Final Fridays (2 page)

But one's calling is invention, not confession, and the subject in hand is neither Yesterday nor the Day Before, but Tomorrow, as seen from the presumable vantage-point of a fairly high-mileage Today.

Tomorrow and tomorrow: On average and on paper, one has more of those in prospect these days than folks did formerly. At age 67, Yours Truly is on the one hand 95 percent through the “biblical” threescore-and-ten, while only 56 percent through the 120-year span alloted us mortals in Genesis 6:3 and reneged on ever since, but latterly affirmed by some gerontologists to be the inherent design-life of
Homo sapiens sapiens
. More probably—after jiggering my American generation's actuarial averages upward for my skin color, downward for my gender, and upward thrice again for (knock on wood) my rude good health, the longevity of my parents, and a blessed remarriage—I can with luck anticipate perhaps 20 more years of breathing air, with most of my faculties more or less though ever less and less intact through much of that period, and always allowing for the circumstance that the world might end (one's own world, anyhow) before this sentence does, or the one to follow.

20 years more: That many? That few? One feels a proper twinge of that
echt
-20th-century emotion, Survivor's Guilt: Donald Barthelme, Italo Calvino, Raymond Carver—splendid writers cut off in the full fruition of their gifts at a younger age than one's present, their voices stilled for keeps while one's own yarns on. One recalls John Keats's famous fears (well justified, in the event) that he might cease to be before his pen had gleaned his teeming brain; likewise the writerly counterfears (let's not name names) that one might go
on being and being and being
after
one's pen, et cetera, silenced not by death or devastation but by mere bare-cupboardhood. One takes courage from the exemplary counter-instances, e.g., of Arthur Miller, just past 80 and evidently going strong
²
; of even-older-at-the-time Thomas Mann, bringing off as his final novel the high-spirited elaboration of his early short story
Felix Krull
—a stunt about which I could write a whole praising page but won't, here; of even-older-yet Sophocles, closing out at age 90 his Theban trilogy with the magnificent
Oedipus at Colonus
.

And having thus twinged, thus recalled, and thus taken courage, one draws yet another deep bonus breath—refills one's trusty fountain pen, boots up one's trusty word processor, whatever—and like the afore-invoked Scheherazade (perhaps for not-dissimilar reasons) deftly segues into the one about . . .

Et cetera.

When this essay was first-drafted back in 1994 (too late for inclusion in the
Further Fridays
collection), subsequently delivered at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, D.C., as part of their lecture series “Novelists on Literature,” and first published in the
Wilson Quarterly
,
¹
; “electronic literature”—fiction to be read and in many cases interacted with on a computer—was still a novelty. 15 years later, as I pen this head-note, it remains, if no longer a novelty, still an oddity, enjoyed by a comparitively small audience. My interest in it back then was mainly dutiful: a checking out of the edges of my medium's envelope for my fiction-writing coachees' benefit and my possible own: I even agreed to be listed on the advisory board of the newly-formed Electronic Literature Organization (ELO), just to stay abreast of things. Some of its members' productions I've found impressive, literarily as well as technically. I remain, however, a book-person, for whom the computer is a workshop-tool: useful indeed for revising, editing, and printing out my fountain-penned first drafts, for sending and receiving e-mail, and occasionally for Googling some item on the Web (my wife, the house WebMeister, uses its vast resources for everything from trip-planning to recipe-checking), but not a source of sedentary entertainment or aesthetic engagement. For those, in our leisure hours, we turn to music (mostly on CDs, although I still enjoy playing Renaissance and Baroque recorder-duets
now that my jazz-drumming decades are behind me), to a nightcap hour of television (mostly movies on DVD rather than network or cable shows)—and above all to the printed, usually book-bound, page, long may it endure: not “virtual reality,” but deliciously virtual virtuality (see below).

 

 

T
HE ART WHOSE state I mean to review here is that of the novel in particular; the art more generally of printed fiction, especially in the USA; and the art most generally of fictional narrative in whatever medium—again, especially in this country, where certain aspects of the scene are changing more rapidly, for better or worse, than they seem to me to be changing elsewhere.

By way of beginning, I submit the following gleanings from my recent and by no means systematic reading on the subject. Readers unfamiliar with some of the names I'm about to drop should not feel particularly left out; I'm unfamiliar with many of them too, and once I've dropped them, I intend to drop them.

“We are [in] . . . the late age of print,” declares the hypertex-tualist Michael Joyce in the
American Book Review
, “a transitional time when the book as we know it gives way to writing the mind in lightforms.” (By “lightforms” Mr. Joyce means reading and writing on computer screens; more on “hypertext” presently.)

A writer named Mark Amerika (too good to be true), again in the
American Book Review
, declares, “The zine scene is alive and well.... Offhand, I can think of a dozen zines that are doing wonderful stuff:
Further State(s) of the Art
,
Puck
,
Sensitive Skin
,
Red Tape
,
Taproot Reviews
,
Dissonance
,
Boing Boing
,
Frighten the Horses
,
Central Park
,
Nobodaddies
,
Science Fiction Eye
,
MAXIMUMROCKNROLL
, just
to name the first dozen that come to my mind.” (Those are not the first dozen that come to
my
mind, but let that go.) And one Mr. Lance Olsen, likewise in the
ABR
, in an essay entitled “Death-metal Technomutant Morphing,” declares, “Me, I'm going down reading Mark Leyner and Jean Baudrillard simultaneously, a copy of
Wired
in my lap, hypertext by Carolyn Guyer on the computer screen, television turned to MTV, windows wide open, ... my fire-retardant corrosion-resistant nickel-base alloy robo-enhanced methyl isocyanate flamethrower exploding, while I listen to Sonic Youth's
Dirty
turned up real, REAL loud.”

