Despite what it may seem, the novel is a fairly recent form of literature. Indeed, the first novels, among Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and Walter Scott’s historical fiction, emerged as a distinct form most prominently around the early 18th century. With the mechanisation of the printing press, novels quickly became the face of literature and could effectively access readers from all classes. Ever since, they have become an intrinsic part of, not only the cultural and social, but the human fabric, as they continue to cater to our intrinsic and ancestral need for storytelling.
With the rise of next-level technology – notably the all-consuming web of social media and, now, AI – the novel has assuredly metamorphosed and, with it, this very fabric of fables. But is it merely a question of change, or of extinction?
Within minutes of scrolling through “BookTok” it often feels easy to agree with the latter. You start to recognise the same copy-and-paste piles of books, stories, and characters, monthly reading counts that uncannily flash in the hundreds, and everything seems to churn around that great, big engine of the steamy, forbidden, college romance (TM). The novel, once a thing charged with versatility, scope, and grip, now seems to have boiled down into a prototype that only reflects, rather than converses with, itself. Six million years into human existence, the novelist admittedly can no longer conjure entirely original and monolithic narratives and experiences.
Yet, the duty of storytelling doesn’t lie in uniqueness, but in authenticity, and that, perhaps, with beeps and whistles, is ebbing away into and within the cogs of capitalism. Far from adopting a nostalgist or highbrow take, the culprit – if there is to be one – is not the cheesy storyline that follows lovers through the trials and tribulations of life, which has comforted readers for millennia. It is the near-artificial recreation and exploitation of it which toes the line between comfort and conditioning.
At the risk of being alarmist, the canon is no longer safe either. Not only do readers smugly admit to using ChatGPT to “modernise” Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment – trading a 700+ page study on the seven heads of guilt with a fifty-word paragraph – but they have replaced the act of reading, say, Jane Austen, with the shimmering silhouette of “girl who reads Jane Austen.” If a novel was read, but no one was around to tab every other page and post it to a non-specific pop ballad, did anyone truly read it?
Believe it or not, I have great faith in the future of the novel. While the semi-misanthropic and scandalised stance against the absurdity of TikTok and its corruption of innate, universal pleasures – such as the novel – is certainly a valid and comforting monologue, I appreciate that social media does not offer an accurate sample of real audiences. The indignation for the hypothesised loss of the novel – and any similarly beloved markers of cultural capital – is a narrative as rehearsed and recurring as any other. The wheel of literature, meanwhile, churns on.
Illustration by Anna O’Gara @ansoctopus