Final Fridays (20 page)

I half-suspect that to be the case; but an abiding sense of malaise'round about our subject resists dispelling. What will the effect on
print-lit be of
hypertext
, for example, whose evangels have called it “the third great advance in the technology of writing, after the alphabet and the printing press,” but whose nature precludes the fixative of print? And how about
e-fiction
, those ingenious interactive hypertextual computer-novels that effectively redefine the job-descriptions of Author and Reader? This is the medium that prompted Robert Coover's landmark 1993 essay “The End of Books?” in the
New York Times Book Review
, which prompted in turn a little essay of mine called “The State of the Art”—to which I refer any who thirst for my extended take on the subject of e-fiction. For now let's merely ask, “Aren't e-novels the
coup de grace
for the old-fashioned p-variety? Don't Hypertext & Co. render all print-lit more or less obsolete—The End Of The Word As We've Known It?”

After much and deep consideration, I reply: Nah. It's a fascinating medium indeed, is hypertext; and electronic fiction is an intriguing genre for sure. Just a few years ago, when one couldn't take for granted that everybody in the room understood what
hypertext
is, I used to illustrate it by asking my auditors to imagine on their computer-screens the innocent old test-proposition
The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog
, its key elements “loaded” in such a way that

End of quote from that aforementioned “State of the Art” essay. A recent communication from my aforementioned fellow print-novelist Robert Coover informs me that one of the “writers,” if that's the correct term, in his Electronic Fiction seminar at Brown University has in fact taken that Quick Brown Fox of mine and run with it: An electronic multimedia
QBF
is now several years into its elaborate gestation, Coover reports, and not finished yet. Stay tuned.

But aside from a general curiosity about all Edges of the Envelope of the art I practice, my own interest in the medium of e-fiction is mainly metaphorical. Hypertext, like the World Wide Web itself, reminds us of the real interconnectedness of things, and the many-layeredness of our experience of life: It reminds us that to “click,” figuratively speaking, on anything we pause to consider—the waterglass on this lectern, the pattern of that fellow's necktie, the earrings that his companion chose to wear this evening—is to open stories within stories, “hot-linked” to further stories, et cetera literally ad infinitum: what I've called elsewhere the Hypertextuality of Everyday Life. I like that sense of narrative depth, that vertiginous dimension of nonlinearity; so too, I believe, would my muse like it, the all-but-inexhaustible Ms. Scheherazade. And so, in the same way that those earlier digressions of mine on Calypso and the hills of Úbeda could be said to have been an awkward linear approximation of hypertext, I have sportingly included in a forthcoming novel [
Coming Soon!!!
] some
faux
-electronic menus and option-buttons, for example, the
way my Modernist forebears incorporated
faux
-newspaper headlines and such into their novels.
³

 

HOWEVER (AS I'VE remarked elsewhere), while much of our life-experience is inarguably of a non-linear character—all our senses operating at once—it happens that on the other hand much of our experience is decidedly linear:
this
apparently leading to
this,
evidently followed by
that
. It is an aspect of our living ineluctably in linear time, which is the basis of all narrative no matter how we might diddle its linearity for effect. 2000 years ago the Roman poet Horace
⁴
was already recommending, in his Epistle on the Art of Poetry, that storytellers would do well to hit the ground running by starting their stories
in medias res
, “in the middle of things” rather than way back at Square One. But even when we heed that sage advice, as more often than not most storytellers do, we still necessarily proceed sequentially from unit to unit of action, event to event in time, as language proceeds linearly word by word and our lives proceed linearly from birth to death. For rendering or at least suggesting
simultaneity
, film is unquestionably a better medium than either printed or pixelated language: Onscreen, several people can talk at the same time, as they often do in life but can't on the page; what's more, they can do so as we see their car moving through city streets, with attendant urban sights and sounds and a musical score to enhance the effect. But even the camera can “narrate” only one scene at a time (split-screen or multiple-screen effects can
show
simultaneously occurring though spatially separated segments of action, but our minds can't simultaneously follow them unless they're radically simplified and abbreviated). In film-narrative as well as print-narrative, it's usually “Meanwhile, back at the ranch . . .”—and in print we have to
read, one word at a time,
While Myrtle fiddled with the fancy new microwave and tried once more to tell Fred about that afternoon's scary phone call, her loser of a husband unfridged and deflowered yet another St. Pauli Girl beer, wondering dully which lie he would tell his wife
this
time....

