Slog - Comments on The Impermanent Novel http://slog.thestranger.com/2007/03/the_novel_is_just_a_novel Here you can read an essay that Susan Sontag wrote before her death in 2004. The essay essentially argues that the novel is still the leading medium for human expression. Long ago - it was the 18th century - a great and eccentric defender of literature and the English language - it was Doctor Johnson - wrote, in the preface to his Dictionary: "The chief glory of every people arises from its authors." An unconventional proposition, I suspect, even then. And far more unconventional now, though I think it's still true. Even at the beginning of the 21st century. Of... Copyright 2008 Tue, 20 Mar 2007 11:41:01 -0800 Wed, 21 Mar 2007 00:59:32 -0800 http://www.movabletype.org/?v=3.34 http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss Comment by dna i mostly agree, charles, though this raises some interesting questions. what will be the new narrative vehicle? some sort of web based, interactive text/video/audio medium? will viewers/readers play a more participatory role in the creation of the narrative?

likewise, what will happen to cinema if it is displaced? i imagine giant flatscreens with cinematic wallpaper (like how warhol wanted his films to function).

]]> dna http://slog.thestranger.com/2007/03/the_novel_is_just_a_novel#c675440 http://slog.thestranger.com/2007/03/the_novel_is_just_a_novel#c675440 Arts Tue, 20 Mar 2007 11:56:45 -0800 Comment by charles mudede dna,part of my answer is here

]]> charles mudede http://slog.thestranger.com/2007/03/the_novel_is_just_a_novel#c675445 http://slog.thestranger.com/2007/03/the_novel_is_just_a_novel#c675445 Arts Tue, 20 Mar 2007 12:01:51 -0800 Comment by jonathan Nice essay Charles, especially liked this quote.

"The 20th century was not primarily narrated by architecture, or by novels, but film. Dickens, Dostoevsky, Melville were replaced by Chaplin, Tarkovsky and Kubrick."

The three former artists were undoubtedly more gifted. Thankfully the 20th Century is behind us. The internet has brought back the written form to challenge the calculating and dumbing down visual media.

]]> jonathan http://slog.thestranger.com/2007/03/the_novel_is_just_a_novel#c675460 http://slog.thestranger.com/2007/03/the_novel_is_just_a_novel#c675460 Arts Tue, 20 Mar 2007 12:23:21 -0800 Comment by Eric The problem with the idea that cinema has replaced the novel as "the leading medium for human expression" is that it requires vast amounts of money to make a movie that someone who isn't a film geek would ever want to watch. It depresses me to think that "human expression" is available only to the wealthy, or to the friends of the very wealthy. Granted, the novel is an art form available only to those with the free time to write one, but that is a much less exclusive club, and in any case "free time" is always going to be the minimum cost of entry into any artistic medium.

]]> Eric http://slog.thestranger.com/2007/03/the_novel_is_just_a_novel#c675464 http://slog.thestranger.com/2007/03/the_novel_is_just_a_novel#c675464 Arts Tue, 20 Mar 2007 12:25:15 -0800 Comment by Megan I think novels replaced poetry more than they replaced theater-- that one you can also chalk up to cinema.

]]> Megan http://slog.thestranger.com/2007/03/the_novel_is_just_a_novel#c675474 http://slog.thestranger.com/2007/03/the_novel_is_just_a_novel#c675474 Arts Tue, 20 Mar 2007 12:30:25 -0800 Comment by Eric F dna, if you'd like to know what will happen to cinema when it is displaced, you need only to look at any other form, style, or medium which has ceased to significantly develop and lost its cultural primacy: jazz, the blues, painting, poetry, opera, ballet, the theater, symphonic music, the daily newspaper, and the magazine could all serve as models. Generally, nothing happens to them. They continue to exist, and some people continue to create in their domains; the only differences are that they become fixed in conservative modes (classical or mannerist), and less people are interested in them.

]]> Eric F http://slog.thestranger.com/2007/03/the_novel_is_just_a_novel#c675489 http://slog.thestranger.com/2007/03/the_novel_is_just_a_novel#c675489 Arts Tue, 20 Mar 2007 12:39:00 -0800 Comment by Eric F oh, and "Eric": there are too many Erics who post on this blog, including current and former Stranger staff, for you to go by our given name alone.

]]> Eric F http://slog.thestranger.com/2007/03/the_novel_is_just_a_novel#c675494 http://slog.thestranger.com/2007/03/the_novel_is_just_a_novel#c675494 Arts Tue, 20 Mar 2007 12:41:11 -0800 Comment by dna eric f, that's not true. take a look at how painting developed in the 20th century. as cinema emerged as a most powerful medium for visual narrative, painters looked to non-narrative means of visual expression in painting, and explored the uniqueness of their medium.

