Read the article here: Factual fiction: writing in an information age
So, like many in the modern world, I'm not quite sure where the novel form now sits or where it may end up (not that I mean to suggest there is a final destination). There's merit in both cases (by which I don't mean to sit on a fence but to allow the possibility that seemingly contradictory conditions can apply at the same time).
There is one point in BookAvatar's critique I'd want to question or have clarified. BookAvatar wrote:
Nothing has profoundly changed us as human beings which is why the same stories played out in Greek theatres 2500 years ago still ring true to us.I probably agree but I didn't read into Ewan Morrison's article a contrary assertion. I read him as saying that how (possibly timeless) human stories are told may need to / must change in the post-internet age if the story-telling is to ring true. Good writers (apologies for the un-defined values-laden term there) may succeed in doing so in a way that proves not to become dated, fashionable or merely stylistic. We read Dickens today. No one will read Jeffrey Archer in 20 years time. Both were best-selling sensations in their times (bizarrely in the latter case).
I'm half way through reading Roxana by Daniel Defoe (1724), one of the modern novel form's early practitioners. I know this will sound a bit daft but it brought to mind James Joyce's Ulysses (1922) because of the ways in which it mixes forms and methods of telling (there are several narrators, sometimes on the same page; at one point it adopts the form of a play; past, present and future tenses can exist in just one paragraph; the principal narrator often breaks the 'fourth wall' to speak directly to the reader). It's not too fanciful to imagine both novels imprinted with hypertext links to people, places and background that could, if done well, enhance the reading experience. I know that when I was re-reading Ulysses last year I went to Google maps at one point to retrace the steps taken by Leopold Bloom. I think that added something. I'd also add that Faber's wonderful iPad app for The Wasteland adds to one's reading of the work in a fragmented, imagiste, symboliste manner that is entirely and brilliantly consistent with the poem.
My point? I guess it is that we do indeed read in new ways and that all literary forms simultaneously reflect their origins / traditions but also anticipate new ways of telling stories. Oedipus the king will be told and re-told as long as we're story-telling but it's entirely reasonable and rather exciting to imagine that it can be done via a hypertext link to a youtube video of a re-creation using vegetables as well as in the original by Sophocles. I prefer the latter and get more from it but there's a place for Oedipus the potato.
