Note: This is the first in a series of posts that will consider the question:
What does literature have to offer (if anything) that no other art form or media (such as video games, social media, movies, TV shows, etc.) can match?
This post will be followed next week by three responses from students at my university—two Honors students and one top English major. We welcome you to join in the discussion of an issue of great interest to many of us in this era of change.
Can the Needs that Novels Once Met Be Fulfilled in Other Ways?
By Joseph Bentz
The purpose of literature is often said to be some sort of “connecting”—with characters, 
with the mind of the author, with other cultures or time periods, with the world outside the reader.
David Foster Wallace, author of Infinite Jest and other novels, said, “I guess a big part of serious fiction’s purpose is to give the reader, who like all of us is sort of marooned in her own skull…imaginative access to other selves” (qtd. in Smith 255). Novelist and essayist Jonathan Franzen, author of The Corrections, wrote that “Readers and writers are united in their need for solitude…in their reach inward, via print, for a way out of loneliness” (88). In the film Shadowlands, C.S. Lewis is quoted as saying, “We read to know we are not alone.” Even though some scholars question whether Lewis ever actually uttered those words, the quote is endlessly repeated anyway because readers resonate with the idea that literature connects them to other selves, other worlds, other minds.
Different Ways to “Connect”
But are novels really the best way to “connect” to the world outside oneself, or will many people increasingly find it easier to meet that need in other forms, such as social media, video games, YouTube videos, and other ways? Does literature offer something those other forms don’t? “Connecting” may be a fundamental purpose of literature, but it is also the central purpose of other forms of expression, including social media such as Facebook and Twitter. In introducing a new Community Pages feature, for instance, Facebook software engineer Alex Li wrote, “Facebook has always been about helping people make connections. We started with helping people connect with their friends, and over time we expanded this model to mirror more of the connections you make in your life—including organizations and interests that may not be people.” Even their famous logo is about connecting, with its map of the world sprinkled with icons of people connected by dotted lines.
People use other technological media, such as online video games, to make a number of different kinds of connections: to connect with other players around the world, to connect with the created characters whose roles they take on, and to connect with the created worlds the game makers have brought to life.
What’s at Stake?
With hundreds of millions of people meeting this human need for “connection” through new technologies, where does that leave literature? Do we really still need it to “know we are not alone”? As a literature professor and author, I and my profession have much at stake in the answers to these questions. If the essence of the literary experience can be matched by the technology of sophisticated video games or social media, then what relevance to do literature courses have for university students?
Are Video Games as Good as Literature?
It’s easy for literature professors to dismiss the significance of popular-culture entertainment technologies such as video games. But as I have studied the work of video game scholars and commentators such as James Paul Gee (What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy), Tom Bissell (Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter), and Jane McGonigal (Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World], I have seen that the case for literature’s superiority in “connecting” with the world outside oneself is not as clear-cut as I once believed.
One reason for reading novels, for instance, is that a reader likes to plunge into a rich, sumptuously imagined world that an author has created. The reader finds pleasure in living vicariously for awhile as a character in that world. Can any video game do that better than a novel?
I recently read an article about the creation of the video game, “Star Wars: The Old Republic.” Look at what its creators went through to develop a rich, fully realized world for its players to inhabit: “More than 800 people on four continents have spent six years and nearly $200 million creating it. The story runs 1,600 hours, with hundreds of additional hours still being written. Nearly 1,000 actors have recorded dialogue for 4,000 characters in three languages. The narrative is so huge that writers created a 1,000-page ‘bible’ to keep the details straight….” (Fritz, Pham, A1).
How can any novelist, using only words, compete with that?
My question is not really whether literature will disappear. Clearly it won’t. It survived the creation of new media such as film and television, so some readers will always be there. My question is more precisely, will literature, for vast swaths of people, become increasingly irrelevant, or is there something about it that is irreplaceable? I and my fellow bloggers plan to consider various aspects of that question in the days and weeks ahead.
Works Cited
Franzen, Jonathan. “Why Bother?” How to Be Alone: Essays. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002: 55-97. Print.
Fritz, Ben, and Alex Pham. “Will Star Wars game reshape the online universe?” Los Angeles Times 20 January 2012: A1. Print.
Li, Alex. “Connecting to Everything You Care About.” The Facebook Blog. 19 April 2010. https://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=382978412130. Web. 6 June 2012.
Smith, Zadie. “Brief Interviews with Hideous Men.” Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays. New York: Penguin Press, 2009. 255-297. Print.
