Fiction's Future: Elaborations

Page 12 American Book Review Michael Bérubé We smile ruefully, knowing that serious readers are a tiny minority within a tiny minority, and that we have no discernable economic effect on anything. And we can complain, if we like, about the decline in the cultural status of literature over the past 150 years, but we run the risk of sounding like we’re yelling at These Rotten Kids Today for abandoning the telegraph machine in favor of Facebook and Twitter. For there isn’t much chance that literature will regain its former cultural prominence as a mass information technology—or as an agent of “civilization .” But as Wendy Griswold has recently argued in her book Regionalism and the Reading Class (2007), our narratives of decline and fall depend precisely on this kind of jury-rigging in which we take anomalous high points as the norm. Noting the “universal pattern” throughout the world in which “no sooner does a popular reading culture get established than commentators start worrying about the decline of reading,” Griswold points out that Reading for entertainment by the general population is something very rare and very recent. Reading has always been associated with education and with urban social elites. Although contemporary commentators deplore the decline of “the reading habit” or “literary reading,” historically the era of mass reading, which lasted from the mid-nineteenth through the mid-twentieth century in northwestern Europe, Japan, and North America, was the anomaly. Today reading is returning to its former, narrower social base: a selfperpetuating minority that I have called the reading class. And there’s fiction’s future, lying somewhere in the heart of the heart of the reading class. Stephen J. Burn InAmerican fiction’s past, Herman Melville— sensing parallels between the workings of his own mind and the widening horizons outside himself— observed that “not the smallest atom stirs or lives in matter, but has its cunning duplicate in mind.” In our current cultural moment, as novelists increasingly see society in terms of complex systems and emergent properties, the reputed most complex object in the universe—the human brain, with its constellation of neurons—provides fiction’s future with, as Melville intuited, perhaps its most powerful symbol for talking about both self and world. But while contemporary writers are exploring what H.G. Wells called “the brain organization of the modern world,” the brain is also central to fiction’s future because over the last twenty years, in particular, the sciences of mind have progressively invaded and reordered disciplines, such as literature, that have traditionally explored and explained the self. Writing in Nature in 1997, the behavioral neurologist V.S. Ramachandran and J.J. Smythies dismissed the “metaphorical explanations” of psychology as a series of “passing fads” that withered next to neurobiology’s landmark breakthroughs and materialist theories. This reductionist movement to scientize the humanities already shapes fiction. Two years before Ramachandran and Smythies, Evan Dara offered a neat summation of this trend: “psychology becomes biology becomes chemistry becomes physics” in FC2’s The Lost Scrapbook. But these vast disciplinary redistributions of power inevitably require a meta-form such as the novel to face a much deeper reformulation of its codes and conventions, and whether looking back explicitly to Melville and Wells or not, fiction’s future may be a kind of neurofiction, simultaneously informed by and contesting the authoritative claims of the neuronal explanation of identity. Teresa Carmody When approaching an innovative work of prose, a reader will ask, “Is this collaged, procedural, constraint-based? Is this influenced by Gertrude Stein, Jorge Luis Borges, Kathy Acker?” This kind of analysis—as used in critical exegesis—will become a compositional element, even as, in many works, it already has. Noy Holland The future of fiction? Can as well ask: What is the future of death? What is the future of joy, or of sorrow? What’s to be expected of love? We keep living, and loving, and dying away, and saying what we can say about it. So long as this keeps going—living and loving and dying away—so long as the fixers of things can’t fix everything—the tattered bowel, the flaccid heart—so...