The televisual novel

The story of television and the novel in the twenty-first-century US is a story of mistaken identity and unrequited love. There have been literary critics who perceive serial television as a witless coup to steal readers from the novel, a false rival pretending to a psychological complexity it can never fully inhabit. And there have been novelists who see the complex serial drama as a life raft for the drowning art of narrative, a last hope in the era of the novel’s allegedly imminent death. However opposite in affect, both of these perspectives are rooted in the same misidentification of television as an inherently imperialist medium. To suspect that the novel must either surrender bloodlessly or fight its rival to the death, or to presume that the two forms need be rivals in the first place, is to advocate a particularly extreme understanding of cross-media influence. Likewise, there are TV creators and showrunners who call their series “visual novels,” rhetorically mark their episodes as “chapters,” and seek to present contemporary narrative television as a down-market subgenre of narrative prose and an upmarket gentrification of the daytime soap opera. This too misidentifies the novel as an eternal ark of prestige and cultural value that elevates anything it touches and television as a medium sorely in need of the novel’s authorizing aura. The perception that these forms are battling over the same parcel of cultural terrain - that there can be only one - has produced a kind of medium panic that has infused American literature, television, and the reception communities for both. Yet, there has been an unmistakable romance between the novel and television. And in the first decade of the twenty-first century, this affair became more public, in part because it became less shameful of a secret. Novelists like Jennifer Egan tried to model televisual plotting in their literary works. Writers like Lorrie Moore moonlighted as TV critics, and novelists like David Foster Wallace sought to represent a culture in thrall to TV’s serial charms and addictions. Television writers, for their part, hired novelists to their writers’ rooms, they turned to novels as source material, and they cited the novel as their art’s aspirational form. Television had become an ambivalent source of inspiration and a worthy foe at the same time.