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Posted by Will Roberts on April 13, 2009, 3:13 pm
THE NEW YORK TIMES
Sunday, April 12, 2009
If Only Literature Could Be a Cellphone-Free Zone
-------------------------------------------------
By
Matt Richtel
Juliet: Fakn death. C U Latr.
Romeo: gud plan.
Conspiring with a distant lover? Try texting. Lost in the
woods/wilderness/Ionic Sea? Use GPS. Case of mistaken identity?
Facebook!
Technology is rendering obsolete some classic narrative plot
devices: missed connections, miscommunications, the inability
to reach someone. Such gimmicks don't pass the smell test when
even the most remote destinations have wireless coverage. (It's
Odysseus, can someone look up the way to Ithaca? Use the
"no Sirens" route.)
Of what significance is the loss to storytelling if characters
from Sherwood Forest to the Gates of Hell can be instantly, if
not constantly, connected?
Plenty, and at least part of it is personal. I recently finished
my second thriller, or so I thought. When I sent it to several
fine writer friends, I received this feedback: the protagonist
and his girlfriend can't spend the whole book unable to get in
touch with each other. Not in the cellphone era.
Then I started talking to fellow writers and discovered a
brewing antagonism toward today’s communication gadgets.
"We want a world where there's distance between people; that's
where great story-telling comes from," said Kamran Pasha, a
writer and producer on "Kings," the NBC drama based on the story
of David. He says even the unfolding of the Bible would have
been a casualty of connectedness. In the Old Testament, for
instance, Joseph's brothers toss him into a pit. He is picked up
by slave traders and taken to Egypt, a pivotal development in
the Exodus narrative that is central to Judaism. Imagine if,
instead, he dialed for help from the pit.
"It’s humorous to think that if Joseph has an iPhone, there's
no Judaism," Mr. Pasha says.
Must we now hit "delete" on tension that simmers for hundreds
of pages as characters wonder, for instance, what's happened to
a lover? Certainly Rick Blaine would have been spared the aching
uncertainty of why Ilsa stood him up at the train station in
"Casablanca." (Why didn't she show up? We were supposed to run
away together! Hmm, let me check my messages ... O.K., well,
that makes sense. Now let's see if I can find her on Google
Earth. ...)
What fate Portnoy had his aunt used the Internet to ask Fresh
Direct to just deliver the liver? Undone would be many a key
underlying misunderstanding in Shakespeare's comedies with a
simple I.M.: Can u clarify whethr u r man or gal?
Thrillers, of course, have long benefited from technology, which
offers new tools for discovery. But technology has also rained
on the genre. The best-selling author Douglas Preston remembers
an "aha" moment in the late 1990s when he was writing with
Lincoln Child. They had a female character being stalked in a
dark alley in New York City, seemingly unable to find help.
Mr. Preston recalls "I said,'Lincoln, she's got a cellphone.' He
said,'Well, maybe readers won't notice,'" They moved the scene
to the subway, where, at the time, there was no reception.
In one episode of this season's television drama "The Sarah
Connor Chronicles," the show's writers wanted to prevent two
main characters from communicating. "We blew up the cellphone
tower," said the executive producer, Josh Friedman, one of
those writers who critiqued my thriller-in-the-making.
Some writers are just rejecting modernity. M. J. Rose, whose
books about reincarnation are the basis for a planned pilot on
the Fox Network, intends to set her next book in 1948 in part so
she can let missed connections and miscommunications simmer.
"You miss a train in 1888 or even 1988, and have no way to
contact the person waiting at the station on the other end," she
said. "He thinks you've changed your mind, been captured, weren't
able to escape. You miss a train in 2009 and you pull out your
cell and text that you'll be two hours late."
##
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/12/weekinreview/12richtel.html
***** Moderator's Note *****
Sic tranit technology: new ways of doing things have always changed
the landscape that forms the background of literature, and not
necessarily for the worse.
The invention of penicillin made Ibsen's "Ghosts" unbelievable in the
same way that the crumbling of the Iron Curtain put an entire
generation of spy novelists and anti-communmists out of work. While
Ibsen's work could be rejuvenated by substituting HIV for syphilis,
the lack of a "big red menace" filling the bookshelves, and of the
corrupting government defense spending it justified, cannot help but
improve our understanding of the ways people are more alike than they
are different.
Bill Horne
Temporary Moderator
Please put [Telecom] at the end of your subject line, or I may never
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