The Death of Books and the Continuity of Stories in Modernity

I have been turning something over in my mind recently. From creation until around 400 BC (different date for different regions) stories took the form of oral tradition. Think about the Epic of Gilgamesh or The Iliad. I know that oral tradition left the culture earlier in some places (Babylon) and later in others (Britain), but the gist is sound I think. There is always overlap in a paradigm shift. Thomas Kuhn and Neil Postman have discussed this in science and technology. I am combining their discussions in a cultural way.
From 400 BC until AD 1940, stories took the form of written documents. From scrolls to books, written stories were the way people got their stories. From Herodotus to Rudyard Kipling, the written narrative was the place to find stories. But another paradigm shift took place around the 1940's that unseated the written narrative as the dominant means of story communication. I mean film, of course, the visual narrative.
From the 1940's onward, we have been increasingly getting our cultural stories from visual narratives. It is no longer the norm for people to rush to the bookstore when a new novel is published, unless that new novel is a J.K. Rowling fantasy narrative or a Stephanie Meyer vampire bit. But it is quickly becoming the norm for the season premier of Lost to unseat even the President's State of the Union Address. The competition is over. Visual narratives have won.
We are still in the vast overlap of this shift, so you can still get written narratives of stories. You can even get written forms of movies and television programs. But this will eventually happen less and less, I think. The more dominant trend is for written narratives to be transformed into visual narratives.
So what does this mean for those of us who want to know the stories of our generation? Well, it depends on whether those stories are worth knowing. I found the overall story of the X-Files to be very good. thoroughly enjoyed Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, and Firefly. I have liked most of the stories of the Star Trek manifestations. I was captivated by Alias, until it self-destructed (same problem with the Matrix and Pirates of the Caribbean movies). I am currently following Lost and sometimes the Mentalist.
Like literature, we go with what intrigues us and we pick up trivia about the rest. The commercials and previews are about all I need to know about Desperate Housewives, probably more than I need to know. Just like you pick up a book and read its dust jacket, or over time get to have a feel for certain genres, we determine what we watch as well. Just because it is a book, doesn't mean you have to read it. Just because it in the theaters doesn't mean you have to watch it.

100 Cupboards

About two years ago, while at the ACCS conference in Atlanta, I discovered that Doug Wilson's son, Nathan, had been doing some writing. He had published two cute books on Noah's flood and Adam's fall at that time and was prepping for his first big release (as in Random House), Leepike Ridge. I picked up the two small books and brought them home. We enjoyed them. The next year for Christmas I ordered Leepike Ridge from Amazon for my son. He read it and enjoyed it, so did my wife. Then I heard about 100 Cupboards. I ordered it too. My son read it, but got a little freaked out while reading it. My wife read it, and understood why James had been a little tense about it. I still didn't get around to it. I had too many other things to be reading and preparing for. So I went on about my merry way. Then I heard that there was a second volume to the 100 Cupboards, Dandelion Fire. And a third to be released eventually. I decided to read 100 Cupboards.
That was one of the best reads I have done in a long while. Over the summer, I had made it my mission to read what James would read this year, so I would be able to talk with him about it. So I had read some children's literature in the recent past. But Wilson's prose is fantastic. Far better than anything I had read recently.
The story is really good too. What happens when a twelve year old boy goes to live with his aunt and uncle in Kansas because his parents are taken hostage while on a South American bicycle expedition? Well, obviously he discovers that there are magic cupboards in the attic where he is sleeping and accidentally wakes up a witch. This is a story that was clearly the product of a mind steeped in some of the best writing of the world. Lewis, Tolkien, Chesterton, O'Connor all find voice here.
One of the most fun things about the book though is its relationship to modern fiction. At first glance, it seems very like Harry Potter or other similar books. However, there are differences that need to be noted. In Harry Potter, as in many books today, the protagonists make really bad decisions, deceive others and go against authority figures. Much of these things happen to Henry York as well. The difference is in modern fiction, this behavior is almost always praised implicity or explicitly. What I mean is, either the characters are victorious in their tasks because they lie, cheat, or otherwise break the rules (hence implicitly teaching that breaking the rules is often a good thing) or they are outright told that by someone else in the book ("If you hadn't stolen the thing no one is supposed to touch and gone where no is allowed to go and told these lies to us, the world would have ended. Way to go!"). In Wilson's hands, these actions take place. Henry and his cousin Henrietta deceive their authorities (uncle or dad), sneak around when they aren't supposed to, and hide information from others so they can do something cool. But this book makes it very clear that if they had told Uncle Frank what was going on, things could have been much better. Henry is not rewarded for doing bad. This is what makes Wilson's book different from other books I've seen recently.
I think this is a worldview difference. Wilson is a Christian and writes like a Christian. That doesn't mean someone is saved in the book or evangelized. It means that the events of the book take place in a world governed by biblical values and biblical reality.
I have read the second book too, and am beginning the third. More to come.