<nettime> Will Self: “The Novel Is Dead. This Time It's for Real”

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[orig to Xitter: https://x.com/wself/status/2057911404041302391 ]


Will Self (@wself)


The Novel Is Dead. This Time It's for Real


I gave a lecture in 2014 at Trinity College, Oxford, later published in
The Guardian under the headline “The Novel Is Dead (This Time It’s 
for
Real).” I was widely pilloried for it. In subsequent interviews and
essays I have repeatedly clarified that I did not in fact proclaim the
death of the novel outright. What I said was that it had entered a care
home. The care homes in question were the proliferating creative-writing
programmes first established in the United States and subsequently
exported across the Anglosphere. These programmes seemed to me
symptomatic of a wider cultural decline: namely, the inability of the
general culture any longer to produce organically the standard of
literacy, concentration and philological depth required for serious
literary production.

At the time, I did not foreground technology strongly enough. Yet it was
already obvious to me that digitisation, followed by the advent of
bidirectional digital media in the form of the smartphone and wireless
broadband, represented a grave threat to deep literacy. I wrote a report
for Philips in the late 1980s in which I was asked how to incentivise
people to play what were then rather primitive and unconvincing computer
games. My response was straightforward: the industry would truly take
off once graphics became sufficiently realistic to incorporate sex and
violence persuasively. The rest is media history.

If you search YouTube you can still find a 1992 edition of The Late Show
in which the designer Richard Seymour and I discuss with Tracey MacLeod
the launch of Mortal Kombat. Looking back on the clip now, the
atmosphere of the studio feels almost painfully innocent, particularly
Seymour’s contribution. His anticipation of predictive systems,
behavioural engineering and the gamification of everyday life deserves
to be recognised as one of the more remarkable acts of technological
prophecy of that era.

Now we face a genuinely civilisational crisis. Can I claim the same
powers of anticipation for myself? Perhaps only in the limited sense
intended by Marshall McLuhan when he observed that the artist is an
expert in technologies that alter sense perception. When wireless
broadband was installed in my house in 2004, my response was not
excitement but dismay. I already regarded dial-up internet and the
accelerated circulation of image and text it enabled as inimical to the
sustained intellection and emotional continuity required for genuine
literary style.

My response was practical. I stopped composing directly on computers
altogether. I had my mother’s 1952 Olivetti Lettera 22 restored and
proceeded to draft every subsequent book on that machine until 2011. To
this day I continue to write manually and offline wherever possible. I
have consistently argued to anyone who asked me about creative practice
that bidirectional digital media would prove profoundly hostile to
literary style, because literature is style. Style is not decorative
frosting applied to content after the fact; style is the mode through
which consciousness experiences and orders reality itself.

I take no pleasure in saying “I told you so.” But unfortunately we 
have
now reached the point at which saying it has become necessary. We are
dealing not with a passing technological novelty but with systems
capable of reshaping cognition, perception, memory and ultimately social
reality itself. If people are to understand artificial intelligence, its
likely impact on their lives, and the steps required to prevent it
becoming civilisationally destructive, they must first understand what
has already been lost during the last twenty-five years of bidirectional
digital culture. Only then can they begin the harder task of recovering
those embodied forms of attention, judgment and style upon which any
serious human culture ultimately depends.

The hostile reaction to the 2014 lecture was itself revealing.
Psychologists describe “professional closure” as the tendency of
threatened professions to circle the wagons defensively around their own
institutional legitimacy. The publishing industry was especially
vulnerable because the threat it faced was one it publicly professed to
welcome. Publishers assured me repeatedly, to my face, that e-books,
audiobooks and digital reading would usher in a new literary
renaissance. Similar claims had already been made around the so-called
Harry Potter phenomenon: apparently young boys would move seamlessly
from Hogwarts to All Souls, Oxford, where they would proceed directly to
practical criticism and literary analysis.

