Fiction and the Smartphone

A few years back, author Ann Patchett complained that “this technology thing, the ever-encroaching creep of communications” was making it hard to write fiction:
“I just don’t know how to write a novel in which the characters can get in touch with all the other characters at any moment…I don’t know how to write a novel in the world of Google, in which all factual information is available to all characters.”

Turns out many authors share Patchett’s “problem”. Steve Himmer says many solve this problem by using “settings close to the present, but far enough back to avoid such inconvenience”. Author Jared Yates Sexton calls this setting the “nostalgic present”.

Himmer himself doesn’t approve of this technique. Instead, he recommends embracing the new world so that the disrupter of art becomes part of the art. After all, he says:
“The more we expect to always have a signal, the harder it is to conceive a convincing situation in which a character does not.”
He recommends a mindset change amongst authors:
“I don’t see these elements of contemporary life as destructive of narrative possibilities, but as sources for new possibilities.”

If present day authors avoid adapting their plots to factor in for the ubiquitous device of the day, Himmer’s warns:
“Pretending otherwise in our stories will only make them appear ossified and exacerbate complaints that literature has nothing left for today’s readers, never mind tomorrow’s who might someday ask how we made sense of ourselves.”

Nobody is saying any of this is easy. In her books, JK Rowling, author of the Harry Potter series, had Hermione Granger running to the library for information. It made sense when she started writing in 1997; but it was already raising questions like “Why doesn’t she just Google it up?” by 2003, mid-way into her series! At least Rowling’s plot and story-telling was awesome; so she could evade the question. But let’s face it: most authors aren’t anywhere near as good as Rowling and so they can’t avoid such questions. At least not if they want to be read.

Comments

  1. Ramiah KumarJanuary 17, 2016 at 2:14 PM

    Is literature about such issues? Is literature about whether information is gathered from libraries having books and persons turning pages in many books laboriously, or, whether persons press buttons while sipping coffee and get it on their screens?

    I haven't read any Rowling but I know this. When William Shakespeare writes or when Alexander Dumas writes, or when Loe Tolstoy writes - not to mention the big list of Hemmingways, Bernad Shaws and many others - there is something fundamentally human and life in what they write. They reflect understanding and wisdom, ask questions about morality and values, not to push anything down the throat, but to make us introspect and maybe feel.

    Machine age and cyber age have dimmed our emotional capability and eroded our moral/values sensibility no doubt, but they have failed in making us non-human. Not yet certainly. In that sense, it looks to me it is not at all possible that literary value would be decided by the transport means being a horse-driven cart or a jet aircraft that the hero or heroine or even the villain (if any exists) would take! For that matter, such technological advanced world comparisons, such as information availability.

    In physics and maths, humanness does not count. Actually there is no place in their domain for such a thing. It is all head, no heart! Physics will only ask, "Are human beings one of the four forces of nature?" "No". "Forget them!" Maths has a different question, "Are human beings numbers?" "No". "Well then, shall we continue with our Laplace Transforms, ignoring them whatever they may be?"

    In literature humanness counts! Actually it is all about that only. One needs a heart to feel, and feel for others, and feel situations people are in. Literature is about it, gently and subtly; it is not into intellectualizing people and situations.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Student of the Year

Image
As a toddler, my daughter loved Alia Bhatt’s songs, esp. the ones from Student of the Year . (That movie did have many good songs and well-choreographed dances). Fast forward to present day, when she is 12 yo. She rarely watches Hindi movies now, but one of the few ones she likes of late, Raja aur Rani ki Prem Kahani has, yes, Alia Bhatt.   If I had any hopes that there was anything to be read in the name of her toddler-time favorite ( Student of the Year ), they have been dashed. Our conversations come exam time are perfectly captured by this photo and its caption: In fact, the pic below captures how she and I look at her answer sheets – me intently, she with an expression of “It’s over, so why are you even looking at it?”   Of late, we pull her leg and tell her that she isn’t showing any signs of academic prowess, she’d better find a rich guy to marry. Some time later, she showed us this meme on the Internet: “Me No Study, Me No Care Me Go Marry Millionaire If He Die
Read more

The Retort of the "Luxury Person"

Image
Coming up with biting and witty retorts. It’s something we dream of, but rarely manage to pull off. Worse, the more we stew over the offending remark, the more likely we are to come up with that dream retort, as Calvin ruefully points out: During our last holiday at the Taj Resort, seeing my wife carrying towels to our poolside chairs, one of the kids there mistook her for a member of the staff and asked for a towel. When my wife narrated this to us, I did not imagine that my 8 yo daughter would come up with her own retort. But a day later, my daughter recapped the incident, an incident that didn’t even involve her in the first place , and said, “You know what I’d have told that kid who asked for the towel?”. And without waiting for an answer, she told us anyway: “I don’t work here. I too am a luxury person who is living at this resort. Go get your own towel.” We were highly amused by the phrase she had coined: “luxury person”. It certainly captures the kind of holid
Read more

Animal Senses #7: Touch and Remote Touch

Instinctively, we think touch is based on contact. Not entirely true, explains Ed Yong in Immense World – there’s a more important aspect than contact: “These incredible feats are possible through movement. If you rest a fingertip upon a surface, you can get only a limited idea of its features. But as soon you’re allowed to move, everything changes. Hardness becomes apparent with a press. Textures resolve at a stroke.” As you run your fingers over a surface, they hit the tiny peaks and troughs and set off vibrations in the mechanoreceptors at their tips.   At the tip of its snout, the star-nosed mole has many pairs of hairless appendages. It uses them to touch things around itself. Alive or dead? Food or ignore? It does these movements at an insane speed. In the time it takes to blink our eyes, the star-nosed mole can probe, identify and swallow its food. “Light may be the fastest thing in the universe, but light sensors have their limits, and the star-nosed mole’s sense of
Read more