Kelln Goes All Cory Doctorow

Posted 8 May, 2008 in Book News, Technology | 3 comments

Mystery / suspense author Brad Kelln, whose new novel, In the Tongues of the Dead, is due out this fall from ECW Press, has jumped on the Internet freebie bandwagon. For a limited time, he’s giving away Black Inside, the third novel in his Michael Wenton trilogy (which also includes Lost Sanity and Method of Madness), as a free download on his website.

Kelln is not a stranger to innovative Internet marketing. Last year he serialized a novel on his Facebook group, “I am aware Dr. Brad Kelln writes Books.”

Anecdotal evidence indicates that authors who give away their material on the Internet experience a spike in sales of their physical books; we’ll have to wait until fall to find out if Kelln’s gambit pays off in sales of his new novel, which is described on his site as “a mystery thriller with religious undertones intended to evoke controversy.”

Hav U Red My Novl?

Posted 24 January, 2008 in Literary Criticism, Writing Life, Technology | 2 comments

Genji had only grown more thoughtful as he rose to new heights of glory, and he ordered things so well that he wrought a wondrous change, for her residence was soon amply populated. Where once rank foliage had cast a dismal and pervasive pall there now ran a newly diverted stream, while shrubbery near the house yielded cooling shade, and junior household staff, barely noticed so far but zealous to serve him, so clearly discerned his deep interest that they danced most assiduous attendance upon her.

Those words were taken from The Tale of Genji, by Murasaki Shikibu (trans. by Royall Tyler), an 11th-century Japanese epic that is widely considered to be the world’s first novel. What is most apparent about the lines above is their sensuous detail, the specificity of the “dismal and pervasive pall” cast by the “once rank foliage,” and the subtle eroticism of the junior household staff who “danced most assiduous attendance upon” their mistress.

Now imagine that those lines had been composed on a cellphone.

You can’t, because there’s no way that those lines ever would be composed on a cellphone. They are too long, for one thing, too full of description and elevated vocabulary. The Tale of Genji, which in its unabridged English translation runs to 1,120 pages, is replete with passages such as this, and remains in print to this day.

One wonders if the same fate will befall If You, the 142-page novel by twenty-one-year-old Japanese author Rin, which was composed entirely on a cellphone. Certainly, If You and its literary compeers are enjoying popularity in the short term in their native Japan. According to a recent article in the New York Times, five out of the ten bestselling novels in Japan last year were cellphone novels, “mostly love stories written in the short sentences characteristic of text messaging but containing little of the plotting or character development found in traditional novels.”

These novels appeal largely to a younger cohort, who grew up with text messages and emoticons and who are not even terribly used to typing long-form sentences on a computer. But, if these ad hoc novels — which devoid of incidentals such as “plotting or character development” may in fact stretch the definition of the word “novel” — are getting young people to read, then everything’s fine, right?

Not necessarily.

The most aggravating part of the Times article for me is Rin’s own assessment of cellphone novels’ place in the literary pantheon, as against more traditional novels:

Rin said ordinary novels left members of her generation cold.

“They don’t read works by professional writers because their sentences are too difficult to understand, their expressions are intentionally wordy, and the stories are not familiar to them,” she said. “On other hand, I understand how older Japanese don’t want to recognize these as novels. The paragraphs and the sentences are too simple, the stories are too predictable. But I’d like cellphone novels to be recognized as a genre.”

So traditional Japanese novels by writers of repute — Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami, say, or even genre fiction like Natsuo Kirino’s Out — are not read by younger readers because of the difficulty of their sentences, as opposed to novels tapped out on the miniature cellphone keypad, which, by necessity to avoid early onset carpal-tunnel syndrome or arthritis, are composed of short, choppy, fragmented sentences and paragraphs more closely resembling the dialogue bubbles in a manga comic book.

I am reminded of a story Sven Birkerts related in his volume The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age (which, notwithstanding the fact that it was published fourteen years ago, seems more relevant today than it ever did). Birkerts is discussing the frustration that a group of college students experienced with a short story by Henry James:

These students were entirely defeated by James’s prose — the medium of it — as well as by the assumptions that underlie it. It was not the vocabulary, for they could make out most of the words; and not altogether the syntax, although here they admitted to discomfort, occasional abandoned sentences. What they really could not abide was what the vocabulary, the syntax, the ironic indirection, and so forth, were communicating. They didn’t get it, and their not getting it angered them, and they expressed their anger by drawing around themselves a cowl of ill-tempered apathy.

Or by reading readily accessible adolescent love stories written on someone’s cellphone. Birkerts’ students’ complaints about Henry James are exactly analogous to Rin’s comment that readers of her generation don’t read professional novelists because “their sentences are too difficult to understand, their expressions are intentionally wordy, and the stories are not familiar to them.”

So what is the problem, you ask? Why should college students and Japanese youth read traditional novels as opposed to novels composed on technology that they are more familiar with, that speaks to them in a way that traditional novels don’t? Birkerts supplies the answer by characterizing what James does that his students weren’t getting:

He is inward and subtle, a master of ironies and indirections; his work manifests a care for the range of moral distinctions. And one cannot “get” him without paying heed to the least twist and turn of the language.

It should not be necessary to point out that James’s inwardness and subtlety, his “ironies and indirections,” and his “care for the range of moral distinctions” cannot — simply cannot – be replicated using the denuded language available to a cellphone texter. Moreover, the fact that James’s implications are impossible to grasp “without paying heed to the least twist and turn of the language” presupposes a level of concentration and deep engagement with the text that would be anathema to most of today’s distracted, media-addled youth.

It’s not difficult to see that we risk losing something in the translation from page to cellphone screen (or computer screen, for that matter). We risk losing an appreciation of subtlety and irony, we risk losing an ability to recognize indirection or to delineate between fine moral distinctions. In short, we risk losing some of what makes us essentially human. I don’t think that’s too grand a statement to make, nor do I think it’s a risk we should be willing to take.