Soon indie writers will far outnumber those who are traditionally published. In fact, they probably already do. There will be way more “books,” but it will be harder to find books you want to read. Writers will become permanently disabused of the notion that writing is a profession that will earn them enough to pay the rent and the electricity bill to run the computer. Looked at from another perspective, we may not get rich, but we may have way more readers.
Only the future knows whether the digital disruption will be a good or a bad thing for books, for writers, for readers, for literature. But Pakistani author Kamila Shamsie asks a provocative question: “Are we hearing all the complex, nuanced human voices we need to help us understand our own times, our fellow citizens, the world in which we live? No. But we could. And we must. And that should be publishing’s bottom line.”
Hugh doesn’t own an ereader or a tablet, and he pecks at his computer keyboard with one crooked finger. I’m pretty sure he has never laid eyes on the digital version of The Paradise Project. But I can see him nodding, bright-eyed, at Kamila Shamsie’s words. More voices, yes!—and who gives a tinker’s damn how they come to us.
IMPLANTING FORGETFULNESS IN OUR SOULS
Each of the paradigm shifts that pushed human communication forward has met with stiff resistance. Even the invention of writing. From the perspective of the twenty-first century, such resistance seems incomprehensible, almost ridiculous. What kind of knob would say no to the written word?
Socrates, for one. In his dialogue Phaedrus, Plato has Socrates tell the story of the ancient Egyptian god Theuth, who invented geometry and astronomy, games of chance, and—his greatest invention of all—writing. Thamus, king of the Egyptians, admired all of these gifts except writing, which he refused to teach to his subjects, claiming that “if men learn this, it will implant forgetfulness in their souls; they will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks. What you have discovered is a recipe not for memory, but for reminder.”
Socrates tells the story to explain why he refuses to “write” his thoughts “in water” with pen and ink, “sowing words which can neither speak for themselves nor teach the truth adequately to others.”
According to Plato, Socrates called writing “inhuman.” In striving to establish outside the mind that which can truly live only inside the mind, writing transforms thought into object, no longer of flesh and blood. Reading, in his view, was just as despicable. Because readers would be able to “receive a quantity of information without proper instruction,” they would “be thought very knowledgeable when they are for the most part quite ignorant.”
Almost 2,000 years later, the advent of the printed book provoked the same response. The humanist Italian editor Hieronimo Squarciafico was at first enthusiastic about books. But in 1477, less than a decade after Gutenberg died, Squarciafico wrote an imagined discourse between the spirits of great authors passing their time in the Elysian Fields. Some authors lauded the new printing press, but others complained that “printing had fallen into the hands of unlettered men who corrupted almost everything.” Yet even the naysayers felt they had to accept Gutenberg’s invention: “Their works would perish if they were not printed, since this art compels all writers to give way to it.”
This sounds a lot like what writers today say about digital books, and self-publishing, too. They are the modern incarnations of that Florentine bookseller, Vespasiano da Bisticci, who said that a mechanically printed book should be “ashamed” to be set beside a hand-copied manuscript.
Squarciafico has become famous for his aphorism, “Abundance of books makes men less studious; it destroys memory and enfeebles the mind by relieving it of too much work.” It is well to remember that he wrote this at a time when books were still enormous, chained to lecterns, long before Manutius released them to everyone’s hands with his para forma.
The rotting impact of reading on the mind wasn’t the only criticism levelled against books. Inexpensive and easily available, books would devalue the work of scholars and undermine religious authority, spreading sedition and debauchery. And perhaps these critics were right. Luther’s Ninety-Five Theses would not have spread so far and wide without a printing press to publish his posters, and it’s unlikely the Enlightenment would have had the impact it did without the rise in literacy that the printing press made possible.
But is it true that writing and reading books have stolen our memories, made us stupid?
That argument was levelled against calculators (a small handheld device that could add, subtract, multiply, and divide at the press of a button). Keep them out of schools! our parents said. Children will lose the ability to add up long columns of numbers in their heads! Which they probably did, since that skill quickly became redundant in the face of a machine with the ability to calculate complicated equations in seconds.
With the Internet fully upon us, the same old criticisms are being voiced once again. “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” Nicholas Carr asked in the Atlantic. “Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading.”
I know exactly what he means. I feel it, too. Even writing these short vignettes, I interrupt myself a dozen times to check facts, scan incoming email, confirm my bank balance. My brain functions seem less linear, more scattered. More nimble, too, if I’m honest. Less able to focus, perhaps, but better able to make connections. In his seminal folklore text, The Singer of Tales, Albert Lord suggests that the act of writing drives us to a linear way of thinking, that oral memory is patterned differently than written memory. Perhaps computers are taking us back to a different—not necessarily inferior—spatial form of memory.
For at least five years, bloggers have been monitoring the phenomenon. “I used to be a voracious reader. What happened?” one moans. “I can’t read War and Peace anymore,” another admits. “I’ve lost the ability to do that. Even a blog post of more than three or four paragraphs is too much to absorb. I skim it.” “What if I do all my reading on the Web not so much because the way I read has changed, but because the way I THINK has changed?”
