I’ve lost sleep worrying about the fate of the written word in the world to come, playing with the pet fear that a young novelist publishing his first book now is like a monk entering the field of manuscript illumination in about 1450, just as the Gutenberg Bible arrives, hot off the press. I have a feeling that literature as we know it is about to go through a major metamorphosis—after which, it’s anybody’s guess what forms of storytelling will emerge as the culturally relevant ones. I have a very realistic fear that the novel won’t be among them.
Questions concerning the fate of the novel in an ever-increasingly hypermediated world remind me of a passage from Italo Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveler, which is partly a commentary on the way books are read in modern life (it was published in 1979, a few years before I was born); it’s simultaneously a loopy brain-puzzle of a book and an earnestly heartsick yearning for big, old-fashioned, realist novels completely unlike itself. It begins in the second person, instructing you, the reader, how to read it:
Yes, you are in you are in your room, calm; you open the book to page one, no, to the last page, first you want to see how long it is. It’s not too long, fortunately. Long novels written today are perhaps a contradiction: the dimension of time has been shattered, we cannot love or think except in fragments of time each of which goes off along its own trajectory and immediately disappears. We can rediscover the continuity of time only in the novels of that period when time no longer seemed stopped and did not yet seem to have exploded, a period that lasted no more than a hundred years.
This is a key to understanding the book’s scattershot string of false starts held together by second-person narration, and a fascinating observation of literary history. Calvino nods to the nineteenth century being (approximately) the hundred-year period when “time no longer seemed stopped and did not yet seem to have exploded.” The nineteenth century was a golden convergence of cheap printing technology, high literacy rates, long leisure hours and not too many distractions: fertile soil for growing Austens and Tolstoys—and, more importantly, their readers.
But then time exploded in the twentieth century—shortening the length of the novel by leeching away at our leisure hours—the rate at which it was exploding exploded, and is still exploding. Presumably, this phenomenon will shorten novels, making them thinner and thinner until finally the art form is whittled out of existence. It will have lasted from Cervantes, to the dreamy atavists of the early twenty-first century who have the absurd arrogance to dare to think their works deserve to sit on a shelf alongside Don Quixote—me, for example. That’s about four hundred years. Not a bad run for a narrative art form. That’s what I think in my most pessimistic moods.
(That phenomenon does not happen in an instantly searchable electronic text that zaps you right to the place you’re looking for, like Scotty beaming you up to the Enterprise.)
These thoughts came to me when I read William H. Gass’s essay, Spectacles, which begins describing the rise of the English masque in the early seventeenth century—elaborate court festivals featuring plays written specifically for them, with crapulous mis-en-scène that overpowered and drowned out the text—and continues to discuss the psychology of the spectacle. Here’s a useful passage that warrants quoting at length:
The Greek world, for example, though its culture was an oral one and only a few of its citizens were literate, was predominately verbal, and Greek plays were static by our standards. Men in masks spoke poetry while a chorus chanted wise and appropriately solemn lines. What mattered was what was said. Until Euripides, whose breaches of decorum caused riots, bloody acts were kept offstage so that great speeches could give an account of them. The medieval world, on the other hand, was visual, and for that it has been called the "Dark Ages." The story of Jesus is so brief and fragmentary in its verbal origins as to be scarcely there at all, but in fresco it is full and glorious; Mary’s figure draws the prayerful to her halo; Christ dies and Christ rises in front of pious eyes at all hours, on every sainted day of the holy year. Life is measured in ritual moments.
A fascinating connection, isn’t it? The spectacle thrives in times of darkness. The spectacle may serve religious ends: it dazzles, numbs, awes, subdues, keeps you dumb. In the middle ages, spectacle was a tool for keeping people dumb ultimately in order to secure the power of the powerful. Which makes sense.
