Splinters

Weary of all this. But here we go again. Tomorrow night sees the third part of Channel 4's lamentable series The Story of the Novel. It is trailed in the Radio Times thus: "Modernist writers such as Joyce, Woolf and Lawrence threw out the rulebook. [?] But, in doing so, alienated much of the reading public, who began to turn to populist authors such HG Wells and Arnold Bennett. [The programme] asks what the modernist experiment achieved, and at what cost."

In what way did they "turn to" these other authors? Was there a time in which the "reading public" (note, an individual in his or her own space, reading alone, is never referred to; always an anonymous mass) read challenging authors and then turned away? Or could this an Alastair Campbell-like way of saying modernism was/is never popular? Is this how they define "achievement" and "cost"? But what might art achieve beyond itself that remains relevant to it? Any ideas?

An audience is important, of course. In fact, one cannot write without an audience. Writing itself is a public act even if it is done on a desert island. Yet there is always the possibility of gaining one reader, one sat quietly in a room discovering at last, in an epiphany of recognition, that there are words for what he or she feels, and thereby aware of alternatives to the stifling Little Englander realism of Bennett and hack journalese of Wells.

This episode features contributions from Ian McEwan, Jeanette Winterson and Christopher Hitchens, among others. Let's hope we hear some sense from them.