The Writer and the Kindle
Heffer Wolfe, quaintly articulating an outmoded version of post-literate cultureIn the 1960s, Marshall McLuhan observed the radical effects of television on North American culture and came to what was then a new and disturbing conclusion: the curtain was falling on the age of the printed word. The extent to which history has borne out his prophecies is well illustrated by a remark made by tech hero Steve Jobs during the first decade of Web 2.0. The Amazon Kindle would fail, Jobs said, on the basis of four words: “people don’t read anymore.”The Kindle survived, but Jobs might have been right after all.One wonders how the Kindle line would have fared had it not been redesigned from an e-reader to an all-purpose tablet for watching movies, browsing the web, and playing games.The futurists preach the inevitability (and often the desirability) of a post-literate culture, a society where non-literate or cross-media modes of communication supersede, degrade, and eventually extirpate print material (or purely textual messages) as a tool for the consumption of information and art. Indeed, there are librarians today making the case for an institutional repurposing of the public library for a world where print matter is terminally on the wane.The present moment finds writers, critics, and editors at an unusual and perhaps frightening cultural crossroads.What might the literary scene look like in ten or 20 years’ time? What shall we write and who shall we write for now that each new generation will be less attuned to text than to electronic media? Is microfiction a necessary response to reduced attention spans? Is it in the writer’s best interest to hybridize old forms with new technology, as some of the Alt-Lit poets have done? How does the novelist answer the claim that the video game is the novel’s 21st century replacement? If we can do nothing to influence general changes in media consumption habits, how can we best embrace them without sacrificing the essence of the literary tradition—whatever that is?This will be The Town Crier’s theme for the month of October.Lest our premise be dismissed as an anecdotal flourish (and until recently, much of the evidence for the perceived decline in reading was indeed anecdotal), let’s peer at a few statistics—and I beg the pardon of my Canadian hosts and readers for using data from the United States.First: a 2012 survey conducted by the National Endowment of the Arts found that 47 percent of American adults had read at least one work of literature (fiction, poetry, drama) that year—down from 50.2 percent in 2008. 45.2 percent reported reading novels and/or short stories; 6.7 percent were reading poetry; 2.9 percent were perusing plays. (The percentage of fiction and poetry readers was shown to have dropped from 47 percent and 8.3 percent in 2002—while the number of people reading plays appears to have risen up from 2.6 percent, though contingencies of this uptick are anyone’s guess.)Further down, we find that only 17 percent of respondents had read more than one piece of literature that year. If we wish to speculate as to what that one piece of literature might have been, we might turn to Publishers Weekly’s list of 2012’s bestselling novels. In descending order: Fifty Shades of Grey, Fifty Shades of Darker, and Fifty Shades Freed—followed by the Fifty Shades Trilogy Box Set at number four, and Gone Girl at number five.Elsewhere: a 2014 report issued by the Entertainment Software Association claims that video games were being played in 51 percent of American households in 2013. A 2013 Pew poll found that 56 percent of American adults own smartphones; another Pew poll published later that year reported that 73 percent of American adults used at least one social media platform in 2013, while 42 percent used more than one. A 2015 Nielsen report indicates that at least one television set can be found in 99 percent of American households, and that 49 percent of Americans “say they watch too much TV.”We can’t ignore that literature is competing for people’s precious time and viscous eyeballs against media that aren’t merely attention-grabbers, but are also associated with symptoms of addictive behavior. (Here is some pertinent literature on this point.)Nor can we discount the role and treatment of literature within the education system. For most of their childhood and adolescent years, students are conditioned to treat reading assignments as obligatory tasks to be completed within a set time, after which the student must demonstrate an adequate knowledge (or memorization) of x characters, y themes, and z sundry details to maintain his or her GPA. Meanwhile, TV, social media, and video games are what they turn to for pleasure once they have skimmed the first ten chapters of The Grapes of Wrath thoroughly enough to answer five open-ended worksheet questions. As they’re coming to associate literature with perfunctory at-home labour, the media that students consume outside of the classroom (the Nielsen poll cited above indicates that the average American youth spends 900 hours in school and 1,200 hours watching TV per annum) might be configuring them such that they become less capable of engaging with print media, which quietly asks for attention rather than commandeers it.It might also be that we’re not writing and publishing fiction with enough electricity to find a mainline into the modern mind.
