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Recently, I attended the Banff Centre’s “Distinguished Author” Series. Douglas Coupland was the inductee, very deservedly — I think he’s one of the country’s eclectic literary geniuses (how many can there be?) — and spoke before an excited mountain crowd. (It was the second leg of the Calgary Wordfest literary festival, the 2009 edition.)

If ever you’d expect a Canadian author to forego the book in its present form, then surely it would be Douglas Coupland. But don’t hold your breath. Memorably, I once interviewed the Vancouver author after he had spent the morning chewing the pages of previous editions of his books so that he could turn them, quite literally, into papier-mâché wasps’ nests to be returned to the outdoors from which their paper pages had originated. But, in truth, the West Coast novelist, sculptor occasional screenwriter (and next year’s Massey Lecturer) has even toyed with writing graphic novels for cell-phones — far too much work, he once told me — remains utterly enamoured of the book as it is.

Enough so that, in Banff, Coupland explained the origins of the thought process that had led to a passage of what Margaret Atwood would choose to call “speculative fiction” that he chose to read from his new novel, Generation A, in which the evolution of human thought is tied to extra-terrestrial meddling through the mechanism of the book. Prior to the new novel, Coupland had written a short treatise about that great but latterly troubled thinker Marshall McLuhan that was published earlier this year as part of the Penguin Canadian Lives series.

Coupland would have identified, certainly, with the way in which McLuhan was forever tied to, and even shackled by, the neat phrases that became the monikers of McLuhan’s forward thinking: “the global village” and “the medium is the message,” in particular. (Substitute, for instance, ‘Generation X’ or ‘McJob’, just a couple of those that Coupland made famous in his debut novel, Generation X, some twenty-odd years ago.)

McLuhan, Coupland explained to an audience that was half made up of youths who were in diapers when he was on the way to becoming their literary icon, went on to conceive of even more revolutionary eventualities, more than ideas, the most outstanding of these being his anticipation of the Internet and its effects on human thinking. For this observation alone, tiring of the hollow corporate predictions of Don Tapscott and the like, I shall now read Coupland’s biography of McLuhan, something that I have not done yet. (Once I do, or should you do, note, the book’s “long life” will have been extended by another human one.)

Coupland was also particularly interested — and this was the substance of the playful passage that he read from his most recent novel — in the ways that novels have shaped human thinking, and specifically how they fostered the notion of individualism in our conception of ourselves. Thoughts that ancient societies often believed were put into our heads (or, if you were Greek, the heart) by gods and goddesses we now generally believe to be our own — unless, of course, you are a bona fide evangelist. The printing press allowed the dissemination of ideas in a fashion that encouraged dialogues that, in another session of the festival, Monique Proulx described as occurring in private and in silence. It was possible, then, if only for an interval of 500-odd years (William Caxton’s printing press was invented in 1476) to believe that one existed intelligently, and almost singularly, as it was no longer as necessary to head to the church or the town square or, if you were lucky, to the school for instruction.

Coupland believes that this period is being brought to an end by Facebook, Twitter and all the other publicly lived social networking sites of the Internet that depend on and propagate associations of like-minded people — that return us to behaving and living as members of tribes, effectively. Recently some scientists have identified genes that they argue make their hosts more likely to behave as members of tribes — a lot of the research done in less developed countries, inevitably — but this strikes me as the modern equivalent of 19th century phrenology, in which the skulls of criminals were measured and all sorts of dubious conclusions drawn.

I accept Coupland’s explanation more easily wondering, as many do, if the last half of the twentieth century as it was lived in Canada especially, was a golden moment for many things — for democracy, for non-conflictual thinking and, dare I say it, for Jews (one tribe that has always fared rather badly at the hands of others.) Maybe we are headed into another period of tribalism, unrestrained by the positive effects of reading upon our character that we may have taken for granted and assumed would be gifts to everyone.

But I would be interested in this aspect of what Coupland is saying — and, I suspect, likely to explore further for his Massey Lectures next autumn — as I am one of many who is particularly interested in story and how the forms of story that we indulge in exist almost independently of us but also throw light on our habits of perception and how we interact with the world. At the moment, we are living in anxious times, enough so that fear and what I would describe as an atavistic pattern of “epic” thinking thrives.

