Beware the Self fulfilling prophecy

It was with a mixture of relish and trepidation, as I stand on the threshold of my own career in the authorial profession, that I snuggled into my armchair to devour Will Self’s summertime 2014 provocation, ‘The novel is dead’. As always, Self’s vocabulary is compelling and his prose masterful. Sadly though, the logic of his argument, on this occasion, is lacking.

To read Will Self's article in the Guardian click here

Self’s article is predicated on the opinion of his son, a canary upon whom Self relies to provide early warning, not of toxic gases in the coal-mine, but of market change in the culture-mine. As many miners in the early twentieth century found, relying on the opinion of a single canary or indeed a whole flock, can prove fatal. For that reason, from the 1950s, miners in South Yorkshire, relied instead on the opinion of mus musculus, the house mouse. I shall stick therefore with the opinion of MM, a house mouse and trusted friend, for the purposes of this article.  

The data upon which Self founds his assertion that the novel is ‘…dying before our eyes…’ is undoubtedly sound. MM and I both believe the survey of over 2,500 authors, conducted by the University of London, which concludes that authorial incomes are plummeting.  We are similarly confident in the data from Nielsen and others that sales of printed books are swirling in a literary vortex towards a yawning, prosaic plug-hole.

It is Self’s interpretation of this data and his logic in drawing his mortal conclusions, however, which render me uncomfortable and lead MM to twitch his whiskers in contempt.    

Let’s start at the very beginning with the definition of what constitutes ‘a novel’. That hefty, dusty smelling tome, the Collins Dictionary, defines the novel as follows:

…’an extended work in prose, either fictitious or partly so, dealing with character, action, thought etc., esp. in the form of a story’…

This definition, with which few would disagree, specifies nothing about the genre of the novel nor the channel by which the novel reaches its reader or, perhaps more accurately, its consumer. There is no narrowing of the definition to suggest that the only ‘true’ novel is the one which fits firmly within the literary genre, nor one which reaches its audience via the medium of a physical, papery book. In the small print beneath the mortal title of Self’s article, there is an assertion that ‘Literary fiction’ is central to the culture. It may be central Mr Self but that does not mean that the trend of a single genre can be extrapolated to indicate the decline of the novel as a whole.

I would further assert, as I did only last weekend to some very good friends of ours, concerned at the emptiness of their own canaries’ bookshelves, that a story read via an electronic channel is as much a novel as the papery, cloth-bound first edition of Pickwick Papers. As the wine flowed last weekend, I went further. A fictitious computer game with characters, stories, plots and all sorts of virtual derring-do, could be argued to be a novel. A bit shaky I know on the ‘prose’ aspect of the Collins’ definition, but you get my drift and I was on a roll!

Sadly MM was not invited to the dinner party so was unable to expand on the dangers of relying on canaries. Self is having none of it, however. He emphasises throughout his article, the essential and indivisible coupling of novel and ‘codex’ and boldly extrapolates his conclusions about the literary genre to suggest that all genres, embraced within the term ‘novel’ are in peril. That is the precise mirror image of the mistake the miners made when a single canary was unaffected by carbon monoxide and they assumed that the mine was safe.

Self goes further to warn that:

…’if you accept that the vast majority of text will be read on digital devices linked to the web, do you also believe that those readers will voluntarily choose to disable that connectivity? If your answer to this is no, then the death of the novel is sealed out of your own mouth’…

Essentially then, Self is asserting that a novel read via an electronic device is less of a novel because of the readers’ innate inability to be distracted by the ‘undisabled’ internet. To extend this logic, are we to believe that anyone who reads a paper (codex) book is not distracted by what is going on around them, by other sights, sounds, activities, people, opportunities for entertainment, cheese and media in proximity. I think not.

In direct opposition to Self, I would argue that the intellectual stimulation yielded by a novel, or indeed any other narrative, can be enriched rather than diminished by selective access to material which deepens understanding of relevant concepts.

Several recent studies, including further data analysed by Nielsen, in early 2014, have concluded that combined paper and electronic sales volumes for fiction (literary and otherwise) are pretty flat. The basal cerebral instincts which have always been satisfied by the novel have not been obliterated by any recent metamorphoses of the human brain. If they had, the health-obsessed Daily Mail would have told us all about it and attributed the change to the increase in immigration, to boot. Writers and the publishing industries have however seen unprecedented  turmoil as a result of new routes to market, greater proliferation of electronic channels and technology which enables greater variety in the ways in which the ‘novel’ may be consumed.

 

Other creative industries have weathered similar turmoil in recent years without sounding the death knell, for example, for music or visual art. Those artists and musicians who have survived are those who have learned to adapt, to leverage the many opportunities presented by new formats, to explore fresh routes to market and to work within the constraints of pressurised profit margins by embracing closer coupling of producer and consumer.

MM is singing a very different tune to your canary, Mr Self. The demand for the novel is alive and well but the genre, length, format, channels, associated industries and routes to market are changing. Affordable technology is now available to enable us to experience the novel in new and exciting ways. It is up to those of us who possess Gutenberg minds to open them up and respond to a world which is changing around us. Dare I say, Mr Self that it is time to release the mortal bell-rope and grasp with relish not only the changes but the opportunities they present?