But, for example, the 2009 movie Avatar’s hokey “messages” are, at least in my opinion, basically on the side of the good: the film is vaguely environmentalist and anti-colonialist. That is, against the big bad power structures that fuck up the world. (Some of them, anyway.) So what power structures, then, does the spectacle of Avatar obliquely serve to bulwark? James Cameron’s ego and bank account, for starters, but what else? I suppose Cameron wanted Avatar to be a stone thrown at the glass pane of what we think of movies as being; to be the defining film of the Kuhnian paradigm shift from what film is, to what it will be. If all the movies of the future will be as badly written as Avatar, then I hope not. No, what Avatar contributes to is simply the massive cultural assault on the written word.
But I did not begin this essay with the intention of bitching into the whirlwind about kids today not reading because they’re too busy watching Avatar, or snuggled in their beanbag chairs munching Cheetos and murdering prostitutes in Grand Theft Auto while somewhere out there a “gamer” is discoursing on why we should consider video games art.
And yes, I admit there’s a strong admixture of unrefined nostalgia in my discontents, and I know nostalgia ranks among the most stupid and dangerous feelings potential in humanity. Albeit its danger comes in varying degrees; an imagined history of a pure-blooded Teutonic Reich is more dangerous than “remember Fraggle Rock?” Fraggle Rock has so far produced no genocides, though there’s still time. But thoughtlessly enthusiastic embrace of newness can breed monsters just as easily as—maybe more than—a deathbed clinging to oldness.
Besides, how can I bemoan the hypermediated world when I myself am guilty as sin of being part of the problem? While I’ve been typing up this essay, I’ve been thoughtlessly taking occasional puffs of the internet’s sweet, potent crack—reading emails, keeping up with the headlines, using Facebook to voyeuristically peruse vacation photos of people I barely know—doing what any 26-year-old with an internet connection in the year 2011 does.
A writer in this climate is about as far removed as one can get from your nocturnal Proust in his cork-lined bedroom, hacking blood into a handkerchief, feverishly working against the clock to finish In Search of Lost Time in single-minded, monastic solitude. (Oh, and by the way—btw, I should say—I just now skimmed the Wikipedia article on Proust to make sure that description is more or less correct, or at least Wikicorrect, which is close enough for government work, and, as the zealous defenders of our brave new world love to point out, more often accurate than Encyclopedia Britannica.)
No, what I actually want to bitch about is the effect the Society of the Spectacle has on the art and practice of fiction. I believe human beings have a hunger for stories that can never be sated, though the novel might die (or, more likely—and even more pathetic—not quite die but, like jazz, become so irrelevant to the dominant popular culture that it becomes a living museum piece, and thereby its practitioners become merely wistful imitators of earlier eras’ masters, like Wynton Marsalis serenading the NPR crowd with diluted imitations of 1950s Miles Davis).
I thought of a paradigmatic metaphor for the structure of narrative when I remembered Ernest Rutherford’s gold foil experiment from Physics 101. Rutherford has nothing to do with what I’m discussing; it’s just that I remembered the experiment involved a half-silvered mirror. A half-silvered mirror is a glass that reflects half the light that hits it and allows half the light to pass through it. (It’s also called a beam splitter.)
They’re often used in optical experiments, and I saw them from time to time as a kid, as my father is an optical physicist. Looking at a half-silvered mirror—provided the lighting level is the same on both sides of it—you can choose with equal ease whether to focus your gaze on what’s on the other side of the mirror or what’s on the surface of it (your reflection). Why do I bring this up? Please imagine the architecture of a narrative as a half-silvered mirror standing between the story and the reader (or viewer, etc.).
'IMAGE NOT AVAILABLE IN PRINT VERSION'
You may imagine the mirror/window as being set in a wall if you like. The important thing is that the reader has to look through this window in order to see the story. The adage “show, don’t tell” advises you to make this window as transparent as possible. Wipe it so squeaky-clean that birds will kill themselves against it. Make the reader the forget it is there, in order to let her see right through it and immerse herself completely in the story; so that in her mind, she’s sitting in the tent with Pierre and Andre on the eve of the Battle of Borodino, rather than concentrating on the painstaking decryption of these little black things crawling like ants one after another across the page, these “words, words, words,” as Hamlet snaps when Polonius asks him what he’s reading in that What irks me is that to tell kids in the undergraduate fiction workshop to show, not tell seems to imply that transparency is the only kind of good writing. Hey, you!—yeah, you!—pack up your highfalutin' semiotics and fuck off. Ignore that guy, kids. Just keep on spit-polishin’ that mirror, till I can’t see my face in it. Gimme the story straight-up with no bullshit, make us forget entirely the inherent artifice of narrative.
