Chapter Six - Can the Novel Trump the TV Series? Competing Media in the Post-television Stage

Summary

As indicated in the last two chapters, where I discussed Ferrante's acclaimed Neapolitan novels and Knausgard's My Struggle, the serial has gained in relevance in the twentyfirst century—both as a popular and respected cultural form, and as a central topic in the theoretical study of literature and media. Other cases in point are William T. Vollmann's Seven Dreams: A Book of North American Landscapes, which runs from 1990 until today, with The Dying Grass from 2015 as the latest instalment. In the same year, Amitav Ghosh completed his Ibis trilogy of historical novels set in the nineteenth century and focused on the Opium Wars. In genre fiction like fantasy and science fiction, the serial had for a long time been the preferred mode of production and consumption. For the literary novel, this can be seen as a more recent “return.”

This is mainly so because serial media have for long been associated foremost with a market logic that was thought to go against their “literariness.” In the nineteenth century, industrialized print production provided a mass readership with access to cheap books. Serial publication strategies supported the logic and rhythms of an industrialized literary marketplace and drove the demand of consumers. Benedict Anderson (1991) and Jean-Paul Sartre (1991 [1960]) already wrote about modern forms of collectivity in terms of seriality, and linked these formations to modern media consumption and media forms such as newspapers, feuilleton novels, photography, and radio. These media, they argued, have effectively “serialized” community and identity throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

But what makes serials relevant or important today? At the core of all serial narration, Umberto Eco writes in “Interpreting Serials” (1990), lies the interplay of repetition and variation of elements. Of course, this applies to all stories to a greater or lesser extent. We humans are pattern-seeking animals. As Frank Kermode has argued, humans tend to live according to patterns that we project onto amorphous time; it is these patterns that make human experience meaningful. Once necessary for survival, behavioral pattern recognition is still an important way to make sense of our world and interact with it, to mediate between the familiar and the unfamiliar. This is one explanation for the pleasures of engaging with serial media: seriality enacts a play, a tension between the familiar and the unknown, code and “glitch,” pattern and noise, stability and change.