It’s a terrifying thought. Clearly, as a species, we aren’t crazy about change. We resist it at the very moment we embrace it. And we are right. There are monsters as well as ghosts in the machine. We know this from experience (even if we don’t remember it). Nicholas Carr cites the example of the mechanical clock, which came into common use about a hundred years before the printing press. In his book Technics and Civilization, the historian and cultural critic Lewis Mumford describes how the clock “disassociated time from human events” and “helped create the belief in an independent world of mathematically measurable sequences.” The scientific mind with its measurable truths evolved in part because of the mechanical clock. A significant benefit, to be sure, but we lost something, too. We stopped paying close attention to our bodies and to the physical world around us. We eat at noon even when we aren’t hungry. We go to sleep at ten p.m. whether the summer sun is still shining in our northern sky or we are pulling up the blankets under a dark winter moon.
Reading onscreen may indeed be turning us into informational magpies, and writing probably did weaken the part of our minds in which long poems and speeches were stored and shared orally with friends and family. My nostalgic self yearns for what I can only imagine: a huddle of loved ones, all eyes fixed on the storyteller, knowing as I listen that the story this time won’t be the same as when I last heard it, or the next time, either, every moment fresh, unique, pure in itself.
Socrates and Squarciafico knew something in their bones that we no longer believe. Or at least, it is a
truth that we fight against: life is ephemeral, it is different one millisecond to the next. No amount of pressing words onto paper or digitizing them on a screen will ever stop that flow.
LEARNING TO READ
I don’t remember a time before books. My mother used to say I was born knowing how to read, but of course that can’t be true. Still, I don’t remember learning. I can’t remember a time when A-B-C struck me the way Arabic or Greek letters appear to me now. Utterly foreign. Impenetrable. Without meaning.
I do remember the day my firstborn son learned to read. More precisely, the day I learned that he could read. It was winter. I was pregnant again, huge with a post-Christmas child. Karl was sitting on the floor at my feet with The Little Engine That Could.
“I think I can! I think I can!” he said in his sweet child’s voice.
I had read the book to him often. I assumed he was remembering my words.
“What are you doing?” I said.
“Reading.”
“Really?” I sat up and closed my own book. “Are you reading every word?”
He read the next sentence perfectly. I wasn’t convinced. He was only three, after all.
“I can read!” he said.
“Can you read the newspaper?”
“Sure I can!”
He heaved himself up and toddled over to the basket beside my chair. He opened the newspaper to its full size and spread it on the floor. He sat on top of it, laid his finger on a line, and read every word.
In her memoir, Ex Libris, Anne Fadiman recounts a story about the Irish novelist John McGahern. When he was a small child, his sisters unlaced his shoes and removed them, while he was reading. He didn’t seem to notice. They put a straw hat on his head. Still nothing. Only when they pulled his chair out from under him did he “wake out of the book.”
I understand this phrase. Emerging out of a story is like rising unwilling from Atlantis. I’ve wandered semiconscious through the house for hours after I left the pages of a Colm Toíbín novel or an Alice Munro story. I’ve seen my granddaughters emerge from their rooms with the same glazed eyes, Kobos limp in their hands.
Parchment, paper, electronic particles: does it matter what the portal is made of that leads us into story?
Maybe.
Julian Barnes, in his acceptance speech after winning the 2011 Man Booker Prize, made a plea for the survival of printed books. Umberto Eco in his published conversation with Jean-Philippe de Tonnac, This Is Not the End of the Book, voiced the belief that printed books must always be with us.
Spend time with someone reared reading digital books and the printed page will seem as old-fashioned as a horse and carriage. Charming, but impractical. What, it’s not searchable? You can’t change the font? I have to squint at that tiny type? If I forget it at home, that’s it, nothing to read? Are you kidding me?
But Julian Barnes and Umberto Eco and Mark Helprin aren’t talking about practicalities. It is the way we relate to a book that these defenders of reading the printed page are determined not to lose.
Clearly, the interface of reader and printed page is different from the interface of reader and screen. Defenders of print talk about the feel of the paper, the sound of a page turn, the heft of pages in the hand. The invitation of broad margins to receive a personal comment, a squiggle, a tick. The way the mind remembers how far into the thickness of a book a specific passage was. I can still remember exactly where I first met the word “ubiquitous,” in the pages of The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. I was fourteen years old, and I’m pretty sure I could lay my finger on that word in that book today.
Digital text discourages that kind of personal, visceral engagement. In his heretical book, Where I’m Reading From, novelist and translator Tim Parks asks, “But are these old habits essential? Mightn’t they actually be distracting us from the written word itself?”
