Will Self and the Death of the Novel

Will Self, courtesy of WIkimedia Commons

I was interested by Will Self’s article in The Guardian last weekend, headed The Novel is Dead (this time it’s for real).  Stripped of the baroque ornament of his prose, Mr Self’s basic thesis is that the digitisation of literature has resulted in destruction of the writer’s ability to earn a living and of the reader’s ability to read in the required way.  As a result, the serious novel “will become an art form on a par with easel painting or classical music, confined to a defined social and demographic group, requiring a degree of subsidy, a subject for historical scholarship rather than public discourse”. 

Personally, I think that this point may already have been reached.  More significantly, however, the fate of the novel, as predicted by Mr Self, somewhat postdates the fate of poetry.  “I’ve come to realise that the kind of psyche implicit in the production and consumption of serious novels… depends on a medium that has inbuilt privacy”, he writes.  Nothing could be more private or intimate than the world of many poems – and I’m not referring here to the declaimed works of performance poets, but the carefully crafted poems intended for the page, which account for the majority of what’s written.

Poetry, however, is not dead.  Far from it.  Its following may be small in number, but seems increasingly vigorous.  The internet teems with poetry blogs, online poetry forums, e-zines and online courses.

Unlike novelists, poets have not usually expected to earn a living from their poetry.  Daytime jobs have been commonplace – often, it is true, in academic life – with the writing squeezed in to spare time.  T. S. Eliot was able to achieve this, so why shouldn’t others?

Poetry has something of a longer history than the novel, going back to the mists of time with Homeric epics, continuing through the Middle Ages with verse both sacred and secular, and stubbornly operating as a medium, even today, for the expression of mankind’s deepest thoughts and feelings.  The serious novel, on the other hand, only came into being in the eighteenth century, and its nineteenth century successes were in part due to publication in serial form.    

Will Self may be right about the serious novel becoming a refuge for the academic and the grey-haired.  But the novel’s loss may turn out to be poetry’s gain.  If the public need for story is satisfied by other media – film, television, computer games – the need to express emotion in words can take no other form than the poem, that brief encapsulation of feeling that finds its echo in the hearts of listeners and readers alike.

Antony Mair