The father of the cell-phone-novel is Yoshi, who in the year 2000 began posting installments of his novel Deep Love on the web. Deep Love is about high school girls prostituting themselves to older men in exchange for designer clothes. It was soon picked up by the publishing industry, turned into manga, and adapted for film and television. The novel has sold almost three million copies.
Experts maintain that in Japan, where young people are obsessed with Internet games, the sale of two-and-a-half million books represents a huge cultural shift in the right direction. They say it’s important that young people do any kind of reading or writing. Mone, the young authoress, has no literary pretensions, but defends the cell-phone-novel phenomenon, claiming: “They say that we’re immature and incapable of writing a literate sentence. But I would say, so what? The fact that we’re producing at all is important.”
Those who work in the multimedia industry declare that it’s important for young Japanese to feel integrated in their community, to feel they belong to a culture and “to have their voice.” Sociologists and education professionals agree. The multimedia industry is of course most interested in a positive assessment of the keitai shosetsu phenomenon, because it makes them billions. A collective author or authorship is a sales guarantee. Millions of readers participate in the novel’s creation, cheering the young authoress on, and then they buy the book, feeling themselves to be, in some way, co-authors.
Attributed to Murasaki Shikibu, “The Tale of Genji” dates from the eleventh century and is considered a classic of Japanese literature. Some in the literature business claim that cell-phone-novels are simply modern variants of this traditional chronicle of court life, which, as they would have it, is little more than a gossip-soaked tome. Others, such as Nobel Laureate Kenzaburō Ōe, place great literary significance on the work. Whatever the case, “The Tale of Genji” is required reading in Japanese schools.
Kiki, a new cell-phone-novel writing star, completed high school, but flunked Japanese. She wrote her novel because she had just gone through “a difficult thing” and writing was a chance “to get it off my chest.” The novel is about a young girl called Aki who falls in love with a guy called Tomo and gets pregnant. Aki loses the baby and Tomo leaves her, but the novel has a happy ending. Asked whether she had ever read “The Tale of Genji,” Kiki replied that the novel’s language was complicated and that it had too many characters, but that she remembered another old book she had read a few years ago, and that it was really great because it was “very easy to read, very contemporary, very close to my life.” The book was called Deep Love.
The cell-phone-novel trend is in steady decline in Japan (some think it will disappear the same way it appeared), but it is slowly making inroads in America. As in Japan, authors tend to be young, uneducated, and from the lower social strata. Julian Knighten, a twenty-two-year-old from Texas, works three jobs and writes cell-phone-novels in the evenings when he goes to bed. Julian likes the contact with his readers, who give him advice and encourage him to write, because only writing, “gives me the chance to escape reality.”
It is interesting to note that in the cell-phone-novel phenomenon, as in all other karaoke-activities, the same simple rhetoric is repeated over and over: the right to a voice (the right to “get things off one’s chest”), the defence of amateurism (illiteracy, ignorance) in the name of having the right to a voice (to “get things off one’s chest”), or in the name of escaping reality.
And let’s not forget Twitter here, which in the space of a few months had seventeen million registered users. Twitter is used for social networking and a quick “getting things off one’s chest.” Two writers have already announced plans to write Twitter novels.
In the meantime Penguin has published Twitterature,[4] a collection of sham citations ostensibly excerpted from the most famous works of world literature and narrated using the abbreviated acronynm-laced language of Twitter users. “Twitterature provides everything you need to master the literature of the civilized world, while relieving you of the burdensome task of reading it.” The collections’s authors, a pair of nineteen-year-olds, employ revolutionary rhetoric, because “like any good revolution, this one started in a college dormitory.”
There’s nothing wrong with a reappraisal or rethinking of the canon, quite to the contrary. In our college days my generation poked fun at the classics of our national literature, the dull and decrepit texts of required reading lists. Instead of reading the poems of our literary lions, we’d sing them in the vulgar style of retro-modern folk-pop songs, thus probing just how much of an “aesthetic” beating the canon could take. The most alluring literary discovery of my time was the Russian writer Daniil Kharms and his literary vignettes (not to mention his longer pieces such as the novella The Old Woman), in which the Russian absurdist delighted in dethroning the classics of Russian literature.
Literary “vandalism” is, therefore, nothing new. The current cultural climate and the new technology of twitter, however, make for a crucial difference. The literary canonization of the pair of nineteen-year-old literary “vandals” occurred at lightning speed (Kharms needed a good seventy years for his entire body of work to emerge from anonymity), their work bound in a Penguin Classics edition. What’s more, the pair’s humorless and dull wee book was received with praise ranging from warm to delirious (while poor old Kharms died in a Soviet prison, not necessarily because of his literary vignettes of course). As far as technology goes, a millions-strong social network gave the novices and “twitterature” their breakthrough. Although the literary “subversion” of the two young authors is little more than a shrewd and fleeting financial scam, the cultural market has set to work on transforming a lucrative joke into a revolutionary trend, and as such, “twitterature” is already embedded within the broader neologism of “amplified literature.” The poorly-defined term also luxuriates in ecstatic self-satisfying revolutionary rhetoric. Here’s how a successful “transmedia” European festival announced the content of its program:
The complexity of the real continues to amplify and literature continues to be the only discourse that does not try to shape the world with ideological clichés, disciplinary limits or absolute norms. The beginning of the second decade of the 21st century reveals a fascinating scenario. The hegemony of the