I'm always fascinated by the economics of art. Once you get past oral tradition, the production and consumption of art has almost always been intrinsically tied to its economics, whether those economics are determined by state/religious sponsorship, patronage by wealthy elites, or capitalistic mass market distribution.
I shake my fist at modern literary publishing for its short-sightedness in exchanging long term staying power for short term returns (an inevitable symptom of an overly efficient capitalist system, and one found in far more sectors than art - see Boeing), but then I look at independent online writers enchained by the Patreon model and see how, even with zero barriers between creator and consumer, with no meddling executives filtering or editing what gets written, authors are still at the mercy of the economics of art. Authors must churn out ceaseless deluges of content to maintain a continuous stream of monthly Patreon donations; there is little time for reflection, thought, or careful consideration, while pointless filler is worth money and thus lucrative. Even simply reaching the end of a story is a bad financial decision, so most of these stories never end.
(When researching RoyalRoad prior to posting Cleveland Quixotic, I found countless commentators who described this or that webfic as being a "Patreon trap": Stories where individual chapters keep taunting the promise that there will be narrative development soon, driving up engagement, without ever actually delivering. Another common RoyalRoad review: "Started promising, but nothing has happened in the past 200 chapters.")
No nefarious, top-hatted, mustache-twirling CEO made that happen, it's simply an inevitable outcome of how authors make money within that system. In fact, for all my issues with contemporary publishing, its willingness to dole out generous advances to authors incentivizes authors to more holistically approach their works, rather than pump out content as quickly as possible.
The side effect of this is that basically everyone today trying to write fiction for primarily artistic purposes needs to exist outside the economic system entirely. Meaning, they need to already be rich, or else willing to starve. Even the most lauded literary fiction authors of today, the people winning Pulitzers and Nobels, can rarely support themselves on their fiction alone. They were either born rich, married rich, or make most of their money as a creative fiction lecturer at some university's MFA program. This leads to "literary" fiction increasingly being generated from the narrow, myopic viewpoint of the wealthy, making it increasingly of little interest to most of the population.
When the economics of art shifted from noble patronage at the end of the Renaissance toward the emerging capitalistic/mercantile mass market in the 1700s and especially the industrialized 1800s, the literary movement of "realism" was birthed. While not without literary antecedent (Cervantes, Austen), this mostly novel new form of literature eschewed poetic form for prose and sought to depict the entire spectrum of contemporary society from the richest to the poorest. Flaubert, Dickens, Dostoyevsky, though concerned with topics of particular interest to their respective national backgrounds, all followed this basic precept. And the precept made sense, because for the first time most of the population was literate, not simply the elite, and the emerging middle class was willing to pay for literary entertainment. Realism was a reflection of the broadening economic basis for literature.
The internet has accelerated the mixing of people from all variety of not merely economic but also ethnic, religious, national, cultural, etc. backgrounds. In the 80s and 90s, when these trends began, there once again seemed to be a novel form emerging to reflect this new culture, the so-called hysterical realist novel. Big, sprawling works by authors like Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, Salman Rushdie, Zadie Smith, and David Foster Wallace that assaulted readers with a half-crazed melange of times, places, and peoples. In James Wood's essay Human, All Too Inhuman, which pejoratively coined the phrase, he describes these novels thus:
It is now customary to read 700-page novels, to spend hours and hours within a fictional world, without experiencing anything really affecting, sublime, or beautiful. Which is why one never wants to re-read a book such as The Ground Beneath Her Feet, while Madame Bovary is faded by our repressings. This is partly because some of the more impressive novelistic minds of our age do not think that language and the representation of consciousness are the novelist’s quarries any more. Information has become the new character.
Information has become the new character. Isn't that line the perfect encapsulation of the internet era? Wood reads today like the reactionary he is, an old fogey upset today's newfangled material isn't like his beloved Madame Bovary (a novel written in 1857), but somehow his view has won out, at least in conventional publishing. Zadie Smith, who his essay is directly about, felt the need to respond to it directly by distancing herself from the other authors listed. Pynchon and DeLillo were already old authors near the end of their careers, Rushdie had a fatwa on him, and Wallace committed suicide. Nowadays the gigantic hysterical realist novels are few and far between in favor of smaller, MFA-style peeks into the lives of the rich (or the rich's frequent, guilt-ridden attempts to imagine what it must be like to be poor and non-white).
What happened? Where is the novel in the age of the internet? What works are grappling with the enormity of the era? Where are the works that reflect the immensity of modern society, its cross-cultural breadth?
It must boil down to the economics. Perhaps the saturation of information brought on by the internet has led to this. Not simply the popular craving for constant content, which spurs even the independent Patreon novel to a bizarre reader-writer cross-exploitation (the creator must slave away constantly to create, while the readers receive only junk). Perhaps the saturation of information has become too much, and rather than become unified, the internet era has led to a paradoxical fragmentation of niche-seekers to hole up with small groups of likeminded peers. The works that gain mass appeal today are not works that seek to grapple with the mass of humanity within the world, but works that strip away all humanity to produce the most watered-down, formulaic, and generic works: MCU movies, if you will, something that can play "in both America and China."
I don't have the answer. These are simply some thoughts I had after reading this post. I deeply apologize to the person I reblogged, because I feel as though my response has veered wildly off their original topic. Hopefully, they might still find this avenue of interest.
