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December 01, 2008
Getting nearer the real questions
For 24 hours I’ve been pondering James Gleick’s piece in Sunday’s New York Times.
I first began sputtering at an early line: “So here is the long dreamed-of universal library.” The Times tried to take us there once before on Kevin Kelly’s wired dream, Scan This Book! This concept always surprises me anew because it presupposes that a digitized, hypertextible, endlessly searchable and probably to-be-sampled database of text is not itself a redefinition of the very concept of narrative. This seems not to be widely discussed, and apparently is going unnoticed by the members of the Authors Guild whom Mr. Gleick represented in their “secret negotiations” with Google.
I understand that this universal digitized library will eventually make all extant works of literature immediately available to any interested reader. I appreciate this, I once stumbled on and read all five (is that right, five?) volumes of Gil Blas and am grateful for the acquisitions librarian who had acquired them for a university research library two generations earlier.
I’m sure there will be screen-reading enthusiasts who will have similar experiences with the digitized library. I’ve already found at least volume two of Memoirs of the Sansons that way, though I can’t say I’ve read more than a single chapter in the book. Which is, precisely, my point—I sampled it and moved on. Who would have thought that guillotining could be a family business?
I believe all we’ve imagined so far in this context is the extant novels (and poetry volumes and epics and memoirs and biographies, etc.—printed research and information sources are already set aside). As a result of this stubborn focus on distant and recent written narratives, my question remains—and I ask it again here: What is the effect on the behavior of writers when the delivery system almost guarantees that no one will read a novel from front to back. This isn’t a library of separate, autonomous e-books we’re talking about. Not in effect it isn’t. It’s a searchable, sampleable database. Once that exists, and once a new novel is destined to be folded into it, then why would one write a full narrative—rather than, say, The Arcades Project or The Anatomy of Melancholy or some such thing?
I’m not saying that writers won’t write narrative; I’m saying they’ll have to answer that question before they write a novel (or while they write it); or at least before they let it out to the public. If literature is not to become one endless museum piece of old, finished books unread, a single huge, digitally woven artifact that resides in a Google-controlled database, then I expect that authors will have to find a means of ensuring not only the existence but the reader’s experiencing of The Text Entire.
Okay. I know. I’ve already been over this ground.
So, I stumbled on through Mr. Gleick’s cheery and oddly prideful NYT thoughts about this “shining moment” in the history of books all the way to its cheery end. Of course, all the while I was imagining reading 2666 on an iPhone. And at that hopeful ending I came with you all to this recommendation for “old-fashioned” publishers:
“Go back to an old fashioned idea: that a book, printed in ink on durable paper, acid-free for longevity, is a thing of beauty. Make it as well as you can. People will want to cherish it.”
Imagine a scenario in which any corporate publishing executive or acquiring editor, or any member of any Board in conglomerated island publishing, could be happy just picking out the right paper for the proud production of a fine novel to be sold to those who cherish the book as an artifact. I can see something (something) like that amongst those of us with thin jacket elbows and longish teeth. But by the time such a thing would happen in commercial publishing, the money would already have left the industry.
This may be inevitable. And in another context I will argue that if it comes it will be good for literature. But let’s try to see it coming. And let’s make sure that another e-based economy for narrative develops that is sufficient to support the authors (at least supported as far as they are now), or such a shining moment might have a significantly negative impact on Mr. Gleick’s negotiating clients.
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