Observatio

The reality of it is that books -- novels, I mean -- are competing with all other “entertainment” media, including You Tube, Twitter, video games, pop music, movies, television, and a few things I’m sure I haven’t heard of yet. And if this really is the case, novels probably don’t stand much of a chance against these more visual, more interactive, and less time-intensive activities (though in the aggregate, people spend much more time, or waste it, doing these things than they do reading novels). The question is, can writers find a way to refashion the novel so that it would appeal on a more visual level, or an interactive one, and pump up its competitive chops in the almighty marketplace?

I’m skeptical, to a great degree, because there’s no getting past the fact that consuming a novel is to read, not to view. And to insert, say in an ebook, video clips, musical excerpts, other sounds and images, or even the voices of characters, would be to push the novel beyond its own “novelness” and into the realm of performance.

One quintessential thing about the novel is that it is writtten by a single person; it’s not a collaborative effort. Introducing video and sound would involve other participants in the creation of the book -- directors, videographers, designers, actors -- and that would make it more of a hybrid thing, multimedia. Novels would need a production budget to get completed, and that would be a shame since writing a novel is probably the cheapest creative endeavor anyone can undertake. I happen to appreciate art that comes from the mind of a single person as opposed to a committee. Collaboration is often an avenue toward dilution, corruption (in the “less than it could be” sense), and sacrifice of quality in favor of marketability.

But it occurred to me, while reading a sample of David Mitchell’s The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, that well-placed and relevant graphics can enhance a novel in a way that might attract more readers. A hundred years ago, many novels were illustrated, a practice that probably ended because of the expense of an illustrator, but I wonder now if there isn’t such an enormous stock of public domain images available that a novel could easily be illustrated with them for next to nothing. Authors could also create their own illustrations with photography or drawing, with collage, or even their own handwriting. From what I can tell, Mitchell uses illustrations to depict certain actual things or events in the book, such as what appears to be a seventeenth or eighteenth century drawing of a breech birth. In many ways, it supports his already vivid description by showing the reader how accurate his description is.

I remember the Griffin & Sabine books of the early ‘90s, when I was impressed by the tactile experience and the vivid detail and color of the materials Neil Bantock used to accompany his words. Not every illustrated novel could be that lush.

Nor could the illustrated novel approach the comic-style graphic novel -- an entirely different beast. The idea wouldn’t be to show every moment in images, only to highlight, enhance, pique, and lead, surprising the reader every now and then with something visual to contemplate.

For instance, I’ve written a novel that takes place in California in the late 1800s, and while working on it I came across a number of photos, maps, drawings, and portraits that enabled me to visualize scenes and locations much more clearly. It would be interesting to include some of them in the book, if it ever gets published (unlikely, it seems), not so much to show a reader what a particular character looks like or to dramatize a moment but to evoke a mood and subtly guide the reader toward a certain way of interpreting the language. W. G. Sebald famously used photographs in his novels for this purpose, and one of the best examples I can recall is Kurt Vonnegut’s drawings in Breakfast of Champions. There were times when his simple Magic Marker artwork made me laugh harder than his brilliantly funny writing.

It’s been a tough task for me to admit that today’s reader is largely different from the reader I was taught to be thirty years ago. Whereas I was encouraged to use my imagination taking in a novel, readers today, especially younger ones, seem to need visual cues because they are less attuned to (or less impressed with) the language. Raised on movies, TV, music videos, and the Web, they appreciate a more literal kind of stimulation. Books, and sentences, are getting shorter. Authors are putting promo clips on You Tube, as if seeing the author is more important to readers than hearing about a book from friends or reviews. And nothing sells books like a movie version, with a major star or two. These days, the experience of a novel has to encompass things beyond the novel itself -- how it came to be written, the author’s life story, how the book relates to the reader’s life. These are elements that weren’t much of a consideration before, or at least the lack of detail in these areas didn’t prevent readers from picking up any given novel. J.D. Salinger would have died in obscurity if he’d come of writing age today.

As I acquaint myself with the Nook, and compare it to the iPad’s bling factor, I can see that the publishing industry will be forced into a more aggressively multimedia approach in the future. The image has displaced the word as our primary unit of communication, though I’m not convinced that means the novel will become obsolete. As long as there is a demand for storytelling, or I should say sophisticated storytelling (and it’s debatable that there is such a demand), there will be a pool of readers for novelists to reach.

The problem will be how to reach a larger audience that will make the novel economically viable in the competitive media marketplace. Appealing to the visual might be one way novelists can evolve with the culture.

All of this is not to say that tossing a few illustrations between a novel’s covers will bring about a renaissance of the written word. Novelists will have to be as careful with the images they use as they are with words. But when the audience has changed, and the survival of the genre itself is at stake, it seems logical and even necessary to adapt.

I don’t mean to say that all novels must have images in them from now on. Only that, sometimes, and maybe more often than we’d like to think, readers will have to be drawn in and compelled to buy a book not because the prose of the opening page is so riveting and lucent but because a picture catches their eye and speaks to them in a way -- subliminally, subtly -- that words don’t achieve on first pass anymore.