Fiction's Present: Brief Notes

The question of the present inflection of fiction is janus faced, looking aside to the novel’s radically changed political, economic, technological circumstances and back to its history of achievement and problems.

—from the symplokē call for papers on “Fiction’s Present”

The “Call for Papers” begins with an interesting comment, there. For me, it brings to mind that when Bakhtin noted that, by the beginning of the twentieth century, all artistic genres had been novelized, he was at a historical point which was beginning a process that allows us to say today that, by the beginning of the twenty-first century, all artistic genres have been film-ized. That process takes us through more than half a century of novelized films that finally did as much as any social phenomenon to remove the novel proper from a certain preeminence in the job of social representation. One remembers the scene in Tim Robbins’s historical drama, Cradle Will Rock (2000), in which, after New York art students have rioted over the destruction of Diego Rivera’s Rockefeller Center mural, Nelson Rockefeller and William Randolph Hearst, who, up till now, have supported this representational, highly social art, do a cold-hearted about-face and decide from now on to support only abstract art with no overt social messages, to avoid this kind of disruptive political response. The ironic point is not whether any such conspiratorial conversation ever actually took place at such a financial pinnacle, but rather the scene’s revelation of a social truth—a moment in what Jameson might call the “political unconscious”—that explains why, indeed, in an art field supported by those with more money rather than those with less, natural selection is finally going to favor the abstract. It happens for the same reason that, if epic singers are going to be supported by 9^th century BCE kings and princes, you’re going to end up with the Iliad and the Odyssey rather than Germinal and Giants in the Earth. The same turning away from the larger social portraiture of the interrelations of the classes is evident in Julie Taymor’s totally gorgeous film, from two years later, that focuses on Rivera’s wife, the painter Frida Kahlo (Frida, 2002). Today, of course, a critical discourse is in place that rushes to read the two films as pejorative mutual critiques. In the light of Taymor’s film, Robbins’s looks like an emotionally button-pushing, finally rather preachy socialist tract. In the light of Robbins’s film, Taymor’s reduces to a kind of tragic-glamorous fairy tale presented as objective reality, but which rigorously cuts out the larger social context making the other film signify: different buttons pushed.

But, one wonders, why can’t the two films be read as supporting one another—expanding on one another, enriching one another? Finally, what would prevent a new, hypertextualized novel, say, from embracing both approaches? But it would require a creative discourse that paid much more attention to rhetorical texture than the novel usually does, in either case, to plot—and in which rhetorical texture would be seen as a site for the generation of meaning in itself rather than as merely a supplementary intensifier.

Novels that aspire to broad scale social representation are rarer and rarer—even as commercial fiction relies more and more heavily on plot; even as it trains its readers to ignore style.

From Pere Goriot to Invisible Man, from Dickens to Flaubert, one thing the novel has done is explain—dramatically—how areas of society interact and affect each other, in terms of what this interaction inflicts on individuals and their strivings and desires within their own social spheres, or as they move from sphere to sphere. Paradoxically, both Marx and Freud, who start out by enriching the range of explanations of how our strivings and desires function, both in the family and the state, may have finally managed to swamp the novel, because we now know that what explains these things is, finally, too complicated to “dramatize” in other than a truly simplistic fashion.

Finally, the novel (with...