Joseph Bottum, ‘The Decline of the Novel’ (2019)
I don’t propose, here, to write a proper review of Joseph Bottum’s The Decline of the Novel (St Augustine’s Press 2019); which is to say, I won’t write a review of the kind I might undertake for a scholarly journal or newspaper. Not that it doesn’t deserve to be properly reviewed: it is a wonderfully brisk and thought-provoking book, written in lively and pointed prose unimpeded by the cumbrous apparatus of scholarship (I’m enough of a nerd that I might have liked a few footnotes, proper citations, a bibliography, an index; but their lack certainly makes the throughline read smoother). Bottum argues that the novel has lost its cultural force. Lots of them are still being written of course, and some of them sell many copies; but he thinks the form is no longer as central to our collective identity as it was in its heyday, when Scott and Dickens and their like not only reflected society’s nature back to society, but shaped people’s sense of what it meant to belong to such a society, to be as a human being. “For almost three hundred years,” he writes “the novel was a major art form, perhaps the major art form, of the modern world — the device by which, more than any other, we tried to explain ourselves.” The book ranges widely, though often shallowly: with only 150 pages in which to stage its argument many of its points and references are mere gestures, brevities, sketches for larger analysis. There are whole chapters dedicated to Scott, Dickens, Thomas Mann and (oddly, perhaps) Tom Wolfe but in these Bottum concentrates mostly on just one title by each. Bottum has a thesis as to why the novel has declined: Protestantism, Weberian disenchantment, Taylor’s A Secular Age, this great shift in the social-cultural life of ‘the West’, which the novel attempts, says Bottum, to re-enchant.
Now, the reason I’m not going to undertake a conventional review of this book is because I’m going to compare Bottum’s with a book of mine, something that would be out of place in a proper review. In 2006 I published a history of science fiction with Palgrave. 2016 saw the publication of an expanded second edition of this, and one of the things that I was able to do with the 2nd edition was bring in Taylor’s Secular Age (which hadn’t been published when I wrote the first edition). My book sets out to write a critical history of SF, from Ancient Greece through the Renaissance and into modernity. Most scholars of SF say it starts with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, or with Jules Verne and H G Wells, or with Hugo Gernsback and the boom of Pulp magazines in the 1920s. I argue it begins in 1600 with Kepler’s Somnium, and that its emergence was a function of the Reformation. Like Bottum (or in advance of Bottum) I say that SF and Fantasy are modes that offer their readers re-enchantment in a world disenchanted by secular modernity, the difference being that SF offers a ‘sense of wonder’ that aligns itself with materialist advances in science, and an extrapolative celebration of new technologies, and which therefore tends to construe an imaginary future; where Fantasy offers a glamour, in the old sense of the world; a world re-enchanted by magic and wonder, set in an idealised past, usually one based on more-or-less medieval Europe. In this, I argue, SF is ‘Protestant’ — not in a sectarian or doctrinal sense (for many great SF writers have been Jewish, Catholic, atheist, and increasingly SF is written out of global cultural and religious backgrounds) but in this specialist, culturally-philological sense, and Fantasy is Catholic (again not in a sectarian way). Cultural Protestants wrote SF, from Kepler and Swift, through Shelley and H G Wells and into the broad delta of 20th-century SF. Tolkien, a Catholic, works towards a different, backward-looking and nostalgic re-enchantment of a world spiritually and existentially desertified by modernity.
I also argue that the primacy of the ‘SF Novel’ was short lived: SF novels were a small (though I think significant) part of the first great boom in novels in the 18th- and 19th-centuries. Short stories were the backbone of the Pulps in the first half of the 20th-century. Then as the Pulps began to lose ground a swarm of ‘fix-ups’ led to a great period of SF novels through the 1950s, 60s and 70s. But the novel is no longer the primary mode of SF (though SF novels are still being produced in great number — by me, amongst many others) The primary mode is, and has been since the prodigious success of the first Star Wars movie, visual texts: films, TV, video games. In this latter form SF/Fantasy has come to dominate recent and contemporary culture: of the top 20 highest grossing movies of all time, 18 are SF or Fantasy. The various iterations of Star Wars, all the Harries Potter, endlessly proliferating Marvel superheroes, hobbits and thrones, hungry games and vampires are everywhere at the moment. What used to be a fairly niche fandom is now ‘the’ mainstream.
