I have an elaborate theory about why the novel was never really a great art form, but I’m going to give you the TL;DR version, as I’m more interested in hearing your thoughts. Here it is:
The novel is a successful entertainment medium in that it, by definition, contains (or is supposed to contain) a story interesting enough to hold the reader’s attention for several hundred pages. Yet that requirement is antithetical to the subtlety that true art requires. That is why no one reads literary fiction: it’s boring. It doesn’t have the BIG stories full of Voldemorts and vampires and teens dying of cancer but finding true love.
But wait, you say, didn’t Austen and Dickens and all those dudes produce true art? And I would say yes, there are novels we correctly revere today as true art. But we have to remember also:
The art form was new in 1719 (Robinson Crusoe), and the body of extant novels was still small at the beginning of the 19th century. You could write about anything and not be redundant with the past.
We find 19th century prose and settings charming and artistic and are massively forgiving of the writers of the past, like Dickens, in ways we are not of modern novelists (Dickens’ coincidences and poorly drawn female characters do genuinely hurt his reputation).
The vast majority of attempts at writing an artistic novel were not successful. Most has been thrown into the dustbin of history. The list of novelists who are considered great is also quite small.
I guess I’d be interested in hearing what you consider are/were other “great art forms” and why.
Dickens? Don’t know that I ever heard his work described as “great art.”
Not sure I get your distinction between “true” and “great” art.
While the novel may be relatively recent, people have been telling stories for eons.
I was discussing the category “literary fiction” recently with my librarian daughter. I find it confusing - and redundant. IM non-expert O, it impresses me as a designation created by people who want to then use it to support their pet theories.
But what do I know? I just enjoy reading good books!
Long-form stories have always mattered and always will matter. Oral story-telling; myths and legends of the gods; novels. Now it is mini-series/Golden Age TV/Netflix/Amazon Prime and video games.
Novels were and are a great art form. They are being somewhat supplanted by long-form TV and video games, just like novels somewhat supplanted oral storytelling. So it goes.
But I don’t correlate the diminishing popularity of novels with their “lack of greatness” as an art form. At all.
Things like painting, sculpture, architecture, poetry, music. For the most part, art is not fundamentally entertaining in the way a TV show is, though it certainly can be intellectually stimulating and enjoyable. I mean, a painting on the wall can be either good art or bad art, but no matter what it is, it can’t really be dismissed as “cheap entertainment,” you know? (Note: I am not saying that all novels are cheap entertainment.)
He’s considered non-disposable and worth retaining. What novelists have you heard of as having written “great art”? I don’t have a hard and fast answer to that question. I think it’s a gray area, tricky.
I didn’t have a distinction in mind.
I don’t really care about the distinction myself, but would-be “important novelists” do make it: Oh, I’m not like Stephanie Meyer–I’m writing the serious stuff!
Of course, the gag is that novels with Voldemorts and vampires and teens dying of cancer but finding true love get turned into movies with thus and such, right?
So flip that around: do you figure movies are dying? Do you think movies can be great art? If you – right this very week – come up with a great idea for a story you’d like to tell, chock full of well-written characters who do interesting things, could you craft it as a movie or as a novel? And would it be art?
(At that, you call out Dickens for coincidence-driven stories and poorly-drawn female characters – I guess with the implication that we forgive those from the classics, but we don’t give passes to folks who write novels today? So what I’m wondering is, do you figure we currently give passes to screenwriters who give us coincidence-driven stories with poorly-drawn female characters?)
I agree that they will continue to be with us, though “mattering” is a different, well, matter.
Well, I don’t think long-form TV and video games are typically great art either. They can be, on rare occasions.
I don’t either. I am saying that the novel actually has a pretty poor track record for producing works that are considered “art” over the long term. That the format actually isn’t conducive to producing art.
Hasn’t the same thing happened with paintings, sonnets, and concertos? A huge percentage of attempts at any artistic form are forgotten. Because their authors didn’t have the talent, because they had the talent but hadn’t developed it yet, because they didn’t spend long enough perfecting the piece, or because the market didn’t push it hard enough. Van Gogh was a flop in his lifetime, right?
