The novel is a space of play. In the past, questions of this sort have generally been part of the entertainment. Writing in the eighteenth century, Richardson, Smollett and Defoe (or their narrators) provoke questions about the novel’s truth, identity and seriousness from the start. In those days it was the preface (or some prefatorial equivalent), rather than an afterword, that raised such issues. We tend to take the playfulness of such prefaces for granted today, and conversely look to an afterword in expectation of a certain earnestness and authenticity. In recent decades we had the ‘death of the author’ to contend with, but we recovered from this or, at least, we like to suppose the author recovered. False alarm, folks — and, if you want evidence of the author’s vitality and genuineness, one of the first places to look is the afterword to a novel! The fact that there is today an apparent preference for the afterword might suggest a curious conservatism in reading, or a firmer policing of the way in which novels are organised and their inherent delinquency controlled. The potential of a preface to mislead the reader is dispatched; the afterword seems a more restrained, less worrying genre.
But perhaps we have not yet really begun to think about the strangeness of the afterword as a genre — about its ability, for example, to unsettle the reader’s sense of time and causality, to alter the conception of the author, and to threaten or put further into disarray distinctions between fiction and nonfiction. The afterword might thus begin by pointing out that it is the preface that is really the backward genre, since it is invariably written after the work to which it refers: the preface is conventionally just an afterword in disguise. Whereas an afterword (this one I am beginning to imagine here) is a quite crazy thing in which anything could happen. It might go anywhere. It might easily turn out to be longer than the work preceding it. It might even seek to inaugurate a new kind of writing and give it a name: reality literature.
A novel has to do what it has always done: tell a story, give pleasure, compel and surprise us. But the situation of ‘the novel today’ is singular and unprecedented. It faces challenges and pressures unimaginable in earlier times. It is difficult not to think of writing a novel as an offensive, at best risible instance of ‘fiddling while Rome burns’ — in other words, while a world war rages all around, with the control and ownership of Jerusalem at its heart, more of the world’s population than ever before live in poverty and hunger, women more or less everywhere continue to be positioned as inferior members of the human race, the environment of the planet is being systematically and rapidly destroyed, and non-human animal species are being wiped out daily. How is the novel to respond to this, while trying to do what it has always done? What are a novelist’s responsibilities in this context?
And at the same time ‘the novel’ itself has become so much a mere product, part of the ubiquitous programme. This programme operates on multiple levels, from the creative writing workshop (‘how to get your novel published’) to the inexorable machine of the publishing industry and the so-called ‘global marketplace’ (itself, obviously, a fiction), whereby every kind of book of fiction for every age and interest group can be categorised and distributed, bought and consumed, filtered and effectively neutralised. At the core of this programme is the simple but crucial determining principle: a work of literature is merely literature; a novel is just a novel. A novel can be as ‘original’, ‘brilliant’, and whatever other admiring adjectives you fancy, it can win a ‘fiction prize’, be talked about on TV, become a movie, so long as it doesn’t interfere with the running of the programme, so long as it can be satisfactorily filtered and neutralised, so long as it passes through without making any real trouble in and with language.
In the case of a work written in English the prospect is especially acute, for this language (‘international English’ or ‘Anglo-American’) is the imposing medium of freedom, as well as of inequality, hegemony and exploitation across the world. This language makes, on millions of people, insidious demands. It is oppressive and domineering, as well as a means of help towards a ‘better life’ — a fuller education, more rewarding job, widening of horizons, etc. Anglo-American is the language in which democracy, international law and human rights continue to be extended, while also remaining the lingua franca of imperialist exploitation and global capital. No language today is more poisoned and treacherous.
But, for the English novel, this is also its chance. The novel has to make trouble in and with language. It must meddle. The novelist has to aspire to a writing that figures and insists on strangeness, on what cannot be appropriated or turned over to the language police. The novel has to resist and, as far as it can, interfere with the smoothly neutralising, nulling flow of the programme. It must strive for English to appear in its most pristine form, as what it always was: a foreign language. It would thus urge a new experience of that language, inviting readers to feel for themselves the strangeness of this ‘English’ which, after all, belongs to no one. Meddling and strangeness, however, should not be confused with calculation and coldness. The novel must also be a work of love. Which means speed. It means moving, in Shakespeare’s words, ‘with wings as swift / As meditation or the thoughts of love’.
The novel can seem such an old-fashioned thing. Its pull on our attention is in many respects weak in comparison with the easy entertainments of TV, film, computer games, phones and other teletechnology. More than poems or short stories, the future of the novel seems bound up with that of the book. The book remains an object of affection, but in an increasingly rarefied, circumscribed way. And the book, we tend to think, is a slow thing, even if we also attribute to it (for example on a train journey) the ability to kill time.
In truth the novel is a key to the experience and value of speed, and to a critical understanding of those forms of teletechnology in comparison with which it can seem such a tortoise.
Take telephones. Especially in their mobile form, they speed up life and communication, intensify anticipation and knowledge, inject new complexity into postponement and decisions. This presents formidable challenges to ‘the novel today’. If you want to write a novel you really have to be engaged (no pun intended). A certain era of literature appears to be over. This was announced, in characteristically playful, downbeat fashion, by the American poet Frank O’Hara when he suggested in a little text called ‘Personism’, dating from August 1959, that there was no need for him to write a poem; instead he could simply telephone the person he wanted to address. It is not that telephone calls (or, more recently, emails or text messages) replace poems. Telephones don’t deplete pleasure, they complicate and can also of course enrich it. More subtly, they interrupt and interfere with the way we desire and think about poetry. And what goes for poetry here also goes for the novel, for any novel worthy of the name is poetic.
Writers have long had a thing about telephones. Mark Twain, Marcel Proust, Franz Kafka and James Joyce, for example, were all fascinated by the strange voice-at-a-distance that a ‘telephone’ literally is. But O’Hara’s Personism represents something new, going to the heart of what we suppose a poem might be or do. His discovery is that the telephone has been installed, there is a poetry of telephony, and no one can really write poems any more without finding themselves — and the value or purpose of their writing — on the line. O’Hara’s telephone is an updated version of E. M. Forster’s suggestive idea, in Aspects of the Novel, that writing a novel is like writing a letter.