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Posted on May 2, 2008

A few months ago, I gave away my television set. It was a massive old Sony Trinitron, the gift of a friend whose girlfriend couldn’t stand the penetrating whistle the picture tube emitted. Its wood-look veneer recalled an era when TV sets were trying, however feebly, to pass as furniture—an era when their designers could still imagine them in a state of not being turned on. I kept it in inaccessible places, like the floor of a closet, and I could get a good picture only by sitting cross-legged directly in front of it and touching the antenna. It’s hard to make TV viewing more unpleasant than I did. Still, I felt the Trinitron had to go, because as long as it was in the house, reachable by some combination of extension cords, I wasn’t reading books.I was born in 1959, on the cusp of a great generational divide, and for me it’s a toss-up which is scarier: Living without electronic access to my country’s culture, or trying to survive in that culture without the self-definition I get from regular immersion in literature. I understand my life in the context of Raskolnikov and Quentin Compson, not David Letterman or Jerry Seinfeld. But the life I understand by way of books feels increasingly lonely. It has little to do with the mediascape that constitutes so many other people’s present.For every reader who dies today, a viewer is born, and we seem to be witnessing the final tipping of a balance. For critics inclined to alarmism, the shift from a culture based on the printed word to a culture based on virtual images—a shift that began with television and is now being completed with computers—feels apocalyptic.Novels are by no means dead, of course—just ask Annie Proulx or Cormac McCarthy. But the novel, as a seat of cultural authority, is teetering on the brink.In The Gutenberg Elegies, Sven Birkerts registers his surprise and dismay that its decline has not been more widely mourned. Not even professional book critics, who ought to be the front line of the novel’s defenders, have raised the alarm, and Birkerts, who is a critic himself, sounds like a loyal soldier deserted by his regiment. The tone of his elegies is brave but plaintive. Birkerts begins his defense of the novel by recounting how while growing up in an immigrant household, he came to understand himself by reading Jack Kerouac, J.D. Salinger and Herman Hesse. The authors, as well as the alienated romantic heroes of their books, became models for emulation and comparison. Later, on the desolate emotional beach on which the wave of sixties idealism seems to have deposited so many people, Birkerts weathered years of depression by reading, by working in bookstores, and finally by becoming a reviewer.“Basically,” he says. “I was rescued by books.” Books as catalysts of self-realization and books as sanctuary: The notions are paired because Birkerts believes that “inwardness, the more reflective component of self” requires a space where a person can reflect on the meaning of things. Compared with the state of a person watching a movie or clicking through hypertext, absorption in a novel is closer to a state of meditation, and he is at his best when tracing the subtleties of this state.Counter-imposed to his idyll of the book-lined study, however, is a raging alarmism. In the decline of the novel, Birkerts sees more than a shift in our habits of entertainment. He sees a transformation of the very nature of humanity. His nightmare, to be sure, “is not one of neotroglodytes grunting and wielding clubs, but of efficient and prosperous information managers living in the shallows of what it means to be human and not knowing the difference.” He grants that technology has made our perspective more global and tolerant, our access to information easier, our self-definitions less confining. But, as he repeatedly stresses, “the more complex and sophisticated our systems of lateral access, the more we sacrifice in the way of depth.”Instead of Augie March, Arnold Schwarzenegger.Instead of Manassas battlefield, a historical theme park.Instead of a soul, membership in a crowd.Instead of wisdom, data.I admit to being swayable by this argument. It’s why I banished my Trinitron and gave myself back to books. But I try to keep this to myself. I mourn the eclipse of the cultural authority that literature once possessed, and I rue the onset of an age so anxious that the pleasure of a text becomes difficult to sustain. I don’t suppose that many other people will give away their TVs. I’m not sure I’ll last long myself without buying a new one. But the first lesson reading teaches is how to be alone.From: “How to be Alone” by Jonathan Franzen. Available at bookstores everywhere.

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