Did the novel die with Dickens?

And is hip hop the real modern poetry?

Two interesting articles about the common reader this week. One on the death of the novel. The other on the resurrection of poetry.

First, Susannah Goldsbrough in The Times this morning.

Perhaps it’s because the novel died with Dickens. A bit dramatic, I know, and also on a literal level quite demonstrably untrue, but hear me out. The Victorian era produced a stupidly large amount of phenomenally good fiction, thanks to one of those bits of alchemy that pop up throughout history between very specific economic conditions and lightning strikes of individual creative brilliance.

1870 seems a little early. What about Middlemarch? Or Thomas Hardy? Still, I was intrigued because Elizabeth Jenkins once said the same thing. In Henry Fielding (1947), she wrote:

The rise and flowering of the English novel as a great work of imagination has been rapid and short-lived. The form was unknown at the beginning of the eighteenth-century, yet the middle of the century saw the publication of Clarissa (1748), Tom Jones (1749) and Tristram Shandy (1760). The art was practised with consummate brilliance during the early and middle years of the nineteenth century, and most people would agree the period of genius was over with the death of Dickens.

Over in the New York Times, John McWhorter argues that hip hop is the revival of American poetry.

A true American poetry today must be articulate and vernacular.

The modern novel, it seems to me, is often not very vernacular. In the rush away from self-consciously literary language, modern writers have created a very artificial tone of voice that never really sounds real. Novels like Pachinko and On Beauty stand out because they largely don’t use that tone. Literature lost its high register, but it still often sounds like literature. Similarly, McWhorter says hip hop took over from formal poetry because of the insular world of what you might call MFA-writing.

But this isn’t a good enough explanation. Doesn’t Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell match anything Dickens wrote? What about Helen DeWitt? Borges? Murakmai? Have you tried to read most of the Victorian fiction not still in print? Perhaps we have just as much good fiction as we can ever expect?

Today talent gets pulled in other directions. We left the Gutenberg Parenthesis. We have Sally Rooney, but books are not the only game in town. Where books are still popular, non-fiction has taken over the cultural prominence that novels once had. We have, as the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries did, a flourishing of essays.

None of this makes me think Jenkins was right about the “decay of the imagination”. Or that Goldsbrough is right about phones distracting us. The imagination runs in many different channels and it’s not always easy for us to appreciate them. (How much hip hop do you listen to?)

Great imaginative writing exists today. Lydia Davis is a genius. But she’s never going to be as popular as Dickens in the internet age. The novel didn’t die, the world around it just got bigger and more varied.

We are spoiled for choice.

Susannah Clarke