Why write novels at all?

Garth Risk Hallberg confronts the question:

The roots of this question, in its contemporary incarnation, can be traced back to the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, who at the dawn of the ’80s promulgated the notion of “cultural capital”: the idea that aesthetic choices are an artifact of socioeconomic position. Bourdieu documented a correlation between taste and class position: The scarcer or more difficult to access an aesthetic experience is — the novel very much included — the greater its ability to set us apart from those further down the social ladder. This kind of value is, in his analysis, the only real value that “refined” tastes have.

It’s hard to overstate how revolutionary this riposte to the aesthetics of “transcendence” must have seemed 30 years ago. You don’t have to subject yourself to the sweep and rigor of Bourdieu’s book “Distinction” to feel how thoroughly a lower-calorie version of its ideas has been absorbed into the cultural bloodstream. As the music critic Carl Wilson argues in “Let’s Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste,” his book on Celine Dion, “In early 21st-century terms, for most people under 50, distinction boils down to cool.” And the Internet has rendered the competition for cool more transparent than ever. We who curate our Twitter feeds and Facebook walls understand that at least part of what we’re doing publicly, “like”-ing what we like, is trying to separate ourselves from the herd.

(Video: ZDFmediatek interview with David Foster Wallace. Just as an aside, I'm currently reading Wallace's Infinite Jest, which has been hailed as a sort of 'revolutionary' novel, the kind that reminds novelists and critics of what the novel can be as a form.)