Twittering Novels – the Great and the New

It had been said that President George W. Bush could only have appreciated Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg address through a power point presentation. Lofty, moving, and unsettling language, reducible to dots on a screen. Then came the networking devices, assaulting, in various measures, language in various forms: the instant update on a character’s profile, or a ‘post’ on a cyber-wall. Then arose Twitter, a supremely neat, somewhat narcissistic package that allows you only 140 characters a ‘tweet’.

With such technological feats, it was bound to happen: novels, both great and new, are going to be given the treatment. Great texts are being reduced to a few characters; novels not yet born, conjured up in spate of tweets.

A few have stepped up to the mark of twittering a novel from scratch. One is Brandon J. Mendelson, whose The Falcon Can Hear The Falconer has given him self-claimed oracular status in handing out tips (tweets?) on the subject. He advocates ditching the manuscript, as ‘twitter is instantaneous’. The static is abandoned in favour of real-time moments, to be exploited by such services as Tweetlater. Brent Spiner of Star Trek: The Next Generation is another, having 366,000 followers grasping every package of words that issues from his fingers. A commercial break has rudely interrupted the enterprise: ‘How long that commercial break will last is anybody’s guess.’

But what of reducing, some might even say slaughtering, an extant, great novel to a series of 140 character packages? Twitter is, after all, the ‘real-time’ technology par excellence, not a sober digest of things long past. The economy of Twitter is so constrictive as to be prohibitive. If the novelist, as Czech writer Milan Kundera explained, is the explorer of existence, then this would be a rather paltry exposition of it. People may just want to read whole novel in the end anyway, though a ‘twitter’ might be a useful pointer.

Tim Collins’ The Little Book of Twitter, just out, is the aspiring work of iconoclasm compressing sacred text to profane tweet. Ulysses: ‘jamesjoyce: Man walks around Dublin. We follow every minute detail of his day. He’s probably overtweeting.’ Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot: ‘Vladimir and Estragon stand next to tree and wait for Godot. Their status is not updated.’

In one sense, the twittering of such works may not as incongruous as one might think. Consider the Oxford Book of Quotations, a bible for those willing to leaf out a convenient phrase, a subtle, encompassing remark from a great work. While it’s not exactly the same as a summarizing ‘tweet’, selected quotes can skew meaning and misrepresent, but prove infinitely useful. Fair to reduce Ludwig Wittgenstein’s work to ‘the world is all that is the case’? Probably not, but entirely quotable as barebones, unadulterated philosophy - and twitterable.

In the final tweet, one wonders whether twittering a novel is worth it. The twittering novelist is not bound to be much better than the standard, paper-churning one. Thousands of twittering packages, sent from a Blackberry, does not seem particularly convenient for anybody. (Avid Blackberry users are bound to disagree.) As for language, those concerned that the novel is bound to suffer from this onslaught will have nothing to worry about. Readers will keep reading the good books; writers, writing them. The twitter format is hardly going to kill either activity. Besides, initial results are not promising for the new aspirants. Mendelson issues a caveat: ‘Based on early results, as compiled by ReadWriteWeb, there have not been any success stories.’

Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. Email: bkampmark@gmail.com

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