Comments 18
Well, there is a lot to think about here, but I don’t really agree with Wallace’s premise. I have always viewed reading as a way of escaping connections, rather than making them. I view reading as an act of going into an alternate world where I can avoid my own problems by burying myself in someone else’s. Personally, I have a long attention span, so reading is attractive to me because of the time it takes. Other activities mentioned (above) do not always engage me long enough to hold my interest. When I experience a deep feeling of concentration, it gives my brain a relaxed feeling, probably like what others get from alcohol or drugs. If there are others like me, I’m sure literature will be in demand for a long time!
Author
Thanks for this perspective, Elena. “Escape” is another of those needs literature can meet. The alternate world is what you’re “connecting” to, if you want to think of it that way. You escape your own world and connect with the world of the novel. I love that feeling of losing myself in a novel, but I know people who can’t do it. They can lose themselves in a movie or video game, but print won’t get them there.
Joe, I think you would provide the group Creative Transformations, on FB and hosted by one of my co-authors, Valerie Hess, very thoughtful ideas infused with a bit of humor.
Author
Marti, thanks for linking this post to that group. I took a look at the group and liked what I saw there so much that I joined!
I like the look of a book, the smell of a book, the feel of a book. Nothing else can replace that. Oh, I hope the day does not dawn where books are obsolete, replaced with kindles and other heavy metal devices!
Author
Thanks, Jackie. I love books too! In my home, they will survive.
Jacquelyn, thanks for sharing because sometimes I feel I’m the only one who feels that way. There is a line in one of my favorite TV series where the high school librarian and the computer teacher discuss why he HATES computer. The quest for knowledge, or exposure to literature should be tactile. Book have texture, have a smell, and a weight to them. I almost feel like a trader to this when I consider purchasing a Kindle, but I will always purchase the stories and authors I love because of this belief.
Literature, like any art form, is targeted to a specific experience. Movies and TV shows tell stories in a way that we experience through our eyes. Music concerts, regardless of weather if it is a Beethoven Symphony or Katie Perry’s latest tour, share emotional experiences and conveys that emotion to the listener. Roll playing games, video or otherwise, tell stories that we can participate in are able to exert our will over the world in ways we can not control the real world. All of these are very different ways to tell a story, but the target is the experience.
Literature is designation I am understanding less and less as I get older. It used to be that I thought literature was something that only great works, like Hamlet, The Lord of the Ring, Treasure Island, and other timeless stories written by highly acclaimed authors, were labeled because they earned the right to be called so. Everything else was just good stories that people like to tell or read. But at the end of the day, if the question being asked is “Is Literature Necessary,” then the answer is going to be dependent on your view of the necessity for any art form to exist. There will always be a need for someone to experience a story in their own personal way, in the comfort of their home, in the solitude of their own mind. And there will always be people who want to tell their story in that way. There is a reason Amazon can get away with selling the kindle at a nearly 0 profit margin, because they know that readers will buy the content. Sure the technology may change, but the experience of being alone in your head, and escaping to some other world all on your own, some people will always need that experience.
Author
Thanks for your post, Tim. I wanted to comment on a statement in your final paragraph: “There will always be a need for someone to experience a story in their own personal way, in the comfort of their home, in the solitude of their own mind.”
I agree with that, and for me, the best way to experience that kind of story is through novels. One thing that sparked this whole question, however, is that my teenage kids do NOT prefer to get their stories through that form. They are good readers, but their preference would be to get stories through film or video games or YouTube videos. I wonder whether that will increasingly be true. Or maybe those of us who love novels have always been in the minority, even though that minority is still a large group of people. I’m still thinking through all this, so for me these questions are still unresolved.
Fascinating post, questions, and responses to your post, and thanks for engaging in this. I share many of the views already expressed here. But I would just add this idea that comes to mind in reading your blog. You ask, “Are novels the best way to connect to the outside world…?” and “Does literature offer something the other forms (social media, games, etc.) do not?” First, I think that social media offer a far better, literal connection to the outside world than do novels or literature. After all, when I go on Facebook, I am sending and receiving messages, for the most part, in real time–or I hear back within hours of sending. This is better than the proverbial “message in a bottle.” But with a novel, I’m actually involved in complete isolation. What starts is an inner monologue, and then usually a dialogue, with someone different from and better than me, there is an inner voice and thinking going on. But it isn’t a literal connection in the way that a social game is (I can hear my sons talking to their friends as they play one of these games. It’s like they are on the telephone with each other.) But as an introvert, I value the book experience so much more. I am free to entertain cloud castles and dreams. I never do this in social media, that is, entertain sustained periods of thought and reverie. That is the experience of the book.
