A Defense for Image Based Media in the Novel and Short Story

The novel and the short story are made beautiful for myriad reasons. Not least of which are the self-imposed restrictions each utilizes to provide what we’ve come to expect from “traditional narrative text.” That is, because the novel is essentially letters that form words that form sentences that form even greater structures, it must depend on the wit, skill, and craftsmanship of the writer to evoke an emotional or thought provoking responses in the reader while relying only, in the case of English, on 26 letters. It’s extremely hard to do. It’s why there are so few good books. However, because of developing technologies (developing mediums) and yet another epistemological shift (thanks Internet), the novel and the short story find themselves at a crossroad of sorts, hesitant to continue their journey because neither can see the road or has, at least, forgotten its GPS endowed cell phone with Google Maps.

I joke here about technology because older forms of fiction (again, specifically the novel and short story) have ignored the power and tools new media offers to create new levels of interactivity. That is, because media has changed fiction must also change.

Although the production of fiction is far more challenging for the writer, the reader is faced with similar obstacles. They must find a way to believe in and make sense of those 26 symbols, allowing abstraction to become concrete. Neil Postman explains it like this; “To be confronted by the cold abstractions of printed sentences is to look upon language bare, without the assistance of either beauty or community.” Having accomplished the feat of writing a novel, the writer hands that work over to the reader. Here, the reader must confront these cold abstractions and essentially reverse engineer the writer’s process. This too is not easy. The reader must have his or her own sets of extraordinary skills to decipher the meaning of the text. Accessing these skills, employing them, requires that the reader do a lot of “digging.” We dig through our own experiences, using them to access the text. These experiences may come from other novels, classes, or even our memory. Using them is often a wonderful, rewarding experience, not unlike cleaning your apartment.

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I promise the analogy will make sense. When we set about cleaning our living spaces, we reorganize, move things around, put them in the closet for use at a latter date. But, when we’re in the closet, putting things back, finding things we need, we also come across things forgotten, things we left and forgot or had no intention of returning, a picture, an old diary, a favorite T-shirt. Reading is much like this. When we begin reading a novel, our powers of classification are buried in the subconscious and provoked by the writer’s words. Making these words make sense requires that we examine them completely, using all tools at our disposal. Perhaps it’s the Post-Colonial Literature course we took as an undergrad or perhaps it’s the time we lost our virginity. In either case, we use them. The Internet has changed the way we store and retain memory, pictures, and documents through the use of bookmarks, search history, or even storage. It has become an additional resource, another closet that we use everyday, and fiction is ignoring it and the forms it has produced.

Fiction writers, especially those working with “traditional narrative text,” seldom lean on the power of the image as a resource for creating worlds. To do so is to “cheat.” The writer, it seems, when choosing to write fiction, as it exists in the short story and novel primarily, chooses a medium with “self-imposed” limitations. These limitations are needlessly archaic. The craft of fiction began and flourished at a time when print was in its infancy. Images were expensive to produce and essentially needless because those images added very little. (Breakfast of Champions strikes me as an exception, and I’m sure there are more: Laurie Anderson might make for an excellent rebuttal to this argument if it weren’t for the fact that her experiments with “traditional narrative text” never caught on.) Today, we interact with image in every medium, including our most heavily used mediums, television and the Internet.

Those who believe the idea of introducing image is a “cheat,” suggesting that the writer may have been “too lazy” to create with words what the image produces, forget the power of an image. If we aim through art to make our gestures more “powerful” than how come we can’t lean on them as a tool?

First, what I suggest above implies a ratification of the novel that essentially changes its form. So, I’m not suggesting that the novel be abandoned, though it certainly seems as if people will do so. (Because revenue affects art, art changes to meet revenue.) Instead, I’m suggesting that the novel be paired with other media to create a new genre class for fiction in all forms that primarily utilize text to produce messages.

The image has the power to titillate, horrify, and compel more than any sentence ever has. That is, it seems better suited to access immediate emotions. The bluntness of that evocation aside, power exists beyond what the sentence can supply as simply. The immediacy of that message has the power to overwhelm into a state of suspension from the source, much like the way we pause in a text. We think. We wonder. We reengage with the book. The application of image in a work primarily governed by text is up to the artist. But for example, an image that remains on the screen underneath the text might mean something different for the reader. Perhaps it’s a black page, the corner of which is occupied by a man standing in a door, looking at the reader while the reader looks at the character. If a complete “suspension of disbelief” is achieved, this image might create tension that could not exist in the text without it. It might also be annoying, but it has the potential to evoke a more powerful emotional response in the user than either experience offers independently.

In this respect, the image has, behaviorally, more in common with text than it does with the moving picture or video. The image becomes a presence that does not explain itself without the assistance of the text or a dependency on the reader’s own imagination. It strikes me that such use of image is more powerful than video. However, this is not to say that video has no place in New Media Fiction. But, traditional, narrative video feels out of place. Video used in conjunction with “traditional narrative text” must aspire to evoke similar reactions. It must evoke a sense of wonder that propels the “user” (to call him or her a reader seems to simplistic now) to move through the “text” (If not “text,” what name should we give it?).

So, by which medium will or should we engage with New Media Fiction. That’s a more complicated question than the purpose of this post. But, it should be robust enough to create a smooth, continuous experience for the user. This, obviously, is more than a hardware question. It is also a question of software, platform, and still more. Again, this is a conversation better suited for a different post, but my point is that a screen capable of producing images in color (this includes black and white) and an ability to interact with the work (touch or point and click) is all that’s needed.

If we embrace electronic devices to access content that would previously have only been accessible via hardcopy, we must remember that the thing we provide is not a printed page. That is, there is no need to present a simulated page from a novel on an OLED screen. It may feel aesthetically richer but it doesn’t “add” anything, and, I’d argue, the only reason it feels aesthetically richer is because we find romance in older technologies and the comfort that what we are engaged in is familiar. If a work is not a novel in the traditional sense, it is no longer dependent on the medium that brought it to life and to bookshelves. This means that the image of the printed page is not necessary and may indeed be “silly.” The screen is not a piece of paper, to insist that it look like paper is to insist that the medium is meant only to reproduce digitally what the “traditional narrative text” produces. Where this might not be a mistake, it certainly is telling. Our desire for the simulated page is a reluctance to accept the new forms fiction will take. It is stalling. It’s the same reason we wouldn’t include the reproduction of a webpage loading for each new page in the text. It does nothing to recall this experience unless the intent is to romanticize either experience. Doing so implies content. Why does the page look like a book? Is the writer telling me something? Is the writer suggesting that such visual trickery is important to our understanding of the text?

This post is all over the place and requires a hell of a lot of editing, but its purpose is to question the restrictions of “traditional narrative text” in the era of new media. Tools such as those we have now are employed by all forms of content, including journalism, business, and even social interaction. For fiction to ignore them in its most desperate hour (our publishing model is broken and has prevented any number of brilliant works from surfacing) is to consciously allow the death of our most cherished form of communication.