Shortly after posting the novelists poll, I came across this: Mark Booth's anticipation that the novel is on the way out as a literary form. All the more reason to fight back the threatening tide. Except I don't buy his argument. The instrument of the novel's demise is, as you may have guessed, the internet. I don't presume to be able say where the internet will take us, all in all, but Booth's hypothesis depends on a very particular prediction about the effect of the internet on individual consciousness. '[T]he importance of the great novels of the 18th and 19th centuries', he says, 'is the role they played in forging the sense we all have - and take for granted - that we have an interior narrative'. The internet's way of killing off the novel will be by closing down this inner space:
Because we are all plugging ourselves into one great electronic mind, we will gradually lose the sense of each being shut off in a private mental space... Our mental space will be out there and... everyone else will have access to it.Some reasons to doubt this: (1) People don't expose their entire inner selves on the internet, but only as much as they want to. (2) The number of those who speak there anonymously indicates some continuing reluctance to 'let it all hang out'. (3) There remain within the culture strong countervailing tendencies to the notion of one great collective mind, including the sense that we all have a right to our own histories. (4) The preservation of individual freedom presupposes that each of us has both an outward and an inner space of our own, and therefore the space for an interior narrative.