What is happening to literature?

There is a tendency to treat every change in habits as evidence of cultural decline. People can’t concentrate. Television, then phones, have destroyed our attention spans. Fewer people will sit through even a 100-page novel.

But literature has long slanted towards succinctness, from Zola to Camus. I beg to differ: we have outgrown the purple prose of the past because people today demand more of letters, as we have with everything else.

What is literature, today?

An example is that reference works such as dictionaries have largely migrated to searchable databases, websites and apps. If taxonomic writing has changed so radically, how would imaginative literature be untouched?

Last year, The Times described an “incredible shrinking novel,” noting the growing visibility of books under 250 pages. Meanwhile, The Irish Times recently published a guide to short books specifically for readers trying to recover the habit of reading in an age of diminished attention. I do not think we are in an age of diminished attention, but that literature has yet to rise to its next level.

And books should be long again, someday. For a novel to be 500 pages today, it must say more, and be prescient, in the same amount of space. We have all become very sophisticated in a highly saturated media landscape, and so our bar for what we are willing to give our precious time to has risen.

What is the point of literature, today?

The above problems have not created the literature we need, in my opinion. There are two different responses to the same crisis of relevance: formally, books have become shorter and more accessible; ideologically, literature has been retrofitted for activism and status enhancement—as if putting a certain quantity of words to an idea, to have ‘written a book,’ charges it with credibility.

An Atlantic essay recently criticized novels in which the author’s political opinions overwhelm the story, producing flat characters shaped more by ideology than psychology. The New Yorker has described a comparable “new literalism” in contemporary culture, marked by relentless signposting of meaning and intent. All of this has tainted the meaning of literature, an art form that, above all, should represent freedom of thought.

What was the point of literature during the belle-lettres period?

During the belle-lettres tradition, the point of literature was primarily to make something beautiful, pleasurable and perceptive out of language: to capture human experience, emotion and character through style and imagination. It did not necessarily need to teach a moral, advance a political cause or have a practical use; as Gautier argued, art could be “its own end and aim.” Sartre, of course, disagreed, but we’ve followed his advice for long enough.

Why save literature at all?

Words remain the most effective way to communicate very complicated things with a unique specificity—a grammar—to which films, plays and music cannot be compared. Discursive literature can introduce new ideas, follow them through their contradictions, and fundamentally challenge how we understand ourselves, other people and the world around us. If we let them. And if neither the format nor the subculture of literature bogs us down.

We must let go of what we think literature is for the sake of what it needs to become.