In a world of intrusive technology, we must engage in a kind of struggle if we wish to sustain moments of solitude. E-reading opens the door to distraction. It invites connectivity and clicking and purchasing. The closed network of a printed book, on the other hand, seems to offer greater serenity. It harks back to a pre-jacked-in age. Cloth, paper, ink: for these read helmet, cuirass, shield. They afford a degree of protection and make possible a less intermediated, less fractured experience. They guard our aloneness. That is why I love them, and why I read printed books still.
(2014)
Are the New “Golden Age” TV Shows the New Novels?
MOVIES HAVE ALWAYS seemed to me a much tighter form of storytelling than novels, requiring greater compression, and in that sense falling somewhere between the short story and the novel in scale. To watch a feature film is to be immersed in its world for an hour and a half, or maybe two, or exceptionally three. A novel that takes only three hours to read would be a short novel indeed, and novels that last five times as long are commonplace.
Television is more capacious. Episode after episode, and season after season, a serial drama can uncoil for dozens of hours before reaching its end. Along the way, its characters and plot have room to develop, to change course, to congeal. In its near limitlessness, TV rivals the novel.
What once sheltered the novel were differences in the quality of writing. Films could be well written, but they were smaller than novels. TV was big, but its writing was clunky. The novel had Pride and Prejudice; TV had Dynasty. But television has made enormous leaps in the last decade or so. The writing has improved remarkably, as have the acting, direction, and design.
Recently we’ve been treated to many shows that seem better than any that came before: the brilliant ethnography of The Wire, the dazzling sci-fi of Battlestar Galactica, the gorgeous period re-creation of Mad Men, the gripping fantasy of Game of Thrones, the lacerating self-exploration of Girls. Nor is TV’s rise confined to shows originating in only one country. Pakistani, Indian, British, and dubbed Turkish dramas are all being devoured here in Pakistan. Thanks to downloads, even Denmark’s Borgen has found its local niche.
I now watch a lot of TV. And I’m not alone, even among my colleagues. Ask novelists today whether they spend more time watching TV or reading fiction and prepare yourself, at least occasionally, to hear them say the unsayable.
That this represents a crisis for the novel seems to me undeniable. But a crisis can be an opportunity. It incites change. And the novel needs to keep changing if it is to remain novel. It must, pilfering a phrase from TV, boldly go where no one has gone before.
In the words of the Canadian writer Sheila Heti: “Now that there are these impeccable serial dramas, writers of fiction should feel let off the hook more — not feel obliged to worry so much about plot or character, since audiences can get their fill of plot and character and story there, so novelists can take off in other directions, like what happened with painting when photography came into being more than a hundred years ago. After that there was an incredible flourishing of the art, in so many fascinating directions. The novel should only do what the serial drama could never do.”
Television is not the new novel. Television is the old novel.
In the future, novelists need not abandon plot and character, but would do well to bear in mind the novel’s weirdness. At this point in our technological evolution, to read a novel is to engage in probably the second-largest single act of pleasure-based data transfer that can take place between two human beings, exceeded only by sex. Novels are characterized by their intimacy, which is extreme, by their scale, which is vast, and by their form, which is linguistic and synesthetic. The novel is a kinky beast.
Television gives us something that looks like a small world, made by a group of people who are themselves a small world. The novel gives us sounds pinned down by hieroglyphs, refracted flickerings inside an individual.
Sufis tell of two paths to transcendence: one is to look out at the universe and see yourself, the other is to look within yourself and see the universe. Their destinations may converge, but television and the novel travel in opposite directions.
(2014)
POLITICS
8
The Usual Ally
I REMEMBER, as a boy in Lahore, the moment I learned Pakistan had become, once again, America’s ally. I was with my cousin in front of my grandfather’s house. It had been raining, and water stood an inch deep on the lawn. Armed with three bricks, the two of us were battling nature. I would put a brick down and move onto it, my cousin would step onto the one I had left, and then he would hand forward the brick he had been standing on a moment before. We were most of the way across when my mother told us to come in. The adults were watching the news. I was told we were now allied with America against the Soviets in Afghanistan. Cool, I thought. We were with the good guys and we would win. I had seen enough cartoons and films to have no doubt about it.
The war went on for the rest of my childhood, but it was mainly a distant, faraway thing. Still, as I got older I began to realize that odd things were going on. Our dictator was giving speeches about transforming Pakistan into a society based on his interpretation of Islam. Painted images of F-16s given by America were appearing on the backs of buses under the words “God is great.” Armed college students were telling women to cover their heads.
I went to college in America soon after the Soviets were defeated. Surprisingly, few Americans I met seemed to think of Pakistan as an ally. Fewer still knew where Pakistan was. After the war, America turned its back. Aid and military supplies were cut off. My friends at home were shocked by this. I, living in America, was less surprised. In America, the murky, unknown places of the world are blank screens: stories of evil can be projected on them with as little difficulty as stories of good.
Now Pakistan is once again dragged into the front line. There was already tension in Pakistan between the graduates of religious madrassas and those of state and private schools. But since the last Afghan war, Pakistan has been struggling toward a compromise between these groups. Such compromises evolve slowly, and are nourished by stability. In acting now, Americans must consider the consequences of projecting a war film onto what is not a blank screen at all. They must have compassion as they weigh the impact of polarizing millions of people in the name of justice. In Pakistan, my friends and family are frightened, as they should be when the most powerful military in the world is sent to do a task best accomplished by schoolteachers, police forces, persuasion, and time.
(2001)
Divided We Fall
WHEN I MADE a reporting trip to Pakistan’s rugged Balochistan province in 2004, I expected to encounter strong feelings against the central government in Islamabad. Balochistan was in the grip of a low-level insurgency, with tribesmen demanding greater autonomy for the province. Just days before my trip, a roadside bomb in the Baloch fishing village of Gwadar had killed five Chinese engineers working on Pakistan’s premier development project: a massive new port. So I was surprised to see children in Gwadar playing cricket in replicas of the uniforms of Pakistan’s national team. In fact, the only hostility I encountered was from aggressive undercover security agents who questioned me rudely and threatened to seize my camera.