Donald Barthelme argued that a story doesn’t have to “be about” something. It can be something. Pure being-ness is all well and good if you’re dealing with a piano sonata, but in the case of a story, I disagree with Barthelme slightly. The very word “story” implies meaning. Only purely nonlinguistic art forms are availed the option of not-meaning. A story always exists somewhere on the continuum between being-about, and being. On the one hand, the glass can never be entirely transparent, because that is technically impossible; it always has to be mediated in some way or else it’s not a story, it’s real life. But on the other hand, neither can the glass ever be completely opaque—pure being—because then it’s not a story. Oh, it’s something alright—it’s an Yves Klein monochrome, it’s a Liszt sonata—but it’s not a story.
Prose fiction—precisely because it makes art using a medium of communication, language—is particularly ripe for structural experimentation. Messing around with the contract of belief between book and reader, self-consciously allowing characters to smash the window and invade the world of the reader and so on—i.e., deliberately calling attention to the artifice of narrative—these things were not invented by a crop of acid-blasted postmodern whackoffs in the 1960s, but rather by the very earliest novelists. Writers like Rabelais, Cervantes and Sterne immediately, instinctively discovered the trippiest possibilities of the form. I can think of not one, but two books sometimes jokingly called a “postmodern novel before the novel”: Don Quixote, and Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy. Don Quixote was written a full hundred and fifty years before Tristram Shandy and is actually a lot more novelistic, but both novels made frequent use of the sort of narrative jokes now frequently scoffed at as being “postmodern”—whatever that means.
Don Quixote is a cat’s cradle of narrative loop-de-loops that weave in and out of the surface of the half-silvered mirror. One of the most memorable moments in Don Quixote happens toward the beginning of Part II, which was published a full ten years after Part I. An essential part of Cervantes’s arch-joke is that Don Quixote and Sancho Panza exist in the banal, everyday world of (then-contemporary) early seventeenth-century rural Spain; ten years later, after the wide success of Part I of Don Quixote, naturally this real world now includes the book, Don Quixote—so of course the characters encounter their readers.
Sancho Panza meets a skeptical critic in an inn, who points out a glaring continuity error in Part I that may have resulted from the printer mistakenly placing a certain passage in the wrong part of the text: Sancho Panza’s donkey is stolen, yet in the following chapters, the story plows ahead as Sancho is still described as riding his Dapple.
“‘To this,’ said Sancho, ‘I know not what to answer, unless it be that the historian was mistaken; or it might be an oversight of the printer.’” A lesser genius than Cervantes might have shamefacedly solved the continuity problem in Part I simply by fixing it and publishing a corrected version of the text. Instead, he chose to work with it, using his characters to directly answer his critics, twisting time and space into a comic pretzel.
One of the reasons the death of the novel, if it happens, saddens me so deeply is precisely because prose fiction can be so good at balancing showing and telling. Cinema is not good at this. Film is most at home when it is showing. Because of the nature of the medium, film must filter all its telling through showing; whereas prose fiction must filter all its showing through telling.
The notion that telling is somehow bad follows after the spirit of film, which always creeps closer to total experiential immersion: Put on these unwieldy glasses and submerge yourself into this fastidiously complete alternate reality we sorcerers have created for you—from the bugs on the ground, all the way up to the stars in the sky—one so real, you’ll stick out your hand and expect to feel something, because we’ve tricked your fucking brain into thinking it’s there. That’s the oneirogogic power of film: to construct a narrative with a fourth wall so membranously thin you actually feel like you’re on the other side of it. It’s playing with the mask of artifice, but going in the other direction; opposite the one available to mere printed prose. It takes us into the story, rather than taking the story to us.
