by Mark Tarallo, AIW Vice President
Think back twenty years, to 1989. The internet and email pretty much unheard of. Most did not have a personal computer, or a cell phone. Cutting-edge personal technology? A fancy answering machine.
Day-to-day life in 1989 was substantially different than it is today. One could almost say it was another era, the immediate pre-internet era. Those differences make it historically significant. Given that significance, it is crucial to preserve accounts of day-to-day life as it was lived back then.
Social historians, documentarians, and memoirists, among others, preserve these accounts of living. Yet fictional accounts are often more memorable and, given the flexibilities of art, more true to life.
In the fictional realm, movies may also do this do this, viscerally and sometimes movingly. The novelist and film reviewer Graham Greene once said that there is a certain feeling a film invokes that cannot be captured in prose.
That seems correct, but its converse does too: written description works on the mind in a different manner than a picture does. The visual that the mind forms after reading words is different than a perceived picture on a screen. It is more “of the mind,” and thus, in some ways, richer. The novel is memory’s canvas.
I thought about this after reading A Girl in Winter, a terrific novel by the British poet Philip Larkin. It is set in England during the 1930s and early 1940s. It captured the feel and depth of unhurried days, and the power of a mind left free to wander. Granted, the world of this novel was much more pre-internet than 1989; it was even pre-television.
Day-to-day life unaccompanied by a computer, device, or phone had a different feel to it, and Larkin’s novel captures this. In the sixty-odd years after it was written, the importance of that accomplishment has only increased.
There is more at work here then simple nostalgia. I think it is related to the old truism, those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it. I would add a corollary: Those who forget the past will be at a loss when trying to negotiate the present.
Obituaries for the book are fashionable these days. But the rise of technology, which some say endangers the book, actually makes the novel more relevant, and more necessary, as a means of transmission and a sanctuary of human experience.
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Mark Tarallo is vice-president of AIW and a Washington-based writer. His fiction and poetry have been published in a range of journals, most recently in the fiction anthology Cold Shoulders. His awards include an Artist Fellowship Award for fiction writing from the D.C. Commission on Arts and Humanities, and the Washington Writing Prize in Short Fiction.