Both aspects of the main thesis of my History of Science Fiction anticipate Bottum’s argument in The Decline of the Novel. Or to be more precise, as for the second, Bottum deplores what he sees as the banalization of culture represented by the shift from novels to TV shows, pop songs and so on, where I tend to celebrate it. And as for the first, I argue that in-a-nutshell ‘Protestantism’ explains the rise of science fiction, as a separated idiom distinct from (in-a-nutshell ‘Catholic’, though to repeat myself I’m using neither term in a theological or sectarian sense) Fantasy. I would not argue that the Protestant reformation is the motor behind the rise of the novel as such, for the, it seems to me, good reason that the novel as such isn’t particularly Protestant. Lots of great novels are, in the sense that Bottum, and I, argue for; but many more are not.
‘Our analysis of the novel has concentrated on English-language works,’ Bottum concedes, not (he says) ‘because of linguistic chauvinism and the monoglotic infirmity that has always infected English speakers’. No: it is because the novel ‘starts as an English-language growth, planted and cross-fertilized in the Protestant hothouses of Great Britain and the United States’ [45–6]. This would be startling news to the large 17th- and 18th-century readerships of (including many Anglophone novelists whose careers began with plagiaristic reworkings of) Don Quixote, Gil-Blas, Le Diable Boiteux, Barclay’s Argenis and many others. People don’t read these books any more, of course; but in their day they were huge.
I don’t think this is nitpicking. The Anglosphere has often sketched a genealogy of ‘the novel’ from Bunyan and Defoe through Smollett, Fielding, Richardson, Burney, Austen, Scott, Dickens, Eliot and into the end of the century. But for much of this time English was a marginal language; Europe’s linguae francae were French and Latin — the former the language of international diplomacy, the latter of science — and fiction was widely written in both. A history of the novel could quite properly foreground the Mercure de France, Prévost, the huge success of Voltaire, Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Julie and Émile (both of which, but especially the latter, effected material and lasting changes in the world), the less respectable but still widely read fiction of Laclos and de Sade, through to the huge successes of Alexandre Dumas and Victor Hugo, and the great Russian writers of the 19th-century who drew on this francophone tradition. This is before we even get to the mode-defining innovations of le naturalisme in Balzac and Zola and the great masterpieces of 20th-century Modernism, A la recherche du temps perdu and Ulysses (written by a culturally-Catholic Irishman, resident on the Continent). It would be bizarre to describe this tradition as ‘Protestant’ in any meaningful way, and daft to pretend that it wasn’t important.
Not that the English novel was entirely a sideshow. I agree entirely with Bottum that Scott is a key figure in the development of the novel, the form’s first international superstar and bestseller. Bottum’s chapter on Scott does not read the Waverley novels as a whole; he instead re-presents Lukacs’ (correct, I think) thesis that Scott’s novels embody the dialectic of history by which the wrong-but-wromantic old ways of the Catholic Highlanders come into conflict with the right-but-repulsive (or, more precisely, right-but-respectable) ways of the coming Protestant bourgeoisie, with a central character who ‘wavers’ between the two. But as Lukacs says, the plot of every Scott novels works through this dialectic — because history moves on, and the Highlanders are being inevitably superseded — towards a synthesis in which the emergent bourgeoisie have their materialism leavened by a Romantic fondness for that pre-modern past. Then, in something of a detour, Bottum reads Gogol’s novella Taras Bulba — an interesting text but hardly ‘Protestant’ in any sense — and then summarises the story of Waverley. A fuller account of the whole series would have enabled a richer and more nuanced account of Scott’s significance, and in particular the way he moved from Scotland to the Middle East (in his Crusader Tales) and then to England — Elizabethan England, Civil War England — as sites of this dialectic of change, and how these differing locations inflect the larger business.
There’s more, too. One day, when I’ve time, I’d like to re-engage Lukacs’ Historical Novel by bringing in Henry Sumner Maine’s ‘from status to contract’ argument as a way of thinking through what Scott’s novels, and the nineteenth-century novel as such, are doing (Dickens, himself wholly schooled by Scott, moves across his career from the former — Oliver Twist is defined by his status, not his circumstances; ostensibly a penniless orphan he in fact has innate nobility, and is recognised as such by all around — to the latter: in a clear sense that’s what Bleak House is ‘about’, the nightmare hypertrophy of ‘the contract’ as constitutive of who we are in society and life. See also: Great Expectations, Our Mutual Friend and … but that’s for another day). It would also be worth mentioning Scott’s favoured narrative strategy, disguise, mistaken identity, the mask and the face. This, I think, is him doing what Jane Austen, a much more technically skilled and accomplished writer, does with irony. Here’s what I said about this in an old blog:
In The Talisman (1825) noble characters are constantly gadding about in disguise. King Richard Coeur-de-lion goes disguised as a slave. When King Richard falls sick he is attended, and healed, by an Arab physician called El Hakim. At the end of the novel we discover that this physician was actually Sultan Saladin himself, Richard’s enemy, all along. All this disguise gubbins is Scott’s way of intimating that a character like Saladin might be both the enemy of Christendom and an honourable, gallant individual at the same time. It’s a device that externalises what happens more naturally, and more persuasively, as interiorised characterisation in Austen’s novels. But it can be a very effective textual strategy for all that; and there are versions of this device, or variants upon it, throughout the Waverley novels. Edward Waverley’s own bivalve political affiliation for example; or the complex games of prophesy and history, false-names and true identities, in Guy Mannering; the manifest and latent paired narratives of Heart of Midlothian.
