This fortnight's Sunday Guardian column.
 |
| FreeDigitalPhotos.Net |
In
an interview some years ago, Zadie Smith remarked that one of the challenges
facing a novelist today was that of how to capture the reality of a person’s
life at a time when he or she spent hours daily gazing into computer or phone
screens and communicating via e-mail and text messages. In a hard-hitting piece in Slate this week, Daniel Sarewitz
called this dependence “a problem we are powerless to resolve”; it’s time to
acknowledge that “the moment you and your date finish ordering dinner you pull
out your smartphones and start texting so you don’t have to face the
possibility of silence; that you have come to believe that you more-or-less
actually have read War and Peace
because you read the plot summary on Wikipedia; that you find out what your kid
is up to not by talking to her but by monitoring her Facebook page; that at
work you simply cannot go more than 10 minutes without surreptitiously checking
email no matter how much else you have to do”. Quite so.
Given
that fiction is supposed to have the advantage of being able to create and map
interiority -- our mental lives -- how does it do so convincingly at a time
when so much of this interiority is informed and shaped by digital
communication?
Some
writers, mirroring the epistolary novels of the past, have simply incorporated
e-mails wholesale – such as Matthew Beaumont’s e. Others have inserted e-mail messages into their narratives, as
with David Gilbert’s recent & Sons.
Such efforts seem forced – too obvious attempts to mirror new ways of
communication. The problem is that such forms are so rooted in their own
contexts that it’s hard, if not impossible, to knit them seamlessly into longer
narratives. This is especially marked when you look at instances when text
messages appear in novels – Gilbert’s &
Sons again being one such. Then again, a new story by Jeffrey Eugenides in
the latest New Yorker has a character playing Words with Friends on his phone,
and this is more efficiently done, possibly because describing it is like recounting
a game of Scrabble.
One
way out would be to take a leaf from the way we write reported speech – to
write, for example, that a text message informed a character that he would be
late, or that her Facebook status indicated that she was depressed -- instead
of actually replicating content. But this, obviously, would create distance and
lack the immediacy of direct dialogue.
Perhaps someone needs to come up with the equivalent of quotation marks
for all digital communication.
It's
an issue that can't be side-stepped, because it's going to come across as
increasingly quaint to have novels of contemporary life peopled by characters
who aren't engaged in periodic bouts of exchanging notes and gleaning information
via screens. (Those writing historical novels must be heaving sighs of relief.)
Movies, of course, face the same issue, and they're also going to have to deal
with it in ways that fit into that medium -- one can't have, for example, a
modern-day romantic comedy in which the protagonists don't exchange text
messages or check Facebook pages obsessively. The next Richard Curtis film
could well be titled Four Weddings, a
Funeral and Several Tweets.
As
for an allied issue, that of being unable to sustain attention because of
digital distraction, there seems to be a mystifying rearguard action by
novelists of simply writing longer works. After Richard House’s The Kills, Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch and Eleanor Catton’s The Luminaries, to mention just three,
comes the news that Knopf has paid close to $2 million for City on Fire, a debut novel by Garth Risk Hallberg that’s 900 pages
long. One hopes it’s a worthwhile investment. As for me, I’ve found succour
from such distractions in the pages of crime novels. So if you’ll excuse me, I
need to return to the squares of Venice and the continuing exploits of the valiant
Commissario Brunetti.
No comments:
Post a Comment