At precisely the same historical moment, British universities massively
expanded. When I graduated in 1980, around 8% of the population held
higher-education qualifications. The figure now approaches 50%. We ought
therefore to inhabit an age of extraordinary cultural production.
Instead, we inhabit a culture of exhausted retreads, franchised
nostalgia and endless recombination. This deterioration operates at
every level of cultural production. The idea that high culture is
dispensable—whether in favour of market demographics, minority 
branding
exercises, “plain reader” utilitarianism, or sheer commercial
expediency—has become axiomatic.

Publishers still love literature to a degree, but increasingly in the
manner that politicians once possessed “convictions”: as vestigial
accessories attached to managerial careers. The long, hard grind of
rights negotiations, acquisitions, logistics and arbitrage has exhausted
many of them spiritually. Because they are rarely direct producers of
culture themselves, they no longer experience the intrinsic thrill of
making something genuinely new. This is decisive. Once publishers cease
to experience publishing itself as a creative vocation, commercial
imperatives become their only remaining rationale. Over the last
twenty-five years the consequences have been plain enough: shrinking
front-list investment except in novelty acts, mechanical exploitation of
backlists only where monetisation is frictionless, and the increasing
transformation of publishing conglomerates into logistics firms with a
literary sideline.

My own former publishers, Penguin Random House, now frequently describe
themselves in quasi-logistical terms. This perhaps explains why I have
been informed that master files for several of my own books have
effectively disappeared into the digital void. Far from inaugurating a
renaissance, digitisation, creative-writing institutionalisation and
demographic marketing have become the three tolls of the bell announcing
literature’s terminal condition.

The latest peal comes in the form of the AI controversy surrounding
Granta and the 2026 Commonwealth Short Story Prize. The facts themselves
matter less than what they reveal. Granta today is owned through the
Granta Trust by Sigrid Rausing, granddaughter of the founder of the
Tetra Pak fortune. She acquired Granta in 2005 for an undisclosed sum,
although contemporary reporting suggested the magazine was then making a
modest profit. Today the Trust reports annual income of roughly £1.4
million and expenditure of roughly £1.8 million, producing a yearly
operating shortfall in the region of £400,000 before investment gains.
Against the scale of the Rausing fortune—estimated in the 
billions—this
loss is microscopically insignificant. It is not an economic burden; it
is a cultural accessory.

This is important because Granta functions less as a profitable
enterprise than as a prestige object: a Potemkin village of literary
seriousness. The analogy is apt. Potemkin allegedly constructed fake
villages so that Catherine the Great could pass through an idealised
version of Russia while remaining insulated from the reality of imperial
poverty. Likewise contemporary literary institutions increasingly
preserve façades of seriousness while the underlying culture
disintegrates.

Rausing’s ‘donation’ to the literary dossier, lying by the tube 
croaking
‘Got any cash, please’, is the monetary equivalent of you tossing 
him or
her tenpence; yet out of this she fashions great cultural
capital––publishes her own misery memoir, gets spoken to 
respectfully
about it by people who should know better at parties held in the
Potemkin village. She then, quite possibly, invites them back to her
place (or places), where they, too, get to sup on the thin gruel of her
cultural  benificience. Benificience she herself sees fit to register as
a charity. One assumes for tax purposes.

Now Granta, or more precisely the Commonwealth Prize ecosystem with
which it is associated, appears to have been fooled by AI-generated
prose. The issue is not whether detection software can “prove” 
machine
authorship. The issue is aesthetic. Several readers and editors
apparently encountered prose displaying classic LLM
characteristics—semantic over-resolution at sentence level, lyrical
excess without governing pressure, figurative autonomy detached from
structural necessity—and accepted these peculiarities as “voice.”

My partner in the SITREP series, who has the––in my view––toxic 
working
environment of dealing with the web interface on my behalf, sent me
examples from the disputed winning story––only a couple of lines, 
but
dare I say, they speak volumes, albeit not ones you’d want to read:
“They called her Zoongie. Maybe it was a name; maybe rain took a shape
and decided to keep it.” Or: “She had the kind of walking that made
benches become men.” Such sentences are not objectionable because they
are strange. Literature depends upon strangeness. They are objectionable
because they exhibit the monocellular quality typical of
machine-generated prose: each sentence arrives as a sealed semantic
capsule, self-maximising for local significance while failing to
contribute to any larger pressure system of consciousness.