The libraries of a post-literate culture, organized according to the Dewey the Library Cat SystemConsider how the things that literature has historically done best have become redundancies or liabilities: the exposition of A Tale of Two Cities, taking shape and settling like a fog in the London twilight; Melville’s paragraph-long sentences and the daedalian thoughtscapes Proust erects between a capital letter and a period; the impressionistic deliria of Faulkner’s Benjy and poetically relayed reams of TMI from Joyce’s Leopold Bloom; Wharton and Brontë’s elaborate descriptions of the clothes, dwellings, and manners of Old New York’s upper crust and the Victorian bourgeoisie; and the narrative scenic routes of the great Russian novels. To the modern mind, with “TLDNR” within its lexicon and an evident preference for plots that are always moving and arguments that get right to the point, these are more likely to be objects of frustration than fascination. (“Beautiful writing requires a patience that modern readers, perhaps, are not accustomed to allotting to words,” Nikkitha Bakshani ruminates.) Lee Siegel of The New Yorker suggests that literary realism has been outmoded by real-life events: the ambiguities, problems, and mutually nonexclusive truths of human life that it was once the work of literature to probe has become the popular province of journalism, tabloid and otherwise. For that matter, one wonders at the desirability of reading about the hypothetical struggles and observations of imaginary human beings in their day-to-day, nonexistent lives when many of us regularly, even compulsively follow the chronicles of real human lives as documented by those living them.John Barth published his widely-read (and perhaps just as widely-misunderstood) essay “The Literature of Exhaustion” in The Atlantic back in 1967. Many people apparently believed he was declaring fiction dead (implying that inattentive reading habits might not be a characteristic exclusive to the last 30 years), but he was actually talking about types of fiction and ways of writing fiction. With a nod to Saul Bellow, who held that to be up-to-date on trends is the least of a writer’s worries, Barth argues that it is nonetheless imperative: “Our century is more than two-thirds done; it is dismaying to see so many of our writers following Dostoyevsky or Tolstoy or Balzac, when the question seems to me to be how to succeed not even Joyce and Kafka, but those who succeeded Joyce and Kafka.”It would be a mistake, he wrote—and then reiterated in his 1979 companion piece, “The Literature of Renewal”—to go on writing fiction as though nothing has changed since the 19th century, the golden age of the novel and the newspaper serial.We would also be mistaken to write as though the last two decades never happened. Despite the lip service to smartphones and Facebook, a lot of fiction of the “literary” variety seems content to remain in the 20th century.’The scintillating anarchy of internet culture (which, like “geek culture,” less and less deserves a qualifier differentiating it from “culture” per se) lives and propagates through tweets, Tumblr rants, Reddit threads, comic strips, comments section arguments, Facebook posts, viral think pieces, and Wiki articles. Contrary to Dr. McLuhan’s prognostications of a moribund phonetic alphabet, electronic media’s enfant terrible is substantially text-based. We haven’t stopped reading at all. And what we’re reading and how we’re reading may divest the contents of a bookshelf, Kindle, or literary magazine of their urgency, if not placing them wholly beside the point.About a month ago, I was an avid witness to a remarkable (though by no means uncommon) digital spectacle. A pair of activists posted an article on The Mary Sue titled “Metroid’s Samus Aran is a Transgender Woman. Deal With It.” It was as though someone was lighting strings of firecrackers and tossing them into Twitter. #samus became a trending topic. There were cheers, groans, vociferations, debates, and meltdowns. Believers in the sanctity of Authorial Intent were answered by Death of the Author pronouncements. The Gamergaters came crawling out of their holes. The SJW contingent made the noises peculiar to its species. Cries of “it’s an imaginary character, it doesn’t matter” were raised and immediately suffocated by the very circumstances that drew them. I added the term “headcanon” to my vocabulary. And then there was the adjacent battlefield on Wikipedia, where somebody attempted to edit the Samus Aran entry to reflect the claims made by the Mary Sue article and furiously protested the vetoes levied against their changes.I stayed up an extra 90 minutes that night watching—reading—this thing as it erupted. It was gripping. It was an event that could not have occurred at any time in the past.
