The Death of Literature

It's a long time in coming, you know. Here's Susan Sontag in 1975:

Geoffrey Movius: In one of your recent essays on photography in The New York Review of Books, you write that “no work of imaginative literature can have the same authenticity as a document,” and that there is “a rancorous suspicion in America of anything that seems literary.” Do you think that imaginative literature is on the way out? Is the printed word on the way out?

Susan Sontag: Fiction writers have been made very nervous by a problem of credibility. Many don’t feel comfortable about doing it straight, and try to give fiction the character of nonfiction. A recent example is Philip Roth’s My Life as a Man, a book consisting of three novellas: the first two are purportedly written by the first-person narrator of the third one. That a document of the writer’s own character and experience seems to have more authority than an invented fiction is perhaps more widespread in this country than elsewhere and reflects the triumph of psychological ways of looking at everything. I have friends who tell me that the only books by writers of fiction that really interest them are their letters and diaries.

Despite what a reasonable person might assume after reading that first question, the interview actually turns out to be extremely good.

Comments

[James Street]

There comes a time when you realize that EVERYTHING is fiction, even history.

In fact, war is defined by some people as a violent dispute over what constitutes the truth of history.

While it might not be "true" that George Washington threw a silver dollar over the Potomac River it might not be true that he married Martha Custis for her money either.

It's doubtful that Gargantua was as big as he was portrayed to be by Rabelais, but in a very true sense, he was.

Cervantes was not quite sure about where the name Quixote came from but he said, "it is but of little importance to our tale; it will be enough not to stray a hair's breadth from the truth of telling it."

That's a good enough definition of the truth of fiction, for me.

[kaia]

You'll get farther in life, by properly applying your mind, than you will, by only trying.
When it comes to counting our "luck", it all adds up.
No harder thing to know, than what to hang on to, and what to let go.
Once alive there's no end to it without losing consciousness, hence the ability for distinction.http://www.buy-ffxiv-gil.org/
Regardless, if we're conscious of it, visiting our imagination, or in reflection, existence can only be lived in the present.