A History of the Future of Narrative: Robert Coover
Robert Coover, experimental author and general enthusiast of new literary forms (I transcribed an excerpt near the end…at about the 33 minute mark).
That no such widely acknowledged masters have as of yet made their mark in the digital landscape is hardly surprising. All previous masters of a form were born into its technology (inaudible?) so far only for preteens is that really true today. It’s not true for anyone in this audience. It took millennia of cuneiform writing and a demise of the civilization that invented it before the first known extended narrative was composed using it –and then by a writer working with ancient source material in a language no longer spoken and requiring translation.
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Don Quixote obsessive reader of books sallied forth from his library on his genre, establishing adventures a full century and a half after the invention of movable type and after a massive amount of other published writing once heralded, now largely forgotten…but probably necessary for Rocinante to get his footing. In America, book publishing had to wait nearly two centuries for the definitive American novel to appear, sending the nation out to sea on a doomed Nantucket boiling ship that it might find itself, and even then, it took better than another half century while Melville’s reputation languished before its value was finally understood.
The new computer technology of our age is still developing and may well need another half century to achieve some sort of maturity– assuming that humanity’s creative appetites outlast its destructive ones and we get that far… meaning that even if digital novelistic masterpieces are improbably already being created, it will likely take at least that long to them to be widely recognized as such.
Meanwhile, as readers we live in rich and enviable times. We have at our fingertips more accessible than ever an unparalleled abundance of great writing, including great novels, with new works of print literature appearing by the shelf load every day. Suddenly as the book takes to its sickbed, everyone wants to write one. And at the same time we are also witnesses to the emergence to the new exciting writing medium of the future, able if we wish –thanks to the very technology making it happen– to write our way into the ongoing worldwide discourse. In a globalized digital era, it will be increasingly difficult to speak of national literatures, or even to locate them. …
I won’t deny progress or that new genres will become more predominant in this culture as technology progresses. But moribund genres don’t fade away. They just become less popular, less convenient, less portable.
But is that such a big deal? Textual forms still are easy to produce and hard to master (and sometimes hard to understand). Literary arenas or site-specific narratives are fun to contemplate, but logistically difficult to produce (Do I need permission from Getty or Disney to stick an image into my literary installation or shoot a video of a shopping center?). Sorry, but I can’t wait that long. Literary commerce doesn’t really matter to me, but the novel may endure simply because it is so easily commoditized (at least until PirateBay puts up a 10 Terabyte bit torrent file of the Complete Works of American literature). When you use experimental forms, the benefits you gain by carving your own niche may be outweighed by the audience’s unfamilarity with how to enjoy it. For early adopters, there is also the danger of banking months or years of toil on a sui generis vessel that is later ignored or disparaged.
There are lots of literary veins being explored to become excited about…and Coover brims with enthusiasm about what the future may hold. I fear that a fascination with emerging narratives (via games, animation, etc) may simply cause people to turn away from the gateway that has successfully allowed current generations to partake of experiences from previous eras.
(See also: Coover on the end of books and his mp3 audio interview at Wired for Books.
