The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age [Paperback]

I was led to this book by booksellers of the "Wooden Spoon" type, i.e., proprietors of used-book stores who stubbornly insist on old-fashioned, or possibly historic, standards of both literature and salesmanship. (The Wooden Spoon remains a haven. I'm sure this would please the author.)

Those sympathetic to Birkerts (and who cannot feel at least some affinity for him and the world he is mourning?) will recognize the type of bookman he describes, a type to which he himself belongs: friendly, perhaps a bit curmudgeonly, and always willing to talk with a serious reader.

One aspect of reading which is mentioned but not explicitly discussed is the degree of human interaction which reading engenders. Contrary to the notion of the reclusive bookworm, most serious readers have a gregarious streak that shows itself in "deep" conversation. The loss of the ability to read deeply suggests a concurrent loss of the ability to interact deeply with other people. The very nature of his writing, and the responses herein, suggest a reason for hope. He cannot, after all, be alone in seeking a "deep" connection.

It is comforting to know that bastions of literature yet remain, in some few bookshops and in the minds of writers like Sven Birkerts.

Sven Birkerts doesn't approve of what you're doing
right now. Reading (or writing) an on-line review of his
recent book, _The Gutenberg Elegies_, is like discussing
an exercise program over hot fudge sundaes: we are
participating in the burgeoning electronic culture that
Birkerts urges his readers to resist. He recommends we
turn off the computer, stop our superficial surfing
through web sites and TV channels, curl up somewhere with
a good book, and -- here's the hard part -- actually read
the thing.

Birkerts argues that reading books has become
difficult for us, precisely because of our saturation
with electronic communications media. Television began
the destruction of reading; the computer and its
electronic attendants have arrived to finish the job.
As Birkerts' argues compellingly, the decline of the
printed word means the tranformation fo the reading
experience, which involves the deep and deliberately slow
processes of imaginative thought. Such experience is
undone by our desire for increasingly rapid movement
across large arrays of text and images -- a desire both
inflamed and fulfilled by evolving systems of electronic
communication.

In _The Gutenberg Elegies_, Birkerts claims his place
in a long and noble line of embattled humanists who have
refused the seductions of the technological. According
to Plato, the Egyptian god who introduced writing as a
new technology praised its usefulness as an aid to memory
and wisdom. The king of Egypt, however, took a different
view. He saw the destructive potential of this new form
of communication, which would eradicate the need for
memory and the more patient routes to wisdom. Birkerts
similarly asserts grave doubts about the electronic
dispensations and sunny reassurances of such modern
divinities as Bill Gates and Nicholas Negroponte.
He asks us to tally our losses as we turn from ink marks
on paper to strands of binary code flowing through
microchips. Like the Egyptian king, he fears that we
will learn to access archives without
using our memories, and to command information without
possessing wisdom. We will forget, Birkerts maintains,
the importance of the private reading experience to the
development of our secular souls.

We are unlikely to get a more eloquent champion of the sheer
pleasures of reading books. Birkerts devotes his first
seven chapters to the delightful sensual and mental
phenomonology of the reading process. This is a book
that makes you want to read more books, not by inflicting
guilt so much as by reminding you of the unique
satisfactions they -- including _The Gutenberg Elegies_
itself -- can provide.

The second half of the book considers our "proto-
electronic" age and the slick beasts that slouch towards
Silicon Valley to be born. As the father of a 5-year-old, Birkerts is
particularly anxious about the evolution of human
interaction in the coming decades. Often his book seems
less of an elegy for something that is dead than a
prophetic announcement that the moment of choice has
arrived. In his happier moments, Birkerts
hopes we may still stem the tide of electronic images and
sounds, assert our love of printed materials, return to
that comfortable chair with a cloth-and-paper codex in
hand, and start reading again.

"Reading," for Birkerts, means reading novels. However,
asserting this as an essential activity of humanity is
historically problematic. Novels began to appear only
about 200 years ago, and were themselves greeted by fierce
denunciations from moral leaders, who saw this new
entertainment as a corrupter of souls, an unwholesome
distraction from more serious (i.e., Biblical) reading.
Birkerts position curiously parallels this
one, in that he emphasizes the "soul-making" importance
of literature, now facing its successor in the form of
the unholy electronic multimedia display. Is the novel
another shell we've outgrown, or are we abandoning it, as
Birkerts claims, "at our peril?" Birkerts neglects the
similarly short history of the private reading private
reading experience he champions, itself a luxury of the
upper and rising middle classes of the past two centuries, who
could afford literacy, leisure, and light to read by.

One can only praise _The Gutenberg Elegies_ as a moving
record of one man's ongoing struggle with our brave new world.
Even Birkerts' blind spots -- his inability to appreciate
anything technological, his insufficient consideration of
history -- are the result of his passionate sincerity.
Everywhere his prose reminds us of its writer's commitment to
intelligent human discourse: our birthright, which we may
be trading away for a mere mess of data.