As spring brings with it warmer climate, I feel the urge to venture out more and take advantage of New York’s rich cultural offerings. Last month I attended a lively talk at the 92nd Street Y by three of the world’s leading writers: Umberto Eco from Italy, Salman Rushdie from India via England, and Mario Vargas Llosa from Peru. The conversation entitled “Three Musketeers” in homage to Dumas’ classic started with each writer reading a part of his most recent novel in its original language form.
The reading was followed by a discussion around various topics including literature of both the good and the bad kind and the place of writers in politics. The three writers were at ease as good friends are when they reconnect after many years. They simply picked up where they had left.
When talking about Dumas’ novel, Eco, who is semiotics professor at the University of Bologna, expressed that the “Musketeers” captured something in the collective imagination but that the novel did not pass muster in terms of its compositional and technical merits. At this point Vargas Llosa jumped to the defense of romanticism and storytelling. He mentioned that a good novel need not necessarily be written well, but it must accomplish richer goals such as making the reader escape to another world and to live vicariously through fascinating characters. The Three Musketeers, he affirmed, did this dexterously.
As someone who enjoys a good story, I enthusiastically nodded to Vargas Llosa’s comments. Yes form, texture and grammar have an important place in how we communicate, but the power of an idea and a story should never be compromised. At the end, the true protagonist is the creativity of the writer and the reader. I left the talk thinking about what the future holds for writing, and for the novel form specifically, especially amidst our creativity and innovation-fueled online revolution.
A sign of things to come might be a place used to giving us hints of the future. Last year five of the top ten selling novels in Japan were written originally through cell phone texting. These novels were mostly written by first time authors who built an audience online and later bought the physical books.
So what could be next? Text message acronyms as part of a novel dialogue, a shortened and more fractured form of story telling that mirrors our more immediate type of human dialogue? These are all things that might make purists cringe but that will undoubtedly capture the essence of this generation. Another possibility can a wiki-novel written in conjunction by up and coming writers across the world. It seems then, that we might be seeing a new phase in literature, empowered by the ubiquity and collaboration of technology, where instead of three musketeers we have millions.