Matthew G. Kirschenbaum

Department of English
University of Virginia
mgk3k@faraday.clas.virginia.edu

 

 

Birkerts, Sven. The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age. Boston: Faber and Faber, 1994.

 

It is tempting to begin by commenting on the fact that this review of the work of an author who is at best wary of, and often openly hostile to, the various new writing technologies, is appearing in the pages (so to speak) of a journal that is published and circulated solely through the electronic media of the Internet. But since this is also a point we might do better to simply bracket at the outset, let me begin instead by saying that I agree with Jahan Ramazani’s recent paraphrase of Countee Cullen: we need elegies now more than ever (ix). If the elegy, as Ramazani writes, is itself an act of struggle against the dominant culture’s reflexive denial of grief, then surely the elegiac sensibility must contain the potential for evoking badly needed forms of recognition in an era when the nightly news is brought to us by Disney (15-16).

 

The merger of the American Broadcasting Company and the entertainment ensemble which this past summer brought us Pocahontas is, in fact, just the sort of phenomenon that gives rise to Sven Birkerts’s project of presiding over the occasion of Gutenberg’s passing. In this collection of essays and meditations, however, his critique of our contemporary electronic environment belongs more properly to the tradition of the jeremiad than the elegy. Birkerts, a critic, reviewer, and self-confessed “un-regenerate reader,” has lately been appearing in such places as Harper’s Magazine to speak against what he describes as the onset of “critical mass” with regard to our media technologies. The components of this critical mass include, first and foremost, the Internet and other on-line services, as well as hypertext systems, CD-ROMs and most other forms of multimedia, PCs in general and word processors in particular, fax machines, pagers, cellula rphones, and voicemail — in short, the whole riot of circuitry that has, over the course of the last decade or so, migrated from the showcases of consumer electronics fairs to our homes, offices, and classrooms.

 

It is no exaggeration to say that for Birkerts, who holds that “language and not technology is the true evolutionary miracle,” this migration is anathema to the printed word as he knows it, and apocalyptic in terms of its broader cultural effects:

 

As the world hurtles on . . . the old act of slowly reading a serious book becomes an elegiac exercise. As we ponder that act, profound questions must arise about our avowedly humanistic values, about spiritual versus material concerns, and about subjectivity itself. . . . 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 there is profundity in the verbal encounter itself, never mind what profundities the author has to offer; and that for a host of reasons the bound book is the ideal vehicle for the written word. (6)

 

To understand Birkerts’s perspective here, we must turn to the model of reading he develops in the early essays of The Gutenberg Elegies. But first, I should note that the above passage allows us to glimpse at the outset a disturbing tendency in Birkerts’s thought: here and elsewhere, “The Book” collapses far too readily into “Serious Literature,” a category which in turn collapses too often into a familiar canon of novels, a canon which, whatever its merits or demerits, forms only one constellation in the Gutenberg galaxy.

 

Reading, for Birkerts, is an insular activity. It allows him to transcend the quotidian order of things, and experience what he calls alternately “real time,” “deep time,” or: “Duration time, within which events resonate and mean. When I am at the finest pitch of reading, I feel as if the whole of my life — past as well as unknown future — were somehow available to me. Not in terms of any high-definition particulars . . . but as an object of contemplation” (84). One might wish to question whether this particular experience of time is truly unique to reading and print culture; Victor Turner and others, in the course of their work on ritual in oral societies, have documented numerous and strikingly similar accounts of temporal transcendence. Yet for Birkerts, it is precisely his anxiety over the “fate of reading,” reading as understood and experienced in this way, that is at the foundation of his aggressive response to new media technologies. This is a position he sketches very early in the course of his work, and I will quote him on it at length:

 

