Is the Video this Generation’s Novel?

The Dimensions of Storytelling

Literature is a dying medium. It pains me to say this as much as it may pain you to hear it. But what does it mean for a medium to “die”? 

There are many people who still read today, and in fact, it has become easier than ever for people to read, write and publish compared to previous generations in history where the literacy rates were far poorer, the readership sparser, and the printing and distribution costs much higher. Nevertheless, when we consider where it is that we may find the latest and most impactful cultural ideas that not only influence this generation, but also are the voice of this generation of people, we find that their stories are told not through novels, or even through the written word, but through videos. This includes everything from the simple instagram reel to youtube videos, to the newest TV show that everyone is watching to the movie that everyone is talking about. 

Of these three, the youtube videos and the reels are without a doubt the most powerful media. This is because youtube videos and reels and tiktoks are not orchestrated by an establishment organization that wants to disseminate an idea. Youtube videos and reels are not comprised of engineered plots that push propaganda onto the public like a contrived human resources training, but rather are organic voices and thoughts of people themselves. The degree to which each voice in particular is already indoctrinated can vary, but the voice itself is genuine (even when it’s a zombie it’s a real zombie and not a Hollywood depiction of one). The best evidence I have that these individual created videos are more organic and real depiction of this generation’s voice is that these videos have far more reach than any Hollywood blockbuster or Netflix tv show. These companies are now absolutely bleeding money. “No one really goes to the movies anymore”. Handing a camera to every single person was as devastating to the film industry as social media was to mainstream publishing. 

Establishment organizations and publishing companies have enjoyed unhindered dominance of the audience for a long time, and though they originally may have published some genuine work of great artistic value, today, they are motivated primarily by “return on investment” which includes messaging approved by the government and by advertising agencies. This means that their output is naked propaganda and lies rather than true art. When competing with people who create because they want to--because they can’t help but create--these establishment companies do not stand a chance. This is part of the reasont that younger millenials and gen Z are far less brainwashed and stupid than their boomer parents and grandparents who are used to believing everything that is said on tv without an iota of criticism.

Now that we have established that video is where we find the voice of the generation, what does this mean for the kinds of stories that can be told through video?

The kinds of stories that can be told through video differ fundamentally and substantially from the kinds of stories that can be told through the written word. Many people may think that the advantage lies in favour of the video. After all, a picture is worth a thousand words, and a video is comprised of thousands of pictures collated and “played” sequentially so quickly that it looks as though it is just one picture, in motion. “Motion Picture” is not an accidental name, though you hardly hear that anymore. A picture, and to a greater extent, a video contains far more sensory information than the written word can convey. In a video you can see multiple characters facial expressions, body language, clothes, the setting, the movement of the light, and you can hear the sound of the background music and dialogue. All these elements give a video much more material dimension. To convey even a proportion of this information could fill pages and pages of exposition in a written novel. However, when we read a great work of literature, it hardly expends a large proportion of it words on physical descriptions of the scene,  and yet we feel we know the characters and the story far more deeply than we do when we walk away from a movie or a video. This is because they are not the physical aspects of a scene that make up the crucial aspects of character and story, but rather the immaterial ones. Good film and video directors spend their time minimizing the physical elements to only that which is necessary to the story, and try to find ways to capture the immaterial using the material. Yet it is still deficient in comparison to the written word.

What can the written word do that the video cannot?

Consider a scene from Brother’s Karamazov when Alyosha finds out that one of his core religious beliefs might be wrong, or that someone he venerated and adored might not be who he thought he was. This scene physically plays out as Alyosha perhaps sitting on the steps of some building or other, by himself, though even this is not clear. We do not even know, based on the book, what he is wearing. There are no physical descriptions given of him or the place where he is. How is it then, that we can still “picture” the scene accurately?

What the writer, Fyodor Dostoevsky, focuses on in the scene are Alyosha’s memories, his biases, his inner turmoil and his future fantasies. The writer can convey things that could only be conveyed via dialogue or monologue in a film. Even then, when it is spoken aloud, it has a different effect entirely because it would have to show that Alyosha is aware of all of the things that are happening in his psyche and his heart, and part of the story is that he is not aware of these things, so he could not possibly say them. The narrator of the story knows things about the characters that the characters themselves do not. This is what makes the story so interesting and what makes the reader feel so intimately connected with the story. 

There are many books you might read, such as Tess of D’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy where the protagonist is described as beautiful in a thousand different poetic exegesis, but when you go back through the words to find a definitive physical description of her to paint, you can never find more than one or two details, and vague ones at that. How can you be convinced of the beauty of a woman without ever being given her physical features? How can you so vividly imagine a woman that palpates with vitality and life through a whole story, and never know even faintly what she materially looks like? This is precisely the magic of the written word, the immaterial dimension to which I now refer.

The immaterial aspects of a story are the memories, intentions, fantasies and imagination of the characters. The way that the scene is described through metaphor can also vastly affect how we picture it. A staircase “snaking down the side of a building” is very different than “a set of steps that lead into blackness”. A “gloomy rain that filled the world with heavy dampness” is different than “a rain that broke the silence and in sheets of freshness carried away the gloom”. The scene is built through the characters and the way that they see the world, and the way that they experience it tells us more about them than any expository dialogue, or even the best acting could ever reveal. The reader’s imagination, and the character’s perspective crafted by the writer, combine to form the world of the written story, and this engagement is what makes the reader so intimately connected to the written word, in a way that a spectator can never ever connect to a film. The video is already made, it is neither remade nor influenced by the spectator, and as such exists separately from him.

