Responding to the latest iteration of the perennial argument that "the novel is dead," David Ulin appropriately dismisses the notion that the "literary novel," now in its death throes, was still culturally healthy as recently as the 1980s. (Maybe I just missed that while I was otherwise diverting myself in graduate school.) But Ulin just redates literary fiction's last period of cultural relevance: "for me, you have to go back to 1950s, or even earlier--Fitzgerald and Hemingway in the 1920s and 1930s, not only novelists but also household names."
This is a myth. Fitzgerald and Hemingway were not household names, although Hemingway did because of his extra-literary activities manage to become better known than almost any other serious American writer of the 20th century. Hemingway was an outlier, however. Fitzgerald's first book was popular, but his subsequent books were much less so, and by the time of his death he was almost forgotten. (The Great Gatsby was a commercial failure and was by no means universally praised by critics.) Our romanticizing of "Paris in the 20s" obscures the fact that at the time, American culture at large was indifferent to the whole thing.
Faulkner worked in almost complete obscurity during the 1930s, the most artistically fruitful period of his career. Nathanael West was ignored, except by B-movie producers. Zora Neale Hurston was unknown among most readers, and her fiction even among African-American readers and critics was frequently dismissed. Dos Passos's USA trilogy was hardly competition for MGM and Warner Brothers in attracting audience's attention.
If we still have the impression that the 1950s was a friendly time for the serious novel, this is mostly because our perception is filtered through the critical commentary of the time, commentary by prominent critics such as the New York Intellectuals, whose legacy endures. That this legacy remains alive, however, is mainly due to the contrast it provides to the current critical scene. The late 1940s and the 1950s was a time when serious literary criticism still appeared in general-interest publications that avoided both the hermetic preoccupations of academic criticism and the superficialities of newspaper reviewing. These kinds of publications no longer exist (efforts are being made to re-create them online), and thus if a golden age has been lost, it is this age of consequential literary criticism that has passed. That the Los Angeles Times is now what passes for an authoritative source of critical discourse is itself a sad commentary on current literary culture.
Ulin himself seems to realize this, as he laments our situation: "Amid all the noise, who, really, can get noticed? And how long can such notice last?" If the need is to "get noticed" by the Los Angeles Times or The Colbert Show, no doubt the task seems overwhelming. But the actual need is for writers to get noticed by readers, not publicists, readers who will take their work seriously. For this task, critics are needed who can alert such readers to writing worth taking seriously, perhaps even to show why "notice" of some work might "last." If Ulin means to confess that the current state of literary criticism is such that it isn't up to the task, he's probably right, but the solution to this is not to assume that nothing lasts, but to advocate for better literary criticism.
Ulin's despair at the prospect of writers gaining notice (an odd stance for a book critic, really) leads to his disdain for the idea that writers might write for "posterity," which is a "fool's game." Since the writer is apparently left hopeless between the impossibility of finding an audience now and the oblivion that substitutes for posterity, the only justification left is an egocentric one: "the only reason to write is self-expression." This is a peculiarly American notion, that art is a form of "self-expression," good as therapy or asserting one's presence in the world.
I am unaware, however, of any great writer who wrote out of the desire for "self-expression," except in the most obvious sense that some writers, like some artists generally, seem compelled to practice their art. Expression of the art form's possibilities is the goal, not some amorphous emanation of the "self." Most great writers of the past would have been appalled to learn they had been engaged in "self-expression," among other reasons because they wouldn't have known how self-expression could be evaluated. Most of these writers would have indeed been writing for posterity, the harshest but most respected critic of all, whose positive judgment was vastly more prized than the "fleeting conceit" of self-expression.
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