If you were like many Americans yesterday morning, you had several pieces of electronic software wrapped as presents under the Christmas tree. In quite a few families, one was more likely to get software as a gift than a book.
This move away from the printed word and toward the Information Highway has been going on for some years, but it's particularly troubling to Sven Birkerts. No wonder: A noted literary critic, he has spent most of his life immersed in books. He believes in their possibilities, their potential to inform and entertain and vex and stimulate -- and, most of all, their importance in society.
But, as he observes gloomily in "The Gutenberg Elegies," as books and reading become less important, society suffers. It's not just a question of the printed word and the electronic media existing side by side, he maintains; as in all revolutions (and he certainly believes the technological advances of the past two decades constitute one), when much is gained, much is lost.
This has all been argued before, but Dr. Birkerts makes his points with clarity and fervor. He writes, "I worry not only that the world will become increasingly alien and inhospitable to me, but also that I will be gradually coerced into living against my natural grain, forced to adapt to a pace and a level of technological complexity that does not suit me, and driven to interact with others in certain prescribed ways."
Of course, the very act of writing this book could be considered an exercise in futility. Dr. Birkerts is preaching to the choir, but its members are slowly leaving the pew. It's doubtful, too, that many devotees of the "new media" will abandon their CD-ROMs after reading "The Gutenberg Elegies" -- if they read it at all.
Dr. Birkerts concedes he may seem a hopeless fuddy-duddy, but he insists: "I would urge that we not fall all over ourselves in our haste to filter all of our experience through circuitries. We are in some danger of believing that the speed and wizardry of our gadgets have freed us from the sometimes arduous work of turning pages in silence."
He devotes the first third of the book to an examination of "the reading self." In "The Paper Chase," he charts his own development as a reader.
Dr. Birkerts grew up in a Latvian-American family in Detroit. His father was a no-nonsense type who could not understand how an able-bodied person could lounge around reading in the middle of the day. But read his son did, and he approached books with a passion that one simply could not conjure up by playing Nintendo:
"When Finney died at the end of John Knowles' 'A Separate Peace,' I cried scalding tears, unable to believe that the whole world did not grind to a sorrowful halt. That was then. Books no longer tap my emotions quite so directly; I am rarely brought to tears or fury. But what I have not lost is a churning anxiety, an almost intolerable sensation that sometimes has me drawing breaths to steady myself."
In the second segment, "Into the Electronic Millennium," he looks at the implications of the recent technological innovations. Citing the works of such writers as Marshall McLuhan, Neil Postman and Mark Crispin Miller of Johns Hopkins University, he concludes that three developments are likely in an "all-electronic future": the erosion of language, the flattening of historical perspective and the waning of the private self.
He notes that in a recent college class he taught on the American short story, he introduced his students to Henry James' "Brooksmith." They were reasonably bright students, but simply could not respond to the story. A student told Dr. Birkerts it was "just the whole thing."
"This is not a simple case of students versus Henry James," he concludes. Rather, his class, whose members had been born in the early 1970s, were just not readers -- "that they had difficulty slowing down enough to concentrate on prose of any density."
One doesn't really get any possible solutions in this book -- frustrating for those who appreciate both reading and the
computer's potential. But a question occurs: In all the talk about restoring traditional values, why is there nothing mentioned about the decline of reading? For instance, which is more important to our society -- the return of prayer to schools, or an increase in literacy and book-reading?
"The Gutenberg Elegies" is provocative, well-considered and argued. If at times it's deeply unsettling, let us celebrate that quality -- one that, by the way, you wouldn't find in a computer.
B4
Mr. Warren's reviews appear Mondays in The Sun.
BOOK REVIEW
Title: "The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age"
Author: Sven Birkerts
Publisher: Faber and Faber
Length, price: 229 pages, $22.95