Hey guys! Earlier today I was reading areally interesting interview with Jarett Kobek, an author who's got a book titled I HATE THE INTERNET forthcoming, earlier today (link: http://lithub.com/the-novel-is-dead-celebrity-is-a-disease-and-more/). The whole interview was very thought-provoking, but one section of it in particular stood out to me:
Thoughts? Personally, I would have classed Kobek's own writing as experimental literary fiction, so I was surprised by this take. I do think there's an element of truth, there, though -- there's a tendency to bury morality in literary circles, to avoid being didactic or ideological as if those two things are the plague, that might sometimes decontextualise struggle and render it meaningless.
One of the things that I Hate the Internet tries to deal with—and now I’m going to sound like Alex Jones—is that much of what we consider literary fiction was constructed as part of the CIA’s Operation Mockingbird. The Writer’s Workshop at Iowa was funded by the CIA. The CIA engineered Dr. Zhivago’s Nobel Prize. The Paris Review was funded by the CIA. It goes on and on.The purpose of this funding was to try and create cultural artifacts celebratory of a very specific American lifestyle. In effect, propaganda. You could have characters who were tormented by their existential drama of living on Revolutionary Road, but the literature must avoid anyone thinking about the materialist circumstances which produced that drama. Basically, your characters could have mental breakdowns on hardwood floors but couldn’t ever question the complex social structures of labor and exploitation and environmental damage that produce hardwood floors. In the good novel, every medical abortion is ideology free!
The good novel was a weapon of the Cold War. Literary fiction is the novel of the state. Literary fiction is statist literature. But like half of the characters in John le Carre, it outlived its conflict and the iteration of the state it served.
Fifty years later and literary fiction is a genre that’s not only dying but inherently exclusive of diversity. By itself this is not a big deal—lots of forms and genres die out. When was the last time you jousted?
The problem arrives when you realize how much the genre has colonized the entire idea of serious fiction while being hopelessly unable to address the challenges of our present moment.
How many literary novels have you read which deal with police brutality? How many serious novels published by one of the majors in 2015 were written by someone who was working class? How many literary novels have you read not by an Islamophobic Frenchman which address something as simple as mass tourism? Basically, how many literary novels not in translation have you read that deal with anything except the melodrama of meaningless sex and death made meaningful only by the social class in which it occurs? That goes in there, that goes in there, that goes in there. Now pay the mortgage.
Thoughts? Personally, I would have classed Kobek's own writing as experimental literary fiction, so I was surprised by this take. I do think there's an element of truth, there, though -- there's a tendency to bury morality in literary circles, to avoid being didactic or ideological as if those two things are the plague, that might sometimes decontextualise struggle and render it meaningless.
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