The Future of the Novel: A Synoptic Account of Prof. Sukhbhir Singh's Talk by Ms. Sumitra Jaiswal

QLC Member and Assistant Professor Ms Sumitra Jaiswal recently attended 

a talk on "The Future of the Novel" organised by the Osmania University English Forum, Seminar Hall, Arts College, January 29 2016

Science has a future because there is a lot to discover and invent. Politics has a future as a lot has to be done for humanity. Medicine too has a future in the wake of newer diseases. But the future of literature is possibly bleak.

Let’s leave aside the novel. In a world growing increasingly commercial, materialistic, scientific, and nihilistic, no one has the time and inclination to sit down for a while and devote attention to a literary text. Earlier people listened to good music, sang popular folk or film songs, read novels, stories, poems and plays to pass time. They read for sheer pleasure, remembered lines, and frequently quoted them to enliven any regular day. They lived a literary, creative, imaginative life which inspired them to abide by certain good morals, social ethics, and healthy manners. The writer’s dream came true and the purpose of his/her creative endeavor was fulfilled.

But now gone are those days, those people, and writers who inspired, agitated, stimulated and succeeded in making a healthy contribution to their readers’ life. We no longer hear lofty orations …The writer now is at a cross road and the poor reader is utterly bewildered. There is a sharp decline in the quality and the clientele of literature. Literary creativity is in doldrums and its future is dark. Where are those great and lofty orations now?

But I (the speaker) personally am not totally pessimistic about the future of literature. Even though literature has not a promising future, some of its branches will act as saving grace for the continuation of creativity. What I mean is that Drama is innate to human psyche and poetry too is implicit in the human psyche. Both these art forms have continued from time immemorial in folk and other forms before taking verbal shapes. They are germane to human nature, mind, soul, and sensibility. But fiction is not, at least not so deeply embedded in the human self as the other two.

So the future of the novel remains doubtful, uncertain and more at risk than other literary genres.

Novel is not only a new genre relatively but also the most protean one. It has over the years exhibited a remarkable capacity to metamorphose into multiple subgenres. On one hand, this quality has gone immensely in favor of popularizing the novel among larger sections of people; on the other, it has considerably weakened in strength and substance. Following its inception in the 17^th and 18^th centuries by Swift, Bunyan, Defoe, Fielding, and Aphra Behn, it has undergone several forms and functions such as Realistic, Historical, Gothic, Science, Detective, Mystery, Fantasy, Psychological, Picaresque, Western,  Buildungsroman, graphic novel, and last but not the least e-novel. By now its tribe has further multiplied into myriad other forms.

I will briefly enumerate upon some of them:

Modern novel, has presented a negative image of man. Man is of course not what he was thought a century or two ago. But he is something. What is he? The contemporary novelist should find an answer to this question.

The greater virtues and heroic qualities are only buried and lost. They are very much there lying dormant beneath the feverish drama of today’s life.

Earlier, novelists persistently probed deep into the subterraneous regions of the lonely self to lay bare the primal and exclusive mysteries of human nature. Due to the shrinkage of moral space in today’s world, common man has suffered an unusual suppression of his primal essence. But, it has not completely been eliminated: “This essence reveals and then conceals itself. When it goes away it leaves us again in doubt. But our connection remains with the depths from which these glimpses come.”

These “glimpses” (Proust’s “true impressions” and Joyce’s “epiphanies”) need to be captured and turned into an inextinguishable glow in art for the moral enlightenment of man on the street: Under the debris of these reductive systems, lie the unfettering essences untainted by man made laws and legislations.

With the help of his art, imagery, style and “serenity of form,” artist should penetrate below the rubble to search for the underlying and unidentified facts of life; he should pierce beyond “what pride, passion, intelligence, and habit and erect on all sides—the seeming realities of this world. There is another reality, the genuine one, which we lose sight of. This other reality is always sending us hints, which, without art, we can’t receive.” A passionate and perceptive writer records these hints to enter himself and his readers into the “quiet zone” of aesthetic bliss; he attempts “to describe the pleasure that comes from recognition or rediscovery of certain essences permanently associated with human life”.

True artists do have a soul; they are all mutually connected by their common appeal to it: “When you open a novel—and I mean of course the real thing—you enter into a state of intimacy with its writer. You hear a voice or, more significantly, an individual tone under the words. This tone you, the reader, will indentify not so much by a name, the name of the author, as by a distinct and unique human quality. It seems to issue from the bosom, from a place beneath the breastbone. It is more musical than verbal, and it is the characteristic signature of a person, of a soul.” This unambiguously proves that some artists are still “stuck” with “what is left of the soul and its mysteries.”  

Once the novelist has negotiated all the afore mentioned risks to his creative art, it is then the reader’s  duty to wade through the literary wilderness and wisely pick up those serious and artful novels that move us to contemplate on our planet, its inhabitants and bring us closer to the truth of our existence.