Literature and the WWW

As I’ve remarked “before”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/001332.html, the Washington Post’s Michael Dirda is a prince among fiction reviewers. Dirda has wide-ranging tastes and an altogether infectious delight in the books that he loves (see “here”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/style/columns/dirdamichael/ for a collection of his recent reviews). It’s a pity then that the NEA’s “Reading at Risk” report has “provoked”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A10807-2004Jul24.html him into a fit of the “Birkerts”:http://archives.obs-us.com/obs/english/books/nn/bdbirk.htm.

bq. at least one in six people reads something between bound covers each month, and I suppose we should be grateful for this saving remnant. Yet what the NEA report fails to say is that most of those people have chosen the very same 12 books, starting with “The Da Vinci Code,” followed by a) the latest movie tie-in, and b) whatever Oprah Winfrey has recommended lately …

bq. most of the bestseller list tends to be innately ephemeral — jumped-up magazine articles, journalistic dispatches in disguise, commercial novels that are essentially screenplays-in-waiting, heavy on plot, shock and spectacle. Such works can hardly be called literary reading. They are entertainments, little more than 250-page TV shows and documentaries. …

bq. A true literary work is one that makes us see the world or ourselves in a new way. Most writers accomplish this through an imaginative and original use of language, which is why literature has been defined as writing that needs to be read (at least) twice. Great books tend to feel strange. They leave us uncomfortable.

bq. “Reading at Risk” is right to lament the decline of what I will forthrightly call bookishness. As the report implies, the Internet seems to have delivered a possibly knock-out punch. Our children now can scarcely use a library, instead looking to the Web to learn just about anything. We click away with mouse and remote control, speeding through a blur of links, messages, images, data of all sorts. Is this reading?

Of course, Dirda is at least half right when he talks about the high proportion of trash on the bestseller lists.[1] He’s more than half right when he says that great books feel awkward and uncomfortable at first reading; if they’re not unsettling in some sense, they’re not doing their job. But he really misses the mark when he claims that the Internet is the root cause of the decline of bookishness and of interest in good, difficult books. Indeed, one can defend just the contrary argument: thanks to the Internet, there has never been a better time to find good conversation about books. “John Holbo”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/001705.html has blogged here previously about the explosion of literary blogs, some of which are very good indeed.

These blogs are superior to the old-style review journals like the _Partisan Review_ in a couple of important respects. They’re more idiosyncratic than their printed predecessors, and thus, in a quite important sense, more democratic. Rather than adhering to, or indeed dictating, a universal standard of good taste they allow individuals to speak intelligently to their personal interests.[2] As a result, they’re less pompous and more fun. In “About Last Night”:http://www.terryteachout.com, Terry Teachout and “Our Girl in Chicago” can mix criticism of high art and literature with intelligent discussion of good popular writers like Donald Westlake. This is a hard trick to pull off in conventional media.

Dan Gillmor’s “We, the Media”:http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/wemedia/book/, which I’ve just started reading, argues that blogging is making journalism into something like a conversation. This argument can be extended to literary blogging, which not only provides a partial substitute for the fading specialized review journals and ever-thinner Sunday book supplements of the major newspapers, but in many respects improves upon them. While hypertext is itself no substitute for for the written word (at least until display technologies improve), it’s helping people to create communities of taste (or, more precisely, of argument about taste), to find good books, and to talk about them. Not a bad deal at all.

fn1. Although one should note that Dirda isn’t a book snob – he likes Stephen King and other popular writers, reserving his ire for hacks such as Judith Krantz.

fn2. Which, I suspect, renders them unattractive to critics like Birkerts who would prefer to be arbiters than readers.