]]> dna http://slog.thestranger.com/2007/03/the_novel_is_just_a_novel#c675558 http://slog.thestranger.com/2007/03/the_novel_is_just_a_novel#c675558 Arts Tue, 20 Mar 2007 13:49:36 -0800 Comment by billy Possibly true, but then how does the internet become a material support, a concrete, fetish object?

]]> billy http://slog.thestranger.com/2007/03/the_novel_is_just_a_novel#c675579 http://slog.thestranger.com/2007/03/the_novel_is_just_a_novel#c675579 Arts Tue, 20 Mar 2007 14:08:25 -0800 Comment by Eric F It's not as simple as "this will kill that," though I love that Hugo bit as much as Mudede does. There can be parallel developments. In any case, painting is generally set against photography, not cinema. I'd set cinema against television, broadcast television against on-demand and DVDs, television against early video art, cinema against late video art... all very messy but, I think, very interesting. Migration of forms, they call it in architectural history.

]]> Eric F http://slog.thestranger.com/2007/03/the_novel_is_just_a_novel#c675591 http://slog.thestranger.com/2007/03/the_novel_is_just_a_novel#c675591 Arts Tue, 20 Mar 2007 14:14:04 -0800 Comment by Eric from Boulder Okeydoke, Eric F., your point is taken. From now on, the infrequent Slog commenter formerly known as "Eric", not to be confused with "eric" or "Eric F.", will answer to "Eric from Boulder". With apologies to "Matt from Denver".

]]> Eric from Boulder http://slog.thestranger.com/2007/03/the_novel_is_just_a_novel#c675634 http://slog.thestranger.com/2007/03/the_novel_is_just_a_novel#c675634 Arts Tue, 20 Mar 2007 14:55:22 -0800 Comment by Grant Cogswell Yep, probably. The reaction to this should not be fear or retrogressive action but to fearlessly MAKE at the edge of the present form central to the world consciousness. (Or to circle back and be a part of the fine fading of a form.) The movement forward is not like a landmass shifting and burying but like the sea, waves crashing on a beach and drawing back, sending up parts of themselves again and again in new forms. Tarkovsky's films include poetry (and man could he write), Chaplin was as theatrical as anything in film, and Kubrick came out of painting and photography as much as anything with true 'talking pictures'. Art isn't about contests: Ivan's Childhood doesn't have to go in the ring with Great Expectations (I wouldn't give up either one). The only film I've ever seen that read just like a book, at its speed and density, was Heaven's Gate.

]]> Grant Cogswell http://slog.thestranger.com/2007/03/the_novel_is_just_a_novel#c676232 http://slog.thestranger.com/2007/03/the_novel_is_just_a_novel#c676232 Arts Wed, 21 Mar 2007 00:34:08 -0800 Comment by Matthew Stadler Interactive, immersive gaming environments will thrive. They'll become enormously detailed and complex, and profoundly social. I'd like to know how to write one.

]]> Matthew Stadler http://slog.thestranger.com/2007/03/the_novel_is_just_a_novel#c676241 http://slog.thestranger.com/2007/03/the_novel_is_just_a_novel#c676241 Arts Wed, 21 Mar 2007 00:44:48 -0800 Comment by Matthew Stadler I mention these interactive gaming environments because I think they -- more than films -- are a kind of "new novel," a new way to do the things a novel does well. The novel is a political space where writer and reader are both given agency. Meanings are negotiated between roughly equivalent powers: the writer and the reader. Less so with films. The viewer of a film cannot control pace and sequence the way a reader can. The film-maker enjoys a predominance of control over the medium's meanings. Interactive games are much more like novels in this respect. One is never in control nor ever powerless. I think this is the essential pleasure and power of the novel.

]]> Matthew Stadler http://slog.thestranger.com/2007/03/the_novel_is_just_a_novel#c676245 http://slog.thestranger.com/2007/03/the_novel_is_just_a_novel#c676245 Arts Wed, 21 Mar 2007 00:57:20 -0800 Comment by Matthew Stadler Oh, and Erics: why don't you all just use your last names? Then I'll always know when my favorite Erics are posting, rather than having to guess.

]]> Matthew Stadler http://slog.thestranger.com/2007/03/the_novel_is_just_a_novel#c676246 http://slog.thestranger.com/2007/03/the_novel_is_just_a_novel#c676246 Arts Wed, 21 Mar 2007 00:59:32 -0800