This is perhaps the most sweeping statement I’ve come across from Dan Green on the future of the novel, and just wanted to make a note of it someplace.
In a word, the idea is, that there is a historical progression at work here: that at some point the Epic Poem spun off its narrative element into the novel and now the novel is spinning off its narrative element into film and television so that what we can expect is that in the future the novel (which I equate with what he calls more precisely prose fiction) will become more and more language-interested or poetry-like. This comes from his review of Sara Greenslit’s The Blue of Her Body:
I believe that the future of prose fiction will only lead it closer to a kind of rapprochement with poetry, where the novel began as a splintering-off of narrative from the storytelling mode of epic poetry (just as drama appropriated the “dramatic” in dramatic poetry). Now that film and television (as well as what is called “creative nonfiction”) have in turn taken over the storytelling function, at least for the mass audience, fiction’s continued relevance, aside from those novels seemingly written with the film adaptation in mind, will perhaps require that it return to its origins in the poet’s attention to language per se. Experimental fiction almost always points us in this direction, as challenges to the hegemony of conventional storytelling usually entail a reinvigoration of the resources of language, highlighting the capacity of prose fiction to do something else. The Blue of Her Body is an admirable addition to this effort.
I think this is a neat idea, which I hope I haven’t overstated. Something that occurs to me is that, on top of a narrative and “language” element, the novel has an essayistic element, and that this could also play into the novel’s future importantly (Milan Kundera most leaps to mind as an author blending fiction and essays, perhaps also W.G. Sebald) — though maybe that’s where “creative nonfiction” comes in (i.e., that’s where the novel’s essayistic component has spun off to.)
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