This occurs because the large language model optimises statistically for
plausibility at sentence level. What it cannot sustain is style in the
deeper sense: the circulation of pressure, contradiction, temporality
and embodiment across an entire work. Real literary style resembles a
living body. Pressure exerted in one region is registered elsewhere.
Damage to one part reverberates through the whole. Even amputation
leaves phantom sensation. Style possesses exactly this distributed
organic character. Machine prose, however fluent, remains fundamentally
modular.

I know this directly because I am one of the authors currently involved
in legal action concerning the use of copyrighted books to train AI
systems. More than thirty-five of my own books were ingested into
Anthropic’s models. There is irony here. I spent much of my productive
life writing novels about the triadic relationship between warfare,
psychopathology and technological systems. Of Phone, the aptly-named
final novel in that sequence, one reviewer observed that it was “a
650-page anti-tweet.” Intentionally so––although it’s much else 
besides.

People endlessly repeat Marshall McLuhan’s dictum that “the medium 
is
the message,” yet fail to understand that the smartphone and wireless
broadband are media environments whose message is the erosion of
sustained comprehension. McLuhan himself remained comparatively
optimistic about electronic media because the fully networked
bidirectional environment had not yet materialised. Nonetheless, he
recognised that an “electric field” of simultaneity and psychic 
exposure
was already emerging. The internet has fulfilled that prophecy, but
largely as a domain of manipulation, pornography, financial extraction,
poisonous gossip, performative outrage and scapegoating.

The web has become a realm of disavowal. Human beings enter it in order
not to become more fully themselves but less so. They use it to evade
embodiment, evade continuity, evade consequence. That literary
institutions proved so permeable to this environment demonstrates not
merely incompetence but philosophical exhaustion. Publishing ceased to
believe sufficiently in literature to defend the conditions under which
literature remains possible.

The crisis therefore is not merely technological: it is
philological––and if the term is unfamiliar to you, in this instance
it’s no sesquipedalianism or wilful obscurity on my part, but the 
index
of your own failing. Editors no longer possess the training required to
distinguish stylistic pressure from stylistic effect. They speak of
‘world literature’ and its frictionless translation, with no
comprehension that this is the gateway drug for machine-generated prose,
given that physical embodiment is also linguistic embodiment. Ask
yourself what machine learning was first turned to as a practical
application, and the answer is––as it is so often nowadays for you, 
even
when you aren’t being onanistic––in your hand: translation. The 
literary
translator is the philologist par excellence, and in a world literature,
comprised by texts travelling frictionlessly across language barriers,
there’s no need for them: Whoopee! But here’s the rub, Homer 
Simpson:
all culture is friction, doh!

What all the Homer Simpsons in contemporary publishing need to do,
bluntly, is relearn practical criticism, textual history and philology
itself. Literary style is ultimately what defeats the Turing test—not
because style proves consciousness, but because genuine style encodes
embodiment.

The Turing test itself rests on obsolete assumptions. If something in a
sealed box persuades us verbally that it is human, we are supposed to
infer consciousness. Yet what remains in the box is always and forever
indeterminate. I can demonstrate my trained ‘literary’ AI defeating 
the
Turing test within three minutes of rebooting it: Turing was a
mathematician, crucially, not a logician: he didn’t understand that
computer models based on natural language would encode meaning
predictively: this may well be because he was almost certainly ASD, and
therefore—following Baron-Cohen et al––lacking the eye-detection
mechanism required to register the minute phase-intention necessary to
fully comprehend––and implicit in language as an open and generative
symbol system.

Which is why, increasingly, human beings themselves would struggle to
convince one another of their humanity amid the sea of synthetic
language now saturating discourse: please tick the following images of
the soiled gussets of human underwear to prove you aren’t a robot. 
What
persuades us finally is not informational content but embodied style:
contradiction sustained through time, pressure distributed across
expression, outrageous obscenity interjected into a serious article not
gratuitously, but because this is the way I’ve been writing––and,
crucially, others have been reading me––for 43 years; and by this 
fact
alone supplying that final element: mortality encoded within language
itself, both mine––and theirs.