In my lifetime I have witnessed and participated in what amounts to a massive shift, a whole-sale transformation of what I think of as the age-old ways of being. The primary human relations — to space, time, nature, and to other people — have been subjected to a warping pressure that is something new under the sun. Those who argue that the very nature of history is change — that change is constant — are missing the point. Our era has seen an escalation of the rate of change so drastic that all possibilities of evolutionary accommodation have been short-circuited. The advent of the computer and the astonishing sophistication achieved by our electronic communications media have together turned a range of isolated changes into something systemic. The way that people experience the world has altered more in the last fifty years than in the many centuries preceding ours. The eruptions in the early part of our century — the time of world wars and emergent modernity — were premonitions of a sort. Since World War II we have stepped, collectively, out of an ancient and familiar solitude and into an enormous web of imponderable linkages. We have created the technology that not only enables us to change our basic nature, but that is making such change all but inevitable. This is why I take reading — reading construed broadly — as my subject. Reading, for me, is one activity that inscribes the limit of the old conception of the individual and his relation to the world. It is precisely where reading leaves off, where it is supplanted by other modes of processing and transmitting experience, that the new dispensation can be said to begin. (15)

 

This long passage both pinpoints the nucleus of Birkerts’s cosmology, and provides us with the basic outlines of narrative in which Gutenberg becomes the signifier of our vanished origins. The themes presented here are reiterated throughout the book, though they are only rarely developed with any greater degree of detail.

 

While the tenor of Birkerts’s argument may strike some as idealistic or perhaps even simplistic, it is not my intention to begrudge him his convictions. Much of what is written in The Gutenberg Elegies seems to exist completely outside the ken of what have come to be accepted as the works defining the leading concerns of humanities scholarship in the past three decades. To ignore this body of work, with the exception of token jabs at Roland Barthes on a single occasion, seems to me distressing and irresponsible, but also a privilege Birkerts assumes at his own risk. What I find more disturbing is the ease with which Birkerts’s own particular experience of reading is propagated as normative and universal. It is true that his authorial strategy is often unabashedly anecdotal and autobiographical; the longest essay in the book, “The Paper Chase,” is a more or less engaging narrative of Birkerts’s own development as both reader and writer. Many of the incidents he recounts here, from the endless fascination derived from arranging and re-arranging his bookshelves, to the realization that he is not, after all, the Great American Novelist, may strike readers as familiar, even endearing. But although the book is laced with such highly personalized reflections, all too often they slip seamlessly into blanket generalizations. Witness, for example, the following shift from the first to the third person over the course of a page:

 

If anything has changed about my reading over the years, it is that I value the state a book puts me in more than I value the specific contents. Indeed, I often find that a novel, even a well-written and compelling novel, can become a blur to me soon after I’ve finished it. I recollect perfectly the feeling of reading it, the mood I occupied, but I am less sure about the narrative details. It is almost as if the book were, as Wittgenstein said of his propositions, a ladder to be climbed and then discarded after it has served its purpose. (84)

 

What reading does, ultimately, is keep alive the dangerous and exhilarating idea that a life is not a sequence of lived moments, but a destiny. That, God or no God, life has a unitary pattern inscribed within it, a pattern that we could somehow discern for ourselves if we could lay the whole of our experience out like a map. And while it may be true that a reader cannot see the full map better than anyone else, he is more likely to live under the supposition that such an informing pattern does exist. He is, by inclination and formation, an explorer of causes and effect and connections through time. He does not live in the present as others do — not quite — because the present is known to be a moving point in the larger scheme he is attentive to. (85)

 

It is clear that this Reader is a Romantic Reader, and while I would not wish to deny Birkerts any of the pleasures of reading that way, his model of our engagement with the written word — a model that occupies the first half of his book and is the basis for the all-out assault on electronic media that follows — is badly weakened by its uncritical and unselfconscious presentation of a highly stylized and idealized reading self. And I should add that this notion of an ideal originates not with me but with Birkerts himself: one of his chapters is entitled “The Woman in the Garden,” and it evolves out of a meditation on a Victorian painting whose name he cannot remember, but which depicts, on a bench within a secluded bower, a woman lost in thought with an open book in her lap. (I am myself reminded of D. G. Rossetti’s “Day Dream.”) That this particular painting represents not a transcendent ideal, but rather a distinct set of artistic conventions from a discrete historical moment, is the sort of critical awareness toward which Birkerts, in his passion for print, is blind.

