that the novel could be a vehicle for high intellectual reflexion and for creative literary expression aimed at better educated readers came much later, in a 50-year process that ran from George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871-2) to Ulysses (1922). This process overlaps with the establishment (in the UK) of state-funded primary and secondary education and, thus, with the idea that reading the classics had to be part of the education of all persons. Please, note that novels were still treated in that context as texts for leisure and they were not proclaimed officially part of a desirable education until F.R. Leavis published The Great Tradition (1948).

The novel, then, has occupied diverse niches in leisure, from the more basic need for entertainment on the beach, while travelling, to fill in a boring afternoon, to the more elaborate need to understand life. Those who read Ulysses originally had time in their hands for this type of demanding text, for this is not at all a text that you read to relax at the end of a bone-tiring working day. You don’t even read Middlemarch to relax, nor any novel by the major Russian and French novelists, but because you are curious about them. Readers endowed with a literary curiosity always find time to read demanding texts, but even so, they read them during their leisure time (unless they are literary professionals in reviewing and academia, or captive readers like students).

Guidance to fill in that productive leisure time, apart from education, used to come from the newspapers, magazines, and journals and in cultivated nations like France or Germany from TV shows devoted to reading. Literary critic Bernard Pivot, a former journalist, would tell French readers who to read in his weekly Friday evening talk show Apostrophes (1974-1989) and they would pay heed. When Oprah Winfrey started her book club (in 1996, as a segment of her own talk show), this was no longer about literary curiosity. As Scott Tossel wrote in The Atlantic, during the height of the controversy unleashed by author Jonathan Franzen’s refusal to be publicised by Oprah, “Modernism (and postmodernism) taught us that the true rewards of art and literature are not easily gained, but must be attained only through difficulty and struggle. Getting your culture from Oprah, in this view, is like getting it from Cliffs Notes—a cheaper, cheating method, one that withholds a work of art’s full rewards”. Tossel did not consider, of course, why Oprah had to fill in a gap left by education, nor when exactly workers employed 40 or more hours a week can find the energy to reap the rewards of hard reading.

Oprah was acting as what would be later called, beginning in 2015, an ‘influencer’. This is where the real battle is happening. German critic Marcel Reich-Ranicki’s well-known talk show on German public television, Literarisches Quartett (1988-2001), which somehow bridges the gap between Pivot and Winfrey, is now unthinkable, with its in-depth interviews and its committed discussion of literature. Winfrey’s book club ended in 2011, with the end of her talk show. Its newer version launched in 2012, Oprah’s Book Club 2.0, which acknowledges the rise of the interactive social media, has never had the same impact. Those who, like Tossel, were appalled by how fine, creative literature had fallen into the middlebrow, plebeian hands of Oprah Winfrey, must be now suicidal, seeing how literature is perishing, drowned by reviews of undemanding narrative first by booktubers, now by booktokers. Readers are still following the lead of others but whereas Pivot and Reich-Ranicki, and to a great extent Winfrey, acted out of a genuine concern to educate readers using the mass media, this is gone from the social media, with a few exceptions that do not reach, anyway, the high number of spectators those proto literary influencers reached. Or that influencers like the Kardashians command.

In principle, nothing prevents booktubers and booktokers from championing extremely demanding Modernist, post-modernist and post-post-modernist fiction, or any other literary genre (poetry, drama). The Kardashians could indeed helped to publicize Joyce as they are publicizing so many fashion brands. The problem, as I see it, is that those who are present in social media as book reviewers are usually very young persons whose literary taste has not been formed yet and who are, besides, in the grip of this malady which is young adult fiction. Excuse me for my ageist snobbery, but although the idea of young persons recommending books to each other is beautiful, the idea of their mostly recommending novels designed to please junior readers is not.

I was recently reading Jorge Semprún’s La escritura o la vida (1994, originally L’écriture ou la vie), a deeply moving memoir of his return to ordinary life after Buchenwald, and I was astonished by the scenes in which he, then 20, comments on poems with an American officer, as young as he is. Both men have read enormously and quote an amazing variety of poetry. They were clearly under other influences (and influencers). As for young adult fiction, I am not disputing the quality of its texts, as I would never dispute the quality of children’s literature. What I am saying is that it has had the unfortunate (or tragic) side effect of convincing most teen readers, of which the vast majority are girls, that there is something called ‘adult’ literature which is dull to death and should only be read when white hairs start sprouting in your head.

I’ll continue my ranting in the following post…

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