Note that I use the word “epic” here, to mean not long, as in an “epic poem,” but to describe a form of story in which good and evil exist as absolutes and it is possible to condemn, often to death, whole other groups because in such a story there is no reigning idea of our common humanity and the Other is perceived of as not human and therefore expendable. Think of the Orcs in Lord of the Rings, or of the language that is used in war — America as “The Mother of All Evil,” or Iraq as part of the “Axis of Evil,” etc. These are terms in stories that are explicitly designed not to encourage our sympathy for the enemy but to want to destroy them.

This is a far cry from the sort of thinking that the novel encourages — a form of storytelling that promotes our sense of being individual, such as Coupland was invoking, but never without forgetting the bond of our “common humanity” and of the “universal experiences” that we believe the best novels elucidate and comment on.

Web bonding, Coupland believes, will abnegate all this — and certainly there are many sociologists who point to the numerous ways in which the web creates constellations of the like-minded that support his view. I am less certain. I am meeting more and more people who spend hours on the ‘net that in prior times would have been spent reading, but I am also meeting more and more people who understand the reasons why they like, not prefer, books and keep buying them.

Old people are now buying e-books and readers because the font can be enlarged without adding a couple of hundred pages to a physical book that then becomes an advertisement for the reader’s diminished sight — embarrassing to many in a society that venerates youth and seems to at least hope that a little more science can make the state permanent. Others, however, continue to buy paper books because they want them, or because as a gift it is much more idiosyncratic than e-mailing a file or leaving it at some website to be downloaded.

So the physical book, I believe, shall continue to have a “long life” and furthermore, exist in many forms. This last detail is important, because it also denotes the junction at which I part ways with my pal Coupland (who is, however, at the mere beginning of a journey of thinking, as much was easy to recognize at the Banff talk and exciting for that reason: we lucked in to being at the beginning of the journey with him, rather than hearing an author just plug his last book). For I believe that creation stories and romances and epics and novels are forms of story that co-exist in us, and that a novel is more than something that is “written, in prose form and long” — a standard definition. I believe that novels can be oral, printed electronically, or conveyed in film — and that it is exactly their message of individuality and our common humanity that distinguishes them.

This message is contained in the leap of the imagination that first an author, and then a reader, makes; a leap that is made on the back of the assumption that a person’s experience in, say, Afghanistan under the Taliban (as in Deborah Ellis’s The Breadwinner trilogy), a New York magazine under an Anna Wintour (Lauren Wesiberger’s The Devil Wears Prada) or England’s Tudor court (Hilary Mantel’s Man Booker winner, Wolf Hall) can be understood exactly because we are fundamentally alike.

This is the distinguishing characteristic of the novel — not, as many argue, its investigation of the interior life or its attention to detail, etc. It is this extraordinary and progressive idea that makes it the highest expression not just of our literary but also our political selves. And as it exists on pages, but also on the radio and in film — movies that are just not very good or ambitious should not deter from the novelistic powers of better ones — and, yet, on the Internet.

These are early cyber days; video games, Facebook, or the now no longer talked about “Second Life” and other ways of storytelling shaped by that technology as the printed book was by Caxton’s 1476 invention, are but early forays into the storytelling that is possible over the web, and there is no scientific reason why the laws of story that have shaped the way we narrate our lives in other media would not apply to this one.

So, yes, we may, in these anxious, strife-ridden times, find ourselves relapsing into tribal thinking — and noticing it more. But the novel and all it has taught us cannot disappear. The book, and the individualistic thinking it has encouraged — in non-fiction texts and treatises, but also in novels — has a long life. Let’s pay attention to how it unravels.

***

Books have a long life and their authors and readers too — or at least it can seem that way at times. Coupland read, after Generation A, the concluding chapter of Generation X, the novel of another set of anxious times that made the fella famous. It was poignant, hearing him do so, and for this reader too, as — what, twenty-three years ago? — I had travelled to Universal City in Los Angeles to interview the author, then not yet widely known — who dressed at the time in fifties suits we now associate with the television series, Mad Men, and who would not get out of bed or draw the curtains of his hotel room because he was himself so anxious then. I interviewed him anyway, was struck by his gift and so took the peculiarity in stride. In Banff I thought, have we really known each other that long? And aren’t I the luckier for it.