Anyway: sure the novel can be an art form. I would argue that it didn’t really become one until the 20th century, or the very late 19th at the earliest. Until then it was disrespected and not vaunted as a valid form of artistic expression, so authors concentrated on telling a good yarn rather than all the numinous literary stuff that was done later, when it *was *recognized as an art form. Sure, lots of authors wrote exquisite novels before then. Jane Austen’s clean and precise use of language was something special. Charlotte Bronte and others even tried some social justice themes. But to find novels with the kind of (okay, some Dopers saw me use this term elsewhere last week, so they’ll roll their eyes) underlying symmetry you can find in a modern literary novel, no. Never seen an early one that did.
Is the novel on the decline? Unlikely. Sounds like sour grapes from an author whose generation is slipping away–or who wants to suck up to the generation that is.
Indeed. Boring, serious lit-fic doesn’t become popular, so then the crap that is popular becomes the movies and video games. (Not that I think all that is popular is crap.)
There is certainly a lot of trouble in that industry. Blockbusters are failing and the small- to mid-budget picture is basically deceased. But that’s the economic side. As far as whether they are succeeding as art and entertainment… I do think they are struggling quite a bit, but I have argued in this forum before that I think we are seeing a crisis of redundancy in storytelling overall. It’s very hard to come up with something new and cliche-free these days. Just look at The Force Awakens. It had been 31 years since the last Star Wars film, so they were going to come up with this amazing story, right? Nope, just a shitty retread of the original movie (pace those who loved this movie, but very few people are saying the story itself was good or imaginative).
I do. I think it’s difficult, however, to make a movie that’s both artistic and entertaining. Add in “stands the test of time” as a condition, and it’s very, very difficult. Many movies that were hailed as masterpieces in their day are quite dated now (8 1/2) comes to mind as one I saw fairly recently).
I am working on a novel right now. I am writing it as a kind of anti-novel, anti-art, don’t-give-a-fuck kinda thing. I’m still not sure how the chips are going to fall.
I don’t think we do. I don’t think most movies try to be art or are considered to be art. Then you have “indie” movies that often try too hard and get ignored.
The vast majority of all art forms are unsuccessful. There were millions of paintings, plays, sculptures, musical works, etc. that are completely forgotten today. I’d guess that less than one-tenth of 1% of all the artistic works created over time are still being considered great work today. And maybe 1% are known by experts in the field, but nowhere else. (Do you know the work of, say Johann Peter Saloman, for instance? Johann David Heinichen?). So this is a meaningless objection, since it can apply to anything.
As for your definition of “true scotsman . . . Art,” it’s very limiting. Guernica is a great piece of art, and it’s anything but subtle. I’m not sure what “true art” even means. The best I can come up with is “lasting art,” where the work is remembered for years after it comes out. And even that is a bad definition of quality, since tastes change over time. No one cared much about van Gogh until after his death, for instance.
Now there can be argued that there is an issue with current literary fiction: too much introspection to the detriment to the story. But that doesn’t stop literary authors like Michael Chabon. And when Stephen King can show up in The New Yorker (twice!) – the bastion of literary fiction – it shows that a genre writer can be appreciated by the literary community.
Going to the article – which dismisses genre fiction with the usual ignorant sneers of the past — it sounds like it can be boiled down to “kids these days. When I was their age, I read books uphill and in the snow.” He can’t accept the fact that genre fiction can say as much as literary fiction*
He’s much like the critics of the 19th century who thought Mrs. E.D.E.N. Southworth was the greatest American novelist and who ignored Herman Melville.
*A genre in and of itself, with as many rules and conventions as any other genre. Nothing wrong with that, except the assumption that only the literary fiction genre is worth anything.
