Customer Reviews

The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age

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I encountered this book as part of my sister's college courses. I loved it; she struggled with it, but eventually grasped the point (and got an A+ on her essay, if memory serves).

But I was looking through the essays and comments by other reviewers, and I wondered -- Did we read the same book?

I didn't see a technophobic don't-read-it-online argument; I found an intriguing series of comments on what happens to when readers encounter something alien, and what happens to a culture when what used to be "normal" is now "alien."

Were any of the rest of you forced to attempt Chaucer's Tales in the transliterated, but still semi-original Middle English? Did you find it difficult?

The literary difference between Chaucer and 1900 is approximately the same difference between 1800 and now. We've gained a lot -- you can have my Mac when you pry it out of my cold, dead fingers -- but we've also lost some things that we used to take for granted.

For example, have any of you slaughtered an animal for meat, or even watched someone else do it? Have any of you used an outhouse every day of every year, because there wasn't an alternative? Have you experienced the fear that comes with the knowledge that any illness or injury, no matter how minor, might kill someone? Have you lived in a culture wherein a woman taking a walk at night, or traveling unaccompanied, was assumed to be having illicit sex? (Think about the woman who marries Proteus at the end of Shakespeare's _Two Gentleman from Verona_: Do you really think she would have agreed to marry him if she had any other choice?)

All of that was once normal. It's not any more. Our books have changed along with our culture.

And just as I struggled through Chaucer, Sven Birkerts says that younger students are struggling through older classics like _The Scarlet Letter_, not because the Internet has made us stupid, but because our notions of acceptable sexual behavior and gender roles and family roles and all of the other things that make up "normal" have changed so dramatically that the situations and character responses no longer seem plausible to the modern ear.

(Can you imagine what an educated 1800's person would make of modern works? They'd be as lost with a 2004 novel as the "media generation" is lost with an 1800s novel.)

For what it's worth, that's what I read in this book: that what was understood for centuries as common cultural ground is no longer shared by everyone in our modern world, and, as a result, our literary heritage -- the surviving communications from ancestral generations to subsequent ones -- is less accessible to this generation than it ever was before.

I thought it was a good book, and I'd like to suggest that you read it, too, and see what it says to you.

Birkerts has created both an insightful personal history and an intelligent defense of history and literature. It is perhaps telling that the reviews appearing from other readers are themselves literate and considered, even when criticizing. Clearly, his writing inspired intelligent responses from readers; this may be the highest tribute one could pay any author.

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.

by Andrew Stauffer
University of Virginia

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.

Occasionally while I was reading Sven Birkerts' The Gutenberg Elegies, something inside me would repeat the words, "a voice crying out in the wilderness." I first came across this image in the Old Testament. I think it appears in Isaiah and is repeated by Christ in one, if not more than one, of the gospels. If I remember correctly, Christ says that this image was Isaiah prophesying the life of John the Baptist. The voice I heard said the words stolidly and slowly with a pause after "voice" and "out." "A voice, crying out, in the wilderness." It still does.

And while I don't mean to liken Birkerts to John the Baptist or suggest that he is the immediate predecessor of a messianic figure, I do think the Old Testament image is fitting. Sven Birkerts is a sort of voice crying out in the wilderness. Only his wilderness is not the harsh deserts of the Middle East but the one that's the same as our's--the new technological wilderness of the infant millennium.

Published in 1984, before the arrival of the millennium, The Gutenberg Elegies is a collection of personal essays in which Birkerts examines his relationship to reading and writing and meditates on what the influx of electronic data, particularly the Internet, means and will mean to literature in the future. Simply put, Birkerts does not like new technologies. He believes that their ability to connect people is over-rated, if not something to be feared. While he can not disagree with the fact that electronic media such as e-mail and the Internet make people more connected, Birkerts feels they diminish the quality of our connections. He thinks the sheer number of avenues with which we can communicate scatters our attention and drains our energy and results in shallower interactions.

Of course, there are those who say that Birkerts is over-reacting. And doubtless, there are still others who think that Birkerts' writings are sparked by a self-centered fear that the new technologies are going to mean the end of his livelihood and take away power from the elite literary class he and other writers (and publishers) belong to. I disagree with those who maintain that Birkerts is writing out of self-interest. I think he is simply a man who loves to read and write and is genuinely concerned about the future of these activities.

For those of us in the book-writing business (I am a technical writer), this book articulates the fears and suspicions many of us share about the impact of electronic media. Birkerts makes the strong case that the difference between hardcopy books and on-line documents is not merely the difference between 'old' and 'new'; rather, that there are significantly different underlying mechanisms, both physical and psychological, which directly impact what is being learned, and how.

Birkerts makes his "ethos" argument by relating his personal history of learning to love book-reading, and of his years managing bookstores, of becoming a writer, and of teaching writing and literature in schools. He began to notice that students coming to his classes increasingly weren't "getting it" in reading literature: they had lost the ability to relate the themes, the "great narratives," of human history to their own lives. Much of this blame Birkerts attributes to a lack of sustained focus, an inability by the students to follow long and complex rhetoric within traditional literary structures. And Birkerts lays the blame for this directly at the feet of electronic media, where reading materials are scanned, not read; where the rush of information overwhelms the critical faculties needed for evaluation, reflection, and integration.

