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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
Birkerts also bemoans the loss of a core individual identity, the kind of identity that deep reading is founded upon, in the expanding electronic hive. I question his assumption that we ever really had such a thing, even in the good old days. Malleability is part of our very nature as human beings, and a self is not a unity but a mixture; each is many. One can be a loving wife and a neglectful mother, a mob hit man who's Catholic and pro-life. One can believe in God and the explanations of physics. If you're a Freudian, you're at the very least a trinity of id, ego and superego. I think the notion of an authentic single self, expressed in such clichis as "being yourself" and "finding out who you really are" are modern myths. If we're finicky about orderliness, we can try to integrate all our personalities, incompatible ideas, rhetorical styles; or we can accept the ad-hoccery of our mental and emotional makeup and learn to live with human muttness.
As I visit online journals and magazines, and the informal discussion groups formed around specific interests, it seems to me that, contrary to Birkerts' denunciations of the medium's senseless babble, the Web is reviving the art of intelligent conversation. Like intellectual Paris in the Enlightenment, or New York in the Partisan Review's heyday, the virtual city is fizzing with bright talk. It is like visiting Madame de Stael's salon to discuss German philosophy, and then finishing the evening at a Greenwich Village party with the likes of Mary McCarthy and Edmund Wilson. If the people who love books today often feel isolated in a world smitten with mass media, then how can a medium that brings them together to share and foster that love possibly be inimical to literature?
Passionate readers often make for passionate writers, and vice versa. E-mail has evolved, for many of us, beyond business notes or forwarded jokes, to genuine letters. I write and receive a great many more of them now than I did 10 years ago. (But here again, the new hasn't muscled out the old; I have no intention of giving up my fountain pen and good stationery.) Casual pen pals turn into friends, and old friends who live in far-flung regions are still close.
Can the culture of the book really be dying as Birkerts insists? Perhaps in some cases it is, and perhaps that's not always a bad thing. Certain kinds of books, like travel and restaurant guides, almanacs, perhaps dictionaries, encyclopedias and other reference works -- all the categories that need constant updating -- might well migrate into cyberlibraries. The book as artifact will probably have a diminished role. There will be beautiful, hard-bound editions of certain genres like art books and literary classics. The coffee-table book will certainly continue to be produced.
For everything else, I predict, or at least fervently hope, that we will be downloading texts into e-books. Once you let go of an atavistic attachment to paper for its own sake, it makes a lot of sense. College students will be grateful not to have to buy all those textbooks, as will devotees of mysteries and romance novels. True, the current e-book models are not friendly to readers like Birkerts and me who like to turn pages. But MIT scientists are close to realizing an electronic book "comprised of hundreds of electronically addressable display pages printed on real paper substrates. Such pages may be typeset in situ, thus giving such a book the capability to be any book." ["The Last Book," IBM Systems Journal] The spine might have a small display and several buttons that would call up a card catalog. The last book, or "reversible hardcopy medium" as it's called in technical parlance, will eventually be the world's greatest text storehouse, a single-volume library that could easily accommodate the holdings of the Library of Congress and more.
What Birkerts doesn't address is how, increasingly, the paper-and-ink publishing industry, by virtue of its economic structure, is far from literature's best friend. If big changes are coming, they may not be for the worse. As Steven Levy gleefully speculates in the Jan. 1 Newsweek, "When publishers no longer have to focus on moving pulped forests to distributors, the business model will go bananas." When books are published and ordered or rented online, there won't be all those remaindered tree products to worry about, and publishers could well become more willing to gamble on literary works with smaller audiences.
When Birkerts talks about the deep-reading experience, that immersion that feels timeless yet somehow linked to an accessible past, I know what he means. But I also think he's romanticizing and he's making a fetish of language by identifying it with a certain printed form. The word is not the book; why should it die if that particular house is remade?
And consider this thought-provoking analogy in an essay called "The Talmud and the Internet" by Jonathan Rosen (you can find it in "The Art of the Essay 1999" edited by Phillip Lopate). "I have often thought, contemplating a page of the Talmud, that it bears a certain resemblance to a home page on the Internet, where nothing is whole in itself but where icons and text boxes are doorways through which visitors pass into an infinity of cross-referenced texts and conversations." A single page of text in this most revered and literary of documents is already a historical, multilayered compendium and a continuing discussion. There are stories, bits of history, anthropology, legal disputes, biblical interpretation, plus the commentaries, corrections, asides, marginalia, reinterpretations of generations of scholars and rabbis.
The e-book will allow us the best of the old and new ways of reading. We can read "Huckleberry Finn" or "The Duino Elegies" from beginning to end and then close the book, experiencing it as a whole in itself, a finite world in which we have dwelled for a while. But why not then open the windows and doors to other texts and voices? Perhaps it's time for romantic readers to give up the illusion of closure and finitude. After all, only the printed book-object is a finite text; every writing is part of a conversation with other writings, past and present. The "last book" will widen the contextual space in which reading takes place, and beautifully complicate its resonances. That's a complex richness devoutly to be welcomed by friends of the book.