This is also ‘about’ the shift from feudal to modern, from old to new, from Catholic to Protestant logics: from a world in which any dissembling from your appearance was hypocrisy and wickedness to a world in which ‘Sincerity and Authenticity’ come to have new meanings, and we understand the complexities of the interaction of social identity and personal identity.
Bottum doesn’t get into any of that, which is of course no reason to criticise him (the worst sin a reviewer can commit is twitting an author for writing his/her own book, for not writing the book the reviewer wants to write). But he ought, I think, at least to consider the counter-examples. Scott was huge, and is hugely important to the development of the novel. But so were other writers of historical and realist fiction, and they don’t fit Bottum’s thesis.
Dumas’ Three Musketeers is a major 19th-century novel, a huge bestseller, a culture-text still known the world-over today. More interestingly, for the argument I’m considering here, it is a kind of anti-Scott. It’s a novel that resolutely refuses the dialectical complexity Lukacs identifies in Scott: Dumas’ bourgeois characters are all simply contemptible, his romanticised cavaliers occupy the novel’s affective and (despite their flamboyant amorality) social centre, a position that is never challenged. Neither does the novel hide its contempt for Protestantism. The Musketeers’ participation in the siege of La Rochelle is cheered-on by the narrator: ‘ce dernier boulevard du calvinisme’ must be destroyed we are assured, because any Protestant population constitutes a ‘levain dangereux, auquel se venaient incessamment mêler des ferments de révolte civile ou de guerre étrangère’ — a dangerous redoubt within which the ferments of civil revolt and foreign war are constantly mingling [Dumas, ch. 41].
In Hugo’s Les Misérables the Scottian past (Valjean) and bourgeois present (Javert) engage not dialectically but in the form of a linear escape-and-pursuit that leads, amongst the bang-crash melodrama of Revolution as such, to both their deaths. Tolstoy’s War and Peace pits not Catholic past and Protestant future, but family against ‘system’ — this is John Bayley’s argument, one I’ve always found compelling. Bayley thinks Tolstoy’s Pierre embodies ‘dynamic absurdity’ (distinguishing this from ‘the merely passive absurdity’ of the novel’s non-Russian characters). Pierre works hard to fit himself into a system which can never be home for him, and one of the saving graces of his simplicity is that, on some level, he always knows this (think of the scene where Pierre is inducted into the Masons, and how awkwardly that goes — at the ceremony ‘a childlike smile of embarrassment, doubt and self-derision appeared on Pierre’s face against his will’). But there’s a larger Tolstoyan point. Bayley asks: ‘what are the elements of antagonism, as Tolstoy sees it, between French and Russians?’ And he answers:
The Russians represent a family; the French, by contrast, represent a system — the terrible it which Pierre becomes aware of when the Frenchmen whom he thinks he has got to know during his captivity are suddenly revealed as automata, controlled by some impersonal force which is pressing him towards destruction, a force which overrides humanity. [Bayley, Tolstoy and the Novel (Chatto 1966), 136]
This is spot-on, I think; but it doesn’t reduce to a simple Lukacsian dyad, not least because Tolstoy’s great novel stages the victory of the family over the ‘system’.