“Show, don’t tell” rubs against the very things which make the novel a unique narrative art form. Telling is what makes the novel such a distinctly human medium of narrative, as opposed to superhuman. The spectacular fakery you get from religion and Avatar are very similar; they employ signs and wonders, dreams and lights, angels and sexy blue-skinned aliens (respectively) to impress you, mollify you, sedate you, to conquer your soul and take your goddamn money.
The spectacle is meant for non-reading audiences—in the time of the cathedral because they can’t, and in the time of Avatar because they won’t. The spectacle is set against the word. It is set, finally against the humbly rebellious power of prose. The magic of the narrative art—all the pleasure and all the poison—is, as any good storyteller knows, all in the telling.
I have a feeling that literature as we know it is about to go through a major metamorphosis.
The order Hemingway invented and fed himself in Paris—“show, don’t tell”—has since become a classic piece of advice. You hear it a lot, particularly in undergraduate workshops. Less so—at least in my experience—in MFA programs; but its spirit certainly remained in the way we (at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop) would talk about “POV” and “scenes” and “cuts.” Using cinematic language to discuss prose fiction bothered me at the time in a vague way I couldn’t quite articulate. But now I think it means we face a transition of form.Questions concerning the fate of the novel in an ever-increasingly hypermediated world remind me of a passage from Italo Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveler, which is partly a commentary on the way books are read in modern life (it was published in 1979, a few years before I was born); it’s simultaneously a loopy brain-puzzle of a book and an earnestly heartsick yearning for big, old-fashioned, realist novels completely unlike itself. It begins in the second person, instructing you, the reader, how to read it:
Yes, you are in you are in your room, calm; you open the book to page one, no, to the last page, first you want to see how long it is. It’s not too long, fortunately. Long novels written today are perhaps a contradiction: the dimension of time has been shattered, we cannot love or think except in fragments of time each of which goes off along its own trajectory and immediately disappears. We can rediscover the continuity of time only in the novels of that period when time no longer seemed stopped and did not yet seem to have exploded, a period that lasted no more than a hundred years.
This is a key to understanding the book’s scattershot string of false starts held together by second-person narration, and a fascinating observation of literary history. Calvino nods to the nineteenth century being (approximately) the hundred-year period when “time no longer seemed stopped and did not yet seem to have exploded.” The nineteenth century was a golden convergence of cheap printing technology, high literacy rates, long leisure hours and not too many distractions: fertile soil for growing Austens and Tolstoys—and, more importantly, their readers.
But then time exploded in the twentieth century—shortening the length of the novel by leeching away at our leisure hours—the rate at which it was exploding exploded, and is still exploding. Presumably, this phenomenon will shorten novels, making them thinner and thinner until finally the art form is whittled out of existence. It will have lasted from Cervantes, to the dreamy atavists of the early twenty-first century who have the absurd arrogance to dare to think their works deserve to sit on a shelf alongside Don Quixote—me, for example. That’s about four hundred years. Not a bad run for a narrative art form. That’s what I think in my most pessimistic moods.
That's about four hundred years. Not a bad run for a narrative art form.
In the future, bookstores will look like vinyl record stores today: Small, cramped, unprofitable shops in hip neighborhoods. You’ll find the bookstore on Bedford Avenue, right there between the organic soap store and the place that exclusively sells cupcakes; it’s run by some weird, obsessive geek and patronized by a minuscule clientele of nostalgic snobs like me—the contrarian luddite who still wants a book to hold, a physical object to scribble up with a pen, to write my name in, to physically put on my bookshelf when I’m done with it and then step back and look at it, and think, your place there signifies that I have read you, and, years later, when something reminds me of a sentence I once read in you, I’ll pull you out again and start flipping through your pages looking for that partially-remembered sentence that I won’t find until I’ve “wasted” half my Saturday afternoon sitting at home by myself, rereading you.(That phenomenon does not happen in an instantly searchable electronic text that zaps you right to the place you’re looking for, like Scotty beaming you up to the Enterprise.)
