NOVELA Y POSTLITERATURA

Abstract

After the proclamation of the death of God by Nietzsche in 1883, it seems a trifle to speak of the death of the novel. Or the death of tragedy, which gave title to one of George Steiner’s essays. Or the death of the author, announced in 1968 by Roland Barthes. As if making the sum of so many deaths, in 1990 Alvin Kernan published his book The Death of Literature.

What is at stake is something fundamental: the survival of literature as a language beyond restrictions of space and calendar; as the “essential word in the time” that the poet Antonio Machado conjured. This dimension of perpetuity is inherent in the literary because it defines its discursive texture, its literariness, by programming, condensing and forming it into an intangible message, enunciated outside of a particular situation, but open at any time for any reader to project his/her own situation and receive the text as a revelation of his/her self.

A writing conceived from the acceptance of its expiration by its author, a ‘fungible’ writing, would immediately stop being literary, and turn into something completely different, mere food for a leisure industry served by a powerful machine. The risk is, therefore, that literature is superseded by something that is not a cure for itself, although it relies on the contribution of those who once were writers and now are nothing but workers of a huge cultural factory of Technopolis.