It’s an interesting question. Over the past 4,000 years, all of the paradigm shifts in communication have worked to make the experience more impersonal, more pared down, more generic. Writing took ideas out of the head and turned them into objects built of words. As the poet-typographer Robert Bringhurst puts it, “Writing domesticated language.” The alphabet reduced images—pictures of everyday things we recognized—to lines and shapes that had meaning only because we ascribed it to them. Mechanical type substituted mass-produced letters for individually recognizable handwriting. And digitization has made words ephemeral, without any physical substance at all.
Each stage has been loudly lamented, but Parks invites us to consider what reading is really all about. Unlike sculpture or painting, there is no essential artifact, and readers aren’t required to respect the artist’s timing, the length of time the experience should take, as they are with music. Joyce is Joyce is Joyce whether set in Baskerville or Times New Roman, whether shouted or read silently. The only requirement is that the words be read in the order in which they were written. Everything else is up for grabs. So what is the literary experience, at its core? To Tim Parks, it is “the movement of the mind through a sequence of words from beginning to end.”
Even Socrates might agree with Parks that writing is “pure mental material, as close as one can get to thought itself.” Not thought itself, but close.
Still, the books in my house are more than repositories of near-thought. They are also mnemonic devices, reminders that I have read those words, enjoyed them, taken them in. Scanning my shelves, my eyes light on the book my Aunt Marion gave me the day I was born, the Fun with Dick and Jane book that taught me to read, the Bible I read cover to cover when I was eleven, the Hardys and Salingers and Capotes that fed my adolescence, the Gone with the Wind I read straight through the night my older son was born, the myriad volumes, slim and fat, ragged and pristine, that make my life flash before me. The same thing happens when I look at the covers displayed on my iPad: the list is shorter because I only have a decade of digital reading stored there, but those covers do the same for me as the spines on my library shelves. They are my Proustian madeleines, opening stories in my memory without ever clicking on the book or pulling it from the shelves.
When our library was bulging, we had nothing on our walls but books. No paintings. No photographs. Anyone coming into that house might have thought we had a book fetish or a deep need to show off our familiarity with famous works.
I wonder if Tim Parks is right when he says that digital text, by eliminating all distractions except the naked words themselves, actually brings a reader closer to the essence of the literary experience. He compares the transition from paper to screen to the moment when we passed from reading illustrated children’s books to reading adult books in which the pictures were gone, leaving only words.
“This is a medium for grown-ups,” he concludes.
His theory is appealing. Yet the more I think of it, the more Parks’ argument strikes me as narrowly intellectual. We are more than brains: we have ears, noses, fingertips, all of which engage with a physical book. Even so if I let go of the nostalgia and think about the last book I read on my iPad—The Mercy Journals by Claudia Casper—I can’t imagine how my enjoyment of that post-apocalyptic novel could possibly be heightened.
When I moved from picture books to my mother’s books, fat novels by Thomas B. Costain and John Buchan, nothing else in my world could lift me so fully out of my life and set me down in Scotland or England or Italy. There were movies, but that was a different experience entirely, one packaged for me, one that manipulated my emotions like a mad puppeteer. A book was a book and nothing else. Opening the covers was like tapping on the stone in front of Aladdin’s cave and saying, “Open sesame.” Only a book held the treasures that consumed me.
Such immersion, I think, is not solely the purview of paper.
Recently, I was sitting in my car in a parking lot, waiting for my husband. I was reading a book when two young women walked past, all legs and
bare midriffs. They were clearly heading for the mall bookstore.
“I, like, read so many books! Most weeks, ten at least.”
“Me, too,” said her friend. “I read fifteen last week.”
I practically jumped out of the car and hugged them. Anyone worried about the state of reading should hang out in the parking lots of bookstores. But that wouldn’t tell the whole story. My granddaughters, who are now fifteen and thirteen, love paper books and collect certain series. Their bookshelves, at their house in the city and at the farm, are bulging. We talk about the books on their shelves, but I have no idea what they are reading onscreen. Those titles are hidden within their digital devices.
Lucky kids. I had to sneak forbidden books into the house. They can read them right under their parents’ noses.
THE MEDIUM AND THE MESSAGE
In The German Ideology, which lays the foundation for Karl Marx’s theory of history, Marx writes: “Is it not inevitable that with the emergence of the press, the singing and the telling and the muse cease; that is, the conditions necessary for epic poetry disappear?” He was referring to the notion in epic poetry that the metre served as an aide-mémoire to an oral poet reciting a long narrative work. Take away the necessity for remembering and the raison d’être of the metre is removed, opening epic poetry to mutations in its form.
The invention of the printing press might have robbed us of a certain kind of literary memory, but it also collapsed the information monopolies of the church and the universities. Literacy increased by leaps and bounds. When sixteenth-century philosopher Michel de Montaigne wrote his famous Les Essais in 1580, just 140 years after the invention of the printing press, he had a library of 1,500 works in his tower in the Dordogne. His short ruminations, printed in a book that could travel the world, went on to influence René Descartes, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Isaac Asimov—an impact unthinkable just a century before. Imagine the implications if those books had not been written, those thoughts not fixed for future generations to read.
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