I could deliver a whole separate talk on what’s being done in that rudimentary narrative sentence that can’t be done as readily if at all with a camera: the interpretations (“fiddled,” “fancy,” “loser,” “scary”), the expository information (“new microwave,” “tried once more,” “her husband,” “yet another beer,” “tell his wife this time”), the voltaged metaphor (his “deflowering” a “St. Pauli Girl”), the transcription of interiority (“wondering dully which lie,” et cetera) — but never mind. My point is the unexceptionable one that various narrative/dramatic media have their various virtues and limitations. Just as you can do things on-page that you can’t on-screen and vice-versa (and I haven’t even mentioned such great paginary virtues as proceeding at one’s own pace, lingering over choice or difficult bits, thumbing back or even forward, making marginalia if the book is your own, marking passages for later reference or for sharing with a pal), so too the printed fictive page, for all its sensory limitations and its inability to let you wander the interactive hills of Úbeda, has virtues that hypertexted, interactive, even multimedial e-fiction lacks. Among them, for the present at least, is relative portability, convenience, and user-comfort. But even when, as is rapidly coming to pass, new technologies permit us to recline in our recliners with hypertexted pages almost as comfortable in the hand as a well-printed book and no harder on the eyes, the latter will still have things going for it that the former, by its very nature, will not. Allow me, please, a final self-quotation:
Interactivity can be fun; improvisation and collaboration can be fun; freedom is jolly. But there are dominations that one may freely enjoy without being at all masochistic, and among those, for many of us, is the willing, provisional, and temporary surrender of our noisy little egos to great artistry: a surrender which, so far from diminishing, quite enlarges us. . Reading a splendid writer, or even just a very entertaining writer, is not a particularly passive business. An accomplished artist is giving us his or her best shots, in what she or he regards as their most effective sequence — of words, of actions, of foreshadowings and plot-twists and insights and carefully prepared dramatic moments. It’s up to us to respond to those best shots with our minds and hearts and spirits and our accumulated experience of life and of art — and that’s interaction aplenty, for some of us, without our presuming to grab the steering wheel and diddle the driver’s itinerary. The kind of reading I’ve just described requires not only [what the critic Sven Birkerts has called] “meditative space” but, as Birkerts observes, a sense that the text before us is not a provisional version, up for grabs, the way texts in the cyberspace of a computer memory always are, but rather the author’s very best: what he or she is ready to be judged by for keeps.
Those virtues, I believe, are sufficient to keep hypertext, e-fiction, and other electronic wonders from being The End Of The Word As We’ve Known It, even before we play our ace: print’s marvelous low-technicity. Back in the late evening of the past century, the New York Times Magazine’s final wrap-up-the-millennium issue (in December 1999) featured a panel of experts discussing the best medium for storing information in a “Times capsule,” to be opened a thousand years hence. After considering a very wide array of high-tech possibilities, they decided that nothing in the nature of Zip disks and CD-ROMs would do, because the hardware required to run the software for accessing the “content” evolves so very rapidly, and the disks themselves have nothing like so long-term a shelf life. For the very long haul, they agreed, nothing beats plain old high-quality ink on plain old high-quality paper.
That sounds encouraging to us POB’s—“print-oriented bastards,” as followers of the late Marshall MacLuhan used to call us even back in the pre-computerized 1960s. But before we break out the champagne and raise a toast to the Health of the Novel-in-Print, we need to remind ourselves that the persistence of our medium for long-term infostorage and other special applications does not in itself mean the persistence of a substantial audience for a particular art-form. Granted that what Joyce Carol Oates has called “pop apocalypses” usually turn out to be false alarms: Thomas Edison’s confidence, for example, that the invention of motion pictures would soon make textbooks obsolete in our schools; the publisher Henry Holt’s concern that the development of the bicycle might spell the end of reading books for pleasure. Granted too that one must guard against conflating one’s personal advanced age with the Decline of the West or the senescence of print-lit. All the same, it doesn’t seem at all unimaginable to me that reading novels may continue to become an ever more specialized pleasure for an ever-smaller “niche” audience, like (alas) the audience for short stories and for poetry: literary support-groups, really, akin to those for the clinically addicted and the terminally ill.
Should we care?
Yes and no. There are certainly graver concerns on the thoughtful citizen’s agenda than the Death of the Noveclass="underline" the death of the planet, for starters. Art-forms rise and decline in popularity with artists as well as with audiences, without thereby going extinct: New symphonies and operas are still composed, though not in 19th-century abundance, and the classical repertoire has a faithful following. Should something analogous become the case with novels for print — if books themselves should become, as one commentator recently put it, “the vermiform appendix of the communications system”6—civilization won’t be the better for it, but it won’t be the end of the word, much less the end of the world. There’s more great stuff to read out there already than most of us can get to in a lifetime; and as for new novels, written by our contemporaries and speaking to the here and now, welclass="underline" Unlike the rhinoceros and the pygmy owl or even the osprey and the eagle, the novel has from its beginnings been as elastic a critter as the octopus and as adaptable as the crow, the coyote, and the raccoon, able not only to survive but even to flourish in radically transformed environments. It cheers me that the population of Virginia white-tail deer where I come from is estimated to be larger nowadays than it was in the time of Powhatan and Pocahontas, when The Novel As We Know It was just being invented on the other side of the Atlantic. Those deer have become a downright nuisance: “rats with hooves,” the environmentalist Tom Horton has called them. The emergence of e-fiction and of electronic publishing are instances of that kind of adaptability on the novel’s part, and while I have no compelling interest in those phenomena myself, I take their appearance as a healthy development and do not doubt that there will be others, on and off the printed page.