So yes, I am sympathetic to Bottum’s argument that the novel flourished for a while and is now declining, or has declined; and I agree with him that this is all tangled up with Weberian disenchantment, and more specifically the desire to re-enchant a disenchanted world. And — to be clear — I am not trying to claim any kind of priority, or accusing Bottum of nicking my thesis (I daresay he was perfectly unaware of my existence, and I’m sure he has not read my Palgrave book). What I am doing is namechecking my Palgrave book to ask whether this thesis — this re-enchantment, Protestant thesis — ‘works’ for ‘the novel’ as a whole, or whether it works, as I suggest, for science fiction novels only. I do think there is some merit in separating out realist/mimetic fiction from science fiction/fantasy, although I also hold the view, eccentric in the strict sense of the word, that most fiction is SF/Fantasy, that SF/Fantasy is the default mode of human storytelling, and ‘le naturalisme’ a fascinating but minor diversion. But we don’t need to get into all that now. Science fiction is a particular kind of ‘Fantasy’ that branches vigorously off from ‘magic Fantasy’ gods-and-monsters stories (Gilgamesh, Odyssey, Beowulf, medieval romance, Dante, Faerie Queene, Paradise Lost) into a materialist sublime. And I realise I’m liable to the bias of my own priors — it may be only because I love SF that I see it everywhere.
Bottum of course has biases of his own, as we all do. For one, his taste skews masculine. He includes the occasional respectful reference to Marilynne Robinson and A S Byatt, but his real passion is for men: Scott, Dickens, Thomas Mann, Thomas Wolfe, ‘geniuses’ all — not to mention ‘Saul Bellow …. V S Naipaul, Mario Vargas Llosa, Thomas Pynchon, Philip Roth and Don DeLillo …J M Coetzee and John Irving … authors who remember the novel’s ambition’ [150]. His tastes are broad enough to mean that he happily reads genre fiction, and he praises certain writers of science fiction, crime or graphic novels as ‘talented’, although he also wonders ‘why they aren’t writing ambitious novels’, adding: ‘to see a great ukulele player is to wonder why someone with talent enough to play the ukulele well is playing the ukelele’ [152]. That’s pretty funny, but it misses its target. I’m sure there were people in the 1960s who grokked Jimi Hendrix’s musical genius but deplored the fact that he was frittering it away on the guitar. The novel itself was looked down upon as a trivial, pop-cultural entertainment — read what Trollope says in his Autobiography about Dickens if you don’t believe me. ‘Serious’ literary artists wrote tragedies and epics. I don’t think Dickens is a trivial artist of course; but then I don’t think that ‘trivial’ and ‘pop cultural’ automatically go together, and any properly historicised understanding of Dickens should see that, for many of his contemporaries, he was very much the grand ukulele player of their age. Bottum has read some SF/Fantasy and is prepared to be appreciative; I have read tons of it and consider it, at its best, not only superb but also vital, alive, doing all the things Bottum thinks novels do. He thinks we no longer centre our social and cultural lives on the novel; I remember as recently as last year when for an entire generation all political and current-events apperceptions were filtered through a novel — Harry Potter — so central to their social and cultural life that it became a meme to beg youngsters to ‘read another book’. Bottum is free to dislike contemporary TV, music and video games, science fiction and children’s literature (this latter in particular is in a golden age right now, I think); but he is not, I think, free to dismiss their cultural weight and importance. As ukuleles go, they’re huge right now. You can fit a whole generation inside their soundholes.
Bottum devotes a chapter to Wolfe because he thinks ‘at the end of the twentieth and the beginning of the twenty-first century Tom Wolfe was America’s greatest living novelist’ [110]. Before the reader can respond with ‘dude, are you high?’ he slips-in a deflating ‘Kind of’. Bottum thinks Wolfe ‘America’s greatest living novelist. Kind of’ because he sees him as the heir to Zola — he calls I Am Charlotte Simmons ‘a satisfying if old-fashioned story’ and, we presume, that second descriptor is not used dispraisingly. Still, it strikes a discombobulating note when Bottum goes on to concede that ‘it’s a flaw that Wolfe’s female characters are blank to the point of non-existence’ [122]. You think? He suggests that this is actually a feature, not a bug: ‘their blankness does allow the author to point almost every important figure in the novel towards the question of what it means to be manly’ [123], and here, Bottum and I are going to have to agree to disagree. In a continuous tradition of Western culture and art from Gilgamesh through Homer, Vergil and Beowulf, medieval and Renaissance literature, what it means to be manly has been absolutely front and centre. There’s really no shortage of art about manliness. But one of the things that the novel innovates is, precisely, the womanly. God knows I love Dickens, but the great novelists of the Anglophone 19th-century are Jane Austen, the Brontës and George Eliot. And in opening the domestic, interiorised, femininized space of the 18th- and 19th-centuries to art, novels also brought not just a diversity of topic but a focus on diversity as such into our collective cultural life. This centripetal, heterogenous and metaphorical (as opposed to metonymic) cultural logic continues to inform the novel in its generic manifestations — encountering the other, the alien, is at the heart of science fiction for instance — and that continues to live and thrive in contemporary culture. Or so I would argue. Your mileage, or declinage, may vary.