A living writer can sustain incompatible conceptual systems
simultaneously because human beings are temporalised organisms. We sit
on the edge of the bed examining the gusset of our underwear for stains,
contemplating mortality while simultaneously preparing ourselves to
function socially as coherent productive agents who can prove they
aren’t––in that sense at least––bots. Civilization, as Freud 
remarked,
is built upon a dung heap. Yet we continue. The human organism sustains
contradiction because it is embodied.

The LLM cannot do this. It lacks embodiment and therefore lacks the
capacity to sustain unresolved contradiction as existential pressure:
when I gave it this piece to rewrite, it eliminated all the gussets… I
can just imagine it tut-tutting to itself: ‘Too many gussets, Mr Self,
too many gussets.’ Not. Instead it resolves meaning prematurely into
sentence-sized semantic units. This is why machine prose tends toward a
strange smoothness even when superficially difficult. Bang! That was
your noggin cracking as it smoothly absorbed this––you forgot the 
old
adage: never eat anything bigger than your own…head.

To write with genuine style requires embodiment plus all the linguistic
capacities already approximated statistically by the machine. It
requires the encoding of lived temporality into symbolic form capable of
being… [tea break]…reanimated by another embodied consciousness at a
later historical moment. Once one understands the complexity of this
operation, one also understands how fragile literary civilisation truly
is.

We therefore face the emergence of a new scribal class. Those writers
who possess genuine original style and who understand how to use AI
systems critically and instrumentally will dominate cultural production.
Genre fiction presents little difficulty for machine-assisted generation
because genre already forecloses semantic openness to a significant
degree. The higheWill Self (@wself)

The Novel Is Dead. This Time It's for Real

I gave a lecture in 2014 at Trinity College, Oxford, later published in
The Guardian under the headline “The Novel Is Dead (This Time It’s 
for
Real).” I was widely pilloried for it. In subsequent interviews and
essays I have repeatedly clarified that I did not in fact proclaim the
death of the novel outright. What I said was that it had entered a care
home. The care homes in question were the proliferating creative-writing
programmes first established in the United States and subsequently
exported across the Anglosphere. These programmes seemed to me
symptomatic of a wider cultural decline: namely, the inability of the
general culture any longer to produce organically the standard of
literacy, concentration and philological depth required for serious
literary production.

At the time, I did not foreground technology strongly enough. Yet it was
already obvious to me that digitisation, followed by the advent of
bidirectional digital media in the form of the smartphone and wireless
broadband, represented a grave threat to deep literacy. I wrote a report
for Philips in the late 1980s in which I was asked how to incentivise
people to play what were then rather primitive and unconvincing computer
games. My response was straightforward: the industry would truly take
off once graphics became sufficiently realistic to incorporate sex and
violence persuasively. The rest is media history.

If you search YouTube you can still find a 1992 edition of The Late Show
in which the designer Richard Seymour and I discuss with Tracey MacLeod
the launch of Mortal Kombat. Looking back on the clip now, the
atmosphere of the studio feels almost painfully innocent, particularly
Seymour’s contribution. His anticipation of predictive systems,
behavioural engineering and the gamification of everyday life deserves
to be recognised as one of the more remarkable acts of technological
prophecy of that era.

Now we face a genuinely civilisational crisis. Can I claim the same
powers of anticipation for myself? Perhaps only in the limited sense
intended by Marshall McLuhan when he observed that the artist is an
expert in technologies that alter sense perception. When wireless
broadband was installed in my house in 2004, my response was not
excitement but dismay. I already regarded dial-up internet and the
accelerated circulation of image and text it enabled as inimical to the
sustained intellection and emotional continuity required for genuine
literary style.

