Interview with Michael Joyce (8/10)

Where do you think the novel form is these days/where is it going? (In Remedia: A Picaresque the technology, among other things, actually progresses.)

Yow. The novel has been accounted dead so long that it lived through the time that zombie novel trended, went viral, and returned to stalking the earth. I’ve lived through the time that we hypertextualists were being told in The New York Times by E. Annie Proulx that “Nobody is going to sit down and read a novel on a twitchy little screen. Ever.” to when Simon and Schuster has (an admittedly 37-second) online trailer and Kindle version of her Barkskins. I watched with unalloyed joy as the (second-wave) Nouvelle Vague of what the French called autofiction swept over what used to be neatly called (and categorized) as “creative non-fiction” and the French word lost the life vest of its italics in the process. Anent the latter, I like the distinction Joanna Biggs made in reviewing my colleague Amitava Kumar’s Immigrant, Montana in The New Yorker suggesting that there are “two main tendencies in novels that fall between genres: in Lerneresque and Hetian ‘autofiction,’ the book most often turns in to the self; in the Sebaldian and Colesque nonfiction novel, that turn is frequently toward the world.” Remedia, while not an autofiction (although I know from you that Johanna Drucker called it a memoir in the first draft of her blurb) wants, in the mode of advaita, to have it both ways.

All of which is to suggest that the novel seems still happily (if twitchily or bewitchedly) as betwixt and between as it was from the start, whether you account that as The Tale of Genji, Don Quixote, the very English Le Morte d’Arthur, Robinson Crusoe, or Pamela. And so, if as some say may soon come to be, AI’s write all new novels and we (or they) read them in AR or VR, it is still the case as it was in 1967 when Italo Calvino wrote in “Cybernetics and Ghosts” that “Writers… are already writing machines, at least they are when all goes well” and so “once we have dismantled and reassembled the process of literary composition, the decisive moment of literary life will be that of reading.”