Criteria for Literary Value

Lev Grossman has seen the future of fiction in the digital age and has come back to tell us about it:

Like fan fiction, it will be ravenously referential and intertextual in ways that will strain copyright law to the breaking point. Novels will get longer--electronic books aren't bound by physical constraints--and they'll be patchable and updatable, like software. We'll see more novels doled out episodically, on the model of TV series or, for that matter, the serial novels of the 19th century. We can expect a literary culture of pleasure and immediate gratification. Reading on a screen speeds you up: you don't linger on the language; you just click through. We'll see less modernist-style difficulty and more romance-novel-style sentiment and high-speed-narrative throughput. Novels will compete to hook you in the first paragraph and then hang on for dear life.

None of this is good or bad; it just is. The books of the future may not meet all the conventional criteria for literary value that we have today, or any of them. But if that sounds alarming or tragic, go back and sample the righteous zeal with which people despised novels when they first arose. They thought novels were vulgar and immoral. And in a way they were, and that was what was great about them: they shocked and seduced people into new ways of thinking. These books will too. Somewhere out there is the self-publishing world's answer to Defoe, and he's probably selling books out of his trunk. But he won't be for long.

There's much about Grossman's analysis that is self-contradictory: If reading quickly will be encouraged by electronic reading, why would novels get longer? If online "readers" are so averse to language, why won't they just eventually gravitate entirely to purely visual communication or entertainment, as has happened already in the transferal of interest from books to film and television? What's a more "high-speeed" narrative than one without words at all? And unless Grossman sees a new form emerging from the electronic maelstrom--not prose fiction but something else--then no Daniel Defoe will appear, since Defore helped create prose fiction itself, did much more than just call attention to himself. What Grossman describes is simply a continuation of "fiction" as we know it, only stupider. It isn't a new genre of literature, only the same one published in different ways.

Lev Grossman's abilities as seer aside, however, something like the transformed publishing environment he evokes is likely to obtain in the not-too-distant future. "Old-school" publishing will continue to fade from relevance, perhaps disappear altogether, to be replaced by less heirarchy-driven modes of publication. Most of the current gatekeepers will find their gates disassembled. The current of choices already confronting the reader of fiction will become a torrent.This new dispensation is likely to strike many of us as chaotic--Grossman is being disingenuous when he writes that "None of this is good or bad," since he surely knows most of his readers judge it to be bad indeed--especially those of us who want some of those "conventional criteria for literary value" to survive.

What Grossman apparently didn't take away from his glimpse into the future (perhaps because he fears his own place as a print-based critic will simply be washed away) is any sense of the role literary criticism might play in counteracting the New Chaos. I think it will have signficant influence on the development of democratized "literary culture," arguably even more influence than criticism now has on print-centered literary culture, since an infrastucture of critblogs already exists and already focuses its attention more widely on marginalized books and presses than print book reviews ever did. Cybercriticism will probably go a long way toward meliorating the chaos lurking beneath Lev Grossman's account, even if such criticism doesn't exactly duplicate the practices of newspaper book reviews, magazines, and the few remaining print journals. There will necessarily be a less uniform focus on the same few new titles, fewer exercises in biographical speculation masquerading as criticism, fewer critical essays that are more about the critic than the work ostensibly at issue. But otherwise there's no reason why web criticism can't carry out the sorting process in which criticism has always been engaged. The worthwhile will be separated from the worthless, the most challenging work will be identified while the jejune and the formula-riven will be duly ignored. Maybe there will be more books to keep track of, but most of them will be dispensable, anyway, and many more blogs and websites will be around to do the sorting than ever was the case with print criticism.

If I'm being overoptimistic and literary criticism fails to adapt itself effectively to these changed circumstances, the disarray implied in Grossman's speculations won't really register much, since fiction itself will no longer matter to anyone.

Comments

[Abbeville]

Human beings are and have always been relentlessly hierarchical, and the Internet will do nothing to change that. Exactly the same phenomenon as took place with print will take place with Internet literary culture. A few critics will rise to the top (through pure merit, flair for populist appeal, powerful connections, etc.) and audiences will begin to follow their judgments far more than the judgments of other critics. Likewise, certain books will "catch on," "go viral," or whatever phrase you prefer--either through their ability to gratify instantaneously (per Grossman) or through some other standard of quality, probably including genuine aesthetic merit. Reputations and fortunes will be made, and smaller cats will have as hard a time hunting with the big as they ever did.

