In an otherwise pedestrian essay in this month’s Poetry, C.K. Williams remarks:
“We all know that when a contemporary painter creates an impressionist painting, no matter how deftly it may be done, no matter how seductive it might appear, it offends, seems at best kitsch, a trivialization, at worst a painful violation, hardly worth being deplored. And when a contemporary poet generates a Keatsian sonnet that isn’t driven by anything in the spiritual cosmos of his or her time, if there is nothing of our difficult contemporary reality infused in the work, and of the poetic history that informs that reality, then experienced readers will find it inert, without essential energy, not worth the effort of bothering with.”
I sometimes think that prose is the one area of twentieth century art that has remained largely immune to this tendency. Which is not to say that the last century did not see prodigious amounts of innovation in prose style – it did – only that all that innovation did not render the old styles redundant. As Williams points out, it would be more or less impossible for a contemporary poet to emulate the style of a poet from a century ago and be taken seriously (and the same goes for painters and classical composers), yet every year sees the publication of dozens of novels that, in terms of style and form at least, would seem barely out of place in 1900, and these works are treated as legitimate works of art.
What, I wonder, is behind this? Is it just that prose is a relatively young art form, one that is yet to reach that autumn of ripeness beyond which the old forms begin to wither? Alain Robbe-Grillet says somewhere (I paraphrase from memory) that he has no wish to write like Stendhal because Stendhal himself has already done that better than anyone else could. Can it be that the rest of us remain unconvinced that the old forms have been exhausted and are still waiting for them to reach their apotheosis before we are prepared to look for something new. Is it then only a matter of time before the novel as we know it – the classic 19th century novel with its traditional narrative and its focus on character – becomes obsolete and our attempts at it remembered, if at all, only as the work of a moribund group of writers who could not see that their form had outlived its usefulness, much in the way we, from our modern perspective, think of those contemporaries of Eliot and Pound who were still trotting out dainty little sonnets?
Or is there something more fundamental at work here? Is there something inherently different about fiction that renders it immune to this process of obsolescence? Could it be that the nature of story-telling – the way its surface trappings change from generation to generation provide enough variance for us not to require the kind of change we regularly demand of other art forms? Does the fact that the new novels are set in a more contemporary world, or in our own country rather than in some distant land, satisfy us, so that we are indifferent to the story being told in the old form? Or is there something about the human condition that makes the fiction that tries to describe it somehow inexhaustible, so that we do not need technical innovation to render the form new?
Don’t misunderstand me. I’m not saying that this relatively unchanging nature of prose is a bad thing, or makes fiction a lesser art in some way, only that it’s curious that in an age where practically every other art form has moved to the point where it would have been more or less unrecognizable a century ago, we continue to read, and write, fiction in the old style.
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