Column

The late David Foster Wallace defined the challenge of literary fiction thus: “To figure out how fiction can engage a reader, much of whose sensibility has been formed by popular culture, without simply becoming more shit in the pop culture machine...”

The year gone by produced a lot of fiction. A lot of it was competent, some was excellent, and a large chunk of it was “more shit” in the publishing equivalent of the pop cultural machine. Thankfully, the tendency to conflate the quality of a book with its commercial success — which has taken over cinema — is yet to make itself the default setting in publishing, though it’s getting there.

While the traditional enemy of serious art has been commerce and the pressures of commodification, the battle of late has been made tougher by technology — across artistic domains. Indeed, technology often dictates even the kind of story that is told, as exemplified by all the effects-driven fare churned out by Hollywood.

The hand of the machine is also palpable in the sheer number of Hollywood and Bollywood films that are such visual and auditory feasts — with brilliant cinematography and mind-boggling sound effects — and yet, as works of art, are but crude assemblages that cynically manipulate the audience according to pre-determined formulae. In the realm of fiction, the formula calls the shots in books such as those of Dan Brown, James Bond as resurrected by Sebastian Faulks, Sam Bourne’s synthetic thrillers, the burgeoning chicklit, and most recently, the vampire genre.

A formula is nothing but a technology of manufacturing that increases efficiency in the delivery of a product as per pre-decided parameters. But in an era where formulaic fiction is not just flourishing (it has always flourished, viz, the Westerns, M&B, and other genre fiction) but is the foundational principle of creation, creativity becomes innovation and originality turns into the originality of the formula, not of artistic vision.

Isn’t this why mass entertainment is so easy to consume, so easy to forget and so difficult to remember? The archetype of such entertainment that plugs in directly to your centres of gratification is TV, and the purest of such programming is porn.

Now the task for novelists has been made even more difficult by a love child of technology and entertainment: social media. Even as news platforms seek to reinvent themselves as entertainment vehicles, the fastest growing entertainment option for many is social networking: Facebook, Twitter, and all their clones and applications that go with them.

If we define ‘entertainment’ simply as something that, for a period of time, takes us out of our loneliness and isolation, then Facebook and Twitter do that better than any TV soap or film. What’s more, in social media, you are both the producer as well as the consumer of the entertainment.

Thus, gone are the days when writers can crib about being marginalised by TV and cinema. Today, they are doubly rendered irrelevant by the Internet, and networking itself as a form of content-generating/content-consuming entertainment. One way out of this maze is to blindly leap onto the technology bus: there is already Twitterature, cell phone fiction, ‘audio’ books, ‘graphic’ novels, and more such. If these are all the T20 avatars, where does that leave the ‘Test cricket’ of fiction as a work of art that, to return to Wallace, “allows us imaginatively to identify with a character’s pain” and makes you feel “unalone — intellectually, emotionally, spiritually”?

The reader, who is daily trained to expect pleasure without effort — let alone pain — is not going to sit down with a novel that is ‘difficult’, requires ‘effort’ and will not fit into the frame of what she has experienced before. Yet, that is the task of the fiction writer today: to get the reader to log out and unplug, while making it difficult to ‘plug in’ and ‘log in’ to the novel. Doing that, of course, has never been tougher. Maybe that’s why, in the networked, NaNoWriMo era where 50,000 novelists log on and start writing novels on the same day every year, to paraphrase Flannery O’Connor, a good novel is hard to find.