Sunday, June 05, 2011

Now and Then

Three cheers for Graham Swift for tackling, and indeed attacking, the current notion of the 'contemporary novel' in yesterday's Guardian. It's an impossibility, he says: novels often take too long to write to be entirely 'contemporary', and are written in reflection rather than in the white heat of contemporaneous reportage. He says something I've been thinking about for a while: that the novels by Dickens and Tolstoy which we may now take to have been 'of their time' were in fact set in an earlier period than the time of writing. Crucially, he says, the true subject of novels is the passage of time, which requires a wider and more reflective historical scope than a concentration on the 'now'.

Commenters on the piece taking issue with him seem to be missing the point that the concept of 'nowness'  he's attacking - ie simply that of the period in which a novel is set - stems from our current culture; it's not his own definition of 'nowness' and he's at pains to point out that novels have their own, more valuable, kind of 'nowness'.

It's an important point: that current obsession with contemporaneity puts pressure on novelists (and publishers), I feel: it appears to be marketing gold to be able to say that a novel is a gauge of current society.

Though on the other hand, there's Simon Reynolds contending that we're just wallowing in nostalgia now...

8 comments:

Sue Guiney said...

I do agree with Swift, and have long believed that "time" is always the core essence of a novel. Now that I'm onto my 3rd one, it is still true for me. Although this wip is firmly set in a recent "now" it unveils whatever it does unveil of its characters over a sense of time, an extended now, if you will. Know what I mean?

Elizabeth Baines said...

I certainly do, Sue.

Vanessa Gebbie said...

It's beyond me - how does a writer let the present work on them enough for a meaningful theme to emerge, sink in, and rise up later as fiction - all of which takes time? Danger is surely that rushing at telling a contemporary story might mirror (maybe unwittingly) the fleetingness and shallowness of 'contemporary' life?

Elizabeth Baines said...

Strongly agree, V, a great danger.

Adrian Slatcher said...

I agree about the "passing of time". I think its why my generation (I'm 44) hasn't really written many defining books about the generation - life happens slower in some ways (people get married later, taking longer in their careers etc.) than they did in the past (except we now have Cameron, Clegg and Ed Milliband! Maybe we should write a book about their rise...) However I'm always puzzled about the reluctance about writing about the "now", it seems, particularly given how fast technology changes, that its about observing the now, and writing it down honestly. The "meaning" if you like, will come out afterwards. Better that than the anachronisms that seem to be so present in alot of nearly-now novels and in recent-past TV series. And perhaps the "fleetingness and shallowness" of contemporary life is in itself a subject? That said, books that try too hard in that direction often read very dated very quickly - so its definitely a balance. Time gives perspective after all - and we don't think of "Middlemarch" as the historical novel that it was at the time!

Mark Illis said...

Andrew Miller's been writing about the same thing. He says history is a 'rattle-bag of wonderful stories' and that historical fiction inevitably suggests contemporary parallels. I agree. There's a snobbishness about historical fiction I think - as there is about all genre fiction - which makes it too easy for some people to dismiss.

Elizabeth Baines said...

Interestingly enough, Mark, I just had a reading group discussion of Andrew Miller's Ingenious Pain in which someone objected to historical novels:
http://elizabethbaines.blogspot.com/2011/06/reading-group-ingenious-pain-by-andrew.html

Mark Illis said...

Synchronicity! I agree with your comments about Ingenious Pain too. Enjoyed it very much, but can't remember a thing about it beyond it's central idea. (Mind you, that's true of a lot of what I read these days ...)