AFTER THE ELECTION of the forty-fifth president of the United States, something happened to fiction. Here I don't mean, thank goodness and for once, the concept of fiction, as opposed to or distinguished from fact. While newspapers benefited (mildly) from a so-called Trump bump of new subscribers urgently wishing to be better informed about just what the hell was going on, the sales of novels—the once profitable form of fiction—continued to decrease in 2017. Information's stock rose; artifice suffered. Or maybe artifice was taking on a new role in American public life—which is to say, a new old role, one it had for a while been playing in a none-too-fresh milieu, what we might have been inclined to think of as the already-outmoded narrative style of reality television. Artifice, fantasy, fiction, allegory, whatever you want to call it, was edited within an inch of its life, blown up to hysterical proportions, broadcast on an inane loop and unceasingly. This inauguration was the best attended of all time! This statement follows logically in no way from images you have seen and other narratives you have come to accept! You'll believe me when I tell you because I (can) say it!
It's now two years since. I have almost no ambition to rehash the disasters and debacles, but I do want to point out a little slip that will have some bearing on what I have to say here—which is, overall, about the state of American fiction, rather than the state of electoral politics. Here, in my opinion, is the slip: we tend to speak of the current executive's maneuvers as “irrational,” claiming they emerge out of a lack of epistemic if not instrumental “rationality,” which is to say, a lack of respect for the efficacy of reason, but we speak less about their status in relation to narrative forms. Indeed, so much of the media we consume is non-narrative, in spite of the existence of presumably linear “timelines,” that it probably does not occur to us to note that what we mean by “rationality”—a concept that seems only vaguely word-like to me and might well be replaced by “reason”—is almost the same thing as narrative, the following-on of one event by another in an illuminating, usually causal way. His pronouncements are non-narrative, but then again, so is much of mediated social life these days. What journalists and other commentators frequently call “the narrative” (of politics, of values, of daily life, etc.) is a slot at the top of a recently refreshed feed, an instance of disjunction.
I mention these categorical slips—of reason for narrative, of narrative for widely read non-sequitur—because I think it has something to do with the rise of nonfiction as a category of profitable literary writing, a rise that began long before the 2016 election. There is, I would argue, a notable hunger in American society for the comforts of narrative. It's a hunger for a species of meaning-making that is not specifically logical (though it may be that too) but which rather provides an account of how things, sometimes sentient, sometimes material, get organized across space and time and in relation to one another and sequentially, such that they become the way things are, after having been the way things were. Sure, narrative can be revelatory and informative, but it can also be reassuring, grounding. To attempt to understand and maintain one's personal narrative is to be healthy, as the popular wisdom goes. Narrative can be incremental; it offers itself up to analysis. It promises to explain something about what human intention and agency are. It is attractively historical. The problem for the contemporary novelist—a problem less pressing for the author of a text on the history of codfish or the business practices of Uber—is that daily life, that classic subject and location of the novel, is, much like everyday consciousness, no longer narrative. I mean, it's quite possible that human consciousness was never narrative (Thucydides for one seems to think so, particularly in his writings on pirates), but more and more people want narrative, a) because they want to know how we got here and, b) because they want to know what to do next. As the philosopher Galen Strawson has argued, a preference for diachronic, narrative description of human life predominates in contemporary culture, supported by “a vast chorus of assent . . . from the humanities—literary studies, psychology, anthropology, sociology, philosophy, political theory, religious studies, echoed back by psychotherapy, medicine, law, marketing, design.” As for Strawson, he's happily “transient,” as he puts it, with a fundamentally shifting, episodic self. This position does not, I assume, automatically entail enthusiasm for social media, but there's a sort of formal rhyme I can't help pointing up.
In a way, I wish I lived in a time in which algorithms weren't sowing chaos with respect to democracy and the public sphere, but given what I know of human history (another cherished narrative!), it's likely there'd be some other largely invisible mechanism with a similar function. Meanwhile, as the idea that there is some counterintuitive explanation for the results of the 2016 election burns off and more and more narrativizing reports appear, it's been interesting to observe fiction's attempt to self-correct, to return to its former, if ambiguous, place of cultural relevance. It's scrambling, but in a recognizable direction. This isn't just a matter of markets, of course; it's also personal, creative. Writers are citizens, too, and accordingly hold themselves accountable after the fashion of their times—sometimes presciently. Enter, therefore, what looks to be a resurgence of the social novel.
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