Georg Klein: The future of the novel

I want to begin by making a confession: I like it when novelists are dead. I find it pleasant to hold a novel in my hand and to know that its author is no longer among us. The spontaneous sympathy I then feel for both text and writer is even a little bit more heartfelt if the book is out of print; if I had to get hold of it secondhand from one of those dubious online dealers who offer as-new copies so cheaply that the cost of delivery exceeds the now no more than symbolic cost of the book itself.

I always read a novel which has become that cheap to the end. I feel an almost personal obligation to do so. I keep going to the very last page, even if it can't really grip me and push against my limits; even if I begin to fear that it was never, even when it was written, a good book. Then I put it in the wastepaper sack along with the newspapers of the last few days. It's a little like laying to rest a mummy that was displayed, undignifiedly and for far too long, in a museum. The memory of this good deed is the last future which, for a little while at least, we will share.

I know that this feeling has something to do with the way I imagine the past of the novel. If I don't shy away from a megalomaniac sense of vertigo, I am briefly able to imagine the totality of all the novels ever written: thousands upon thousands of manuscripts, of which many – presumably only a minority, but still a mighty host – have become books, lingering for a time in libraries or other memories until they too disappear into nowhere.

The history of literature tries to control this vortex of time. Where there's a twisting maelstrom of production and destruction, it claims to recognise stable linearity: beginnings; development; opposition and gain; sometimes something new, better even. Progress without end. The history of the novel – at least the history of the European novel – then turns into a tree whose growth we can supposedly reconstruct. This oak rises from the fertile soil of older narrative forms. At some point a separate sapling emerges from the epic thicket. The wood of the trunk grows stronger and harder; gradually the tree becomes aware of the tradition it forms, but also of unrealised possibilities. Grown stately and proud, it forks into powerful branches. Its youngest twigs reach further towards the light; towards new, not yet explored kinds of writing.

I like this illusion. I enjoy the idea that I could know what is old and what is new, that I understand how the new emerges from the old. Like every illusory control of time it can help one to keep going, if one submits to it at the right moment. But there is also the fatally wrong moment. I remember a young author telling me about her collision with the history of the novel. She had written her first work of prose, a slim, autobiographical volume, in the finest enthusiasm of naïve creativity. Before she tackled a proper novel, she simply wanted to see just what had been written so far. She asked experienced readers for help and drew up a list. No more than a selection from, supposedly, the most important German-language novels of the 20th century, 20 or 30 titles.

She began in chronological order. What had been conceived as an instructive game turned into a nightmare. She had entered the forest of literature in order to collect a few fine mushrooms for her basket. But she was forced to realise that a giant mushroom rhizome ran through the gentle grove from one end to the other. A network of dead fibres, but also of damp living ones. Not everything that strove towards the light there was in good condition: much was maggot-eaten, there was much ugly rank vegetation, above all far too much iridescent beauty. In the young writer, however, the emotional surplus of yearning, anticipation and fear, the many-armed dream-catcher, which her future novel had been, shrank away into despondency and resignation.

A pity! With a little luck things could have turned out differently. From the experience of frightening greatness she drew the fatal conclusion that whatever there was inside her, driving her to write a novel, was embarrassingly small. The shock of greatness prevented her from achieving what experienced readers spontaneously succeed in doing time and again: the fusion of one's own creative system with the structure of the text; the magnificent identification of a reading consciousness with the imagined world of the novel; the flight into a wonderful and vast expanse.

That could be called escapism. And there are spatial metaphors that suggest themselves to describe the experience. But someone who escapes into a novel is also escaping from a particular time. Every habitual reader – the genre junkie just as much as the lover of subtle language games – senses and enjoys the fact that he is escaping that time which is constantly being presented to him as the really important, decisive one. This deceitfully dominant time format could perhaps be called "small time" in contrast to the grand experience of time in the novel.

This small time has something to do with our everyday lives. And its dogmatic champions maintain that dealing with daily life prevents us from squandering our always-scarce hours on reading – never mind writing – novels. An old, threadbare reproach. But who can feel so certain of himself in this respect? A few weeks ago I was talking on the phone to an author; almost 40, his latest novel was about to appear. I thought our conversation was going to be all about this happy forthcoming event, when he abruptly asked me what kind of nursing care insurance I had. At the moment he felt tormented by the thought that in the future, in 30 or 35 years, he might be at the mercy of the infirmities of old age without appropriate support. His son would then find himself in the terribly awkward situation of having to take care of a poor, invalid writer, one perhaps even suffering from dementia.

A few days later I started reading his new novel. I can no longer say how many pages it took before I forgot the nursing care insurance cover, but it was quite a few. On the unusually difficult way into the promise of time of the novel, I felt that what prevented my immersion was a kind of future. It's not the presence of everyday life, its demands and duties that stand in the way of experiencing a novel. On the contrary: every genuine reader knows the special pleasure that comes of escaping into the time of the novel in the middle of everyday life, in the middle of the automatically prolonged present of errands, of getting things done. No: not the present but a particular kind of future – a feeling of apprehension, a specific anxiety, indeed cowardice – appeared to me to be the time-enemy of the novel.

So I don't believe those people who claim that unfortunately they don't have any time to read novels, never mind write them, although in fact they feel strongly drawn to do one or the other or both. Out of a mistaken sense of consideration I don't say to them: it's only your small future that stops you dedicating yourself to the bigger time of the novel. The fact that you don't allow yourself to push against your own limits is a great pity, because it's precisely the experience of the novel that could help prevent your soul being soured by too much small future.

