The Length

To Margaret's post on Turkey about a week ago, I made a comment where I suggested she (or you) might want to read Orhan Pamuk and I recommended Istanbul (his autobiography) and an novel called Snow.

She responded:

Pamuk: his book about Istanbul is fascinating. Though he be a novelist, I find them a bit of a slog...Snow and Red being the ones I struggled with. It reminded me how important deep cultural references can look to outsiders. Ditto "The Time Regulation Machine" by Tanpinar (recommended by the very Western grandson). It's book marked at page 7. Maybe I should try again.

I would agree with her that his novels, at least are a slog.  I went from Snow to The Black Book.  I didn't want them to be a slog and in my case, I looked for reviews that might mention something about their slogginess.  The thing about it is that they are very good prose, but in a way they also feel endless, but without any kind of page turning narrative to keep one on the edge of one's seat.  (Shame on me).

And I found one interesting review (that I can't locate now to link to) that said that what looks to us like slogginess (sorry, I like this new word) is actually "Turkishness".  The writer said that Turkish literature often has lots of side stories and digressions and that people like these. This tendency seems a bit strange to us.  The most sloggy recent American novel  that I can think of is David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest, which was truly infinite, at least as far as I was concerned.  And if I remember, it's infinitude was considered one of the strange things about it.

But our own literature used to be longer in the Turkish sense.  Old novels that I was (at the time) forced to read in school like Tristam Shandy seemed to go on forever, because, it turned out, they did.  Once someone gave me a copy of The Life and Opinions of Tomcat Murr by ETA Hoffman, written in the early 19th century, and I discovered this long book had been abridged in the edition I received because, explained the editor, modern audiences would no longer tolerate its length.

Now the late Ivan Illich suggested that the computer age would cause a revolution in reading similar to the revolution caused by the invention of movable type; similar in the sense that would create a radical change in the way people read.  I have noticed that novels seem to be getting shorter.  In a writing group I sometimes participate in, the younger members (and they are all younger members at this point) all want to write "flash fiction" or "flash poetry".  In our public readings, we are asked to keep things to 800 words.  I once wrote a detective story that was exactly 1,000 words (I called it The 1,000 Word Noir) and was told it was too long to present.  I taught a course in sociology online a about a year ago and found that the students were confused and dismayed that I would write a thousand words or more in responses to their answers to my questions.  I ask younger people what's going on, and I am usually told that we are now in a sort of "age of facts".  I have been told that if one can't communicate the essence of the novel in a summary, no one is going to read it.  Along with this, I have been quite surprised at how little my high school and college age kids have to read.  And, how little they are willing to read.  I try to explain to them that a summary of a book, especially a novel, does no more than spoil the book and that the meat is in the prose.  But they don't believe it.

I throw all of this out there as simply an observation.  People our age read differently than younger people in general.  I blame fucking computers.  (Sorry, but I feel very strongly about this).  But I also think that it is part of the commodification of everything, including time and art.  And I think we are poorer for it.

It is this cultural tendency more than any other that I can think of that makes me afraid for the future.