Fiction is Dead

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Fiction is dead. Biographies, non-fiction, histories, travel essays, and diet books have replaced the privileged position of the novel in our daily lives. Part of the bourgeois shift toward realism, the novel, unlike the classical romance or tragedy, did not show life as it should be but rather as it is. Abandoning the classical tradition of forming language according to internal poetic rules, novelists instead treated it as a transparent window onto real life, following its own rules and codes. But the novel’s transparency was artificially constructed, a window that nevertheless framed reality to give it a distinct viewpoint. Like a modernist curtain-wall, the novel is an artifice that puts modernity into an easily comprehensible form for the bourgeois subject.

Today reality replaces fiction. The television sitcom and one-hour drama have given way to 24-hour news, sports, game shows, reality television, celebrity biographies, cooking shows, and an endless stream of pundits.

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