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."
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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.
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