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Literary Review
The fate of reading
EVERYTHING in the world as we know it would have changed in the 25th Century. Everything but the book. In some cozy corner of a room you will still spy a person reading a book. And she will be holding it as we hold a book today. And it will be made of paper, ink and glue. This isn't a book lover's fantasy. I can't imagine the book being something else in the future because it hasn't happened so far. The LP record became a spool of tape; the spool became a cassette; the cassette became a CD; the CD became MP3. Soon, the MP3 will probably be something else. The videocassette changed into LD, VCD and DVD. Ah, but the book? The book is still a book, since Gutenberg.
Entire books have been uploaded on the Net, but how many of us really scroll up and down a computer screen to read a whole book? Audio books (which is a billion dollar industry, with more than 55,000 thousand audio titles available from 1, 400 publishers) have been around for a long time (mainly in the United States) but they haven't revolutionised the way we read. Reading, curled up with a book, returns you to solitude. Reading from the Net takes you back to community; makes you feel connected. Because you know somewhere someone is reading the same thing off a computer screen. John Updike noted in More Matter, his latest non-fiction tome, that the digital revolution lacks physical beauty. But books have them. Because the book is beautiful in relation to the human hand, to the human eye, to the human brain, and to the human spirit.
Sven Birkerts' beautifully titled book on the subject, The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate Reading in an Electronic Age, is a celebration of the "complex pleasures of reading". In 15 scholarly and personal essays, he explores "the impact of technology on the experience of reading. Drawing on his own passionate, lifelong love of books, Birkerts examines how literature intimately shapes and nourishes the inner life."
Are books as we know them dead? asks Birkerts and goes on to answer — no. He looks at reading without romanticising the act or becoming sentimental about the perilous fate of books. His tone is both discursive and autobiographical. Birkerts speaks as an unregenerate reader; a book lover who still believes that "language and not technology is the true evolutionary miracle." In his introduction, "The Reading Wars", he offers this confession: "I have not yet given up on the idea that the experience of literature offers a kind of wisdom that cannot be discovered elsewhere; that the bound book is the ideal vehicle for the written word. My investment in the topic of reading is too deep and too partisan to allow me the detachment of the watchful bystander. My book originates in the private self — that of the dreamy fellow with an open book in his lap."
The first part of the book, "The Reading Self" meditates on the bound book and the act of reading in intriguingly titled essays: "MahVuhHuhPuh" raises the question, "What is the place of reading, and of the reading sensibility, in our culture as it has become?" "The Paper Chase" is an autobiographical fragment about his childhood and how reading became his one great addiction. "From the time of earliest childhood, I was enthralled by books. First just by their material mysteries. The notion of hiding, secreting myself in a text was important to me — it underlies to this day my sense of the book as a refuge." In "The Shadow Life of Reading" he writes, "Reading: the term is as generous and imprecise as "love". What reading does, ultimately, is to keep alive the dangerous and exhilarating idea that life is not a sequence of lived moments, but a destiny. I read books to read myself."
"Paging the Self" is not just an account of the books that matter to him but also a recollection, a cataloguing of his favourite moments, from these books. "I love this trolling of the memory", he writes. "With each retrieval I not only re-experience something of the flavour of the book, but I also recover, the original circumstances of my reading — a train ride, a favourite chair in an old apartment, the atmosphere of a long, disconsolate summer. I have an intense memory of hiding in bed with Humboldt's Gift and trying to outrun the pain of a break-up than I do of the long depression I moved around in. I read then in order to get away and what I now recall, mainly, is the book that rescued me."
Though it is books he clearly loves, Birkerts speaks also for the electronic medium in the second part, called, "Hypertext: Of Mouse and Man". Those of us, he says, who feel that the ideal place for the printed word is the bound book, should begin to realise that language is a hardier thing than we have allowed. It may flourish among "the beep and the click and the monitor as readily on the printed page. I hope so, for language is the soul's ozone layer and we thin it at our peril." And as much as it pains his old bookish soul to admit this, he has to: that there are certain virtues in listening to audio books. "Short stories work beautifully in the audio format. I have heard stories by Updike, Malamud and Raymond Carver — all artists highly attuned to words sounds and sentence rhythms — that achieve a delightful resonance." "Hypertext" also examines at length the philosophical, literary and metaphysical difference between words on page and words on screen.
In the end, Birkerts, a self-confessed book lover, is moved to say: "The writing process begins in the writer; the life; it branches off onto paper, into artifice; but the final restless resting place of every written thing is the solitary life of the reader."
The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age, Sven Birkerts, Fawcett Columbine, p. 231, $14.
pradeepsebastian@hotmail.com
PRADEEP SEBASTIAN
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