Fiction is dead. Again? [updated]

Put down that dragon tattoo girl. Stop catching up with Bree Tanner. You don't need any help from Kathryn Stockett, or to chew your fingernails through a hunger game. Forget about the latest from Scott Turow or David Mitchell or Charlaine Harris or Paul Auster or Rick Riordan or Stephen King. Novels are over. Fiction is dead.

Here we go again.

Every few years someone finds a platform to declare fiction dead, despite all evidence to the contrary. This time around, it's Lee Siegel, writing in The Observer. Siegel's piece flogs a tired horse, that fiction is less central to our culture than it was in the 1950s and 1960s, and not as good. It's hard to figure out which is more problematic: how poorly Siegel's argument is made, or how many things he gets wrong in the process.

So for fun, let's see if I can resuscitate poor old fiction by addressing Siegel's points, one at a time, as he lays them out.

1. Siegel: "Fiction has become culturally irrelevant." People buy books, read books, are right now camping on sidewalks to see "Twilight: Eclipse," a movie based on a book, and they camp out in bookstores too, when a novel they're eager for is sold at midnight. Maybe these people are not part of our culture?

2. Siegel: "With the exception of a few ambitious -- and obsessively competitive -- fiction writers and their agents and editors, no one goes to a current novel or story for the ineffable private and public clarity fiction once provided." So on the one hand we have obsessive, competitive authors and agents. On the other, "ineffable private and public clarity." This doesn't make sense -- the ambitious literary establishment may go to books for many reasons, but how does clarity connect to their obsessiveness? And while there are no doubt legions of readers who turn to fiction for "private clarity," they certainly aren't limited to agents and writers. And what exactly is the connection between "private and public" clarity -- are these two the same thing? Are they even related?

3. Siegel: "Exhibit A in the argument that fiction is now a marginal enterprise: Everybody complains that The New Yorker list is inbred, house-approved, a mere PR ploy for the magazine, but no one does anything about it. If fiction were really alive, if it were still the vibrant experience it used to be, then an artistic affront like the '20 Under 40' junior pantheon would be something against which literary people would deploy all their creative energies....Where are the counterlists to The New Yorker's 20? Where is the mischief in the little literary magazines, the fiction-publishing monthlies like Harper's and The Atlantic, the countless online sites devoted to contemporary fiction? Isn't such sharp dissent what the Web was supposed to empower?" Since Mr. Siegel's Internet seems to be broken, here we go: HTML Giant's 400 Under the Age of 1, Ward 6's 10 Over 80, the Millions' 20 Under 40 from 40 Years Ago and 20 More Under 40, the Telegraph's 20 Under 40 in Britain, Steve Almond's One Over 40 in The Rumpus, The Big Other's 40 Over 40 and a lively conversation on Twitter.

This is going to take a while. Let's continue after the jump.

4. Siegel: "The practice of fiction is no longer a vocation. It has become a profession." These are synonyms. From the Random House Unabridged Dictionary (my 1967 edition was my parents'): "vocation: a particular occupation, business or profession; calling" and "profession: a vocation requiring knowledge of some department of learning or science." Do writers want to find the vocation-profession sweet spot and both follow their calling and make a living? Probably. Has this prevented them from responding to the New Yorker's list, as Siegel claims? No.

5. Siegel: "It is only when an artistic genre becomes small and static enough to scrutinize that a compensating abundance of commentary on that genre springs into existence." If writing critically about an art form indicates that it is in its decline, that means there hasn't been a rock song worth listening to since critic Lester Bangs died in 1982, and that filmmaking ended with the 1965 publication of Pauline Kael's "I Lost It At the Movies."

6. Siegel doesn't like critic James B. Woods' book "How Fiction Works." I don't much, either, but  one critic's poorly conceived manifesto is hardly enough to prove that fiction is dead.

7. Siegel: "The most interesting, perceptive and provocative writers of our moment write narrative nonfiction." This may be true. I think we agree.

8. Siegel goes on to say that today's nonfiction generates "existential urgency and intensity [with] the feelings with which people used to respond to novels..." Just because nonfiction may generate intense feelings doesn't mean that those feelings have been taken away from fiction. It's like a parent saying, "Sorry, son, now that your little sister is born, all our love is going to her" -- love for reading is love for reading, and if Siegel and I are both feeling fondly toward nonfiction, there is still plenty of fiction love (at least from me).

9. That quote about fiction continues "...feelings with which people used to respond to novels by Bellow, Updike, Mailer, Roth, Cheever, Malamud..." Fiction and nonfiction are both so lovable that Siegel has confused Mailer with a novelist on a par with John Updike and Saul Bellow. But Norman Mailer's best work was always his nonfiction, not his fiction; "Harlot's Ghost" and "Ancient Evenings" are a far cry from "Armies of the Night" and "The Executioner's Song."

