My fight to save the novel from ‘progressive’ publishers

When Miguel de Cervantes published Don Quixote in two parts in 1605 and 1615, the modern novel was born. One of its defining features was the autonomous individual as the heart of the story. Through printed words on a page, the reader could do something miraculous: not only see life through the eyes of protagonist Sancho Panza, but also experience his consciousness clash with the world around him.

This friction is the source of the novel’s humour and pathos. Most importantly, it established a framework for novels that followed: the characters’ subjective viewpoints, at odds with their surrounding world, serve as the engine of the novel. Readers became godlike in their omniscience, experiencing the variety of human consciousness and perception. Don Quixote was a massive success, quickly making its way to the Spanish colonies in the Americas after its publication in Madrid.

When the novel emerged as a dominant literary art form 100 years later, it coincided with the rise of individualism. In The Rise of the Novel (1957), Ian Watt called it ‘the form of literature which most fully reflects this individualist and innovating reorientation’. While earlier forms of literature tended to conform to tradition, the modern novel had a new focus: ‘Truth to individual experience – individual experience which is always unique and therefore new.’

The novel became the most individualistic art form that had ever existed. In a story told across hundreds of pages, novels delved into the intricacies of human beings and celebrated variety, contrast and friction. The writer had free rein to build differing characters with depth and nuance. A reader opened a novel to be surprised by the world the author had crafted. The origin of the word novel honours this, derived from the Latin novus (‘new’). The word entered English from novella in Italian, meaning a short tale in prose, or ‘new story’.

What happens to a novel when its newness and its individualism are compromised? What happens when it becomes a tool that serves an external agenda or collective expectations?

Oscar Wilde’s anti-authoritarian essay ‘The Soul of Man Under Socialism’ (1891), written under mounting artistic and aesthetic pressures in late-Victorian Britain, described the loss of individualism and artistic autonomy as a death blow to all forms of art, including novels:

‘The moment [the spectator] seeks to exercise authority he becomes the avowed enemy of art and of himself… Popular authority and the recognition of popular authority are fatal… A true artist takes no notice whatever of the public. The public are to him non-existent. He has no poppied or honeyed cakes through which to give the monster sleep or sustenance.’

Ten years ago, the monster Wilde described started looming larger, operating in darker, more insidious ways. It used two methods to strangle the modern novel as an art form: ideology and technology.

In 2016, the ideological takeover of literary publishing accelerated, with gatekeepers making social justice their top priority after the shock of Donald Trump’s first election win. Virtually overnight, they updated their wish lists and required novelists to conform to a set of new mandates, ranking and selecting books according to identity categories and alignment with progressive themes. Manuscripts that did not meet these rigid criteria were sidelined. Unproven novelists without a large, loyal following were powerless to fight this, losing their artistic autonomy completely. The choice was stark: write novels that reinforce the approved narrative, or remain unpublished.

As a ‘Big Five’ published novelist, I attempted to sell my second novel in this brave new world. My publisher expressed disappointment that, ‘given the political and social climate’, the novel was not ‘a more gimlet-eyed treatment of gender relations’. As I searched for a new literary agent, the dozens I corresponded with echoed the same sentiments. My apolitical novel about tail-end Gen Xers coming of age against the cataclysmic backdrop of the 11 September World Trade Centre attacks, and the final disappearance of offline life, wasn’t ‘urgent’ or ‘relevant’. The demographics of my characters were troublingly ‘homogenous’. My nuanced male characters bore no resemblance to the two-dimensional villains I encountered when reading new fiction. My novel did not cater to Gen Z ‘sensitivities’. I was told my characters would be perceived as ‘monstrous’ and ‘trigger’ younger generations that could not comprehend their behaviour following the tragedy of 9/11.

At the same time, in 2016, algorithmic feeds became the default on social-media platforms, turning them into addictive echo chambers. Sucking users into their vortex for hours a day, they trained people to reject anything – including art – that did not align with their outlook. As publishing gatekeepers imposed their uniform ideology on novels, insisting a subset of people should be able to ‘see themselves’ in fiction, the algorithms accelerated the demand for uniformity. Instead of serving as portals, novels began to act like increasingly narrow mirrors.

The novelty and variety that gave novels their name – making them a powerful and enduring art form for centuries – are vanishing at an alarming rate, even at the prose level. While publishers employ sensitivity readers who dull language to ensure readers are not offended, they are also requesting shorter and simpler sentences that cater to people’s deteriorating attention spans.

Agents and editors make hefty social-media followings a top criterion for book deals, incentivising writers to be performative instead of soulful. The net result is a conveyor belt of more accessible and predictable content – how many ‘tradwife’ takedowns must we be subjected to? – that might as well be generated by AI.

At the hands of ideology and technology, the purpose of the modern novel is no longer to provide originality and illumination – the ‘axe for the frozen sea within us’, as Kafka described it. Novels have become a means to an end, serving a collective instead of the individual. Oscar Wilde is no doubt turning in his grave. In a letter to a reader in 1891, he wrote: ‘Art is useless because its aim is simply to create a mood. It is not meant to instruct, or to influence action in any way… If the contemplation of a work of art is followed by activity of any kind, the work is either of a very second-rate order, or the spectator has failed to realise the complete artistic impression.’

Wilde’s test has been failed by mainstream publishing. If we are to save the novel as an art form, we will have to do it from outside the literary machine.

Kimberley Tait is a novelist and the author of Bright Stars and Fake Plastic Love. She is the founder of Dogstar Press, a new literary press devoted to beauty, sincerity, and 100 per cent human fiction. She is part of a New Romantic movement rising above the age of algorithms.