Connections

For anyone who hasn’t yet read it, I’m recommending Sven Birkerts’s The Gutenberg Elegies. As the title suggests, the pieces in this collection are reflections on the future of literature in an age where the printed word is being supplanted.

Right now, I’ll focus on the 13th piece in this book, “The Death of Literature.” I think that in this essay Birkerts does a good job of getting past the tired proclamations about why the novel is dying, and says a few things that are genuinely interesting, and perhaps original. For starters

The book dead-ends us in ourselves, whereas the screen is a sluice into the collective stratum, the place where all facts are known and all lore is encoded.

This is an essential point. Often, discussions of the so-called death of literature revolve around false distinctions between our age and previous ones; e.g. significantly more people read serious novels in the past, or people have less leisure time for novels nowadays. Birkerts gets at a very real, and very important distinction: Our idea of how leisure activities should engage us and where they should take us has changed. With the internet, there is more expectation of being drawn into something interactive, something part of a thriving, changing web. This, of course, is not what we are given to expect books to do.

Technologically speaking, the novel is obviously much more of a dead-end, interaction-wise, than a computer. It just doesn’t fulfill the same expectation that people raised on the internet and cell phones have.

Additionally, in my own experiences, I have found that it can damn difficult to find someone who has a) read a novel I am excited about, and b) can discuss it intelligently. I do feel like this is a product, somewhat, of our times and I think this contributes to making the novel feel more like a dead-end than ever.

Birkerts also says something interesting about computers, something I think is still true enough, but that has changed somwhat since he wrote the essay:

The dominant reality that we all live in the midst of . . . is the reality of impulses and mediated information. Reality comes in over the screen, the phone line, the fax, the radio. But for all the difference this makes, we are collectively no more hospitable to the mind than before. . . . It has, if anything made us less available to the kinds of self-inspection than enlightened living would demand. . . . While circuit and screen are ideal conduits for certain kinds of data . . . they are entirely inhospitable to the more subjective materials that have always been the stuff of art.

I think that Birkerts gets this just about right, with a few the very notable exceptions--including the internet medium you are participating in right now. I can’t criticize Birkerts for not anticipating the rise of blogs, but it is the gaping hole in his argument. Good blogs--political, literary, and otherwise--have shown an immense capacity to incite the kind of retrospection and discussion that is fundamental to healthy arts, and intelligent thought in general. Great communities have sprung up around places like DailyKos and Atrios. Supporters of politicians (most notably Howard Dean) have used the internet to connect, and to do so potently. Sites like Meetup have helped people with common hobbies and interests seek each other out and engage each other.

The internet has shown a remarkable capacity to transform novels from a dead-end experience to a portal for engaging a wonderful community of readers. One personal example: Since I started my litblog, I have acquired many, many books with the intention of reading them so that I can enter into intelligent discussions of particular authors and styles that have been featured on other litblogs. I now read with a realistic expectation of engaging that book with other bloggers and readers of my blog, whereas before I had no expectation of engaging any particular book after I had finished it. I know scores of other people who now read with blogs in mind. Blogs have very much helped put the conversation back into reading (no pun intended).

This can only be good news, because Birkerts, definitely not unreasonably pessimistic about the future of literature, does make this dead-end/computer argument one of the legs of his diagnosis of the decline of literature. If blogs are truly changing the concept of what computers and the internet mean, making them more congruent with personal reflection, community, and the discussion of ideas, then they are a potent force for attacking one of the defining maladies of our contemporary culture.

I’ll close with Birkerts’s nightmare version, a possibly future that he hopes does not come to pass.

What I fear is a continuing withering-away of influence, a diminution of the literary which brings about a flattened new world in which only a small coterie traffics in the matters that used to be deemed culturally central. My nightmare scenario is one of . . . efficient and prosperous information managers living in the shallows of what it means to be human and not knowing the difference. I fear a world become sanitized and superficial . . . in which the existential unknown is banished outside the pulsing circulation system of data.

Whatever tendency computers may have to perpetuate this nightmare scenario, intelligent blogs (and some other forms of online communication) have formed a substantial region which is most definitively not sanitized and superficial.

I’ll also say that I believe that several exciting authors working today have both attracted large followings and have managed to grapple substantially with the complexities of life in their works. Off the top of my head, they include people like DFW, Paul Auster, Jonathan Franzen, and Dave Eggers (there are many others I’m not thinking of), and they have demonstrated that large amounts of people will read their works and do so intelligently because they want to know more about themselves and their times. It’s up to us to foster that discussion, and promote new authors of their caliber.

Comments

[Robert Nagle]

Excellent essay (as usual).

I've always enjoyed Birkets for pretty much the same reasons you mentioned. (Also his essays on European literature were always perceptive). Interestingly, I took a break from serious reading between 1999 and 2003 (When I was overseas I read tons of stuff; but upon coming home again, the chaos of unemployment and technical skill building preventing me from reading anything substantial).

I read for different reasons these days. I read not so much for the sublime or enlightenment (although those things are of course welcome). I read to get a glimpse of old societies and old ways of living (pre-Internet and beyond), to see what is the same and what has changed. do we still enjoy the things people did two centuries ago? What is the cost of progress?

Another thing. Because of competing entertainment choices, I find I use reading more as a prelude to sleep than anything else. Reading a book can be a good way to wind down the day. TV screens and monitors bring great content, but don't bring a sense of refreshment, just a state of stimulation.

Perhaps the word "literature" is a loaded term. The IT manager may not read novels, but he may download cartoons off the net and catch the latest HBO shows. Storytelling never leaves us, both as a need and a human habit.

As far as your remark about the difficulty of finding people who can read and talk about the same books, hey, you're in San Francisco. Imagine what it must be like in less literary-minded cities. Seriously, it is always a pleasure to follow blogs like yours and see that someone has discovered a writer who had been in my peripheral literary vision. (And by the way, I'm now loving Crescent: A Novel by Diana Abu-Jaber on Moorishgirl's recommendation).

[Michael Blowhard]

It's funny: I don't disagree with a certain amount of what Birkerts says (and say similar things at my own blog). But I don't like reading him anyway, and disliked "Gutenberg." I find him stuffy, and a problem I have with a lot of the writin' world is that it does tend to get stuffy. This might come from a basic difference between the way he sees literature (as a kind of semi-pre-defined category of writing -- we supposedly know what "literature" has been and now is, so can pronounce confidently about what's worthy of the label now and in the future), and the way I see it, which is that reading lists arise over time out of an infinite number of conversations, and then get revised anyway. I suspect Birkerts of being one of those guys for whom publishing is justified by the existence of literature. For me, literature is an subset of publishing. I like the rowdiness of the business and the conversation, and wish the fiction-writin' world were more (not less) open to it. Birkerts I suspect likes his quiet study, where he can go to ponder his preferred texts.

[KA Kopple]

Historical death-of-art discussions are worth revisiting, despite the fact that you find them boring. Those discussions, which took off around the turn of the last century, spoke to a deep crisis in Europe - specifically, the conflict between Fascism and Communism. Some of the most important intellectual work to come out the era - the 1930s and 1940s - is found in Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, and, more currently, Habermas - all thinkers who were deeply concerned with the relation between art, politics, and the mass media.

Art lives on but those aesthetic traditions of the past involving observation, imagination, memory, and play have been deeply altered by technology and mass media. Today we replicate the world and call that art - in the past, we created it through our imaginations.