B is for Birkerts
To look back to 25 years ago is to revisit a year which was bursting with significant signs of impending change. Apartheid over, the African National Congress won a majority in South Africa’s first multiracial elections, and Nelson Mandel was elected President. That same year Israel signed an Accord with Palestine and a Peace Treaty with Jordan, and later in the year Yasser (Yasir) Arafat, Shimon Peres, and Yitzhak Rabin were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. The IRA and Ulster Protestants declared cease-fires in Northern Ireland. Simultaneously, in Rwanda, at least half a million people were massacred in clashes between Tutsis and Hutus. Serbian artillery commence their attacks on Sarajevo, and the Russians invaded Chechnya.
This was when Bill Clinton’s troubles over sexual harassment first appeared, and OJ Simpson was arrested after a ‘slow chase’ on Los Angeles freeways (found ‘not guilty’ when charged with murder, he was to lose in civil cases). Richard Millhouse Nixon and Jaqueline Kennedy Onassis died, as did Kim Il Sung. Congress, now with a Republican majority, appointed Newt Gingrich Speaker of the House. Tony Abbott was elected to parliament, Andrew Peacock resigned.
1994 was a year of change in other areas of life. Annie Proulx won a Pulitzer for The Shipping News, and Steven Spielberg won an Oscar for Schindler’s List. The major movies of the year included The Shawshank Redemption and Forrest Gump, The Lion King and The Mask, Pulp Fiction and Muriel’s Wedding; on television it was Law and Order, and The X-files. In popular music, Bryan Adams, Rod Stewart and Phil Collins were hanging on, but coming up quickly were Snoop Doggy Dogg, Celine Dion and the Beastie Boys. Geoff Bezos founded Amazon; Netscape Navigator was launched (“what’s a browser”!); Java was released; and The White House launched its first web page, soon to be followed by the first e-commerce websites.
In that same year, I was busy building up a national organisation, and moonlighting, running sessions based on The Aspen Institute’s Executive Seminars. Although the seminar core was reading and debating extracts from key thinkers from the West and the East, (not just the writers read in Aspen sessions), I wanted more. I had a string quartet play one evening, combining the music with commentary from the performers. I also took the group over the Heide Museum of Modern Art, where the Director talked about the collection, and one painting in particular.
The item she chose was by Imants Tillers, usually described as a Latvian, although he was born in Sydney, and lived in NSW; the work was Untitled (Gold Knot). That 1988 work spoke to the changing environment. Half the painting showed a classical scene, but falling apart: inside a room was a temple doorway, a collapsed column, and behind some strange twisted organic shapes, hands or gnarled tree trunks. In the style of de Chirico, it spoke to a disintegration of things now long past. On the other side, a checkerboard of timber tiles, all out of sequence, and including three strange golden oval objects, randomly placed among the tiles; I read it as an image of postmodernism. A painting depicting a disappearing past, and a confusing present.
Always searching for a deeper understanding of the world around me, it was in the same year I came across Sven Birkerts, an American literary critic, and another person of Latvian ancestry! Like Imants Tillers, he was looking back to what he saw disappearing, and forward to a worrying future. He had just published The Gutenberg Elegies, a lament based on his fear of a decline of reading as a result of the emerging digital world. [i] It sounded like an ideal reference for my week-long seminar. He had me, as they say, by page 30, when he announced we were on the brink of a fundamental change in terms of what it meant to be human.
He had three reasons for his concerns. First, that he believed that “what distinguishes us as a species is not our technological prowess, but rather our extraordinary ability to confer meaning on our experience and to search for clues about our purpose”. Second that “language is the soil, the seedbed, of meaning”, and that literature is how we preserve our thoughts and ideas. Finally, it is through reading that we experience meaning, in all its dimensions. [ii] For Birkerts, reading is the key: “when we enter a novel, no matter what novel, we step into the whole world anew”. Articulating the way I like to think about it, he saw reading as a ‘collusion’ between reader and the author; we readers engage with the text and “work with the writer to build our own book.” [iii]
Re-reading Birkerts twenty-five years later, at first I was reminded how immersion in fiction does take you to another place, another world, and, in the process, allows you to think about what we say and do, what words mean. [iv] So very different from the academic analysis of texts, his book reminded me of my love of Wittgenstein and the view that words mean what we agree to make them mean, that they are secondary to our understanding before it can be put into words. In analysing, Wittgenstein warned us “We acted as though we had tried to find the real artichoke by stripping it of its leaves.” [v] Birkerts also saw reading as a process, exploring meaning that comes from engaging with and immersing in another’s world, with the whole artichoke.