My response was practical. I stopped composing directly on computers
altogether. I had my mother’s 1952 Olivetti Lettera 22 restored and
proceeded to draft every subsequent book on that machine until 2011. To
this day I continue to write manually and offline wherever possible. I
have consistently argued to anyone who asked me about creative practice
that bidirectional digital media would prove profoundly hostile to
literary style, because literature is style. Style is not decorative
frosting applied to content after the fact; style is the mode through
which consciousness experiences and orders reality itself.

I take no pleasure in saying “I told you so.” But unfortunately we 
have
now reached the point at which saying it has become necessary. We are
dealing not with a passing technological novelty but with systems
capable of reshaping cognition, perception, memory and ultimately social
reality itself. If people are to understand artificial intelligence, its
likely impact on their lives, and the steps required to prevent it
becoming civilisationally destructive, they must first understand what
has already been lost during the last twenty-five years of bidirectional
digital culture. Only then can they begin the harder task of recovering
those embodied forms of attention, judgment and style upon which any
serious human culture ultimately depends.

The hostile reaction to the 2014 lecture was itself revealing.
Psychologists describe “professional closure” as the tendency of
threatened professions to circle the wagons defensively around their own
institutional legitimacy. The publishing industry was especially
vulnerable because the threat it faced was one it publicly professed to
welcome. Publishers assured me repeatedly, to my face, that e-books,
audiobooks and digital reading would usher in a new literary
renaissance. Similar claims had already been made around the so-called
Harry Potter phenomenon: apparently young boys would move seamlessly
from Hogwarts to All Souls, Oxford, where they would proceed directly to
practical criticism and literary analysis.

At precisely the same historical moment, British universities massively
expanded. When I graduated in 1980, around 8% of the population held
higher-education qualifications. The figure now approaches 50%. We ought
therefore to inhabit an age of extraordinary cultural production.
Instead, we inhabit a culture of exhausted retreads, franchised
nostalgia and endless recombination. This deterioration operates at
every level of cultural production. The idea that high culture is
dispensable—whether in favour of market demographics, minority 
branding
exercises, “plain reader” utilitarianism, or sheer commercial
expediency—has become axiomatic.

Publishers still love literature to a degree, but increasingly in the
manner that politicians once possessed “convictions”: as vestigial
accessories attached to managerial careers. The long, hard grind of
rights negotiations, acquisitions, logistics and arbitrage has exhausted
many of them spiritually. Because they are rarely direct producers of
culture themselves, they no longer experience the intrinsic thrill of
making something genuinely new. This is decisive. Once publishers cease
to experience publishing itself as a creative vocation, commercial
imperatives become their only remaining rationale. Over the last
twenty-five years the consequences have been plain enough: shrinking
front-list investment except in novelty acts, mechanical exploitation of
backlists only where monetisation is frictionless, and the increasing
transformation of publishing conglomerates into logistics firms with a
literary sideline.

My own former publishers, Penguin Random House, now frequently describe
themselves in quasi-logistical terms. This perhaps explains why I have
been informed that master files for several of my own books have
effectively disappeared into the digital void. Far from inaugurating a
renaissance, digitisation, creative-writing institutionalisation and
demographic marketing have become the three tolls of the bell announcing
literature’s terminal condition.

The latest peal comes in the form of the AI controversy surrounding
Granta and the 2026 Commonwealth Short Story Prize. The facts themselves
matter less than what they reveal. Granta today is owned through the
Granta Trust by Sigrid Rausing, granddaughter of the founder of the
Tetra Pak fortune. She acquired Granta in 2005 for an undisclosed sum,
although contemporary reporting suggested the magazine was then making a
modest profit. Today the Trust reports annual income of roughly £1.4
million and expenditure of roughly £1.8 million, producing a yearly
operating shortfall in the region of £400,000 before investment gains.
Against the scale of the Rausing fortune—estimated in the 
billions—this
loss is microscopically insignificant. It is not an economic burden; it
is a cultural accessory.

