By Mohsin Hamid Ask novelists whether they spend more time watching TV or reading fiction and prepare yourself to hear them say
the unsayable. Movies have always seemed to me a much tighter form of storytelling than novels, requiring greater compression, and in that sense falling somewhere between the short story and the novel in scale. To watch a feature film is to be immersed in its world for an hour and a half, or maybe two, or exceptionally three. A novel that takes only three hours to read would be a short novel indeed, and novels that last five times as long are commonplace. Television is more capacious. Episode after episode, and season after season, a serial drama can uncoil for dozens of hours before reaching its end. Along the way, its characters and plot have room to develop, to change course, to congeal. In its near limitlessness, TV rivals the novel. What once sheltered the novel were differences in the quality of writing. Films could be well written, but they were smaller than novels. TV was big, but its writing was clunky. The novel had “Pride and Prejudice”; TV had “Dynasty.” But television has made enormous leaps in the last decade or so. The writing has improved remarkably, as have the acting, direction and design. Recently we’ve been treated to many shows that seem better than any that came before: the brilliant ethnography of “The Wire,” the dazzling sci-fi of “Battlestar Galactica,” the gorgeous period re-creation of “Mad Men,” the gripping fantasy of “Game of Thrones,” the lacerating self-exploration of “Girls.” Nor is TV’s rise confined to shows originating in only one country. Pakistani, Indian, British and dubbed Turkish dramas are all being devoured here in Pakistan. Thanks to downloads, even Denmark’s “Borgen” has found its local niche. I now watch a lot of TV. And I’m not alone, even among my colleagues. Ask novelists today whether they spend more time watching TV or reading fiction and prepare yourself, at least occasionally, to hear them say the unsayable. That this represents a crisis for the novel seems to me undeniable. But a crisis can be an opportunity. It incites change. And the novel needs to keep changing if it is to remain novel. It must, pilfering a phrase from TV, boldly go where no one has gone before. In the words of the Canadian writer Sheila Heti: “Now that there are these impeccable serial dramas, writers of fiction should feel let off the hook more — not feel obliged to worry so much about plot or character, since audiences can get their fill of plot and character and story there, so novelists can take off in other directions, like what happened with painting when photography came into being more than a hundred years ago. After that there was an incredible flourishing of the art, in so many fascinating directions. The novel should only do what the serial drama could never do.” Television is not the new novel. Television is the old novel. In the future, novelists need not abandon plot and character, but would do well to bear in mind the novel’s weirdness…. Novels are characterized by their intimacy, which is extreme, by their scale, which is vast, and by their form, which is linguistic and synesthetic…. Television gives us something that looks like a small world, made by a group of people who are themselves a small world. The novel gives us sounds pinned down by hieroglyphs, refracted flickerings inside an individual. Sufis tell of two paths to transcendence: One is to look out at the universe and see yourself, the other is to look within yourself and see the universe. Their destinations may converge, but television and the novel travel in opposite directions.
What advantages does Hamid say contemporary television has over the novel? In what ways does Hamid lend credibility to his argument? In an essay of 300 words or more, and using evidence from the text, analyze this argument about the advantages of television, identifying three persuasive examples Hamid uses to bolster his argument.
