something new under the sun

Every few years someone comes along to bemoan the death of the novel. Usually and unsurprisingly, the villain is determined to be Hollywood*** or Televisionland. Now, with the mass public mourning over the end of the beloved (except by me) Sopranos, someone adds a little nuance to the argument:

More and more Americans spend their day waking up, checking their email, travelling to work, clicking through their Blackberries, sitting at cubicles, staring into a monitor, and the coming home, to look - once again - at a screen: the television. The eye has been trained to scan, and to receive, and less and less to read.

It feels somewhat ungrateful to complain in today’s television environment, with so many well-written, superbly acted shows available, that the screen is destroying the page. But it’s true, especially if you pause to consider that reading fiction is something that requires time, time away from a screen. More and more, though, Americans don’t have the time to think, let alone to read. … In this environment, there is no better delivery system than the image for themes which transport - because that’s how our eyes work the rest of the day. The Sopranos does the imagining; our eyes need only follow.

Well, his argument doesn’t explain the specific appeal of The Sopranos—which I’d put down to the storytelling skills of David Chase and the aching desire of audiences in the HBO demo for compelling storytelling … regardless of the form in which it’s delivered.

Reading stories in print delivers one kind of experience. Watching a story unfold delivers a different kind of experience. If they’re great, sprawling stories well told, what’s the difference to the consumer of the story?

Nothing. Nevertheless, this author too is “troubled” by the falling numbers of people who read novels.

America’s most powerful myth-making muse long ago moved in to Hollywood (and the White House press room), so the ascendancy of The Sopranos to the level of quasi-literary art should have been expected. Indeed, this wouldn’t be troubling were Americans reading other, actual novels. But they’re not - at least not in the numbers they once did. An alarming study released in 2004 by the National Endowment for the Arts noted that in the last two decades the US has experienced a 10% drop-off in the reading of literature - which they define as just one novel, story or play per year - and a 28% drop in the key 18-24 age group.

As a devoted book lover, I find it regrettable that young people aren’t indulging in this uniquely gratifying form of storytelling, but I don’t find it alarming that in an image-soaked, plugged-in-24/7 world people are seeking to get their story fixes elsewhere than in books.

Our storytelling forms are evolving, and so are our story-hearing preferences. The book is only a container for a certain kind of narrative, the novel, which itself has only been around for a few hundred years. Before there were books, there was verse, spoken and later written in meter.

The world is changing. Deal with it.

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*** In 1999 Hollywood was also accused of killing off—excuse me: of having “conquered”—reality itself by Neal Gabler in Life: the Movie.

Nicholas Lemann summarized Gabler’s argument in The Atlantic:

Gabler’s argument here is an interesting, even an arresting one. He says that entertainment, the subject of his previous two books (and of his next one, a biography of Walt Disney), has become increasingly important, and not just because it is a big industry and a leading exporter; its logic and rhythm have become the controlling ones in American life. “Karl Marx and Joseph Schumpeter both seem to have been wrong,” Gabler writes. “It is not any ism but entertainment that is arguably the most pervasive, powerful and ineluctable force of our time — a force so overwhelming that it has finally metastasized into life.”

The basic means by which we now organize experience, Gabler says, is the creation of “life movies,” or (a great neologism) “lifies,” about public figures and about ourselves. These have a structure borrowed from popular entertainment, movies in particular. There has to be a strong central character, a plot line, and a play on the emotions. We are far more absorbed by lifies than by the facts of any situation.

Gabler rolls out dozens of examples of the transmogrification of life into stock drama, as entertainment techniques have relentlessly leached into non-entertainment venues. In politics the quadrennial political conventions have changed from real dramas to pageants staged for the purpose of winning the votes of television viewers. Ronald Reagan turned the presidency itself into a procession of scripts and images. The docudrama and the novelistic lead are ubiquitous in journalism. The self-dramatizing memoir has taken over book publishing. Donald Trump became a tycoon by making himself a celebrity first. Ordinary people have turned from religion to the worship of celebrities (Gabler points out that the Air Jordan logo resembles a crucifix), and have also become the dramaturges of their own lives …

Lemann also poked a big whole in Gabler’s thesis:

It’s mesmerizing to have the surreal dramas that make up so much of the on-rushing stream of American life — the Washington feeding frenzies and the Diana-keenings and the star-chamber trash-TV interview shows — presented all together. The nearly unavoidable first reaction is that Gabler is on to a real change, up there in significance with urbanization or post-industrialism. Reality is fading away as the governing principle in human affairs. The manipulation of perceptions is replacing it. …

It isn’t too much to say that narrative and visual imagery are the basic means by which people process experience. … Gabler’s evidence, however, could be marshaled in support of the idea that we’re seeing a development less earth-shattering than the trumping of reality by perception in the conduct of human affairs. That development would be an expansion in the breadth and visibility of popular culture.