This is important because Granta functions less as a profitable
enterprise than as a prestige object: a Potemkin village of literary
seriousness. The analogy is apt. Potemkin allegedly constructed fake
villages so that Catherine the Great could pass through an idealised
version of Russia while remaining insulated from the reality of imperial
poverty. Likewise contemporary literary institutions increasingly
preserve façades of seriousness while the underlying culture
disintegrates.

Rausing’s ‘donation’ to the literary dossier, lying by the tube 
croaking
‘Got any cash, please’, is the monetary equivalent of you tossing 
him or
her tenpence; yet out of this she fashions great cultural
capital––publishes her own misery memoir, gets spoken to 
respectfully
about it by people who should know better at parties held in the
Potemkin village. She then, quite possibly, invites them back to her
place (or places), where they, too, get to sup on the thin gruel of her
cultural  benificience. Benificience she herself sees fit to register as
a charity. One assumes for tax purposes.

Now Granta, or more precisely the Commonwealth Prize ecosystem with
which it is associated, appears to have been fooled by AI-generated
prose. The issue is not whether detection software can “prove” 
machine
authorship. The issue is aesthetic. Several readers and editors
apparently encountered prose displaying classic LLM
characteristics—semantic over-resolution at sentence level, lyrical
excess without governing pressure, figurative autonomy detached from
structural necessity—and accepted these peculiarities as “voice.”

My partner in the SITREP series, who has the––in my view––toxic 
working
environment of dealing with the web interface on my behalf, sent me
examples from the disputed winning story––only a couple of lines, 
but
dare I say, they speak volumes, albeit not ones you’d want to read:
“They called her Zoongie. Maybe it was a name; maybe rain took a shape
and decided to keep it.” Or: “She had the kind of walking that made
benches become men.” Such sentences are not objectionable because they
are strange. Literature depends upon strangeness. They are objectionable
because they exhibit the monocellular quality typical of
machine-generated prose: each sentence arrives as a sealed semantic
capsule, self-maximising for local significance while failing to
contribute to any larger pressure system of consciousness.

This occurs because the large language model optimises statistically for
plausibility at sentence level. What it cannot sustain is style in the
deeper sense: the circulation of pressure, contradiction, temporality
and embodiment across an entire work. Real literary style resembles a
living body. Pressure exerted in one region is registered elsewhere.
Damage to one part reverberates through the whole. Even amputation
leaves phantom sensation. Style possesses exactly this distributed
organic character. Machine prose, however fluent, remains fundamentally
modular.

I know this directly because I am one of the authors currently involved
in legal action concerning the use of copyrighted books to train AI
systems. More than thirty-five of my own books were ingested into
Anthropic’s models. There is irony here. I spent much of my productive
life writing novels about the triadic relationship between warfare,
psychopathology and technological systems. Of Phone, the aptly-named
final novel in that sequence, one reviewer observed that it was “a
650-page anti-tweet.” Intentionally so––although it’s much else 
besides.

People endlessly repeat Marshall McLuhan’s dictum that “the medium 
is
the message,” yet fail to understand that the smartphone and wireless
broadband are media environments whose message is the erosion of
sustained comprehension. McLuhan himself remained comparatively
optimistic about electronic media because the fully networked
bidirectional environment had not yet materialised. Nonetheless, he
recognised that an “electric field” of simultaneity and psychic 
exposure
was already emerging. The internet has fulfilled that prophecy, but
largely as a domain of manipulation, pornography, financial extraction,
poisonous gossip, performative outrage and scapegoating.

The web has become a realm of disavowal. Human beings enter it in order
not to become more fully themselves but less so. They use it to evade
embodiment, evade continuity, evade consequence. That literary
institutions proved so permeable to this environment demonstrates not
merely incompetence but philosophical exhaustion. Publishing ceased to
believe sufficiently in literature to defend the conditions under which
literature remains possible.

