IN THE wishful thinking of today’s cybernetic Utopianism, it would not be surprising if emerging electronic specialists with a précised knowledge of early cinematic tendencies in the writing of Flaubert, Joyce, or Hemingway, gained like fast-food from the Internet snackette, came to the ridiculous conclusion that such a style of visual writing should be seen simply as the mere embryonic stage which justifies the proposed supremacy of a communication system comprised only of image and sound, presaging the natural obsolescence of printed novels, stories, poetry, essays, plays, film scripts, comic books etc, along with the end of traditional trade publishing.
But the perennial freshness of the imagistic writing style (some critics trace it as far back as the Roman poet Virgil’s ‘The Aeneid’) remains meaningfully linked to the perennial turning of pages printed on both sides, where both reading and finding parts of the text links eye and mind in one sequential motion.
When the text is highly informational and descriptively mobile, what use is there for another format of reading? To get an early example of such new writing as visual imagery, we have to refer to Flaubert once again. This time to his novel, ‘Sentimental Education’ of 1869, which has been called the greatest French novel of the 19th Century, and easily one of the most interesting and captivatingly exciting novels ever written; a firm precursor of the modern novel.
‘Sentimental Education’, translated by Robert Baldick, begins:
“On the 15th of September 1848, at six o’clock in the morning, the Ville-de-Montereau was lying alongside the Quai Saint Bernard, ready to sail, with clouds of smoke pouring from its funnel. People came running up, out of breath; barrels, ropes and baskets of washing lay about in everybody’s way; the sailors ignored all inquiries; people bumped into one another; the pile of baggage between the two paddle-wheels grew higher and higher; and the din merged into the hissing of steam, which escaping through some iron plates, wrapped the whole scene in a whitish mist, while the bell in the bows went clanging incessantly.”
Do you SEE and HEAR anything when you read this?
Flaubert’s ‘Sentimental Education’ also added to its already vibrant descriptive imagistic style another literary quality which enhanced the identity of the novel as a mobile and realistic chronology. By this I mean the clever use of the objective Third-Person Tense, which, however, sounds very much like a First-Person  narration because its point of view is like that of a reporting journalist.
The style of ‘Sentimental Education’ is one of the first superb examples of journalistic fiction which, by its communication of a world viewed or experienced, a world  of information, activities, characterizations, viewpoints, historical data, etc, further validated  such writing as worthy of a distinct creative identity inseparable from the preciously printed and bound book format.
When we hear of disinterest in the novel today by young people who feel they are part of a new age of visual entertainment, communication, and information via movies, TV, or computer and Internet screens, it no doubt refers to those who perhaps never heard of, or experienced, the entertaining scene-descriptions, dialogue, stream-of-conscious monologues and social insights of these innovators of new writing who deliver even more details and anecdotes than movies.
Again, Flaubert, Proust, Joyce, Woolf, Steinbeck, Faulkner and Hemingway come to mind. And these creative writers are by no means snobbish, ivory-tower, difficult intellectual writers (except for Joyce’s last novel, ‘Finnegan’s Wake’, largely written in his own invented language). What makes their novels lively, clear, and excitingly readable is not restricted to their content or story or plot, but the sentence-by-sentence, page-by-page arrangement of words on paper which reveal exact and precise human scenes as visual imagery.
Films indeed learnt from such a literary approach, as well as from 16th to 19th Century figurative and representational painting, especially by Veronese, Caravagio, Canaletto, Vermeer, Fragonard, Delacroix, Chardin and Lautrec.  To replace the experience of the creation and consumption of writing as visual imagery by a literal preference for movies would be to diminish both our standards and expectations for the novel, and film culture. On the other hand, if we cannot savor and appreciate the structural arrangement of sentences and the reality suggested by such an arrangement, we have missed the relationship of written language to the enjoyment of the environmental world, and the pleasure of reading as seeing.
