The Novel’s Extended Death Scene

Hollywood films and novels used to be best of friends - so much so that screenwriting awards are regularly divided into two categories - original and adapted - with the latter category being for the most part owned by novels. But there are ripples… rumours of a falling out between films and novels.

For one thing, graphic novels are becoming more prominent as sources for films. Think here of films like V For Vendetta, Sin City, A History of Violence and Road To Perdition. Add to this the usual adaptations from comic books that once were sporadic but are now legion: the Batman, Superman, X-Men and Spider-Man franchises, as well as notable one-offs like Ghost World. Then add the movies based on video games (which, admittedly, haven’t fared all that well): Tomb Raider, Doom, Final Fantasy, Resident Evil, among others. Finally, with the success of the Pirates of the Caribbean series, there is the prospect of having more movies inspired by theme park rides. And, of course, the novel has its usual competition in the form of stage plays, non-fiction books, articles, and its old nemesis, the short story.

Meanwhile, the sales of fiction are slightly down overall in Canada. But this may be completely unrelated to film’s spurning of the form. It might have more to do with the concentration on literary fiction by Canadian publishers. While this has worked for a few decades and given Canadian fiction a deep and broad literary reputation both home and abroad, it has been disastrous in terms of attracting new audiences. The passion for literary nationalism is dying somewhat in the country. And the novels that have so often dealt with the perils of growing up, the anguish of the inability to communicate, the repression of characters’ feelings and the explication of that repression which leaves no room for an actual plot, the average reader might be forgiven for cutting back on their fiction consumption. And, as some critics have noted, the retreat from Canadian fiction has been led by men.

I’d have to count myself as one of those cowards. I’ve read probably four novels over the last ten years. And before that, for many years the only novels that interested me after finishing grad school were science fiction novels. Maybe it’s as simple as arguing that studying English killed my interest in novels. But, interestingly, it fueled my desire to read poetry. Another argument I might make (and I’m not the first person to propose this) is that the novels I studied and the novels dominating the Canadian scene today are simply too feminine. They deal with character development over plot. Not nearly enough stabbings, shooting, fistfights, etc.

But there are still other developments putting the novel in jeopardy. American classrooms include fewer and fewer whole novels, and educational administrators are promoting the use of novel excerpts to make life easier for schoolkids. TV series and videogames are developing stories over longer and longer periods of time. Whether it’s the Halo series or shows like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Desperate Housewives, The Sopranos, Lost and many many others, the long-form story is being picked up by other media. Where once the novel had scooped up the guts of poetry – heroic narratives and epic storytelling – and left it with little crumbs of lyric forms, now the novel is being gutted in return by other media for its narrative essence which it has often abandoned in any case for more microscopic examinations of the human psyche.

These examinations are vital, but just as vital are the big stories that carry us many an imaginative mile. These are stories with larger than life flawed heroes, the likes of which you might find in The Iliad or The Odyssey. For a few centuries, the novel managed to provide these stories all by itself, even though you could see from the very beginning in a book like Don Quixote that the novel was not comfortable (if a genre can be personified) with the old epic heroes. And now most novelists have abandoned this ancient type of storytelling and are being upstaged by Lara Croft and Batman, and a guy just named V.

I’m not really predicting the death of the novel. But I think it is going to be gradually subsumed by these other forms and limited in its role, just like poetry has been limited to dealing with the domestic in its ghetto of the everyday. The new media know the hero is what puts bums in seats. The novel, for a time, as the leading book technology since the 1700’s, used to know that too. But the novelists that have come since, to their credit and their peril, have resisted those restraints. And the price of their freedom is an increasing irrelevance.