10. In the postwar decades, Siegel writes, "So-called commercial fiction was just as relevant to people's lives as so-called literary fiction." He lists some marvelous books of the period that he says were categorized as commercial fiction, which were "as primal as the bard singing around the pre-Homeric fire" (I think that's good). But now "everything literary is also furtively commercial" (I think that's bad) and "nothing is popular" (also bad), "except for the explicitly commercial fiction that the literary crowd refuses (or is unable) to write." From what I can tell, he started out saying postwar commercial fiction was good because it was relevant to people's lives, and he ends by saying contemporary literary writers both are "furtively commercial" yet not writing commercial fiction. Issues of popularity, commercialism and literariness are all jumbled up. And he conflates the idea of relevance to an individual's life -- the intensity of response to a piece of writing -- to relevance with the culture as a whole.

11. Siegel writes that the work of the magazine's own nonfiction staff is the "best argument against The New Yorker's self-promoting, vulgar list" of 20 novelists under 40. That makes sense only if you believe good nonfiction equals bad fiction. Um, no.

12. Fiction is, Siegel writes, "a museum-piece genre most of whose practitioners are more like cripplingly self-conscious curators or theoreticians than writers." While this might be argued, Siegel hasn't argued it. He touched on relevance, on popularity, on an obsessive literary establishment, on the quality nonfiction of decades past -- but he didn't address the content of today's novels at all. At this point, he's just tossing insults.

13. Siegel concludes that fiction is dead because nonfiction is alive. I would argue that readers energized by one form will not abandon another; it would take a small heart not to love them both.

Fiction lives! It lives!

-- Carolyn Kellogg
twitter.com/paperhaus

[Updated at 4:10pm Wednesday: In an earlier version of this post, "I Lost It At the Movies" was said to have been released in 1955.] 

Photo: A hearse in Vancouver. Credit: mulmatsherm via Flickr.

Comments

[RichLeC]

You got more out of "ineffable private and public clarity" than I did. I have no idea what the devil he meant. First off, there is no Culture. There is literary culture, then there's academic culture, then there's multi-cultural culture, then there's the culture mocked on "The Soup." I think literary culture is more vibrant than ever, thanks to Internet bloggers, narrative nonfiction, YA fiction, innovative SF and mystery fiction, plain-old good fiction, and even bad fiction (they're making a film of "Atlas Shrugged," for heaven's sake). Updike, Cheever, Roth and Bellow never sold like Harold Robbins or Jacqueline Susann did. Maybe a higher percentage of the population read fiction in the 20th century, but as you point out, most of what they read is the equivalent of "Eclipse" or "The Da Vinci Code." My brain hurts.

[Isaac]

Lee Siegel is an idiot.

[Laird Hunt]

Thanks, for this. I'd love to hear more about how the narrative nonfiction writers are carrying the day not just in terms of sales but in terms of quality (you and Siegel concur). Is this a ref. to lyric essayists (à la Shields, D'Agata, etc.) or is this a different kind of extraordinary nonfiction that is doing it better, going deeper than, say, Echenoz, Tulli, Tspeneag, Ourednik, Evenson, Toussaint, Link, N'Diaye and many other non-mainstream, national and international writers, very much of our moment, who tend to write fiction?

[Cedric's Mom]

Thank you LA Times Jacket Copy for picking Lee's piece apart. How dare he make such a broad declaration with no credibility. Sounds to me like HE doesn't read fiction. Clearly, the guy is an idiot.

[bob]