I confess to being addicted to such catalogues of Where It's At: catalogues with which the
American Book Review
particularly abounds. Here is another from the same lively source, by one Martin Sheter, in an essay called “Writing As Incorrectness”:

Perhaps he has; but the aforecited essay by Mr. Mark Amerika goes far to fill in any gaps in Mr. Sheter's checklist of the contemporary Action. I quote again from Mr. Amerika:

And on and on and on: avant-pop, splatterpunk, cybersex—you name it, if you can, or make it up if you can't. Indeed, it's tempting to imagine that the pugnacious contributors to the
ABR
invent these wonderful catalogues as they go along; but I am assured by my more with-it informants—if scarcely reassured—that the items, however ephemeral, are for real.

If among the intentions of such in-your-face lists is to make us dinosaurs from “the late age of print” feel our dinosaurity, then they quite succeed. I confess to being out of the loop of contemporary American letters in their most aggressively avant-pop aspect. I cannot sing along with the “voluminous melange of hardcore industrial grunge post-everythings”; I cannot line-dance with the cybersexual splatterpunk avant-poppers. And while I do not revel in my end-of-the-century troglodytehood, I'm inclined to shrug my shoulders at it. I scan the
American Book Review
with considerable interest and amusement, likewise some of those “wigged-out zines” when my former students publish in them and kindly send me copies; I maintain a benevolent curiosity about hypertext (of which more presently) out of my long-standing interest in the nonlinear aspects of life
and of literature. But the American perodicals that I actually subscribe to and thoroughly
read
are the
New York Review of Books
,
Harper's
, the
Sciences
(the journal
²
of the New York Academy of Sciences, which my wife and I enjoy as much for its art as for its articles), and
Scientific American
—the latter two partly as a source of fictive metaphors. Also
Sail
magazine, but never mind that, and
Modern Maturity
, the journal of the American Association of Retired Persons, which subscribes to me more than I to it; I look through it, but I don't inhale. The current American fiction that I most relished while preparing these remarks happens to have been John Updike's latest collection of short stories,
The Afterlife
, and William H. Gass's monumental novel
The Tunnel
—two comparably masterful though radically different works of literary art from “the late age of print.” They make me pleased to have lived before the transition from “the book as we know it” to the “writing [of] the mind in lightforms” is complete.

Let me say at once, however, that I do not doubt the reality of that transition. Granted that a few writers still compose on the typewriter, even on
manual
typewriters: Saul Bellow says that he uses two, one for fiction and the other for nonfiction; my Johns Hopkins colleague Stephen Dixon worries that his prolific fiction-writing career will crash when he can no longer find anybody to service his brace of Hermes manual portables, or to supply ribbons for them. A very few of us, believe it or not, still prefer to draw out our first-draft sentences the even older-fashioned way, with fountain pen on paper.
³
Despite these exceptions, however, most of my comrades in arms and all of my recent students compose their fiction on word processors, and of the few of us who don't, most (myself included) depend absolutely on our computers for editing and revision, whether
we do that on hard-copy print-outs or directly onscreen.
⁴
Our publishers now routinely expect the finished product on disk or e-mail attachment as well as on paper, and the hottest, thorniest issue these days in the
Authors Guild Bulletin
(another “zine” that subscribes to me) is the protection of its members' electronic rights in our book and magazine contracts, as more and more of our originally printed publication goes online one way or another down the road, and our control of copyright tends to evaporate in cyberspace. Although I might disagree with Mr. Michael Joyce about the implications of his proposition, I quite concur with the proposition itself: that we are indeed in “the late age of print,” not only as a means of producing and publishing literature, but, importantly, as a means of
reading
it. One New York playwright recently described all of us authors-for-print as “roadkill on the information superhighway.” He may be right.

To afford some perspective on this “transitional time,” I want to back up a bit now: first just a few years back, then a few decades back, if not farther yet, always keeping a navigator's eye on where we are and where we seem to be going, literature-wise, as we briefly retrace where we've been (this is the
Sail
magazine approach to navigating the State of the Art).

 

A MERE 15 years ago, in 1981, we received at the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars our very first word-processored manuscript in an application to our graduate program in fiction-writing. Although the piece itself was unremarkable, I was impressed by its virtually published look; it was, in fact, an early specimen of “desktop publishing.” Remembering how instructively chastened I myself had been in the early 1950s to see my own apprentice efforts first set in official, impersonal print in a student magazine—which seemed
to me to make strikingly manifest both their small strengths and their large shortcomings—I imagined that this newfangled mode of manuscript-production might afford our apprentice writers some measure of the critical detachment that print confers. The farther their words were removed from longhand, I reasoned, and even from homely old-fashioned typescript, the more objectively the apprentice authors would be able to assess them.

And so I showed the handsome specimen to our visiting fiction coach that year (Leonard Michaels) and expressed my pedagogical sentiments: wave of the future, et cetera. Michaels took one suspicious look at the justified right-hand margins, the crisp print, and handsome typefaces, and said, “This is terrible! They're going to think the stuff is finished, and it only
looks
that way!”