I finished reading The Gutenberg Elegies by Sven Birkerts the other day. I thought there were only two sections of the book but there turned out to be three. The final section, “Critical Mass: Three Meditations” proved quite interesting.
Birkerts does an analysis of Lionel Trilling’s book from the 50s, The Liberal Imagination and uses it to prove, or attempt to prove, that Trilling is a) a genius and b) there was a literary golden age that was already coming to an end in the 50s but could have been avoided if we had only listened to Trilling. If Trilling saw things on the verge on decline, Birkerts believes we have fallen very far over that cliff. Somehow we have managed to break our fall in a bramble bush on a narrow ledge from which Birkerts peers out into the great abyss and says that he can see a time when “the idea of the literary intellectual threatens to become altogether implausible.” Infuriatingly and tellingly, Birkerts laments the end of not only literary culture but of proper criticism. I may have read him wrong, but it seems to me his idea of the role of the critic is to tell people what to think about literature and nobody is listening anymore, but no one is talking either:
The great critics have mostly died; the former venues have either shrunk, disappeared, or become commercial. In the cultural spot where Trilling and others stood and jousted, there is a great and distressing silence. The fathers and mothers are no longer there to tell us what to think. Listening to the pundits on TV or reading them in the editorial pages is not the same. Whether criticism died of one of the novel’s terminal illnesses is uncertain.
He goes on to say that what likely happened was that criticism “failed to address the crisis of reading–the overthrow of the authority of the book and writer–and died of irrelevance.” Perhaps in the hallowed halls of academe, readers know about Roland Barthes’ death of the author, but I’d hazard to say for the average reader, both intellectual and pop cultural, the author still has authority. And even if the average reader thinks the author dead, I’m not quite clear on how that killed literature and as a result, criticism. Maybe what readers want is a different kind of criticism, not someone telling them what to think of a book, but instead someone who can offer a close reading, context, background, suggestions for what the author might be up to without the presumption of knowing. That’s the kind of criticism I like anyway.
Birkerts also does an analysis of Alvin Kernan’s Death of Literature which sounds like it actually might be an interesting book to read. Kernan postualtes, and Birkerts agrees, that romanticism has been squashed by the utilitarian. The power and force of literature is diminished because people feel books lack relevance. There is also the problem of living in a busy, overstimulating world and being unable to slow down:
Who among us can generate regularly the stillness and concentration and will to read Henry James, or Joseph Conrad, or James Joyce, or Virginia Woolf as they were meant to be read? And which one of us, when able to do so, does not feel immured in a privacy that has nothing to do with the real business of the world?
I want to say, Sven, dude, stop projecting, just because you seem to be having problems with your own reading doesn’t mean the rest of us are. I have read and and will continue to read those writers. Nor do I feel like they have nothing to do with the real world. They have everything to do with the real world and how I see it and understand it.
One of the things that worries Birkerts most about our tendency to unquestioningly accept technology is all the constant connectedness. He fears for the end of the individual, solitary and thinking with book in hand. He worries we will become hive-like in everything we do which made me think of the Borg on Star Trek Next Generation. Birkerts doesn’t suggest anything as extreme as the Borg, but he fears, perhaps, that we will become not so much like bees or termites, but more like lemmings; as one goes so go the rest.
All in all, The Gutenberg Elegies is a thoughtful, well written book. I don’t agree with everything he says but I appreciate that he asks the questions not only about books and technology but also about humans and technology. Our relationship to technology is something more and more people are beginning to question so I give Birkerts credit for being ahead of the times (the book was published in 1994). On NPR’s Future Tense Jon Gordon has talked to the authors of a couple of new books, Andrew Keen about The Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet is Killing Our Culture, and Steve Talbott about Devices of the Soul: Battling for Our Selves in an Age of Machines. But then there is the optimistic view of technology as expressed in Rachel Donadio’s NY Times Book Review essay, Get With the Program, which I am sure if Birkerts read it he’d say it was an example of everything that was wrong with literature. A lot of people frame the issue as “book wars” but clearly it is much bigger than that. Books are only a small part of the cultural changes that technology is bringing about. So it’s really “tech wars” but I don’t like that framing either because it means winners and losers and I honestly think there is a balance that can be found. Whether or not we can attain that balance remains to be seen.
I can not share the sort of pessimism that he seems to project. There are probably more excellent writers writing today than there every have been before in history.
Yes, there are many (perhaps the majority) who choose not to read. But, in the past there have been even more who didn’t have the choice because they didn’t get the opportunity to go to school. Fine literature has always been produced and read by a small proportion of the population.
Check the statistics on how many new books are published every year. Someone must be reading them. I can’t see how it could be worse than in the past.
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If that’s the kind of literary critic that Birketts values then I am glad that his demise is imminent. Times change, books are infinitely flexible, and readers continue to be passionate.
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I mentioned before on your earlier post that I’d like to read this book, and I still do. Even if I sense that his conclusions regarding the shifts in literary criticism are far too drastic (and negative) for me, I am glad he is asking the questions. If anything, he was/is starting a debate that sounds quite useful for our understanding of reading culture.
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I’m very suspicious of any talk of a “golden age.” “Golden ages” are myths! It seems to me that there ARE people reading and writing good criticism, and if the larger culture isn’t paying a whole lot of attention, I don’t think the larger culture has ever paid a whole lot of attention. That’s not to say he doesn’t have some good points, but I doubt some of the more extreme claims he makes.
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Interesting! It’s really fasincating, how we view technology: Seems it’s the great savior or the great villain, depending on who you talk to.
What that says to me is that literature in particular is in a sort of transition period–I predict “the novel” is going to undergo some transformation (most likely in its form), surrounding this question of technological influence.
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Rod, I’m right there with you, nodding my head in agreement.
Litlove, you are right, times do change and just as literature evolves, so too much the criticism of it.
Verbivore, in spite of his negativity I enjoyed the book and am glad he asked the questions he did.
Dorothy, those happy golden ages, I share you skepticism. Ask the people living in the supposed golden age about things and they’d probably look at you like you had two heads.
LK, I think you are right that literature is in a transition period. We have a choice of looking at the exciting possibilites or saying nothing could be as good as what has already been written. I like to think about the possibilities.
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I enjoy reading the great literary critics, like Edmund Wilson (I’m also reading two current bios of him by Dabney and Meyer). I don’t feel he’s telling me what to think. I haven’t finished the Gutenberg Elegies but I find in it a lot I agree with…
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BJ, I find, too, that the great literary critics don’t tell a reader what to think but open up the text for the reader to find all kinds of interesting things in it. So I found Birkerts’ thoughts on this a little odd. I’d be interested to know what your conclusions on the book are.
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