These thoughts came to me when I read William H. Gass’s essay, Spectacles, which begins describing the rise of the English masque in the early seventeenth century—elaborate court festivals featuring plays written specifically for them, with crapulous mis-en-scène that overpowered and drowned out the text—and continues to discuss the psychology of the spectacle. Here’s a useful passage that warrants quoting at length:
The Greek world, for example, though its culture was an oral one and only a few of its citizens were literate, was predominately verbal, and Greek plays were static by our standards. Men in masks spoke poetry while a chorus chanted wise and appropriately solemn lines. What mattered was what was said. Until Euripides, whose breaches of decorum caused riots, bloody acts were kept offstage so that great speeches could give an account of them. The medieval world, on the other hand, was visual, and for that it has been called the "Dark Ages." The story of Jesus is so brief and fragmentary in its verbal origins as to be scarcely there at all, but in fresco it is full and glorious; Mary’s figure draws the prayerful to her halo; Christ dies and Christ rises in front of pious eyes at all hours, on every sainted day of the holy year. Life is measured in ritual moments.
A fascinating connection, isn’t it? The spectacle thrives in times of darkness. The spectacle may serve religious ends: it dazzles, numbs, awes, subdues, keeps you dumb. In the middle ages, spectacle was a tool for keeping people dumb ultimately in order to secure the power of the powerful. Which makes sense.
But, for example, the 2009 movie Avatar’s hokey “messages” are, at least in my opinion, basically on the side of the good: the film is vaguely environmentalist and anti-colonialist. That is, against the big bad power structures that fuck up the world. (Some of them, anyway.) So what power structures, then, does the spectacle of Avatar obliquely serve to bulwark? James Cameron’s ego and bank account, for starters, but what else? I suppose Cameron wanted Avatar to be a stone thrown at the glass pane of what we think of movies as being; to be the defining film of the Kuhnian paradigm shift from what film is, to what it will be. If all the movies of the future will be as badly written as Avatar, then I hope not. No, what Avatar contributes to is simply the massive cultural assault on the written word.
But I did not begin this essay with the intention of bitching into the whirlwind about kids today not reading because they’re too busy watching Avatar, or snuggled in their beanbag chairs munching Cheetos and murdering prostitutes in Grand Theft Auto while somewhere out there a “gamer” is discoursing on why we should consider video games art.
Or snuggled in their beanbag chairs munching Cheetos and murdering
prostitutes in Grand Theft Auto...
That essay may as well be written on wind and running water, for the lick of difference it would make. I know the world changes, and that art changes with it. I can accept that if I’m lucky enough to keep writing fiction into the future, I might wind up with a fan-base consisting of a handful of nostalgic snobs who are probably all writers themselves. This is the state in which contemporary poetry already finds itself.prostitutes in Grand Theft Auto...
And yes, I admit there’s a strong admixture of unrefined nostalgia in my discontents, and I know nostalgia ranks among the most stupid and dangerous feelings potential in humanity. Albeit its danger comes in varying degrees; an imagined history of a pure-blooded Teutonic Reich is more dangerous than “remember Fraggle Rock?” Fraggle Rock has so far produced no genocides, though there’s still time. But thoughtlessly enthusiastic embrace of newness can breed monsters just as easily as—maybe more than—a deathbed clinging to oldness.
Besides, how can I bemoan the hypermediated world when I myself am guilty as sin of being part of the problem? While I’ve been typing up this essay, I’ve been thoughtlessly taking occasional puffs of the internet’s sweet, potent crack—reading emails, keeping up with the headlines, using Facebook to voyeuristically peruse vacation photos of people I barely know—doing what any 26-year-old with an internet connection in the year 2011 does.
