Some books have moved me more than others - Ernest Hemingway's "The Sun Also Rises" crushed my spirit as a high school sophomore, leaving me pacing my room through frustrated tears. As an eighth-grader, Victor Hugo's "The Hunchback of Notre Dame" shook the "iron chains" of my moral universe with Dom Claude's every lapse into the self-resignation of passion. Even earlier, Madeline L'Engle's "A Wrinkle In Time" series taught me that both love of God and love of science mean sacrifice - a sacrifice that does not lose its value if the person who performs it is weak.
Contrary to my own wishes, however, I no longer read many books for pleasure. I do not have time. Neither do many intelligent, educated Americans who would be prime candidates for pleasure-reading in a slower world. The current pace of political developments, the job market and the academic world demands that each person, no matter his profession, absorb an uncanny amount of information every day.
In this climate, what is becoming of the novel?
In an age of unprecedented literacy, reading for pleasure has become a rare luxury - instead of mulling over the meanings of the latest masterwork at a cafe, people read bytes of information just to keep apace of the movement of their increasingly global societies.
In fact, the very term "masterwork" has become antiquated. Our culture is no longer defined by the oeuvres of a small group of literary giants. Access to information and to publication has been democratized by the increased opening of niche markets and the Internet.
At the same time, the publishing industry has become so competitive that over 99 percent of submitted manuscripts are rejected. Independent bookstores are being pushed out of business by Borders and Barnes and Noble, which, according to Barron's, together command 30 percent of the U.S. market share for books.
When I turn to print's alternative, the Internet, its reigning anarchy bewilders me. Who should I read and when? Everyone is breaking stories; many are producing brilliant commentary. But where is the heart of all of this - where is all the discourse going? What are the defining stories of my generation?
It seems that unless an author can condense her message into a blog or a five-minute interview, her work is probably destined to remain obscure. In fact, I would venture that in the coming generations, the term "author" will increasingly lose meaning as people flood the intellectual marketplace with written contributions - in such a climate, the most a breakthrough "author" will be able to expect is 15 minutes of fame.
This may sound morbid, and in a sense, it is - what we once knew, the ability of the good novel to dominate discourse, seems to be dying. Humanity is in the process of reinventing itself socially, politically and culturally through some of its most radical structural changes to date, and remaining relevant and accessible in the wake of those changes necessitates altering the way people tell stories.
Yet over the next several hundred years, intellectual and social ferment are sure to generate new forms of widely, if not universally, recognized storytelling. After all, people were born to communicate. And the inevitability of an increasingly homogenized global culture, setbacks notwithstanding, will facilitate the sharing of experiences.
Though the novel may one day be seen as a distinctly cultural product, much as we now see epics or medieval passion plays, it will continue to echo through our literary heritage. Its intellectual heirs will grapple with the same questions of meaning the novel once so skillfully addressed.
I take comfort in knowing that human beings will continue to challenge their moral and spiritual assumptions through narrative, even if it takes forms I do not understand - even if, for the time being, I do not know how to participate in the development of that shared narrative form.
Natalie Smolenski '07 is an "author."