i think you are missing a key point. Siegel is (in my view) making an implicit distinction, akin to Clement Greenberg's "Avant-Garde and Kitsch," between "high" and "popular" fiction (the former used to be called "literature" in Theory departments, and the latter "mass-market fiction"). Yes, people consume the latter by the truckload; Edward Cullen and Harry Potter are the poster boys for this, and with the exception of Paul Auster, all the writers you mention practice this form of writing. What Siegel means by his broad and ill-defined category "fiction" is the transgressive, transfigurative, transformative, and often difficult writing, which traditionally and typically doesn't sell well, and is often recognized as "important" only post-facto, and sometimes post-mortem. It challenges commonly-held ideas and prejudices, plays with and undermines the established rules of production, demands the engagement of readers, and is itself an "experience" that one undergoes. This is indeed an increasingly rare form of writing, though i don't think it's dead (dying, maybe, but that's debatable). His rationale for this claim is quite correct--popular mass-market fiction is formulaic and obeys certain well-established rules of production that are meant to move the product on the market; this is not to say that such fiction isn't "fun" or "enjoyable," but only that it doesn't serve the transgressive and transformative purpose of "literature." The fiction market is controlled (let's say, for purely Symbolic purposes) Oprah and her minions, and so if you want to succeed on this market, you write for her/them, and she/they decide if you pass or not--hence you write "safe," fun, and enjoyable stuff, else you don't get to be the Book Club pick of the month. You obey the rules set by Wood, or else you fail, just as the AbEx group obeyed the rules set by Greenberg. And you hone your skills against these rules, so that your work succeeds on the market. When you start writing for the market, trying to curry O's favor, then you are a writing "professional." And "professional" and "vocation" are clearly and decidedly not synonyms, as your own thesaurus suggests with the addition, in the definition of the former, of the phrase "with specialized knowledge." A vocation is indeed a calling--you do it because you must, because you love it, because you hear beautiful voices in your head, and as such, you do what you want to do, write what and how you want to write, regardless of the approbation of the rule-meisters; you may not be rewarded for it materially with best-seller status, and you may be, as Nietzsche said of himself, "born posthumously," but so what? you must do it. A profession, any profession, requires that you play by the rules, that you conform to certain norms descried by the science or specialized knowledge of that field. This is precisely why he invokes the Salon des Refuses against the official Salon de l'Academie. So yeah, he's a bit arrogant and pompous, and yeah, maybe his obituary for fiction has come too soon, but he nonetheless has a valid argument, several key points of which you seem to have missed in your response.

[MarcoKaye]

Nice retort. Frank Kermode said it best:

"The special fate of the novel...is to be always dying..."

http://bit.ly/b20z06

Hopefully it's pieces like this that will be dying off, once everyone comes to understand they are just written for shock value. Pretty soon we can all rest easy, continue writing and ignore these diatribes.

[Randy Russell]

Okay, I honestly cannot figure out most of what Siegel is trying to say. You did a much better job of that. Here's what might be suggested as an alternative consideration:

Fiction is alive and well and is what it has always been, as rich and as deep and as clear (okay, clarity is supposed to be important here) and as regularly asinine and inpet as ever. Readers just aren't CELEBRATING it for the same reasons or in the same manner (print reviews) as they did in the so-determined "wonder years" of the 1950s and 1960s.

There are contemporary works sitting right there, published this year, that are at least an equal to every short story Bernard Malamud ever wrote. If you can't find them for us, Mr. Seigel, that's not the death of fiction. Rather, it is the death of the critic who can't find fiction without a colony of like-minded reviewers to point the way. Or perhaps is too lazy to.

I think what Mr. Siegel is actually lamenting is the death of the literary print reviewer, people he relied upon to direct him to the books worth reading. Now he has to find them on his own. And doesn't know where or how to look. It's a jungle out there.

I think if John Updike were still reviewing, he'd finding some things worth reading, don't you?

[Polomoche]

"Bellow, Updike, Cheever, Malamud..." - list any contemporary writer worthy of sharing the same shelf space with these gentlemen and I will read. I think - if you are honest with yourself - you will be hard-pressed to come up with a single name.

[billofwrites]

"Bellow, Updike, Cheever, Malamud..." - list any contemporary writer worthy of sharing the same shelf space with these gentlemen and I will read. I think - if you are honest with yourself - you will be hard-pressed to come up with a single name.

Two words for you, Polomoche. OK, two MORE words: Jennifer Egan. Most ambitious American writer writing today. And on the other side of the pond: Ian McEwan. Our neighbor to the North: Alice Munro. Please don't make me go on...

[James Smith]

A most sensible response to an idiotic column by Lee Siegel

Siegel must have been flirting with controlled substances - his "arguments" either make no sense or are outlandish.

This columnist has done a service in trying to neutralize the nonsense.

[peter wright]

First, it's all fiction. Histories, memoirs, past and current science, biographies, autobiographies -- are and always were fiction. No such thing as nonfiction. Second, maybe it's just that Siegel once was young and now is old --- the 'clarity' he, or anyone, derives from fiction is most enlightening, and is recalled as most powerful, when that fiction invades a young naive mind. The fiction of the '40's and '50's was absorbed by the wide-eyed Siegel of the 50's and '60's.

[Cal Godot]

Fiction has died so many times now, it is clear that it no longer lives but is in fact undead. You have to stab it in the heart with a sharp stick, cut off its head, burn the body, and bury the ashes at a crossroads. Even then, some weird gang of British hippies would come along and resurrect it. Fiction, holding hands with the Novel, will attend the funerals of every person who ever said they were dead. The duo will dance on their graves and write obscenities on their tombstones. Fiction will never die. Fiction is a vampire with a soul.