You’re talking novels written in English, no? I mean, El Ingenioso Hidalgo Don Quixote de la Mancha was publishef in 1605 and was already mocking the equivalent to fluff novels. Im sure a similar case can be made in other languages about novels appearing earlier than 1719 and how that literary form works within the languages.
Correct! It’s a tricky question. I would say some forms are art by nature: they can be good art or bad art, but they are always art. Some form are entertainment by nature: a Punch and Judy show is just entertainment, though we can admire the performance when it’s skillful. And some forms are on the line between art and entertainment.
Thanks. This is helpful in that it further circumscribes the domain in which novels were, in fact, art.
Educate me on what you mean by “underlying symmetry.”
I would ask you this: What is the last novel to have had cultural impact and still be considered a work of art today? To Kill a Mockingbird (1960) comes to mind, though I’m not religiously wed to that. I would call that a decline, or a significant symptom thereof.
The Tale of Genji (Japan, early 11th century) “… is sometimes called the world’s first novel, the first modern novel, the first psychological novel or the first novel still to be considered a classic.”
One Hundred Years of Solitude came out in 1967 and had a lot of influence in the Spanish-speaking world.
When is the last time “painting, sculpture, architecture, poetry, music” had cultural impact and is still considered a work of art today? (Mind defining “cultural impact” while you’re at it?)
I don’t think a debate can be had with you because you define “art” in a personal and idiosyncratic way that seems to be wildly different from us, from history, from culture, and from critics. And yet you refuse to give us actual examples of what lives up to your definition of art, and whether art in those other fields is time-dependent. We’re going up against a blob.
If I’m reading you right, then I guess the title of this thread and the stuff you wrote in the first post is supposed to be the tip of that iceberg: that it’s not the novel that’s uniquely on the ropes, but that the problems you figure bedevil novels bedevil movies (and, one supposes, plays; and ballads; and every other storytelling method): being artistic and entertaining while avoiding clichés – but not by embracing some new and of-the-moment trend, because that’ll keep it from standing the test of time as a masterpiece – all while not getting ignored upon trying too hard.
Have I got that right? Not novels, but everything?
I agree. There can be flawed forms, however. After Milton published Paradise Lost, people thought the blank verse epic was going to be the next big thing. Many tried, including Milton again, but no one ever succeeded. It was a one-off.
Obviously, the novel as a form produced many valuable works. In any case, I would say either my thesis is correct, or this is correct: The novel has had its run as a serious art form. Just like poetry. The canon is closed.
Personally, I have no prejudice against genre fiction. One of my favorite writers is Robert Sheckley, ostensibly a sci-fi writer. I find his work both entertaining and meaningful. Sadly, he is now basically forgotten. I’m not really sure any genre fiction written in the 20th century will be read 100 years from now beyond hobbyists in the particular genres.
[/QUOTE]
You’re right: we’re seeing canon closure across the board in society today. We don’t really have famous poets, playwrights, painters, and sculptors today.
Haha, well… sort of. Money is everything now. Stephanie Meyer is famous because she sold a jillion books; Your Favorite Literary Novelist is not famous. There is a demand for pop music, movies, and TV shows, so actors and other people in those industries can be rich and famous.
The thing is, the media/academia/whatever used to be able to make people famous and respected who did not sell a lot of units. Poets and artists could be famous, even if they were not Rod McKuen (now forgotten despite being the biggest-selling poet in history) or Damien Hirst (barely famous among average people, I would say).
What I think makes the novel different today from other forms is that we do still have novelists who become rich and famous. Whereas those working in other forms mostly have no hope of either money or renown.
You’re still dodging the question. Who were these famous people? Who thought they were famous? Are you defining fame just by success in a tiny segment of the rich? Is your complaint about the rise of the mass audience after around 1850? Isn’t Lin-Manual Miranda about as famous as any playwright in American history?
Please provide some specifics. And some definitions. Some examples. Some time frames. Anything other than “I think things are different today and I don’t like it. Why aren’t you agreeing with me?” That’s a waste of our time on a potentially interesting subject.