A writer in this climate is about as far removed as one can get from your nocturnal Proust in his cork-lined bedroom, hacking blood into a handkerchief, feverishly working against the clock to finish In Search of Lost Time in single-minded, monastic solitude. (Oh, and by the way—btw, I should say—I just now skimmed the Wikipedia article on Proust to make sure that description is more or less correct, or at least Wikicorrect, which is close enough for government work, and, as the zealous defenders of our brave new world love to point out, more often accurate than Encyclopedia Britannica.)
No, what I actually want to bitch about is the effect the Society of the Spectacle has on the art and practice of fiction. I believe human beings have a hunger for stories that can never be sated, though the novel might die (or, more likely—and even more pathetic—not quite die but, like jazz, become so irrelevant to the dominant popular culture that it becomes a living museum piece, and thereby its practitioners become merely wistful imitators of earlier eras’ masters, like Wynton Marsalis serenading the NPR crowd with diluted imitations of 1950s Miles Davis).
I thought of a paradigmatic metaphor for the structure of narrative when I remembered Ernest Rutherford’s gold foil experiment from Physics 101. Rutherford has nothing to do with what I’m discussing; it’s just that I remembered the experiment involved a half-silvered mirror. A half-silvered mirror is a glass that reflects half the light that hits it and allows half the light to pass through it. (It’s also called a beam splitter.)
They’re often used in optical experiments, and I saw them from time to time as a kid, as my father is an optical physicist. Looking at a half-silvered mirror—provided the lighting level is the same on both sides of it—you can choose with equal ease whether to focus your gaze on what’s on the other side of the mirror or what’s on the surface of it (your reflection). Why do I bring this up? Please imagine the architecture of a narrative as a half-silvered mirror standing between the story and the reader (or viewer, etc.).
'IMAGE NOT AVAILABLE IN PRINT VERSION'
You may imagine the mirror/window as being set in a wall if you like. The important thing is that the reader has to look through this window in order to see the story. The adage “show, don’t tell” advises you to make this window as transparent as possible. Wipe it so squeaky-clean that birds will kill themselves against it. Make the reader the forget it is there, in order to let her see right through it and immerse herself completely in the story; so that in her mind, she’s sitting in the tent with Pierre and Andre on the eve of the Battle of Borodino, rather than concentrating on the painstaking decryption of these little black things crawling like ants one after another across the page, these “words, words, words,” as Hamlet snaps when Polonius asks him what he’s reading in that What irks me is that to tell kids in the undergraduate fiction workshop to show, not tell seems to imply that transparency is the only kind of good writing. Hey, you!—yeah, you!—pack up your highfalutin' semiotics and fuck off. Ignore that guy, kids. Just keep on spit-polishin’ that mirror, till I can’t see my face in it. Gimme the story straight-up with no bullshit, make us forget entirely the inherent artifice of narrative.
The half-silvered mirror of story exists simultaneously as both a portal,
and object in its own right...
Some great fiction deliberately knocks against that pane of glass in extremely interesting ways. Some great writers are fascinated by the realization that the glass through which the reader gazes into the story can never be perfectly transparent. The glass is always at least partially silvered; we can see through it, but if we refocus our eyes we can easily see our own reflection in it at the same time. The half-silvered mirror of story exists simultaneously as both a portal, and object in its own right—in our world, the book we hold in our hands. (Or Kindle, or iPad, or whatever.)and object in its own right...
Donald Barthelme argued that a story doesn’t have to “be about” something. It can be something. Pure being-ness is all well and good if you’re dealing with a piano sonata, but in the case of a story, I disagree with Barthelme slightly. The very word “story” implies meaning. Only purely nonlinguistic art forms are availed the option of not-meaning. A story always exists somewhere on the continuum between being-about, and being. On the one hand, the glass can never be entirely transparent, because that is technically impossible; it always has to be mediated in some way or else it’s not a story, it’s real life. But on the other hand, neither can the glass ever be completely opaque—pure being—because then it’s not a story. Oh, it’s something alright—it’s an Yves Klein monochrome, it’s a Liszt sonata—but it’s not a story.
A story always exists somewhere on the continuum between being-about, and being.