Birkerts’ concern wasn’t in what reading does for the reader so much as what he feared would be the impact of the emerging electronic future. Prescient, he listed some ‘melancholy thoughts’ as he described them. First, he imagined the immediacy of electronic communications would affect language, replacing the rich and complex expressions of written language by “a more telegraphic form of ‘plainspeak’”. And this was before texting and the ‘gr8 lif u n IK now, AMR? LOL!’ Second, he saw there would be a ‘flattening’ of our historical perspective, with everything being ‘present’, and our ability to discriminate reduced. His concerns ended with the thought “Andy of Mayberry’ – at first enjoyed with recognition [is] later accepted as a faithful portrait how things used to be”! Go to Mt Airy today, and, yes, it has become Mayberry made real.
The last of his concerns was a ‘waning of private life’, that the solitary self would disappear in an environment where computers, telephones, answering machines (!!) and other devices would find each person constantly in contact with others. He foresaw this before smartphones, Twitter, instant messaging, Instagram and all the other ways in which we are always online, always connected. [vi] Six years later, William Powers was to argue that we should learn from the past, and make sure we switched off for some of the time, perhaps having a digital free Sunday: Hamlet’s Blackberry reads as an example of a quaint, though often repeated, plea for an almost impossible change in the way in which most people live today. [vii] Birkerts was right to be worried.
Birkerts examined his three underlying reasons for concern. If what makes us distinctive is our ability to confer meaning, that language is the source and means of conveying meaning, it’s through reading we experience meaning. In the face of electronic media, he feared we would lose contact with the natural world, and was certain we were already witnessing the death of literature, the collection of great works he considered defined our accumulated wisdom about ourselves and our world. When he wrote, those books were the Western canon; today, we might be more catholic, including great literature in other languages, from other cultures and traditions. Nonetheless, his concern was about the loss of literature, and his view stands without having to specify exactly what is to be included. Imants Tiller’s painting captured the same concern: on one side, the decline, the disintegration of the classical past, and on the other life a meaningless jumble of tiles, each disconnected from others, with no possible pattern to bring them together.
Twenty-five years later is a good time to re-examine his fears. Certainly, everyday language has been largely simplified, and texting is a clear example of plainspeak. Fewer young people are reading books; many appear to prefer the film or television series, which offer another kind of flattening. Courses on the Western canon have been largely pushed aside, representing the views of one narrow group. Why privilege and impose only those oppressive Dead White European Males? Does present behaviour suggest we should agree with Birkerts melancholy thoughts?
In his analysis, Birkerts looked at the long sweep of history, beginning with the emergence of writing. We now know that the first written records date back to 3,000 BC, if not earlier. To begin with, the information was largely economic, clay tablets inscribed with details of quantities of produce, loans and debts. Writing for other purposes appeared later in the “Fertile Crescent’, most famously with Hammurabi’s code of laws. Soon, in Egypt, hieroglyphics were used to mark events, as well as recording the work of a massive bureaucracy. The same was true in China. There is no clear evidence to date when writing was first used for stories. The epic of Gilgamesh appears to go back to 2,000 BC, but the first written version, on clay tablets, was only discovered in the 19th Century AD, and dates from around 700 BC.
In one sense, written stories were unimportant, as for thousands of years it was the oral tradition that kept origin stories and myths alive. They exist in every society we know, and must have done for as long as people were able to converse. This is also true of ‘heroic’ tales like Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey. While there are still debates about timing, it appears likely Homer pulled together earlier material to tell these two adventures at some time in the 8th Century BC. However, no written version has been found before the 3rd Century when fiction on papyrus, or later on parchment, began to appear in collections like the famous library in Alexandria.
