W(h)ither the Novel?

Inasmuch as concepts, including the concepts Fiction and Necessity, are more or less necessary fictions, fiction is more or less necessary. Butterf_ies exist in our imagination, along with Existence, Imagination, and the rest. Archimedeses, we lever reality by conceiving ourselves apart from its other things, them from one another, the whole from unreality. Thus Art is as natural an artifice as Nature; the truth of fiction is that fact is fantasy; the made-up story is a model of the world.

Yet the empire of the novel, vaster once than those combined of France and England, is shrunk now to a Luxembourg, a San Marino! Its popular base usurped, fiction has become a pleasure for special tastes, like poetry, archery, church-going. What is wanted to restore its ancient dominion is nothing less than a revolution; indeed, the Revolution is waiting in the wings, the 2nd Revolution, and will not stay for the Bicentennial of the 1st . . .

--John Barth, LETTERS (1979), 33.

And an updated take, found while Googling about for something David Foster Wallace says somewhere about serious literature having always been "in trouble":

And I'm not saying that television is vulgar and dumb because the people who compose the Audience are vulgar and dumb. Television is the way it is simply because people tend to be extremely similar in their vulgar and prurient and dumb interests and wildly different in their refined and aesthetic and noble interests.

--Wallace, "E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction," in A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments

Wallace and Barth, while agreeing here on the cultural ghettoizing of the novel, don't agree on what the contemporary novelist's response--that is, his/her approach--should be to this circumstance. Each, though, argues in his own way that merely replicating contemporary culture and its responses to itself is at least an aesthetic dead-end, if not a moral one as well (Wallace's comments on irony in "E Unibus Pluram" are especially instructive on this point). Without this post's turning into a disquisition on how some recent writers have (or have not) risen to this challenge, I'll content myself for now with encouraging my reader(s) to think on what they've read recently and how what they've read can be seen as a response (or a surrender) to our particular cultural moment.

Supplemental readings: a summary of Barth's essay "The Literature of Exhaustion," here, another summary of that essay in conjunction with its later companion essay, "The Literature of Replenshment," and the transcript of Wallace's 2005 Kenyon College commencement address.