from Vila-Matas's Dublinesque:
“He dreams of the day when the
spell of the best-seller will be broken, making way for the reappearance of the
talented reader, and for the terms of the moral contract between author and
audience to be reconsidered. He dreams of the day when literary publishers can
breathe again, those who live for an active reader, for a reader open enough to
buy a book and allow a conscience radically different from his own to appear in
his mind. He believes that if talent is demanded of a literary publisher or
writer, it must also be demanded of a reader. Because we mustn’t deceive
ourselves: on the journey of reading we often travel through difficult terrains
that demand a capacity for intelligent emotion, a desire to understand the
other, and to approach a language distinct from the one of our daily tyrannies.
… The same skills needed for writing are needed for reading. Writers fails
readers, but it also happens the other way around and readers fail writers when
all they ask of them is confirmation that the world is how they see it.” (New Directions, 2012; p.51)
Ben Okri, speaking at the World
Writers Festival in Edinburgh, 2012:
“My brothers and sisters in
Africa, we feel that our stories have still not been told. We feel that the
form of the telling of those stories has not yet been found and articulated and
evolved in a way that, as it were, can be appreciated round the world. We feel
that the novel is still very young. … I seem to be hearing about the exhaustion
of the novel. I find that very puzzling, personally. Because I think that the
novel is only 350 years old. It’s not as old as painting. It’s not as old as
sculpting. And as an art form itself, I think maybe the real future of the
novel lies with the fact that we, the writers, have not issued the fundamental
challenge to the perception of the novel as a form. What do I mean by that? In
almost all the other forms—in music, and certainly in art—the narrative
tradition, the naturalistic tradition of painting, has been superseded by
abstract, by many other kinds of media. And I think that we have accepted too
much, as it were, the definition of the limitation of the novel. I think the
real challenge is to change the form of the novel in terms of how we read it. I
still think that we accept too much the beginning, middle, end. Even where we have experiments, we have not
managed, as it were, the kind of Duchampian change of game. I feel that the
novel is not dead yet. I just feel like I’m at a funeral here, really. I feel
like speaker after speaker has given a kind of oration to the end of the novel,
as if the novel has yet begun to express all the different possibles, all the
different ways in which reality can be expressed. I don’t think that reality is
as homogenous as that. I think each person carries within them a special way of
seeing and perceiving reality, and I think that’s what the novel does. The
novel constantly challenges us to say that the way that we’re told that the
world is, is not the way the world is. The world is much more mysterious than
that, is much more elusive than that, and is much more magical and more challenging,
and possibly even more fragmented. I just would like to propose that we talk
about where we can go as novelists, where we can go as writers, and whether we
accept the fact that we are really totally determined by the marketplace, which
I don’t accept.”
(Okri's remarks are transcribed from the dazzling 2-hour discussion on "the Future of the Novel," involving 50 authors from all over the world, which can be viewed in its entirety here.)
