Or do they?
A fascinating article in The Atlantic discusses the revival of the cliffhanger, courtesy of the internet.
As MEGAN GARBER begins--
Before the arrival of the 40th and final installment of The Old Curiosity Shop, in 1841, American readers of the series were forced to wait. And wait. And wait—not just for Charles Dickens to finish his story, but for his completed work to cross the Atlantic. When the ship bearing the resolution of the series finally docked in New York, a mob desperate to learn the fate of the tale’s protagonist, Little Nell, stormed the wharf. The ensuing scene would make a modern-day publisher swoon: a band of readers passionately demanding to learn how the story ends.
The Old Curiosity Shop owed its narrative power not just to the genius of Dickens but also to a certain type of ending: the cliffhanger. In this, the story was akin to Great Expectations and Anna Karenina and Heart of Darkness and the many other works of the time that began their lives as installments in periodicals like The Atlantic Monthly. That wave of serialized fiction was the product of particular historical forces, among them rising literacy rates, industrial advances in printing, and periodicals’ need to sustain reader interest over time. But it was the product of something else, too, something less technologically contingent and more human: the anticipatory pleasure that can come from the simple act of waiting.
The best evidence for this is that, in a plot turn Dickens himself might have appreciated, serialization is enjoying a renaissance, at what would seem to be a most unlikely moment. The Internet, with its ability to give us pretty much any content we want, pretty much any second we want it, ought to have made waiting—for entertainment, at least—obsolete. But that same Internet is also helping revive the serial form. At the same time, television, in so many ways the legatee of periodical literature, is enjoying a new golden age, with shows like Homeland and Breaking Bad and Downton Abbey challenging cinema for cultural supremacy. And book publishers, in an even more overt nod to Dickens, are establishing new platforms devoted explicitly to serialization.
Read the rest.
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