I could deliver a whole separate talk on what's being done in that rudimentary narrative sentence that can't be done as readily if at all with a camera: the interpretations (“fiddled,” “fancy,” “loser,” “scary”), the expository information (“
new
microwave,” “tried
once more
,” “her
husband
,” “
yet another
beer,” “tell his wife
this
time”), the voltaged metaphor (his “deflowering” a “St. Pauli Girl”), the transcription of interiority (“wondering dully which lie,” et cetera)—but never mind. My point is the unexceptionable one that various narrative/dramatic media have their various virtues and limitations. Just as you can do things on-page that you can't on-screen and vice-versa (and I haven't even mentioned such great paginary virtues as proceeding at one's own pace, lingering over choice or difficult bits, thumbing back or even forward, making marginalia if the book is your own, marking passages for later reference or for sharing with a pal), so too the printed fictive page, for all its sensory limitations and its inability to let you wander the interactive hills of Úbeda, has virtues that hypertexted, interactive, even multimedial e-fiction lacks. Among them, for the present at least, is relative portability, convenience, and user-comfort. But even when, as is rapidly coming to pass, new technologies permit us to recline in our recliners with hypertexted pages almost as comfortable in the hand as a well-printed book and no harder on the eyes, the latter will still have things going for it that the former, by its very nature, will not. Allow me, please, a final self-quotation:
⁵

Those virtues, I believe, are sufficient to keep hypertext, e-fiction, and other electronic wonders from being The End Of The Word As We've Known It, even before we play our ace: print's marvelous low-technicity. Back in the late evening of the past century, the
New York Times Magazine
's final wrap-up-the-millennium issue (in December
1999) featured a panel of experts discussing the best medium for storing information in a “Times capsule,” to be opened a thousand years hence. After considering a very wide array of high-tech possibilities, they decided that nothing in the nature of Zip disks and CD-ROMs would do, because the hardware required to run the software for accessing the “content” evolves so very rapidly, and the disks themselves have nothing like so long-term a shelf life. For the very long haul, they agreed, nothing beats plain old high-quality ink on plain old high-quality paper.

That sounds encouraging to us POB's—“print-oriented bastards,” as followers of the late Marshall MacLuhan used to call us even back in the pre-computerized 1960s. But before we break out the champagne and raise a toast to the Health of the Novel-in-Print, we need to remind ourselves that the persistence of our medium for long-term infostorage and other special applications does not in itself mean the persistence of a substantial audience for a particular art-form. Granted that what Joyce Carol Oates has called “pop apocalypses” usually turn out to be false alarms: Thomas Edison's confidence, for example, that the invention of motion pictures would soon make textbooks obsolete in our schools; the publisher Henry Holt's concern that the development of the bicycle might spell the end of reading books for pleasure. Granted too that one must guard against conflating one's personal advanced age with the Decline of the West or the senescence of print-lit. All the same, it doesn't seem at all unimaginable to me that reading novels may continue to become an ever more specialized pleasure for an ever-smaller “niche” audience, like (alas) the audience for short stories and for poetry: literary support-groups, really, akin to those for the clinically addicted and the terminally ill.

Should we care?

Yes and no. There are certainly graver concerns on the thoughtful citizen's agenda than the Death of the Novel: the death of the planet, for starters. Art-forms rise and decline in popularity with artists as well as with audiences, without thereby going extinct: New symphonies and operas are still composed, though not in 19th-century abundance, and the classical repertoire has a faithful following. Should something analogous become the case with novels for print—if books themselves should become, as one commentator recently put it, “the vermiform appendix of the communications system”
⁶
—civilization won't be the
better
for it, but it won't be the end of the word, much less the end of the world. There's more great stuff to read out there already than most of us can get to in a lifetime; and as for new novels, written by our contemporaries and speaking to the here and now, well: Unlike the rhinoceros and the pygmy owl or even the osprey and the eagle, the novel has from its beginnings been as elastic a critter as the octopus and as adaptable as the crow, the coyote, and the raccoon, able not only to survive but even to flourish in radically transformed environments. It cheers me that the population of Virginia white-tail deer where I come from is estimated to be larger nowadays than it was in the time of Powhatan and Pocahontas, when The Novel As We Know It was just being invented on the other side of the Atlantic. Those deer have become a downright nuisance: “rats with hooves,” the environmentalist Tom Horton has called them. The emergence of e-fiction and of electronic publishing are instances of that kind of adaptability on the novel's part, and while I have no compelling interest in those phenomena myself, I take their appearance as a healthy development and do not doubt that there will be others, on and off the printed page.

The king is dead? Long live the king!

And the novel?
Encore! Encore!

The popular Key West Literary Seminars, held each January at the southern tip of the USA, offer workshops for aspiring writers and guest appearances by more established ones. In 2001, the Seminar's theme (which changes annually) was “The Spirit of Place.” That year's writer-speakers included, among others, Merrill Joan Gerber, Peter Matthiesson, Annie Proulx, Susan Richards Shreve, Lee Smith, and myself; we participated in a spirited symposium on “The Loss of Place in Fiction: The Homogenization of American Life,” and then each of us delivered a talk on some particular aspect of the general subject. What follows are, in order, my symposium-statement and my presentation on the place of “place” in fiction.

 

 

I
T MAY BE worth noting that the title of this symposium comprises two separate or at least separable topics: the first general, the second more specific, and both interesting. I'll make a few remarks first about the general subject of a writer's being cut off for whatever reason from a geographical/cultural place that had been important to his/her creative imagination, and then about the specific loss of place-identity to what we're calling “the homogenization of American life.” Both, I'm going to argue, are non-problems—at least in themselves.