Incoming Call: Literature
By Hernán Casciari
How awful literature would be if cell phones had always existed.
Last night I was reading a very famous children’s’ tale to little Nina, Hansel and Gretel by the Grimm Brothers. There is a dramatic moment in the story when the siblings find out that some birds have eaten the breadcrumbs they had strategically scattered in a foolproof plan to trace their way back home. Hansel and Gretel realize they are all alone and lost in the woods; and it’s getting dark. Right at this turning point in the story my daughter says to me: “That’s ok. They can call up their daddy on one of their cells.”
And then, for the first time, it hit me: my daughter has no notion of life without cell phones. That was also the moment I realized how awful literature would be, generally speaking, if cell phones had always existed, just like my four-year-old daughter believes. How many classics would have been left without their climax. How many plots would have never come to be. And, most importantly, how easily the greatest literary conflicts would’ve been resolved.
I would like you to think now of a classic story, any story that comes to your head. It could be anything from The Odyssey, to The Adventures of Pinocchio, from The Old Man and the Sea, Macbeth or Hopscotch, to One Hundred Years of Solitude. It doesn’t really matter if it’s a meaningful or popular story, and the setting is irrelevant as well. I’d just like you to think of a classic story you know by heart, one with an introduction, a conflict, and a resolution.
Do you have it yet?
Good. Now place a cell phone inside the main character’s pocket. Not an ancient black device mounted on a wall but a modern-day phone — a phone with coverage and email access, a phone that enables you to chat, send text messages and make phone calls even to the most remote corners of the world.
Can you see what happens to the story you’ve chosen? Now that the characters can call each other regardless of how far apart they are, now that they can chat, video call and send text messages, does the plot still work? Not even a little.
Last night, without realizing, little Nina opened my eyes to a dreadful scenario: cell phones will completely destroy all future stories, leaving behind cheap technological anecdotes.
For example, if she had a cell phone with her, Penelope wouldn’t have to wait impatiently for Odysseus to return from war.
With a cell in her basket, Little Red Riding Hood would be able to warn Granny about the wolf in time, and the woodcutter’s help would be unnecessary.
Cinderella would give her phone number to the Prince from the beginning and he wouldn’t have to go all over the place trying to find who the owner of the glass slipper is.
Tom Sawyer wouldn’t get lost on the Mississippi River, thanks to Verizon’s remarkable GPS service.
The three little pigs could google a way to trap the wolf before their houses are blown down.
And Geppetto would get a notification from school saying that Pinocchio didn’t show up that morning.
Throughout the past twenty centuries, the main conflicts in most stories, whether written, sung, or acted out, have revolved around the characters’ misunderstandings and their inability to meet up or keep in touch. In other words, the reason why these stories exist is that cell phones didn’t.
No love story, for instance, would have been tragic or complicated at all if lovers had been able to stay in touch through the phone. The iconic dramatic climax of the most famous love story in the world, Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, is solely based on a ridiculous lack of communication: Juliet fakes her own death, Romeo believes she really died and kills himself, so once Juliet awakens and realizes what has happened, she commits real suicide (spoiler alert).
If Juliet had had a cell phone with her, in Act 4 she would’ve texted Romeo something like:
IM PLAYIN DEAD,
BUT IM NOT REALLY.
DNT WORRY ABT ME
OR DO ANYTHIN STUPID XOXO.
And all the subsequent drama could have been avoided. The last part of the book would have been a waste of paper; it would have never been written if, in 15th-century Verona, AT&T had launched a special 3G data plan.
Many important works would’ve also had to change their names to more suitable ones. For example, technology would have completely destroyed the solitude in Aracataca and so the novel by García Márquez would be called One Hundred Years Offline. It would narrate the adventures of a family where they all have the same username (buendia23, a.buendia, aureliano_goodmorning) but messenger doesn’t work for any of them.
The famous novel by James M. Cain, The Postman Always Rings Twice, written in 1934 and later adapted to cinema, would be called Gmail Duplicates Incoming Emails and it would be about a man who discovers his wife is having an affair with a drifter of ill-repute by reading her chat history.
Within two acts, Samuel Beckett would’ve had to change the name of his famous tragicomedy to a title more consistent with the technical advances, such as Godot’s Phone is Off or He’s Out of Service Range — the story of two men that wait, on a moor, for the arrival of a third who never shows up or who’s run out of credit.
In The JPG Image of Dorian Grey, Oscar Wilde would tell the story of a young man who remains forever young and wrinkle-free thanks to a pact he made with Adobe Photoshop, but in the image gallery on his phone there is a photo of his face that, inevitably, becomes gradually pixelated until all definition is lost.
The witch from the classic Snow White would not ask the mirror every night “who is the fairest of them all” because calling the oracle would cost $2.25 to connect and then $0.71 per minute; she’d be satisfied asking once or twice a month. And, eventually, she’d get fed up.
We would also get fed up and bored with these stories with instant solutions. We would lose all mystery, secrets, and bad timing in literature (those big obstacles that always create the overall plot) to the era of cell phones and Wi-Fi.
All those wonderful romantic movies where the boy ends up running like crazy through the city and against the clock because his beloved is about to get on a plane would be solved today with a quick text.
There is no longer need for that cheesy rushing around, that regret, that explanation that never arrives; we don’t need to stop planes or cross seas anymore. We don’t have to leave breadcrumbs in the woods to find the way back home.
Cell phones, little Nina unintentionally warned me last night, will hinder the stories we write from now on, making them sadder, less calm, and much more predictable.
And yet I wonder — isn’t the same thing happening in real life? Aren’t we depriving ourselves of idyllic adventures because of this 24/7 connection? Will any of us ever run desperately to the airport to tell the person we love not to get on the plane, to live in the here and now?
No. We’ll send them a pitiful, short text message from the couch. Four lines in capital letters. Maybe we will leave them a missed call on purpose to get their attention, if we’re lucky enough that they don’t have their phone on vibrate. Why make the effort to live on the edge of adventure, if something is always going to ruin that suspense; a call, a text message, an alarm?
Our world is already infected with clues and solutions: beware that the Duke is on his way to kill you. Be careful the apple is poisoned. I won’t come home tonight ’cause I’ve been drinking. Kiss her, and the girl will wake up and fall in love with you. Dad, come find us, some birds ate the breadcrumbs.
Our plots are losing their brilliance — the written, the lived, even the imagined — all because we have become lazy heroes.
