https://blog.ayjay.org/here-we-go-again-2/
…
Let me ride my old hobby-horse once more: The reading and writing of
books — and when Krauss says “books” I think she’s primarily referring to
novels — has always been a minority pursuit. Until recently
Western cultures did not even aspire to universal literacy, and until quite recently
no one imagined that universal literacy would extend to the reading and
comprehension of novels and poems by all young people. The idea that Western
culture as a whole should involve encounters with serious
literature is largely a product of World War II and the period following.
…
What percentage of English people could have read Paradise Lost when
it appeared? What percentage of Americans could have read Uncle Tom’s
Cabin when it appeared? We have to know things like
this if we’re going to make comparative assertions. But people make comparative
assertions all the time without even thinking about such matters.
I agree that novels, and other long narratives, have become less culturally central, less influential, than they were fifty or sixty years ago. (And I regret this.) But are they less culturally central than they were a hundred years ago? I’m not sure about that. Two hundred years ago?
Hard to
say.
How many ambitious and masterful novels can we reasonably expect our
culture to produce each year? How many thoughtful and sensitive readers can we
reasonably expect those novels to have? I don’t find these questions easy to
answer.
This isn't a "It was ever thus" response of the sort I have seen plenty of people make about concerns about cultural decline coming from conservatives (not that Jacobs isn't one, by the way); instead it's a more "I don't think we have reckoned with how recent apparent near-universal literacy and recreational reading of novels actually was". Maybe various thinkpieces about the postwar consensus and pining for the moral certainties of the Cold War span the proverbial liberal and conservative branches of liberalism?
Something similar to the perceived/real demise of the prestige of the novel has been going on with the symphony and orchestral music over the last half-century, too. Even Ted Gioia, a jazz and blues fan of fans, has lamented that attention spans are dropping and people are more distractible. But the needed remedy is apparently, among some classical music partisans, to get rid of all DEI as fast as possible (trust me, there's a post about this in the making), and to try to get people to expand their attention spans to the point where Mahler symphonies and Wagnerian operas are in the offing.
The prospect of conceding attention spans are short and composing in such a way that people can process music in clearly delineated chunks of 2 to 3.5 minutes even within large forms (the kind of thing that was known to happen in music composed by J. S. Bach, Haydn, and Mozart)? Nah, don't even bother with that. Music education is supposed to get people to be as attentive to music as music journalists comparing a Furtwangler Beethoven's 9th to a Reiner Beethoven's 9th.
I am back to reading novels but I have not bothered reading contemporary literary fiction or "serious novels" since ... Bill Clinton was in office. I haven't read Infinite Jest and I'm not going to waste my time doing so. I'd sooner revisit Lee/Ditko Spider-man. I wouldn't be surprise if Te-nehisi Coates might hypothetically say, "That's probably more worthwhile reading anyway."
I've been going back to usual suspects, Melville, Dostoevsky, Kafka, Austen, I have copies of The Master and Margarita and We I need to get to. I have heard Coates has written novels but I'd sooner revisit Ellison because Invisible Man is a work of genius. Alan Jacobs has a couple of points worth pondering and they tie into a point that is maybe more awkward to discuss, that the perceived deaths of literary fiction may not just be a function of some downward trajectory in quality or quantity but the opposite, the sea of what is out there, regardless of quality or quantity, makes things more and more likely to be unseen in the sea of books and poems and short stories.
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