Anyone who thinks of the Internet as an unhierarchical, gatekeeper-free medium should start his or her own blog and try to achieve a mass readership for it...then compare the results with those of a new blogger who just happens to be a close friend of Nick Denton, Arianna Huffington, the Pope, etc., etc.

[LML]

I think Abbeville's right about hierarchies. You and other first-wave bloggers have a serious leg up on new arrivals. The Sarvases and Newtons out there clearly drive mainstream literary-fiction sales (dwindling though those sales may be) to an already measurable degree. Scott Esposito has done a lot to raise the U.S. profile of writers like Jean-Philippe Toussaint and Adolfo Bioy Casares. There's a whole subset of bloggers whose taste in books seems directly adopted from Stephen Mitchelmore (not a bad reader to emulate, it's true). Tastemaking like this may represent a greater diversity of voices than that in the print venues of the last ten years, but it's still good old-fashioned tastemaking. (More admirable than in the print world, maybe, because, with a few exceptions, there's no real money in the balance.) Traffic patterns seem to indicate that the bloggers with influence are in a position to augment their influence considerably as book culture migrates more fully to the web. There is still time for new voices to gain influence, but I wonder how long that will remain true.

[Schopenhauer's Bloody Knuckles]

Grossman's anatomy seems to be too excited about "the web" to actually understand the internet; evolved internet "culture" is extremely sarcastic, if not hateful, focused on remixing pop culture images and phrases, and does not care at all about understanding or creating fiction/poetry/art on the level of a Goethe, Joyce, Stendhal, Lyotard, etc. The internet kidz play WoW and Counterstrike and Facebook, watch south park, colbert, and cartoon network (hence the inhereted sarcasm) and do not read Plato or Pindar and have no idea who Ben Jonson is. I would be mocked endlessly for saying someone still plays counterstrike outside of this context, probably along the lines of "olol ufag"

Outside of the "[lit]blogosphere" is the whole rest of the internet, where most interaction, via bbs, is done in a few lines of mock cell phone txting or mercilessly sarcastic remixed images, most often anime porn, god awful old movies, old video games, cliched movies/video games, classic movies/video games, and cult movies/video games. These are used not to stimulate thought, but to insult someone, which is almost the *entire point* of the internet, understood broadly.

Anyways, Grossman's article reeks of someone tacictly concerned and alarmed with the future of Literature, but who at the same time is conflicted and desires to keep up with the cool kids and thus has said to himself he will "maintain an open mind." (The cliche of a journalist, sickening even when typed!) If anything dissapears when the magazines/publishing houses finally go down, (and I'll be the first to grab a lyre) hopefully it is the carreerist cowardice that thrives in publishing and the media in general. This is not business. Literature is *ART*, SHED SOME BLOOD FOR IT!

Also, to discount the ability of "new blog voices" to gain reputation is to fall into the same error that print/traditional publishers did. If humanity is relentlessly hierarchical, then it is even more enfatuated with "the new." Let someone set up a blog with all the celebs and e-celebs backing and guest posting, and watch how the snipers come out to pick off the audience at first *in their own comment threads*, and then move in to melee with shotguns and chainsaws--a new trendy sight design and some anger(thereby becoming anti-celeb-celebs). Better yet, wait until the blogs start having site wars and crashing the "sold out" celeb sites.

The internet is not at all respectful of order and anyone with the slightest bit of knowledge can do dramatic things (the stupidity just factors how many times they can do it before getting caught). If, initially, the arbiter elegantiae mentality carries over into the Internet, it is no cause for fear; it seems to be in the nature of the universe that a thing strives, becomes established and respected, and then is overthrown and dies. Just be glad the "young bloggers" cant hack your genitals off and toss them in the water, or should that make us all sad, since then we would be without the beautiful and "laughter-loving" Aphrodite?

No one has ever been safe from a revolution. Ever.

[Steven Augustine]

Tend to agree with SBK here: this conversation is only "safe" in the narrowest, time-contingent context imaginable. What you know and love dies with you; 'twas ever so.