[F. Lagnab]

You people are silly. None of this matters at all. Not at all! Go write something beautiful. When you come back, this (& other similar tiffs) will have evaporated like a marital spat where neither spouse can remember what the subject was.

Stop it, now. Go to your rooms and write.

[Habry]

Of *course* fiction is dead! Anyone who ever thought it alive is delusionary. IT'S AN ART. It dies every day -- every hour. Every time a book is finished, by a writer or a reader, the book dies. That's why we write: to give fiction life again. It's like you people have never heard of tension or release, or seen a flower bloom. Jeez! Lee Whomever can go write some fiction, of he doesn't like what on his shelf. But that's probably too hard for him, poor duck.

[Johnny]

Fiction is far from dead. Just look at the New York Times Bestseller List for Hardcover Fiction. Not a single Non-Fiction title. Case closed.

[dsk]

LOL old people.

"What Siegel means by his broad and ill-defined category "fiction" is the transgressive, transfigurative, transformative, and often difficult writing, which traditionally and typically doesn't sell well, and is often recognized as "important" only post-facto, and sometimes post-mortem."

An artifact of the mid to late 20th century, as much as the epistolary is an artifact of its time. He's complaining that an older form is no longer being practiced, while ignoring newer forms that are.

[J. Nelson Leith]

Perhaps, with all of the vampire and zombie books on the shelves, fiction could be described as undead.

But dead? No.

[Kevin Smokler]

I hearby debutize neigh insist Ms. Kellogg be the ordained responder to all such claims of "Fiction is Dead" in the future. This was 10 times more enjoyable than the source material.

[F.H.]

billofwrites said: "Jennifer Egan. Most ambitious American writer writing today."

Uh, what? The most ambitious American writer writing today is Joshua Cohen.

[Chelsea]

Why do people keep assuming that fiction is something even capable of dying? It's impossible! Can't we all just agree on that? Once and for all?

[R. H. Greene]

Bully for you Carolyn! And may I add that it seems to me Mr. Siegel's entire argument rests on a ludicrous church/state separation between commercial awareness and literary aspiration that is a creation of criticism and has rarely operated in the actual field of creation itself. Shakespeare was a man of the theatre who thought so little of the literary prospects for the plays he poured his soul into that his stage collaborators needed to assemble them for publication without his participation after his death--to him, these were purely commercial works. Dickens' novels are exceptionally long in part because they were serialized in newspapers where he was paid by the installment. Citing Fitzgerald as Siegel does as some sort of standard of literary purity divorced from commercial consideration will be news to anyone aware of the author's actual life, which was riddled with financial scrabbling that both informed and influenced the shape of his efforts. And on the literary non-fiction front, I would be willing to argue that Mailer (along with Capote and Tom Wolfe and others of the Esquire Magazine school) virtually invented the contemporary format, and that Siegel pet Ernest Hemingway's self-aggrandizing autobiographical novels (not to mention DEATH IN THE AFTERNOON) were significant precursors. In other words: purity is for purists, and artists are thankfully rarely pure. Writers of all stripes have usually known something Siegel seems not to understand: to work, an artist is also required to eat, and the two are not in conflict, at least not inherently.

[R. H. Greene]

PS to Carolyn--Such a long way from film school, where I used to be known as "Ray Greene." I am delighted to continuously encounter your work online. The web is a monster, but in this instance a benign one. Good on ye.

[Dave Daley]

Siegel's runs aground beginning with his "Exhibit A." Literary people should "deploy all their creative energies" against ... a list? Really?

Actually, most of us in 2010, having come through best of the century lists, best of the millennium lists, best of the decade lists, let alone the annual list-making exercises that seem to begin every year around Halloween, are a little more media-savvy than that.

The New Yorker list is inbred, house-approved and a PR ploy, as he writes. Yes. Like every list -- and most of us understand this. If we were to spend all our time outraged over lists, and deploying creative energies to go to war against them, well, we'd be pushing that rock up the hill every single day. And on what? New lists? What a waste of time. Time that the literary community might use for, perhaps, literary pursuits.

But Siegel, of course, is very interested in sparking fights and wasting time online. Let's not forget that, posting as "Sprezzatura," he lingered on the comment boards of his own pieces, talking about his own genius and brilliance. Well, I guess someone had to....

[CCM-LA]

New Yorker's shift from stodgy highbrow lit into contemporary fiction simply mirrors the changing of its staff from old folks to young marketing list-makers who know what the best marketers know: any "best-of" list will sell products, no matter what you put on it. The New Yorker has the power to be a taste maker, but readers have the power to decide whether to buy in to forced hype. I don' t think that makes fiction dead, but rather highlights the power of lists to sell it.