 

From here Birkerts proceeds to a discussion of what he terms the “electronic millennium,” as well as more specific considerations of CD-ROMs, hypertext fiction, and, somewhat incongruously, the recent commercial phenomenon of books-on-tape. The latter, however, actually proves to be the medium best suited to his taste: “In the beginning was the Word — not the written or printed or processed word, but the spoken word. And though it changes its aspect faster than any Proteus, hiding now in letter shapes and now in magnetic emulsion, it remains . It still has the power to lay us bare” (150). Birkerts discusses a number of different audio books in the essay from which I quote (“Close Listening”), while his experience with CD-ROMs and hypertexts seems limited to the Perseus package developed by Classics scholar Gregory Crane, and Stuart Moulthrop’s interactive novel Victory Garden. And when Birkerts confesses that he finds a recording of Dudley Moore reading Oscar Wilde’s The Happy Prince much the superior achievement, his misapprehension of the technologies he is ostensibly investigating appears near total.

 

It is also in these middle chapters that we begin to notice a certain rhetorical shift, one that is altogether in keeping with the conventions of the jeremiad. Birkerts begins presenting extensive lists of what the future might have in store. In the chapter entitled “Into the Electronic Millennium,” for example, we find the following:

 

Here are some of the kinds of developments we might watch for as our “proto-electronic” era yields to an all-electronic future:

 

1. Language Erosion. . . . Joyce, Woolf, Soyinka, not to mention the masters who preceded them, will go unread, and the civilizing energies of their prose will circulate aimlessly between closed covers.

 

2. Flattening of historical perspectives. . . . Once the materials of the past are unhoused from their pages, they will surely mean differently. The printed page is itself a link, at least along the imaginative continuum, and when that link is broken, the past can only start to recede. . . .

 

3. The waning of the private self. We may even now be in the first stages of a process of social collectivization that will over time all but vanquish the ideal of the isolated individual. (128-30)

 

A similar list appears in the chapter on CD-ROMs. My point here is not so much that Birkerts’s observations are uniquely misguided, for they are not very different from the positions others have articulated, albeit with somewhat less millennial urgency, in various ivory tower skirmishes for years. Rather, my concern is that these lurid predictions manifest themselves at the expense of a more balanced account of ongoing work in the humanities that is engaging with such technologies as hypertext and the CD-ROM in innovative and productive ways – -work that when done well, I might add, is conducted with the same rigor that has characterized the best of more traditional forms of scholarship.

 

Birkerts’s claim that the classics will soon lie unread, for example, is not only stale, but it also displays complete ignorance of a project such as the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI). The TEI is the result of an effort by an international committee of scholars and librarians to produce a set of guidelines for the standardized markup of electronic texts. As it is adopted by a growing number of libraries and other institutions, the TEI will enable a vast body of printed material to be archived, indexed, and disseminated in a consistent manner. In time, a community library in, say, Nome, Alaska, will be able to deliver access to the same materials as are available to the patrons of the New York Public Library. The TEI’s 1600 pages of specifications also, I would argue, reflect a somewhat deeper and more thoughtful commitment to the Word than simply a headlong rush to zap books into cyberspace. Birkerts need not be impressed by any of this, but he ought to at least be cognizant of it when he writes, with regard to the development of electronic media, that “every lateral achievement is purchased with a sacrifice of depth” (138).