The crisis therefore is not merely technological: it is
philological––and if the term is unfamiliar to you, in this instance
it’s no sesquipedalianism or wilful obscurity on my part, but the 
index
of your own failing. Editors no longer possess the training required to
distinguish stylistic pressure from stylistic effect. They speak of
‘world literature’ and its frictionless translation, with no
comprehension that this is the gateway drug for machine-generated prose,
given that physical embodiment is also linguistic embodiment. Ask
yourself what machine learning was first turned to as a practical
application, and the answer is––as it is so often nowadays for you, 
even
when you aren’t being onanistic––in your hand: translation. The 
literary
translator is the philologist par excellence, and in a world literature,
comprised by texts travelling frictionlessly across language barriers,
there’s no need for them: Whoopee! But here’s the rub, Homer 
Simpson:
all culture is friction, doh!

What all the Homer Simpsons in contemporary publishing need to do,
bluntly, is relearn practical criticism, textual history and philology
itself. Literary style is ultimately what defeats the Turing test—not
because style proves consciousness, but because genuine style encodes
embodiment.

The Turing test itself rests on obsolete assumptions. If something in a
sealed box persuades us verbally that it is human, we are supposed to
infer consciousness. Yet what remains in the box is always and forever
indeterminate. I can demonstrate my trained ‘literary’ AI defeating 
the
Turing test within three minutes of rebooting it: Turing was a
mathematician, crucially, not a logician: he didn’t understand that
computer models based on natural language would encode meaning
predictively: this may well be because he was almost certainly ASD, and
therefore—following Baron-Cohen et al––lacking the eye-detection
mechanism required to register the minute phase-intention necessary to
fully comprehend––and implicit in language as an open and generative
symbol system.

Which is why, increasingly, human beings themselves would struggle to
convince one another of their humanity amid the sea of synthetic
language now saturating discourse: please tick the following images of
the soiled gussets of human underwear to prove you aren’t a robot. 
What
persuades us finally is not informational content but embodied style:
contradiction sustained through time, pressure distributed across
expression, outrageous obscenity interjected into a serious article not
gratuitously, but because this is the way I’ve been writing––and,
crucially, others have been reading me––for 43 years; and by this 
fact
alone supplying that final element: mortality encoded within language
itself, both mine––and theirs.

A living writer can sustain incompatible conceptual systems
simultaneously because human beings are temporalised organisms. We sit
on the edge of the bed examining the gusset of our underwear for stains,
contemplating mortality while simultaneously preparing ourselves to
function socially as coherent productive agents who can prove they
aren’t––in that sense at least––bots. Civilization, as Freud 
remarked,
is built upon a dung heap. Yet we continue. The human organism sustains
contradiction because it is embodied.

The LLM cannot do this. It lacks embodiment and therefore lacks the
capacity to sustain unresolved contradiction as existential pressure:
when I gave it this piece to rewrite, it eliminated all the gussets… I
can just imagine it tut-tutting to itself: ‘Too many gussets, Mr Self,
too many gussets.’ Not. Instead it resolves meaning prematurely into
sentence-sized semantic units. This is why machine prose tends toward a
strange smoothness even when superficially difficult. Bang! That was
your noggin cracking as it smoothly absorbed this––you forgot the 
old
adage: never eat anything bigger than your own…head.

To write with genuine style requires embodiment plus all the linguistic
capacities already approximated statistically by the machine. It
requires the encoding of lived temporality into symbolic form capable of
being… [tea break]…reanimated by another embodied consciousness at a
later historical moment. Once one understands the complexity of this
operation, one also understands how fragile literary civilisation truly
is.

We therefore face the emergence of a new scribal class. Those writers
who possess genuine original style and who understand how to use AI
systems critically and instrumentally will dominate cultural production.
Genre fiction presents little difficulty for machine-assisted generation
because genre already forecloses semantic openness to a significant
degree. The highest literary style, however, remains difficult because
it preserves irresolution, contradiction and embodied temporality: I
know whereof I speak––I wrote my Will in September 2024 because I 
was
about to undergo a medical procedure that had less than Russian roulette
odds of survival. It won’t surprise you, dear, gentle, 
machine-assisted
reader, to learn that it was short and to the point. Distinctly pithy:
and I am not known for my… pith.