Video and film versions of written stories are often disappointing for this very reason. The video can never, in all its sensual material advantages, capture the immaterial that the written word can capture. The written word can be in the past, present and future at once. It can be in an imagined world and in the material world at the same time. This magical ability is not available to the film-maker or the videographer.

The Birth and Death of the Novel

The first novel ever published was Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe in 1719. This is not a long time ago in the context of the long stretch of history. Of course written stories are much older than this, but they were largely written in verse or poetry, and not in bound books as we recognize them today. Many stories were also conveyed orally and only recently had been copied down in a written form, so they were not “written” originally, and thus had a different flavour and dimension entirely as far as story-telling goes.

Another of the early novels was Don Quixote by Cervantes and Gulliver’s Travels in 1796. The 18th, 19th and 20th centuries saw an explosion in fantastic literature and great writers. Mass literacy is another thing we take for granted. The reason there are so many novels in the English language is because the English were among the first to make posting letters very cheap and printing books and magazines very cheap as well. As a result, more common people were able to not only learn to read and write, but to express themselves and their daily lives, thoughts, musings and ideas in the written word. This is why there is such a vast array of literature that came out of England alone in the nineteenth century. It was a culture that valued the power of the written word.

I must make a note here on writing letters and compare it to writing an email or an instant message. This is yet another example of how the medium affects the message. A letter has many limitations to it: it will not be instantly delivered and so some time must be permitted between delivery, receipt and then perhaps a resposne. As a result, each letter must be composed carefully so that the time is not wasted and all that needs to be conveyed can be conveyed. This means that when we sit down to compose a letter, we must concentrate and be thoughtful. This is very different to the experience of instant messages that can be a few words. There is no second thought given to what is written because it can be sent in the click of a button. If there are any misunderstandings, they can be corrected immediately and so the impetus to be good at writing and communicating diminishes greatly.

When you write a letter, you also end up carving out some time to sit and concentrate to reflect upon your life and the world around you in order to compose a good letter. Most people never make time to do this at all. It is a rare person from this generation who ever writes an expansive or thoughtful email. Most people write instant messages which are rarely given the thought and concentration that a letter requires. When you speak on the phone, you might have a very good conversation with someone, but because it is never written down, you can never read it over, reflect on it, amend it, craft it and connect it to other things. The words you have said disappear as soon as they leave your mouth. Letters, and the things written in them, stay. People who wrote letter regularly therefore became not merely good writers, but good story tellers and more reflective and thoughtful about the world around them.

If Literature truly dies, so do our stories

Literature, perhaps, is dying because we don’t take this time anymore to sit and reflect about our stories and our lives. We tumble through them like a child somersaulting down a grassy hill, crushing flowers along the way. To stand and to walk down the hill requires control, thought and effort, and yet it is the only way that we will walk on a path that we choose rather than one that is chosen for us by the simple forces of gravity. 

Prior to the novel, we have some vague ideas about how people lived their lives and their stories, but we do not know these time periods as intimately as we know these last three centuries. We cannot imagine how the people of Mycenae might have lived, or the people of medieval Japan or 15th century India. We may know some broad historical facts, but never how they thought, or what they imagines or how they understood the world around them. This is something only the novel can convey.

The video can convey what we look and sound like, but never our philosophic world, our hopes and our dreams. It is a mirror only of our physical world and if it tells us anything about our spiritual one, it is indirectly and by accident, like the patterns of basket weaving from an primal tribe might tell us how they worshipped the forest as a God. In our time period, perhaps, our media will reveal how we worship girls in face filters doing makeup while repeating feminist talking points.

Despite the assiduous records we have of this era, through videos, pictures and tweets, we can never truly know or understand this time period without written stories that are of this time. There are of course, many people writing novels today, but these novels largely take place in other times, and in other places. This is because it is always easier to write about another time when it has been written already by someone else. The difficult part of crafting the world of 19th century Russia has already been done by the likes of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, writing another novel set in that time period is like copying a master painting, it can be impressive but it is neither important nor worthwhile work. 

We do not need another story set in medieval England or Victorian London, we need stories set today. We need creative artists and writers who know how to articulate the philosophic and spiritual problems and conundrums of the present world. This will be challenging because there is an entirely new dimension fo social media and the internet to contend with and articulate, but other writers have faced similar challenges and succeeded. Prior to Charles Dickens and the Victorian writers, few had imagined how a novel could be written that incorporated the incredibly changed world of the Industrial Era. How would a story unfold with trains, telephones and guns in it? Even during that time period, the more reticent writers returned to their comfort zone of writing about the medieval world they were nostalgic for rather than take on the new challenge. Yet, who do we remember but the writers who took on the challenge head-first.

We do not need another Youtuber, or another film. We need stories that are told through the written word, but living, breathing people who are writing about our time period. We need stories to help us to make sense of all of the stories we are living through in the modern world, not merely to record them for the future like an archaeological preservation, but to understand our present better so that we can move forward with more wisdom.