Not in the (face)book

By Raghu Karnad
It’s not often that someone under thirty complains about cellphones, but then there’s Eleanor Catton. At the Jaipur Lit Fest last month, Catton, the youngest author to ever win a Booker Prize, raised objection to how mobile telecom had crippled her craft. “Mysteries depend so much on misinformation,” she said. “The invention of the cellphone is the worst thing that could have ever happened for the mystery novelist.” In writing The Luminaries, which is set in the 19th century, part of her intention was “to go back to a time when communication was difficult — when people could still arrive at a place and miss somebody — could get on the wrong train.”
Catton went on, in a later session, to gently bemoan the “invention of the Internet” for the way it confounds novelists writing about the present: “There’s something tacky about having your characters check their Facebook feed.” As a result, most fiction set in the current era averts its eyes from our vulgar digital habits.“Many fewer characters have cellphones which they’re using all the time in fiction than they do in real life.” Other writers present might have disagreed, but we don’t know, as they were all busy hunting the courts of Diggi Palace for a 3G signal.
This year’s sessions at Jaipur illuminated wide fields of creativity, from the arts of the Bijapur sultanate to the inventions of the modern CIA. But the cloud that hangs over all literary activity, reading as well as writing, was largely ignored at the lit fest, as it has been in literature itself. That may have been good manners, like not talking about hip fractures at your grandmother’s birthday. Or it may have been a costly sort of denial, like not talking about hip fractures when your grandmother straps on the pair of rollerblades she received as a gift.
Other kinds of fiction have accepted the challenge, and first to mind is the way the movies Queen and PK used Skype to make conversation visual, and to modulate the independence of their young women characters, despite long distances. Of course, all of Bollywood still leans heavily on missed rendezvous and misplaced letters; a single, well-timed SMS could kill half the plots in the industry.
Our actual digital lives are not going to wait for fictional digital lives to catch up. If that wasn’t obvious, then another conversation taking place the same weekend, made it so. Over in Davos, the World Economic Forum hosted a panel of the leading puppet-masters who decide how much we live offline or board the wrong trains. The chief executives of Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Vodafone all spent an hour nodding in sync at shared utopian visions, and the session closed with Google’s Eric Schmidt saying that “simply, the internet will disappear: There will be so many devices, sensors, things you are wearing… you won’t even sense it, it will be part of your presence all the time.”
In light of this sinister promise, the question may not be — as author David Gates asked — whether fiction without the internet is a kind of historical fiction. Rather, it’s whether fiction with the internet has to be a kind of sci-fi. By the time we come to grips with our new devices, they’re already going obsolete. Write a novel about now, to be published in 2018, and you’re already describing a lapsed era when it was legal to quit Facebook. The stories that seem best at apprehending our present lives are ones that kick the ball ahead in the direction we’re running; a genre that could be called proximate sci-fi, or better, imminent realism.
One fresh novel of this sort was Gary Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story, which described a post-literate New York society coked up on intrusive digital feeds. But the finest fiction of all in this genre might be the British TV miniseries Black Mirror, each episode of which projects forward a different facet of our plugged-in lives. Its scripts are piercingly sharp at describing the almostpresent, and exquisitely mean about how we will conduct ourselves there.
It’s unsurprising that literary fiction offers few models. In Catton’s case, a longrefined formula of “ingenious” detective tales seems to have been ruined by geolocation (Two men call Uber. Get into taxis. Man in second taxi shouts, Follow that Uber!) More fundamentally, no human endeavour is as offended by the internet as writing a decent book. Nothing disrupts writing like the gong of a Whatsapp alert, even if you’re writing about lives disrupted by Whatsapp alerts. There’s a way through this, surely. But it may have to be discovered by the generation coming, for whom the world of total internet is as rich and opportune for fiction as that nostalgic age in which it was even possible to log out.