when photography developed, there was a tectonic shift in the visual arts. painting’s role as documenter of vision had been displaced, leading to a crisis over what job painting could still do. this is standard art history summarizing, the advent of impressionism neatly coinciding with the rise of photography, the need for mimetic resemblance having been met thanks to new chemical processes and technology. it is a topic still discussed today, whether painting is obsolete, with the latest wave of technological innovation generally contributing to an overabundance of images, most of them digital, the rest digitally reproduced. yet painting continues.
anxiety over the supposed “death of the novel” is hardly new, nor is it new to procrastinate on novel writing by considering this anxiety. a “job” I have seen ascribed to the novel is in collecting and organizing, via aesthetic principles, information. writing novels in the 19th century and earlier involved amassing sociocultural data descriptive of whatever milieu constitutes the subject of the work. but thanks to the advent of the internet, wikipedia, mass data collection, so on, the idea that the novel is in someway responsible for organizing information might be questioned. I have also seen it said, somewhat bizarrely, that conceptual art broadly speaking took over this job from the novel in the late 20th century.
the function of language is not to communicate, since “communication,” as conceived as the expression or conveyance of privately held thoughts to another’s mind, is impossible, for reasons far to complicated to get into here. sartre, never one to skip a chance to be extremely French, has it that speaking is fundamentally a seduction. he puts it more generally by saying language causes to be experienced. if this is the case, then a writer is someone who deliberately anticipates what experiences their language is likely to elicit, as a chess player anticipates how their moves will be answered. skill or talent then lies in how many moves ahead are considered, in employing tactics that catch off guard. I’m also fond of D&G’s metaphor that language is a synthesizer—in which case a writer in the 21st century must approach their task as lee scratch perry would approach a crate of vinyl, the recording tape, the sampler, and the mixing deck.
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