I also think that we still go to sources for stories, but the stories and the sources have changed. The old epic poems were supposed to have been recited to kings and tribes over the tribal fire, or whatever. They gave accounts of adventures but also of meaning and the tribe’s origin, purpose, and future. Today, science is our main, popular system of thinking, our discourse of certainty and purpose, and we tell stories oriented around science and using technologies that fit that mode. Social media fit this and keep us up.
But it is fascinating that we have had stories like The Hunger Games, Harry Potter, and Lord of the Rings that have resonated so widely in our cultue, even across generational lines. Something in those stories is important to us, something that cannot be found in video gaming, something of the romantic period and highly individualistic, in which a single person or a small group of people must group together to face a greater, larger threat from some outside evil. One gets this in a video game, I guess. Perhaps those Internet games approximate this literary thrill.
I could think of other stories that are meaningful to me, but these three are especially popular.
I hope some of this thinking out loud makes sense.
Author
Great comment, Tom. You give us much to think about. I’m especially interested in your point about stories such as The Hunger Games, Harry Potter, and The Lord of the Rings. Those are all examples in which people have responded to the stories themselves, but in various forms. Some know those stories only through books, some only through films, and some through both. So would that indicate the books themselves aren’t the crucial form?
With a story like Star Wars, people responded first to a film, and later there were book versions. Now there are elaborate video game story versions. Should one form be considered the “real” story? Is it whatever form in which the story was first told?
As usual, Joe, great questions. I would (try to) answer them by starting with Harry Potter and The Hunger Games. These both started as books and are examples of the need for story being fulfilled through books. And the wide popularity of the books fueled the popularity of the movies and then video games.
Star Wars is interesting. It started, as you point out, as a movie, and then moved to books and games. But the movie came out in the dull, pre-Internet mid-seventies, when the only video games I remember playing had to do with watching a white dot (it represented a ping pong ball) going back and forth across a dark screen. I think it was called “Pong.”
So while I would agree that with those three story “universes,” books are only one way of getting the story, still, they remain important, and people do still go to them, if they are convinced they are going to love entering the universe the book offers.
I still want to argue that literature gives us a private realm we can enter and not only live in, but think in. I don’t believe that interactive video games provide that space for introversion and thought.
I say this for the sake of argument. Thanks for posting this.
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To me the world of books both fiction and non-fiction open the door to a whole new form of connection. So often in this world of business and action, there is hardly time for reflection. Reading reinforces the idea that connections not filled with foolish, youtube-worthy actions are the actual long-lasting friendships true joy come from. There is nothing like the bright eyes of one who meets another who has read their favorite book. Hearing someone else’s thought on that book not only opens up a new perspective, but shows you a window to their inner soul. Forget the phrase the eyes are the window to the soul, for actually, a person’s thoughts on a book are the window.
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Funny you mention Star Wars: The Old Republic.
Having played that game several times, I can attest that it weaves a compelling tale. What adds to the game is the ability to influence the story through decisions. It’s a different story depending whether the player wants the character to make “good” choices or “bad” choices.
Regarding video games for introversion and thought,
Heavy Rain is an example. It’s like the Old Republic in terms of scope and gameplay, but more realistic and decisions affect the plot more. Decisions are also much greyer in Heavy Rain. IN the Old Republic, decisions are usually black and white; This is a good choice, and this is an evil choice. Heavy Rain requires some serious thought. Do you choose to seduce the bad guy, or do you get information elsewhere? Do you take the drugs to stop the visions, or do you not take the drugs?
While literature still holds much more value in imagination and thought, video games have the potential to overcome that. I’m not sure whether video games or anything will replace literature. IT’s a tough call.
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I enjoyed how you focused on ‘connecting.’ God created us to be in fellowship with one another, and literature is a perfect outlet for that part of our human nature. Like you said, even if we are not on Facebook connecting with friends and family, with a novel we are connecting with ourselves. As we travel through the challenges, emotions, and choices while reading, we discover more of who we are and the type of person we want to become.
Literature is still necessary because it is a way out of being lonely; it is a way to connect and relate. The biggest different because literature and social media is the different between connection. Connection on social media is a form of publicity; social media is an example of the loud, boldness of our individualistic society. Literature, on the other hand, in my opinion, are the deep thoughts, contradictions, and self-concepts and beliefs that are still kept alive within us. Literature is more than knowing that you are not alone; literature is thinking, the personal, self-reflective nature of our imagination. Literature is imagination, not image. It is our thoughts, not our actions. Our beliefs, not briefs. Our self-concept, not self-fashion. Literature provides our lives with depth; it’s similar to the soul that you can find through music. Literature impacts our lives with meaning, a story-line, a pitch with meaning and inspiration that we don’t have to publicize, but it’s public through the way that an individual acts, because a story changes a person. It changes their image through imagination. That’s what’s irreplaceable.