Keitai shosetsu

I'm currently preparing my PhD proposal on precariousness and contemporary fiction. To give a gloss on it, it will question contemporary literature's ability to adequately represent a world grown out of postmodernism and postmodernity in the last ten years, a world which I think is primarily characterised by precariousness, from the quotidian (lifestyle trends and job security or lack of) to the extraordinary - those attempts by Western governments to indefinitely detain suspected terrorists or the banking crisis/credit crunch/recession/depression.

I'm going to look at some novels by writers who tackle this world one way or another, with some doing better than others, and end up saying that they're all pretty much failing. In the same way that the early twentieth century needed modernism's upheaval, I think this period needs its own shake-up. No author, at least no author of mass readership, has, for instance, gotten to grips with the internet in any significant way, either as subject matter or - and this is what I'm most interested in - form. You can tell how insufficient literature is when Joseph O'Neill's beautifully written but formally conservative Netherland is praised as "new territory, or at least new subject matter, claimed for fiction" for talking about Google Earth.

Today I've been reading parts of Randall Stevenson's 12th volume of the Oxford English Literary History covering 1960-2000 The Last of England? and discovering how David Lodge wondered at this division of subject matter and form in an essay from 1971 called "The Novelist at the Crossroads". There is most likely a long line of essays of this nature. I suppose it's a fairly fundamental question. I'm about to read Jonathan Franzen's infamous "Harper's essay", now collected in the book How To Be Alone, about the evils of the experimental novel. That Franzen is such a big seller may well not be unconnected to the lack of the sort of experimentation seen at modernism's height.

So I'm searching high and low for glimpses of new forms. I have a suspicion that the internet may have something up its sleeve, though I'm not sure what it will be like and when it will appear. Today, though, I discovered keitai shosetsu, the Japanese phenomenon of the cellphone novel. Dana Goodyear is widely commended for writing the best English-language article on the literary form of teenagers and 20-somethings, but I discovered it through this article by Barry Yourgrau on Salon.com. The cellphone novel, is, written by "Japan's vast demographic of girls and 20-something young women, who thumb out ultra-lurid, mawkish teen romances on their cellphone keypads in scraps of manga-like dialogue, skimpy action, texting slang and emoji (emoticons). They post these skeletal pseudo-confessions in installments, under cute pseudonyms, on dedicated Web sites like Magic i-land and Wild Strawberry where they can be read for a low fee."

They are extremely popular: "In 2007 -- keitai shosetsu's annus mirabilis --half the top 10 fiction bestsellers in the shrinking Japanese book market originated on cellphones. Overall list-topper "Love Sky," by the self-styled "Mika," has sold 2. 9 million copies." Even "Jakucho Setouchi, the Marguerite Duras of Japan, revealed herself as "Purple," author of a keitai shosetsu, "Tomorrow's Rainbow," about a teen's search for love after her parents' traumatizing divorce. Delightfully, Setouchi is also a celebrated 86-year-old Buddhist nun who wrote a contemporary update of "The Tales of Genji," Japan's racy ur-novel classic."

The precariousness that I'm interested in appears here, in connection with a new form of literature. Yourgrau explains how his attempts were hindered by writing them longhand first, then typing up the finished pieces. Not so the more "genuine" ones: "Keitai shosetsu, however, exist in vast online pools, where writers and readers can dynamically engage with each other. And that's key. Yoshi shaped "Deep Sky" based on ongoing hits and e-mails." It is in these Mills and Boon-style stories that perhaps what I'm looking for reveals itself most clearly. These are novels that not just through subject matter but crucially through form engage with contemporary lived experience. They do not look down on this experience from a rarefied distance, but speak directly out of it. They have precariousness built into their very distribution - text messages are easily lost, deleted or ignored, and their authors canvas opinions on storylines through the same medium that those storylines are distributed. Whether these cellphone novels come to be seen as a sort of twenty-first century imagism is of course unlikely (although thinking about it, there is a certain similarity in the vividness of the imagery, the short bursts of text etc), and apparently the American equivalent, Twitter fiction, hasn't taken off to nearly the extent that keitai shosetsu has, but I'm sure its the first of many new forms. To me at least, they claim far more "new territory" for fiction than Joseph O'Neill does.