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If this is the future of the novel, the novel is finished
August 30, 2009 | 9:59 am
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By Court Merrigan
Reminder: These are Court’s personal opinions. Furlong fans are welcome to speak up in the comments area. – D.R.
Today’s entry on the future of literature comes from Nicola Furlong, self-identified “shameless self-promoter” and Canadian writer of mysteries.
Furlong has produced a multimedia novel entitled Unnatural States. It is certainly multimedia. Whether it is a novel is debatable. More on that later. Navigating the simple site, you are immediately confronted with a “Trailer / Intro”, which features an buzzcut older woman in sunglasses performing YouTube-esque antics in lieu of of a book jacket. It had me clicking desperately for the next page. Readers, it went downhill from there.
Unnatural States is a linear progression of linked Web pages filled with text, pictures, sound effects and more video clips. These are all meant to serve as the stuff of this “novel,” which apparently is a mystery about some latter-day John the Apostle and a terrier-like reporter named Virginia hot on his trail. Or something. It was hard to tell, what with all the noise and bad sentences.
If it’s possible for a website to be claustrophobic, this one is. When I’m reading, I like to know where I’m going. How many pages the books has (or dots at the bottom of the screen, in the case of the Kindle), how far along I am, what chapter I’m on, and so forth. Unnatural States gives you none of these. You don’t how far you’ve come, or how far you’ve got to go. There are no chapters. No organization at all that I could detect, other than the arrows at the bottom of your screen. If you want to understand what’s going on, you can’t skip the video clips. You have to watch them. It’s like taking orders from the author. It’s annoying as hell.
I mean, I like movies and video as much as anyone. But I watch them as video. Clips as stand-ins for the written word are horribly inefficient. They just take so long. What would constitute a few paragraphs of dialogue takes three minutes of video. It’s the same reason I prefer to get my news off the web rather than TV: in the time it takes a talking head to get to the gist, I can have read a whole page of analysis, and be on to the next thing, rather than passively waiting for the talking head to tell me what’s next.
Now, a novel just is a passive experience. Which is why I can’t stand to read bad ones. If I’m going to hand my conscious working mind over to a writer, he / she better do good things with it. Inserting video clips as stand-ins for words just doesn’t cut it. I don’t pick up a novel to be a part-time watcher. I pick it up to be a reader.
Normally I’m all for innovation. But this is the kind of thing that’s going to make a raging literary reactionary out of me. There have to be some parameters. A novel can be spoken, a novel can be filmed. But, as yet, a novel cannot be turned into a multimedia showcase. Not without ceasing to become a novel and becoming something else. A dreary mess, in this case.
Take the video sequences, for instance. Yes, they are painfully amateur productions. But that’s not the problem. Slick scenes directed by Quentin Tarantino would not improve the situation. That’s because video clips are not writing; they are fundamentally something else. This is the reason you don’t attend a movie screening of your favorite novel book in hand, nor read a book with a DVD remote, watching the scenes as you read them. I suppose it’s possible to imagine a future when the multitasking hordes both read and watch video at the same time, but that won’t be reading (or watching, for that matter). It will be something else. For now the barrier between the two is impermeable. Unnatural States is a demonstration of why. If this is the future of the novel, the novel is finished.
Is it fair to review a “novel” that I haven’t actually finished? Normally I’d say no. But in this case I think it is justified. I couldn’t possibly drudge through to end of this exercise in digital tedium. Furlong has managed to construct a galactic failure of tinny sound effects, 80s-arcade music, painfully turgid video scenes, and woefully uninteresting writing. An actual novel, the kind that consists of mere words, is incapable of such a massive falling down. So I guess this makes Furlong something of an innovator, after all.
Judge for yourself here: Unnatural States, by Nicola Furlong.
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Comments:
I think the basic problem here is that everyone feels a need to reinvent things that are perfectly good as they are. Even if Ms. Furlong’s project was entirely worthy of attention, that doesn’t mean it is a novel, nor that it should be considered a novel. Rather it would be a new thing.
In any case, lets consider, for a moment, that the nature of any art form is working within the limitations of that art form. There are rules that define what a novel is as opposed to a short story or a poem and though it is generally unnecessary to state them, that sets a novel apart from a move. The novel is about bringing an extended story to life with words; the occasional illustration might be allowed, but certainly those illustrations should serve as accents to the text and not replace it.
If an art form ever does really develop that serves to mix video and text, I am not sure what it will be, but it won’t be a novel.
I think the really telling thing is that the technology to create hypertext and multimedia non-linear “novels” has been with us for (give or take) two decades. The audience (i.e. those who can connect to the Internet and might be interested) has been around for more than ten years. And in that time, despite a few efforts, I haven’t seen one truly moving, interesting, captivating hyper-novel.
Traditional narrative works. Novels work. Fiddling around with links, branches, and gimmicks? Not so much.
The problem with this example is not that hypertext novels don’t/can’t work — it’s that this particular example is straight up abysmal. Nicola Furlong’s website is using technology from the early 90s, so of course it’s completely laughable. If authors really want to contemplate “the future of the novel” the first thing they need to do is make good websites!
It is extraordinarily difficult to put together something that combines multimedia with text without it becoming laborious.
Text-based stories are very efficient both to write and to read.
By the way, let’s not mock use of older technology in this project. It doesn’t matter how new it is; what matters is what you do with it.
That said, I would love to try a similar experiment (and await the negative feedback from people for not trying the latest/greatest Flash doohickey).
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Do you mean extraordinarily difficult or prohibitively expensive? The possibilities are limitless (with or without Flash), provided you have the cash to pay for development. I can understand that authors and publishers usually don’t have the cash to put toward paying an agency to design something nice (I’m in the strange position of being a web developer in the publishing industry), but my real beef with the topic is that when these kinds of tech novels come up and are derided, we make declarations like “the future of the novel is doomed!” and yet it’s usually because the tech novelist is just bad at web design.