Andrew O’Hagan contemplates writers whose work was informed by another medium:
[N]ovelists are so often attached to second art forms that wear their physicality or their beauty outwardly. Ernest Hemingway considered bullfighting an art form and, indeed, he thought writers should be more like toreadors, brave and defiant in the face of death. For Japanese novelist Yukio Mishima it was the art of the samurai – he loved the poise, the nobility, the control, tradition, all things you would say of good prose – and he died in a ritual self-killing. But most novelists take their influence seriously without letting it take over. They are emboldened by a love of opera, as were Willa Cather and the French novelist George Sand, or by modernist painters, as Gertrude Stein was, each of these brilliant women finding in the spaciousness and drama of the other art form an enlarged sense of what they themselves were setting out to deal with on the little blank page.
In The Guardian, O’Hagan invites six novelists to describe the second art that drives their passion. John Lanchester names video games:
There’s a curious link between video games and the novel, and it is to do with the experience of being inside a world created by somebody else, but having the freedom to make up your own mind about what you find there. The novel takes you further and deeper inside someone else’s head, but the aspect of agency inside video games, the fact that you can make choices that genuinely affect the story, is fascinating and genuinely new. I’m sure that there’s going to be some hybridisation between the two forms: a new beast, slouching towards us carrying in one hand a Dualshock controller and in the other a copy of A la recherche du temps perdu. I’m eagerly looking forward to meeting the beautiful mutant.
Earlier Dish on novelist Ben Greenman’s inspiration over painter Amy Bennett here.
The Dish 