Four years ago, the literary editor of a newspaper asked me whether I would like to contribute to a series in the arts pages of the publication. Its title was "The Future of Yesterday". Short essay-like texts were supposed to discuss utopian novels of the past 300 years. I was very taken by the idea, because I looked forward to reacquainting myself with texts I had read for the first time decades before. Most of the titles that involuntarily came to mind were so-called science fiction novels from the second half of the 20th century.

Fortunately the editor didn't expect me to consider whether they contained forecasts that had subsequently come true in technology, politics or society. Only the cheap know-it-all attitudes of those born too long after would throw themselves at these novels to explain that they told of gadgets, social orders and forms of rule that have not (or perhaps even have) become contemporary reality. Indeed, I didn't feel in the least that the technological, social or political environment around me would have been the future of these novels. I doubted that these authors, like members of some literary-military special unit equipped with telescopic sights and laser pointers, had been aiming at our 21st century.

Admittedly, as genre literature, the majority of these books had in some formal aspects satisfied the expectations of genre readers. Probably the vain desire to predict something that could still come true in the lifetime of the author had played a limited part in the writing. But this prognostic ambition had evaporated from the space of reading like some initially overpowering but ultimately fleeting perfume. How liberating to enter into the apocalyptic visions of these novels without the possible nuclear war between the USSR and the US forcing itself into one's mind. How fascinatingly open to fantasise about a fictitious cyberspace and its obscure matrix without having to see this fictitious system and its world as representatives of yesterday's or today's internet. How good, not to be the posterity of these novels.

Relieved of all prognostic expectations they seemed to me to have gained in scope. And my reading profited in more than a futurological way from the character of our contemporary shared world: if I am not deceiving myself, then in recent decades a certain pressure of expectation has very much diminished. The novel no longer has to provide the guiding thread linking a historically tamed past with a critically comprehended present, a string of knots by which one is then supposed to feel one's way forward into the already looming future.

I know there are phenomena which distract from this liberation of the novel. Even when I'm writing I often don't feel as free as the present-day novel actually is. The demons of small time know all about my diffidence and regularly lead me into temptation. It's not so long ago that an agency that looks after the media advancement and public future of its clients called me up. A very energetic young man got to the point right away. They had heard that my prose texts had an interesting closeness to science and technology. They had read random samples. I was the right man. An important client – a well-known German scientist, the cutting edge of medical-biological progress personified – was looking for someone who could relate in an attractive way what his research team had discovered and which was about to cause a sensation. I should immediately look at the client's Wikipedia entry. The agency had brought it right up to date.

The Wikipedia article was very long, fairly well written and just easy enough so that with my chance bio-chemical and medical knowledge I was able to follow it. All cleverly and skilfully done. What could this established and eminent authority expect from me? The future was quickly told. Planned was a bestseller: that is, one with sales figures in the six-digit range. I asked for examples, and my caller had them at his fingertips. To my surprise these included not only popular non-fiction books but also downmarket fiction. As a professional, I would no doubt immediately appreciate that the future quite evidently lay in the fusion of up-to-date scientific topics with narrative forms of presentation. Time was short. It would be best if I could provide a written sample as soon as possible. An introductory chapter. The relevant material had already been prepared.

In the meantime I know what I should have replied: you're mistaken, I'm not an expert provider of narrative services. I am not an expert at all. I am a very dogged amateur in the field of experiencing big time. I don't believe in the continuous progress of science; I think that the natural sciences, especially medicine, are, just like literature, a maelstrom of production and annihilation. Consequently, in common with many authors, I love doctors as literary figures. I doubt whether the latest equipment and approaches are always better than yesterday's machines and abandoned procedures. I can certainly see that there is change. But I think that most of what we encounter as new is a surprising variation on and combination of older, more or less well-remembered or even quite forgotten elements. I enjoy the phenomenon of "novelty" as an invigorating feeling, as hormonal agitation, but I am far from wanting to make a bony fetish of whatever's new. I would probably not buy the book that I'm supposed to write for you. And if I got it as a present and began to read it out of curiosity it would probably bore me to death. Of the many forms of future, of the expectations, longings, fears I have so far fallen victim to, the future you have in mind is among the most inhibiting. If it were to become dominant, this future-obsession would cannibalise everything that I find hopeful about writing.

Of course I didn't say any of that. Its not often that I make grand statements on the phone. I merely said: "I'm really sorry. Thank you very much for thinking of me. But the imaginary scope of a possible novel has begun to absorb me. It will be called 'The Future of Mars' but have almost nothing to do with what you imagine as the near future of 'science' and 'fiction'. We've simply got a small time problem here, a time problem among contemporaries. But you can certainly call me again in one-and-a-half, in two or two-and-a-half years!"

That time is up. That future is over. The nervous young man never called me again. I finished my novel in June of this year. The book on which I was supposed to collaborate as a ghost-writer was considerably faster. It never became a bestseller. One can now buy copies online for 99 cents plus postage. I am afraid that the experience of big time can make one arrogant towards other forms of the experience of time. Perhaps I should order a copy and read it right to the end as slowly and devoutly as possible and then also lay this narrative mummy to rest in an appropriately dignified manner.

This is a translation of Georg Klein's keynote speech at the International Literature Festival Berlin. The next stop for the world writers conference is Cape Town, where South African writers Antjie Krog and Njabulo Ndebele will ask "Should Literature be Political?" Cape Town Open Book runs from 20 to 24 September. For more information go to the British Council website