[crcb]

Fiction is dead again, is it? It's in good company. Poetry keeps dying every few years, too, as does the printed word itself. (There's a joke that the second work Gutenberg printed, after the Bible, was a book announcing the death of book publishing.)

The "[insert art form here] Is Dead" genre is alive and well.

[bob]

to dsk : i'm not really all that old (40). i'm just trying to explain what i think Siegel means. What i think he means by "fiction" is what you call a mid twentieth century artifact (though i think that's an unfair characterization of it). i'm willing to preserve that category and to say that fiction understood in this (narrow) way may well be dying. but notice that i also hinted that fiction more broadly construed--popular fiction--is not dying. quite the contrary, it's flourishing. it may not have the best "literary"qualities in the narrower sense, but (and this is, in my mind, the most important and least discussed fact), it gets people, especially kids, reading. that pre-teens want to go to border's at midnight to get the latest installment of harry potter, or spend the weekend plowing through twilight, is a fantastic development (for the record, i like harry potter, but not as much as lord of the rings, and i hate twilight). and if someone is about to board a six hour flight, and has a choice to kill time among their gameboy, style magazines, and scott turow, i'd rather they pick the latter. dan brown is a terrible terrible writer, but he's fun and entertaining. Reading (even dan brown) stimulates higher cognitive and creative centers in the brain in ways that video games don't, and i'm all for that. So yes, i want to preserve and defend an "old" "artifact" and give it special status, and i hope that it doesn't die (i don't think it will), but at the same time, unlike Siegel, i don't want to denigrate popular fiction; quite the contrary, i am happy it flourishes, precisely because it gets kids (and even adults) to read. I view it as a gateway drug--it's fun, and i hope it leads to (reading) harder stuff.

so there's my defense of the older form; but i'm not sure if this addresses the claim about "newer forms that are [being practiced]." if by newer forms, you mean the kind of popular fiction i just talked about, then okay, but if you mean something else, then i'd like to know. i admit that i'm not a huge fan of most graphic novels, but i recognize that some of them have been able to be inventive with narrative structure and plot development in ways that the written novel has been unable to replicate. and i think blogging is a great form of journalism and social commentary, but i'm not sure if that is "fiction". so what else am i missing here with these "newer forms" ?

[Cyrus Duffleman]

I don't know about fiction, but I'm still alive!

[Mela]

And it will live on!
As long as there will be people, there will be some kind of storytelling. It's just human. They want to dream. They wont to hear stories bigger than life. The want to be breathtaken, touched, inspired or just entertained.

[sally sue]

If fiction is dead then a lot of people are into necrophilia.

[Nicole]

Bellow, Updike, Mailer, Roth, Cheever, Malamud. There's not a female or muliti-cultural writer to be found in the list. I'm not negating these authors, but rather saying that there's more than the male, white experience. And frankly I'm just tired of people ignoring woman's contribution to literature.

[Anchoress]

My question is, given the scandal Lee "Sprezzatura" Siegel found himself embroiled in at the The New Republic, why does anyone keep giving this man jobs and platforms to spew his nonsense?

He is a terrible novelist, an uninformed critic, and, as his New Republic debacle demonstrated, neither honest nor honorable. Yet he keeps getting these high profile gigs!

WHY?

[marc nash]

Siegel may overstate the case, but I think there's a validity to his argument. The changing nature of the book market that has squeezed mid-list writers in favour of best sellers has seemingly had a knock-on effect on authors' creative decisions to reposition themselves accordingly. Hence a deluge of what I would term 'escapist' literature, rather than that which seeks to engage with the world. I believe this combination of publishers and self-censoring authors have undersold the reading public and I speak as an author myself.

I'd love to believe that on the fringes, in all the samizdat independent online magazines, that a riot is going on in literary terms, but not one that I credit can shake the foundations. Too small, too dispersed, too disposable in terms of how they are consumed.

Fiction still has the wherewithal to make itself relevant, to speak to its readers in with an emotional intelligence that TV storytelling can't match for example, but to do so it has to life itself from last century's artform and redefine itself according to the current one.

[lin]

@bob: naturally, if this "high fiction" tends to sell badly and only be recognized after the fact, it will appear to get rarer as time goes on simply because the "high fiction" of today has had less time to be recognized. If Siegel is complaining that this kind of "high fiction" is disappearing, he might as well complain about the fact that no trees planted in the past ten years have yet attained the gigantic size of those from an older age.