More important, as Birkerts saw it, was the development of printing in the middle of the 15th Century (the technology was already established in China at much earlier date, some 600 years before Gutenberg). It was this that made written material more readily available, moving quickly from religious texts through to fiction, starting with ‘literature’ and continuing on to far less edifying materials! I’m sure we’d agree with Birkerts, this changed the world in many ways. However, from his perspective, it allowed an individual to read a book, and to do so alone, carving out a place in time where the reader was free to engage with a writer, occupying another world. As his book title suggests, it is this that he saw under threat from electronic media.
Before we look at recent times, it is worth reflecting on what happened with the emergence of the printed word. By the 15th Century, handwritten stories had been around for a long time, and a privileged few had access to copies. However, most people would still be listening to a story teller’s well-established tales. The oral tradition was flexible, the ‘teller of tales’ recognised if he or she could bring adventures to life, changing characters, and locales. Printing largely stopped that: the story became frozen, especially early on when the opportunity to bring out a new version was limited by the cost involved. There were several ‘printings’ but no new editions.
A Sven Birkerts writing then would have had melancholy thoughts, but they would have been rather different. He would have been alarmed at the loss of creativity, with a great epic now stuck in the form the printer had created. He would have been concerned at the loss of community, forcing families and friends apart as they went off to read by themselves, rather than sitting together to enjoy a storytelling session. Finally, he would have been gloomy about the impact on how we saw the world: people would now draw their own, individual conclusions from the stories they read, no longer sharing reactions, questions and ideas. Back then he would have been alarmed at the fragmentation of what had been a common culture.
This is almost a duplication of his concerns in 1994. The printed word would lead to the impoverishment of language as each version became canonical, just as now electronic media would simplify language! Second, there would be a loss of history, no interjections to remind listeners to what had been said at other times the epic was told, just as now, everything would become immediately present. And finally, then and now, the balance between community and the individual would change, although in this case, a change in the opposite direction.
If he had written back in 1494, we would be able to see he would have been largely wrong in putting forward his concerns. Language grew, and elaborated; literature was far from ossified, flourishing and growing with a larger audience. The very act of printing would actually provide a rich ongoing history, with the ability to look back over themes, events and, later, even different versions of a story. As for the relationship between the individual and the community, it remained as complicated over the next five hundred years as it had been before, at least until the industrial revolution completely changed our ways of living and working.
1n 1994, just 25 years ago, Birkerts was worried about the decline in literature in the face of the digital world, and already we can see he was largely mistaken. Some of the words in the English language have declined in use or disappeared, but they have been replaced by many, many more. Language is as vital, rich and constantly changing as it has ever been, possibly more so. At the same time, what we read has continued to change, with innovation driving writers and entrancing readers. Whole areas of literature have exploded, especially fantasy, science fiction, manga and experimental post-postmodern novels. As for the individual, it seems we are even more privately engaged in our personal digital world through smartphones, computers and e-readers. It’s not all good (it never is), but thousands of writers are producing work, in many cases just for their own small audience (like a blog?). Indeed digital technologies are taking us back to an engagement with fiction that is rather like the case in the world before printing, with online communities now constituting the group entranced by a storyteller. Less reading the old classics? Probably. New classics to replace them? Possibly. A variety of new stories to draw in new readers? Certainly.
[i] Sven Birkerts, The Gutenberg Elegies: the fate of reading in an electronic age, Faber and Faber, 1994
[ii] Ibid, pages 31-32
[iii] Ibid, pages 81, 83. Also see Why the Novel Matters, Eimear McBride, New Statesman, Books, 16 October 2019
[iv] As I explored in my earlier blog on ‘A is for Authentic’
[v] Clive James, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Slate, 12 April 2007
[vi] Op cit, page 128-130
[vii] William Powers, Hamlet’s Blackberry, Harper Collins, 2010. His theme is often taken up, but we stay online!