In Proust’s final volume of ‘In Search Of Lost Time’, titled ‘Time Regained’, we encounter the evidence of such visual and human pleasure in this passage:
“The afternoon in Balbec when, the tables already laid and glittering with linen and silver, the vast window bays still open from one end to the other of the esplanade without a single interruption, a single solid surface of glass or stone, while the sun slowly descended upon the sea and the steamers in the bay began to emit their cries.”
Would seeing such a scene in a film be more ‘real’ or better than what we have just read? Similarly, in another paragraph, Proust’s narrator tells us why he liked the back streets and artisan areas of Venice:
“It was this Venice that I used to often explore in the afternoon when I did not go out with my mother. The fact was that it was easier to find there women of the people, match-sellers, pearl stringers, glass or lace makers, young seamstresses in black shawls with long fringes, whom there was nothing to prevent me from loving…”
It would be difficult to convey such a feeling wordlessly in a film, but as a written paragraph, the narrator’s inner desire projects the possibility of romance that could put the imagination of a reader, or film director, to work by projecting different affairs with such women. In other words, the writing and the reality it suggests invites the imaginative participation of readers, who can add to or complete the scenario for themselves.
With Joyce’s hilarious and gregarious yet highly knowledgeable and linguistically playful novel ‘Ulysses’, novel-writing arrived at a distinct advancement where the structure of the narrator’s mind is shown like a mirror reflecting its own involvement in the environment around it.
Here is a paragraph from ‘Ulysses’ about Mr. Bloom in his wife’s kitchen: “Another slice of bread and butter: There, four: Right. She didn’t like her plate full. Right. He turned from the tray, lifted the kettle off the hob and set it sideways on the fire. It sat there, dull and squat, its spout stuck out. Cup of tea soon. Good. Mouth dry. The cat walked stiffly round a leg of the table with its tail on high.”
Here is a descriptive scene in a bar/restaurant: “An illgirt server gathered sticky clattering plates. Rock, the bailiff, standing at the bar blew the foam crown from his tankard. Well up: It splashed yellow near his boot. A diner, knife and fork upright, elbows on table, ready for a second helping stared towards the food lift across his stained square of newspaper. Other chap telling him something with his mouth full.”  The scene has a cartoonish comic book style of visual clarity.
One huge difference between the absorption and pleasure of reading such literature and the pleasure of movies, is that the new imagistic writing is not as fleeting as most scenes in films, even though there is a similarity of descriptive intention. The advantage such written visual language has over many cinematic images, is that the reader is more deeply and closely involved with scenes as singular realistic moments, rather than a story or plot as  magnetic content, which the average film encourages the average viewer to expect or anticipate.
Some contemporary writers like Tom Wolfe, certainly one of the most interesting and original American writers to emerge since the 1960s, have put all their bets on a return to ‘content’ in novels, fiction and poetry, which would rejuvenate the American literary arts since it has faltered behind the popularity of movies, among a new generation at least.
Wolfe defended his bestselling lengthy novel, ‘A Man In Full’ with his essay, ‘My Three Stooges’ in the brilliant collection of essays, ‘Hooking Up’, against the attacks of three well-known American writers: John Updike, Norman Mailer, and John Irving, who equated the success of ‘A Man In Full’ with a lower level of ‘popular’ fiction.
In reply, Wolfe attributed the public failure of their recent novels to the fact that they had turned away from the life around them in America, writing cerebral esoteric novels on weird subject matter instead, whereas, only if fiction was fed with content from contemporary real life could it achieve the same popularity as movies.
However, it is clearly not content alone, but style which needs to intrigue writers and readers again. Wolfe, in fact, is foremost a stylist. His prose is an urgent, accessible and hilarious linguistic update of James Joyce, especially his long novel, ‘A Man In Full’, and his novella, ‘Ambush At Fort Bragg’, which invigorates his content with written visual cartoon and caricatured portraits and characterizations (it is not surprising that Wolfe is a caricaturist specializing in figurative art), including it in the novelty of new writing as visual imagery.