The very nature of the medium—“words, words, words”—assures that one can never reach pure abstraction. Words do many things—they connote, they sound a certain way, they look a certain way on the page—but most importantly, they communicate. Whenever you use a word, you’re already stepping into the sphere of being-about. Nonlinguistic art forms can be narrative, but linguistic art forms can never not be narrative in some way. A story is anything that lives between the extreme points of abstraction and the real world. Navigating between these two points is where the fun of the novel is.Prose fiction—precisely because it makes art using a medium of communication, language—is particularly ripe for structural experimentation. Messing around with the contract of belief between book and reader, self-consciously allowing characters to smash the window and invade the world of the reader and so on—i.e., deliberately calling attention to the artifice of narrative—these things were not invented by a crop of acid-blasted postmodern whackoffs in the 1960s, but rather by the very earliest novelists. Writers like Rabelais, Cervantes and Sterne immediately, instinctively discovered the trippiest possibilities of the form. I can think of not one, but two books sometimes jokingly called a “postmodern novel before the novel”: Don Quixote, and Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy. Don Quixote was written a full hundred and fifty years before Tristram Shandy and is actually a lot more novelistic, but both novels made frequent use of the sort of narrative jokes now frequently scoffed at as being “postmodern”—whatever that means.
Don Quixote is a cat’s cradle of narrative loop-de-loops that weave in and out of the surface of the half-silvered mirror. One of the most memorable moments in Don Quixote happens toward the beginning of Part II, which was published a full ten years after Part I. An essential part of Cervantes’s arch-joke is that Don Quixote and Sancho Panza exist in the banal, everyday world of (then-contemporary) early seventeenth-century rural Spain; ten years later, after the wide success of Part I of Don Quixote, naturally this real world now includes the book, Don Quixote—so of course the characters encounter their readers.
Sancho Panza meets a skeptical critic in an inn, who points out a glaring continuity error in Part I that may have resulted from the printer mistakenly placing a certain passage in the wrong part of the text: Sancho Panza’s donkey is stolen, yet in the following chapters, the story plows ahead as Sancho is still described as riding his Dapple.
“‘To this,’ said Sancho, ‘I know not what to answer, unless it be that the historian was mistaken; or it might be an oversight of the printer.’” A lesser genius than Cervantes might have shamefacedly solved the continuity problem in Part I simply by fixing it and publishing a corrected version of the text. Instead, he chose to work with it, using his characters to directly answer his critics, twisting time and space into a comic pretzel.
One of the reasons the death of the novel, if it happens, saddens me so deeply is precisely because prose fiction can be so good at balancing showing and telling. Cinema is not good at this. Film is most at home when it is showing. Because of the nature of the medium, film must filter all its telling through showing; whereas prose fiction must filter all its showing through telling.
The notion that telling is somehow bad follows after the spirit of film, which always creeps closer to total experiential immersion: Put on these unwieldy glasses and submerge yourself into this fastidiously complete alternate reality we sorcerers have created for you—from the bugs on the ground, all the way up to the stars in the sky—one so real, you’ll stick out your hand and expect to feel something, because we’ve tricked your fucking brain into thinking it’s there. That’s the oneirogogic power of film: to construct a narrative with a fourth wall so membranously thin you actually feel like you’re on the other side of it. It’s playing with the mask of artifice, but going in the other direction; opposite the one available to mere printed prose. It takes us into the story, rather than taking the story to us.
“Show, don’t tell” rubs against the very things which make the novel a unique narrative art form. Telling is what makes the novel such a distinctly human medium of narrative, as opposed to superhuman. The spectacular fakery you get from religion and Avatar are very similar; they employ signs and wonders, dreams and lights, angels and sexy blue-skinned aliens (respectively) to impress you, mollify you, sedate you, to conquer your soul and take your goddamn money.
The spectacle is meant for non-reading audiences—in the time of the cathedral because they can’t, and in the time of Avatar because they won’t. The spectacle is set against the word. It is set, finally against the humbly rebellious power of prose. The magic of the narrative art—all the pleasure and all the poison—is, as any good storyteller knows, all in the telling.