When readers struggle with writers such as James Joyce, Virginia Woolf
or Eimear McBride, the difficulty arises precisely because those writers
compact immense cultural and philosophical inheritances into linguistic
form. Joyce’s consciousness was formed through Thomism, Jesuit 
pedagogy,
scholastic metaphysics and the accumulated sediment of centuries of
European intellectual history: it took thousands of people conceiving
millions of angels on the heads of billions of pins to create the lived
and still living tapestry of Ulysses. Recently, a feted Booker-Prize
winner said ‘life was too short’ for her to be bothered to read it. 
If
contemporary readers imagine such inheritances reproduce themselves
automatically merely because “the novel” continues to exist as a
commercial category, they are deluding themselves.

The scale of the crisis is therefore monumental. The Granta affair is
not simply an embarrassing editorial oversight. It is the first
genuinely literary manifestation of a much larger civilisational
fracture: institutions charged with preserving style can no longer
reliably recognise it.

So here is the interim report. Turn the phone off. Not airplane 
mode—you
are not on a plane. Put it in a drawer. Go for a walk. Read a book
physically. Speak face to face: sense the light rain of the Other’s
spittle before they transmogrify into a drooling zombie. Recover contact
with the body that gives rise to personality and therefore to style:
don’t buy another puffer. Then attempt something culturally serious
rather than merely consumable in the mode of synthetic fluff. Genuine
artistic appreciation—uncommodified, unrecycled, 
non-performative—has
itself become a revolutionary act.

The novel is dead for real this time, if we think of the novel as for
entertainment, or for making money, or for turning into something else
then eventually merch’––and if that novel is dead, the life 
support
system of the true novel, the generative human living novel is, like the
literary culture that has sustained it, running out of power fast… on 
an
alien planet that’s been inadequately terra-formed, and which supports
nothing much else besides… server farms.st literary style, however,
remains difficult because it preserves irresolution, contradiction and
embodied temporality: I know whereof I speak––I wrote my Will in
September 2024 because I was about to undergo a medical procedure that
had less than Russian roulette odds of survival. It won’t surprise 
you,
dear, gentle, machine-assisted reader, to learn that it was short and to
the point. Distinctly pithy: and I am not known for my… pith.

When readers struggle with writers such as James Joyce, Virginia Woolf
or Eimear McBride, the difficulty arises precisely because those writers
compact immense cultural and philosophical inheritances into linguistic
form. Joyce’s consciousness was formed through Thomism, Jesuit 
pedagogy,
scholastic metaphysics and the accumulated sediment of centuries of
European intellectual history: it took thousands of people conceiving
millions of angels on the heads of billions of pins to create the lived
and still living tapestry of Ulysses. Recently, a feted Booker-Prize
winner said ‘life was too short’ for her to be bothered to read it. 
If
contemporary readers imagine such inheritances reproduce themselves
automatically merely because “the novel” continues to exist as a
commercial category, they are deluding themselves.

The scale of the crisis is therefore monumental. The Granta affair is
not simply an embarrassing editorial oversight. It is the first
genuinely literary manifestation of a much larger civilisational
fracture: institutions charged with preserving style can no longer
reliably recognise it.

So here is the interim report. Turn the phone off. Not airplane 
mode—you
are not on a plane. Put it in a drawer. Go for a walk. Read a book
physically. Speak face to face: sense the light rain of the Other’s
spittle before they transmogrify into a drooling zombie. Recover contact
with the body that gives rise to personality and therefore to style:
don’t buy another puffer. Then attempt something culturally serious
rather than merely consumable in the mode of synthetic fluff. Genuine
artistic appreciation—uncommodified, unrecycled, 
non-performative—has
itself become a revolutionary act.

The novel is dead for real this time, if we think of the novel as for
entertainment, or for making money, or for turning into something else
then eventually merch’––and if that novel is dead, the life 
support
system of the true novel, the generative human living novel is, like the
literary culture that has sustained it, running out of power fast… on 
an
alien planet that’s been inadequately terra-formed, and which supports
nothing much else besides… server farms.


---
Ted Byfield
tedbyfield@gmail.com
https://counter.ink

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