 

The final suite of essays in The Gutenberg Elegies ponders more or less recent trends in literary and academic circles. One piece comments upon the eclipse of the homegrown Trillingesque intellectual — described as a benevolent sage whose thought is accessible to the “intelligent layman” — by the inscrutable knowledge industry of the modern university (181). In another essay we meet the writerly counterpart to the gentle reader encountered earlier in the bower. This personage turns out to be Youngblood Hawke, a romanticized Hollywood icon of a writer who, living in rural isolation, toils throughout the night to finish his first novel, wraps the manuscript in plain brown paper, and ships the whole thing off to the Big City where it is promptly accepted by a major publishing house (198). The final essay in this section recounts the decline of the American literary tradition, and here Birkerts has the misfortune of conceiving a certain “Mr. Case” as sort of postmodern teflon Everyman who spends the whole of his day interfacing with computers and networks and the like, all the while removed from the world of Nature (205-6). How, Birkerts asks, can Mr. Case — into whom we are all gradually evolving — possibly provide an honest writer with the motivation to put pen to paper? Birkerts is unaware that William Gibson’s protagonist in Neuromancer — a novel which received widespread acclaim when published in 1984, and which also, as everyone by now has heard, contains the first use of the word “cyberspace” — happens to be named . . . Case. This is mere coincidence, I am sure, but cyberpunk fiction is not the only or even the most important literary trend to emerge from developments in electronic media. Birkerts has no comment whatsoever on the recent proliferation of E-Zines and other electronic venues for writing and publication, nor does he consider the phenomenon of the personal homepage and its implications for new forms of autobiography. But even laying these last points aside, the banality and pining nostalgia of these three pieces make it difficult to accept Birkerts as a serious observer of the contemporary American literary scene, to say nothing of his views on technology.

 

The Gutenberg Elegies closes with a Coda entitled “The Faustian Pact,” and if there were ever any doubts about the jeremiad being the hidden rhetorical structure of this text, those doubts are ended here. “I’ve been to the crossroads and I’ve seen the devil there,” Birkerts begins, and he ends with the admonition to simply “refuse it.” In between, he proceeds to assemble a series of charges against technological change that culminate in an astonishing avowal:

 

My core fear is that we are, as a culture, as a species, becoming shallower; that we have turned from depth — from the Judeo-Christian promise of unfathomable mystery — and are adapting ourselves to the ersatz security of a vast lateral connectedness. That we are giving up on wisdom, the struggle for which has for millennia been central to the very idea of culture, and that we are pledging instead to a faith in the web. What is our idea, our ideal of wisdom these days? Who represents it? Who even invokes it? Our postmodern culture is a vast fabric of competing isms; we are leaderless and subject to the terrors, masked as the freedoms, of absolute relativism. It would be wrong to lay all the blame at the feet of technology, but more wrong to ignore the great transformative impact of new technological systems — to act as if it’s all just business as usual. (228)

 

Here there is no room left for compromise — one either embraces this worldview or one sees in it a black hole of anxieties and essentialisms. The utter insolubility of Birkerts’s position, combined with his blatant unfamiliarity with the electronic media he discusses, is the reason why reading The Gutenberg Elegiesso failed to move me.

 

In a recent Harper’s Magazine forum on technology in which he was a participant, Birkerts said the following: “I have very nineteenth-century, romantic views of the self and what it can accomplish and be. I don’t have a computer. I work on a typewriter. I don’t do e-mail. It’s enough for me to deal with mail. Mail itself almost feels like too much. I wish there were less of it and I could go about the business of living as an entity in my narrowed environment” (38). Any implementation of technology on the scale of the Internet brings with it its skeptics and naysayers. I would go so far as to say that those skeptics and naysayers are indispensable. This may strike some as patronizing, but I have yet, for example, to read an informed critique of class issues in relation to the Net that matches the cogency of Gary Trudeau’s Doonesbury strips depicting a homeless couple accessing on-line services through a terminal in the public library. The massive telecommunications bill now flying through Congress is so much arcana to most of us when compared to the attractions of Waco and Whitewater. There is much work here for Birkerts, and for like-minded others. But until Birkerts at least acquaints himself with the technologies he so fears, he will not participate in this work in any meaningful way.

 

Works Cited

 

• Barlow, John Perry, Sven Birkerts, Kevin Kelly, and Mark Slouka. “What are we Doing On-Line?” Harper’s Magazine Aug. 1995: 35-46.
• Ramazani, Jahan. The Poetry of Mourning: The Modern Elegy from Hardy to Heaney. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994.