In the post-literature culture, these Great Recession-era “touch boxes” will be forgotten for being too wordyThe next day I read a short story in a recent issue of The New Yorker. It was significantly less gripping—and the discrepancy between the one reading experience and the other was rather sobering for someone with a hangup for fiction writing.Tell me if you’ve read this one. There’s a middle-aged person whose marriage has seen better days. She and her husband feel trapped in their dreary suburban environment. They worry about their young son, who’s kind of off, sort of different from other children. There is an atmosphere of oppressive mundanity and inexplicable dysfunctionality. There’s a scare when their son goes missing, but it’s ultimately a false alarm. The story concludes with a sort of narrative koan, a fugacious glimpse of transcendence amid the congealed muck of the modern world, but nothing about the situation actually changes.Right. I’d read it before, too.If fiction does not wish to become a horseshoe crab maundering unnoticed through the cultural seabed, it needs to evolve. It must bring clarity to the unprecedented situations in which we find ourselves in today instead of speaking to the situations in which Ernest Hemingway and Raymond Carver (for instance) observed themselves.Can this can be achieved with text alone? Perhaps the elasticity of the written word can only extend so far, and can’t reach a configuration where it becomes as compelling and urgent to a modern audience without subsuming new media components. This would mean that the 21st century writer will have to also be a graphic artist, a programmer, or a director—or otherwise a collaborator.It is possible that the commercial and cultural vitality of a medium determines the sort of person who dedicates themselves to it. Think of it as the Wall Street theory of art. The argument goes that if a firm doesn’t offer satanically high compensation packages, they will be incapable of attracting the executive skill and talent they require. There is a kernel of sense in this: if you wish to see the most capable and brilliant people in a given field lined up at your door, you must make it worth their while. To some degree, this must be true for the institutions and modes with which artists choose to align themselves. This is not to say that the artist is driven primarily by a lust for fortune and fame, but these things must factor into the path he or she selects.If a driven, creative youth has any sense, she will explore television or film, try to get a foothold in the gaming industry, or take some figure drawing classes and learn how to use Photoshop and Illustrator. Writing fiction just doesn’t make sense today. If she has any shred of pragmatism in her body, the budding artist with iconoclastic potential will flock to media offering her a decent shot at recognition, the satisfaction of involvement in a vigorous and visible community, or at least some supplemental income. Though it may be easy to believe someone like Charles Dickens, Kurt Vonnegut, or Toni Morrison was “born to write,” we have to remember the availability and viability of the medium were instrumental in the choice to take up the pen. If the reincarnation of Dickens is walking the Earth and coming of age today, it would take a fantastically unlikely freak of chance to compel him to write books rather than design video games or produce shows for HBO.Who then will be left writing fiction?Desperate, passionate, crazy people who know they have no hope of recognition, who write without commercial or even artistic consideration. They will do what they do, knowing it’s not commercially viable, or even respectable. They will write savagely, like musicians banging on trashcans and buckets because they can’t afford drum kits and don’t know how to manufacture beats on their laptops.Such a field will be ripe for mutation. It can only be a good thing for literature.Patrick Roesle lives in Philadelphia. He left his heart in the US Virgin Islands, his soul in New Jersey, and his shame in Maryland. The less of him there is, the more powerful he becomes.
