Screens vs Literature is a False Dichotomy

Rumors of the death of narrative have been greatly exaggerated.

I’ve been reading—with great interest and enjoyment!—Junot Diaz’ back-and-forth with Robert Hoekman about literary narratives vs the internet. Latest round here:

ULTIMA RATIO POETATUM – OR THE SUPREME AFFORDANCE OF LITERATURE

Hoekman and Diaz are each arguing their side with more-than-usual thoughtfulness, insight, and charity for this debate—which kind of unavoidably draws attention to the fact that this is a long-running and long-unresolved debate. Whenever there’s a long-unresolved discourse like that, I think it’s worth questioning the structure of the two sides a little bit to see if that clarifies anything, at least for my own thinking.

So I think it’s worth saying that, like, you can read books on your phone. You can even read ~literature~ on your phone. Most of the books I read, I read on my phone. I’ve talked a little about this before. Obviously, there are only twenty four horus in a day, time spent on algorithmic content dispensers (like this one!) competes with time spent reading books, but it’s also true that the phone makes it easier to read books than it was for our ancestors. All the books are on the phone! You don’t even have to go to the library. They have apps! (Have you read the new novel? It's on Libby. It's literally on Hoopla. It's on Boundless with a waitlist. It's literally on BorrowBox. You can probably find it on Overdrive. Dude it's on EBSCOMobile. It's a Digby original. It's on Hoopla. You can read it on Hoopla. You can go to Hoopla and read it. Log onto Hoopla right now. Go to Hoopla. Dive into Hoopla. You can Hoopla it. It's on Hoopla. Hoopla has it for you. Hoopla has it for you.)

If you get into the habit of reading books on your phone, you can empirically check for yourself which books compete successfully with algorithmic content. For instance:

I first read Anna Karenina on my phone, not even in a special reading app, just in the browser, on Project Gutenberg, which was crashing over and over as I read it, all in one beautiful day.

No One Is Talking About This is a novel that’s trying to digest and integrate the internet, “break writing open and turn it into something new,” as Robert Hoekman says.¹ It’s also about an eighth of the length of Anna Karenina. But Libby tells me that it took me eleven days to read.

And, I feel bad saying this, I kind of had to make myself finish it. There are a lot of other books that try to take both language and structure from internet-native writing styles. I have not made myself finish those.

I’m all for internet-native writing. My twitter addiction has, unfortunately, been deeply personally rewarding, both in terms of things I’ve read there and things I’ve written there.² Some tweets have more literary value than some novels, just as some epigrams have more literary value than some novels. Why not? Same for substack posts, livejournals, blogs.

But if a text is not a tweet, or a blogpost, or whatever—if it’s not being forged in the fires of the algorithm and served algorithmically, or if you have the ambition to make something longer—it genuinely cannot compete with tweets, blogposts, etc by aping them. It doesn’t have the backing of the algorithm! It needs a different engine to keep it going!

In my personal experience, narrative is still the best way for a long work to compete with internet text. It takes less discipline to read a really long novel with narrative unity and propulsion, than it does to read post-internet experimental stuff.

This is not just a me-thing. I haven’t read Colleen Hoover,³ but she sells better than alt lit, and (I hear, secondhand) that her books are characterized by event, and plot, and story, even too much event and plot and story, to the point of melodrama.

In internet-native forms, or at least in popular ones, I see more stripped-down-narrative than text-stripped-of-narrative. R/aita is popular because of story and character, not because of anything about the language—you can often see the commenters arguing about how the writer used language, but it’s always in service of clarity about event, character, motive. Same with advice columns, personal essays, all of the genres that go viral. Tweets, for structural reasons, are more about language itself than other internet-native forms, but even so most of the tweets that get attention, get attention for their stories/narratives. When I look at what kind of text engages our post-internet minds, it seems less like we’re post-narrative, and more lie we’re post-style.

1. Maybe Hoekman would disqualify No One Is Talking About This from his idea of the post-internet literary project because it’s basically a narrative? But it’s much less narrative

2. If it were just a timesuck/energysuck, it would be more clear how to deal with it.

3. My internet addiction has robbed me of the patience and diligence that this would take.