Whether we like it or not, the net is rewiring our reading habits. As Benjamin said, the novel, as it exists, cannot contain the threat from the form that is greater than it: information. If it is to be relevant at all, the novel must break into new hybrids and leave the 19th-century segregation of fact, fiction, memoir and essay behind. The novel must let the world in and speak through the many forms that the world already speaks through. (Ewan Morrison in The Guardian)
I’ve been thinking about this article all week. Summarised in the quote above, Morrison’s argument – and it’s not just his, it’s been going on for ages – states that the ‘traditional’ linear narrative work of fiction is doomed in the internet age, that our ‘hopping from screen to screen’, as Morrison puts it, has changed not only the way we read but also the kind of fiction we are interested in reading.
I’m kind of with him. The great philosophical novels of nineteenth century Russia formed the bedrock of my literary education. They shaped my thinking and to some extent my personality. I’ll never regret a moment spent reading them. But now as a reader and as a writer I am finding that I prefer fiction that has some interface with the world – whichever world that may be – beyond the pages of the book. In the last five years or so I’ve noticed a distinct shift in the kind of novels I like to read, which has reflected itself in the kind of fiction I’m trying to write, and back again and vice versa. It’s rare these days for me to pick up a novel that is ‘just’ a story and feel wholly satisfied by it. I used to believe it was bad form, a gross discourtesy, to abandon a novel once I’d started to read it; more recently I’ve found myself reluctant to plough on with a book once it becomes clear to me that I’m not going to gain much by it. This is something I rather regret, but is nonetheless true. Novels I’ve abandoned have often been competently written and engaging on the story level at least – but they’ve been lacking in what I’d call creative nutrition.
I like a text that is self-aware. I like a book that talks back.
Where I differ from Morrison though is that I don’t wholly attribute these changes in my preferences to the arrival in my life of the internet. If you read the whole of Morrison’s article (which I strongly recommend because it’s excellent) you’ll see that many of the works he cites as examples of the ‘fracturing’ of the traditional linear novel date from before the modern computer age truly began and certainly before the internet became ubiquitous. Milan Kundera published The Book of Laughter and Forgetting in 1979. Douglas Coupland’s Generation X came out in 1991. We might also mention D. M. Thomas’s 1981 novel The White Hotel, and the ‘document in the form of a novel’ it so shamelessly ripped off, Anatoli Kuznetsov’s Babi Yar, first published in 1966. Further examples of ‘factual fiction’ are Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song (1980), Capote’s In Cold Blood (1966), Nabokov’s Pale Fire (1962), Hugo’s Les Miserables (1862) and Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851). None of these guys had iPads or worried about whether their readers were suffering from screen-hopping-related ADD or not. They just wanted to try new things, to push fiction as far as it would go and see what happened.
And it’s not just the writers. Kids take to gaming and social networking more or less instantly but when it comes to reading they are more likely to begin their adventures in fiction with Harry Potter than with William Burroughs. Fiction takes time, and literary taste takes time to develop. In spite of any changes the internet might have made to the way we spend our leisure hours, the majority of book readers still prefer traditional linear narratives because that is what they are used to and therefore feel most comfortable with. You only have to look at this year’s Orange Prize longlist to see how the traditional novel still dominates the literary establishment. Of the twenty writers selected, only two (Ali Smith and A. L. Kennedy) show a consistent interest in literary form – how as opposed to what – and Helen Oyeyemi, whose novel Mr Fox presents one of 2011’s most gorgeously daring experiments in structure, is yet again conspicuous by her absence. (I note with dismay that the chair of this year’s Orange is Joanna Trollope….)
Those who seek out newer forms of fiction are likely to do so not because their brains have somehow been altered by too much screen time but because they are actively interested in how the traditional medium of literature reacts and changes when faced with the encroachment into its territory of new media. They enjoy the internet as theory as well as practice. The readers and writers who gain most inspiration and enjoyment from new forms of writing are not necessarily the most media savvy; they are more likely to be the most intellectually curious – in other words, precisely those same people who would have been galvanized by Moby-Dick a century ago.
One of the things I love most about SF is that by its very nature it has already called the traditional novel into doubt. By presenting the reader with the unexpected – with fact that might be fiction and vice versa – it has already confounded reader expectations, added an extra layer of significance to the experience of reading it. It’s no surprise then to discover that some of the greatest literary innovators – Dick, Strugatskys, Lem, Ballard, Gibson, Priest, (M. John) Harrison, (Steve) Erickson, Coupland, Tidhar – are to be found at the borderlands of slipstream and SF.
I’m guessing that some readers will have discounted Ewan Morrison’s article as simply one more unwelcome pronouncement that ‘the novel is dead’. I found what was said here not only interesting and relevant but inspirational. We can debate the reasons for change and enjoy doing so, but what is important is the change itself, the pushing forward. Like I say, I’ve been thinking about this all week.