Bookplanet: a net novel

Techno thriller:
'The Unbinding,' Slate's serialized 'Net novel' being written and posted 'in real time' by Walter Kirn, raises intriguing possibilities for the future of fiction. But is it a future we really want?
By Sven Birkerts

ON MARCH 13, Slate magazine made a bid to turn the dynamic power of the Internet to artistic account, inviting the writer Walter Kirn to create an online work of fiction ''in real time." According to its announcement, this will be ''the first time a prominent novelist has published a genuine Net novel-one that takes advantage of, and draws inspiration from, the capacities of the Internet."

Readers will recall Stephen King's ill-fated effort to publish his serial, ''The Plant," online, but that was a different business, more marketing than conceptual origination. Kirn's ''The Unbinding" (www.slate.com/id/2137804/) merits our close attention, not only for itself-the man is a talented writer-but for what might be portended for the art of fiction if his venture succeeds.

At the moment, it's too early to tell. Kirn is posting entries twice a week, and at this writing only seven sections of the novel were ''up." Still, certain things can be surmised. For one, maybe because he is writing in real time (as opposed to the unreal time of reflection that novelists usually choose to work in), presumably without benefit of substantive self-correction, the prose is straightforward, more notational than crafted. It is a bit less ''literary" than what we might expect from the stylishly up-to-date author of ''Thumbsucker" (1999) and last year's ''Mission to America"-certainly we find no ''spontaneous bop prosody" of the sort Jack Kerouac reputedly ventured onto rolls of teletype paper.

But Kirn's emerging plot premise, so far gadgety and quasi-futuristic, invites this kind of presentation. The setting is the flash-speed world of information processing. His protagonist, Kent, works for a personal surveillance/protection service called AidSat, and in the opening installment, Kent fills us in on the details of his work. '''AidSat?' they ask us, and as we answer them we check our screen for their pulse rates and other vital signs, which are forwarded to us from sensors in their bracelets or, for Active Angel clients, in their earjacks." Some readers will hear echoes of the William Gibson of ''Neuromancer" or the Don DeLillo of ''The Names"-both of whom enjoy manipulating the paranoia generated by applied information technology.

We can see why the data-is-power premise was chosen. If the genius of the Internet is the harnessing and linking of information, then the narrative-so-far has come to the right place. Private as well as public realms are implicated. Before the reader can even guess what the larger system of narrative complications might be, the romantic circuits are lit-cyber style. Within pages-perhaps mere minutes measuring by real-time composition rates-Kent has announced and begun acting on his attraction for a neighbor in his living complex, gathering data (''her name is Sabrina, she works at the Heart Glow Spa") and figuring out how he might approach her (''she recently rented DVDs of 'Aguirre, The Wrath of God' and 'Neil Diamond Live!"'). Seemingly fished up from the Internet sea around us all, this information is given in the form of fictional ''found" documents: online diary postings, e-mails.

The means and ends run together: The technology used in the writing is meant to serve as a central subject. The question, one question, is where it will lead in a deeper sense. Is Kirn angling for a narrative Mobius-effect, bringing together the body with its reflection, the world depicted with the act of depiction?

An initiative like Kirn's was never a possibility before, not in this way, but the Internet has set before us all the dream of high-speed outreach and linked integration. We are shifting our assumptions and expectations about everything, including the arts-what they are and what they should be.

All verdicts are, of course, pending, but it does seem that the ''capacities of the Internet" that Kirn is looking to draw upon are of a particular sort-they feed directly into the kind of paranoid consciousness that fuels the techno-thriller. But where the bound artifact-the novel-can only posit the narrative possibility, the Internet version makes it actual. The reader knows and feels, even if only at a semiconscious level, the implications of the online medium; he registers the suggestive power of the idea of surveillance, of being seen, investigated, and known.

This, I would argue, is one of the profound subjects of our age-the transformation of the idea of identity in the light of invasive documentation-and our mainstream novelists and story writers have only sniffed at its perimeters. Kirn, who has until now worn a ''literary" tag, is trying to tap it directly. But is he tapping it to try to fashion meaningful artistic work, or is he looking to give the hitherto genre-bound cyber-novel a new kind of public baptism?

''The Unbinding," says the promo copy, ''will make use of the Internet's unique capacity to respond to events as they happen." But what does this mean? Those ''events" are presumably events in the world, or the world as it finds its way onto the Internet. How will they inform the fiction? So far, the experiment is only paying lip service to the fantasy of real-time incorporation of the world into the work. Part of the suspense of the venture is waiting to see if Kirn can make good on this promise.

I'm skeptical. Not only because I can't imagine the real-time marriage of reality and narrative, but also, more basically, because I believe that real time and the time of art, the consciousness that makes art, are contradictory concepts-"real-time art" is an oxymoron. (Certainly there are those who believe that our communications are guiding us toward some threshold-that we are en route to a new level of collective integration with our technology. But how this would play out concretely is anybody's guess.)

Thinking of Kirn's experiment in these terms brings up the underlying aesthetic issue, and this is where a critic could balk. The traditional aim of art, in response to deeply planted human needs, has from the first been fundamentally contemplative. The work offers a deliberate distancing from the chaos and turbulence of the immediate and allows the reader or viewer to process its tensions through the recognition of underlying patterns.

What Kirn seems to be after-like Kerouac in his ethos of unfiltered expression (though he did not always follow it) or William Burroughs with his cut-up novels or the participatory theater experiments of the '60s-is the reverse. He wants to use the medium as a way of breaking what dramatists call the ''fourth wall"-the illusion of a separate, freestanding order on the other side of the proscenium arch-merging the digital world-in-progress with the digital work-in-progress.

This is no small thing-indeed, I don't know that it can be done. More important, I don't know if we finally want it to be done. Artistic distance may well be prophylactic, a requirement for sanity in the face of the boggling complexity of living. As Nietzsche put it: ''We have art that we not perish of the truth."

Of course fiction cannot sequester itself exclusively in its orderly invented worlds. Narrative art must continue to map and process the world, and now that the world has become-significantly-tuned to the constant pulsations of information, now that reality is gaining at the level of data as it sacrifices material definition, we look to novels to key us in. Whether active incorporation of the Internet is a new next step-whether it can take us anywhere beyond the thrills of techno-paranoia-remains to be seen.

And yet, if Kirn can successfully deploy some of the energies and capabilities of this extraordinary technology, if he can intensify the participatory dynamic of reading-real-time interaction with real-time output-and win a readership, others will quickly follow. Should this happen, the best-case scenario might be the emergence of works that alert us to-and make us question-the significance of the process that has made them possible.

(Sven Birkets edits the journal AGNI at Boston University. An updated version of his book ''The Gutenberg Elegies: The fate of Reading in an Electronic Age" will be published this fall.)