As noted in my prelude post, the decision to attend the Melbourne Writers Festival session described today was very much a last-minute one. However, being a fan of the longest form of fiction, a session entitled The Future of the Novel was always going to attract my attention 🙂 The session was one of many around the world celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the legendary World Writers’ Conference held in Edinburgh, and while this session was a little more low-key than the chaotic events in Scotland in 1962, it was still entertaining.
The session was chaired by Scottish-Kiwi academic and writer Liam McIlvanney and also featured ‘transmedia creator’ Christy Dena (even after briefly chatting to her, I couldn’t tell you exactly what that means – my fault not hers, I assure you). The star attraction though was Teju Cole, author of the prize-winning novel Open City, and it was Cole who kicked things off with a ten-minute keynote address.
He started by explaining what he felt about the novel, focusing on works which (in the words of Russian-American poet Joseph Brodsky) ‘elongate the perspective of human sensibility’, with Cole saying that: “…excellence in the novel is not one-dimensional.” After a brief summary of the history of the novel, including a comment on the retreat of English-language writing into the safe realm of consensus and prize shortlists, he moved onto his main focus, Twitter, which he described as a novel with no end, evergrowing, but with no single responsible author. Is this one form of the novel of the future?
The Future of the novel – a book review blog where gradually the narrative of the reviewers life shifts more and more into the limelight, driven perhaps by their interactions with commenters and even encroaching celebrity when they start meeting and interviewing writers and becoming (very) minor celebrities on the literary discussion circuit….. It all starts to fall apart when the blogger stretches themselves too far with podcasts and a youtube channel.