As a novelist, I’ve often felt a kind of indirect pressure to toe a certain authorial line when it comes to popular culture – an attitude somewhere on a continuum between long-suffering tolerance and outright hostility. And over the past few decades popular culture and digital media have merged to be considered one and the same. The Internet, with its hashtag activism, its soul-withering comments sections, its oiled Kardashians and its Donald Trump Twitter feeds, is the latest all-consuming, bottom-feeding cultural influence that “serious” writers feel obliged to publically eschew, if not denounce.

I can still remember when television was the lowbrow bogeyman we most frequently wrung our hands over, but unlike the imp of television, which sucked us into its screens, the Internet demon possesses the nefarious ability to actively reach out to us. It invades our pockets via iPhones, our ears via earbuds, our minds via the intellectual conduit of keyboards and swipeable screens. Fifty years ago, worried commenters (often speaking from the decreasing-in-cachet world of newspapers and magazines) could not have imagined a social blight worse than the utterly passive engagement of the iconic “couch potato” TV viewer. But now that passivity has been replaced with the interactive engagement of today’s “netizen” (as Internet devotees were once quaintly called) – and somehow this transition, from slack-jawed, screen-gazing viewer to slack-jawed, thumb-swiping web surfer is all the more alarming.

In the face of this rapid cultural shift, many of us in the book trade feel we must remain aloof – but authors, in particular. Aren’t we, after all, the vanguard of what’s known as print culture? And isn’t print the natural enemy of pixels? Who will defend the printed page – good old-fashioned ink on wood pulp – if not us, the weird, obsessive warriors of the written word? Everyone else involved in publishing is simply doing a job, after all – editors, marketers, booksellers. What does it cost these hardworking souls to make the pragmatic leap from old media into new, once all the deckchairs on the Titanic have been thoroughly rearranged? Authors are considered to be a different breed, however. Ours is not a job, but a vocation. We are the captains of the sacred ship, true believers, fully expected – in some corners at least – to go down clinging to our deckchairs.

That is, if you even buy the whole sinking-ship metaphor at all.

Last year, Will Self published a peevishly resigned essay on this very topic called – wait for it – “The Novel Is Dead (This Time It’s for Real).” In it, he writes: “[T]he kind of psyche implicit in the production and consumption of serious novels (which are, after all what serious artists produce) depends on a medium that has inbuilt privacy.”

This is what an artist must be at all times: private and serious. So serious that the word merits two mentions in this quote alone, and is used seven times in the 4,400-word essay. Yet for all its usage, “serious” is never actually defined – Self does not even make the attempt. He takes its meaning as a given. Quite a lot is taken as a given in this essay.

The other quality Self invokes with respect to the novel, a quality that goes just as unquestioned as the adjective “serious,” is what he calls its “cultural primacy.” Self assures us he’s not some wild-eyed Chicken Little, he understands that books themselves – that is, long-form fictions published electronically or as a codex – are in no danger. We have publishing juggernauts like J.K. Rowling’s “kidult boywizardsroman,” as Self calls it, and E.L. James’s “soft sadomasochistic porn fantasy” keeping the form afloat. And his vision is not so apocalyptic as to imagine that “serious” books (there’s that word again) will one day soon cease to be written and read altogether. The heart of the problem, says Self, is “what is … no longer the case is the situation that obtained when I was a young man.”

It might be said that we live in an age where a great many not-young men, in a variety of disciplines, are looking around and making the same complaint. But Self’s particular point is that in the good old days he is describing, and indeed the second half of the past century, “the literary novel was perceived to be the prince of art forms, the cultural capstone and the apogee of creative endeavour.”

This may be true. But he doesn’t clarify: perceived by whom?

I find it difficult to relate to Self’s lament about losing the primacy of the novel as an art form, about the novel being stripped of its exalted status in the culture. The culture he’s describing – a world where right-
thinking people make it their business to seek out the latest acclaimed work of fiction in order to partake of informed, erudite discussions on the topic, and feel appropriately ashamed and left behind if they haven’t – was never a given in my life. In what circles has the novel ever been viewed as, as Self defines it, “the cultural capstone and the apogee of creative endeavour”? In some academic circles I suppose. Various urban, artistic enclaves. But certainly none that I was exposed to as a young person. I grew up desperate to encounter such spaces, had to deliberately seek them out as a young writer and then laboriously set about worming my way into them.

My formative medium was television. And it’s no exaggeration when I say I would never have become a writer without it. That is, I would never have truly grasped that there were people in the world who devoted themselves to writing stories as a vocation if I hadn’t seen them on TV. I would never have known about people who made their living as artists. If I had had access to the Internet back then? It makes me dizzy to think how I might have feasted on the culture, literature, and art that I so craved. But since I grew up in the pre-digital era, very little of it crossed my transom. Such was not my world.

I might add that when I think about today’s version of me – the small-town 14-year-old desolately checking out the same books over and over again from the local, bare-bones library – and hear so-called defenders of the culture bemoan, from their home offices in New York and London, her single most accessible portal to the very culture they exalt – I become completely furious on her behalf.

---

Who Needs Books? by Lynn Coady is due from University of Alberta Press in February