For Birkerts, the difference between reading a book -- a physical structure with both substance and texture -- and reading the same material in an on-line format is the way with which the reader can and will interact with that material. "The Gutenberg Elegies" posits that the difference is not just one of experience and style, but that the physics and form of on-line presentation make sustained focus and contemplation nearly impossible. Birkerts writes,

"Wisdom can only survive as a cultural ideal where there is a possibility of vertical consciousness. Wisdom has nothing to do with the gathering or organizing of facts -- this is basic. Wisdom is a seeing *through* facts, a penetration to the underlying laws and patterns. It relates the immediate to something larger -- to a context, yes, but also to a big picture that refers to human endeavor *sub specie aeternitatis*, under the aspect of eternity. To see through data, one must have something to see through *to*... It is one thing to absorb a fact, to situate it alongside other facts in a configuration, and quite another to contemplate that fact at leisure, allowing it to declare its connection with other facts, its thematic destiny, its resonance."

The Gutenberg Elegies is a stimulating discussion of the impact of electronic media on our culture for now and for the future, and a battle-cry for those who don't want the art of book-reading crushed by technology.

I was very sympathetic to Birkerts's argument and point of view, and I agree with reviewer "amazon3131," who "didn't see a technophobic don't-read-it-online argument." Birkerts is making a case for both reading and thinking, which do seem to be rapidly slipping away -- and I am grateful for his observations, and hope that the image-besotted younger generation pays attention (which they probably won't). I did, however, find that, although Birkerts's prose is always intelligent and articulate, and sometimes eloquent, it was too often tedious and redundant. In some of the later chapters of Part 1, in particular, he really tends to bang the reader over the head with ideas that are interesting but perhaps not quite as profound as he seems to think they are. And some of the sentences would make the wonderful William Zinsser cringe (e.g., "The postmodern artifact manipulates its stylistic signatures like Lego blocks and makes free with combinations from the formerly sequestered spheres of high and popular art. Its combinatory momentum and relentless referencing of the surrounding culture mirror perfectly the associative dynamics of electronic media," p. 123 -- now there's a man who's a little too much in love with alliteration and the sound of his own words, tho' I'm aware this may have been his attempt to have a little fun with the reader and/or attempt to mimic the technology that he's critiquing . . . but still, one wishes Mr. Birkerts and/or his editor had brushed up on Zinsser's ON WRITING WELL . . . ).

Nonetheless, I was gratified to find and read this book: Birkerts has something important to say, and often says it well. I despair, though, that it will reach the right people, or enough of them . . .

Sven Birkets holds nothing back in this book. He writes very bravely and boldly about what he feels to be a great problem: Literature is taking a back seat to technology. He starts out with an example of Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own. Birkets discusses how he came across this essay while watching a televised version of it. This example shows just how much television is overtaking literature. For example, Stephen King has many novels that have been turned into films. People are more apt to watch the movies than read the novels. At least I am. Why would you want to sit through a book of over a thousand pages that may take more than a month to read when you can watch the movie in a little over two hours? Plus the movie is packed with much more action, and it is all visible. You don't have to imagine anything. This is exactly Birket's problem. Too many people are turning to electronic means rather than the written word. Birkets read A Room of One's Own, and he enjoyed it very much, but he is upset that he hadn't heard of the essay until he saw a televised version of it. Birkets bravely suggests what and whom we as humans will turn to in a major electronic age. And I think he right on the mark. He feels that in a dehumanizing electronic age, humans will either turn to religion in search of a spiritual fulfillment, therapy for a personal fulfillment, or literature for a sense of self. I think this is very true. In a society that may become very electronic and dehumanized, our natural instinct as human beings would be to turn to something or someone who fulfills our needs. This book reads very easily. This doesn't mean that it is written in a low style. On the contrary, it is written in an upper middle to high style. Birkets does a brilliant job of writing intelligently but also letting the reader in on his true feelings. That is, it is not simply a book containing Brikets' ramblings about how he feels abot the electronic age and the disappearance of literature. Rather, the book is intelligently written while maintaining a personal feeling about it. Although the book reads easily, it is not that you can just whip through. Granted, certain parts of the book go quickly. But there are also parts of the book that need to reread once or twice to fully understand what Birkets is saying. It may sound contradictory to say the book reads easily, but there are many parts that need to be reread. However, the statement is true. The book reads easily because it is written well. The language may be an upper middle style, but it is written so that it can be easily understood. But almost the entire book is written in an explanatory way. Birkets is explaining the problem that he sees and what can or can't be done about it. Despite being an explanatory book, it isn't confusing. Birkets doesn't use big technological or literary terms to get his point across. He makes his point using language we can all understand. If you've ever sat around thinking, "I wonder how far they're going to go with electronics," then you must read this book. Whether you agree or not with what Birkets has to say, it will definitely give you more to think about.

Although Birkerts may come across as technophobic at first glance(and with a Coda entitled "The Faustian Pact," it is an honest intial response), patience and further, close reading will dispell any such notions. Birkerts' personal memoirs about his life and the role that books have played in it are passionate and moving. One can almost see him huddled in his small room, curled up on his bed with a tattered volume taken from his homemade bookcase. Birkerts does not dispute that technology can aid in the study and discovery of literature, but it will never replace the history, the beauty and the mysterious allure of the printed page.

The ELEGIES are a series of essays in which Birkerts explores the act of -, the pleasure in -, the meaning of -, the function of - and the future of reading. The author has read widely and thought deeply about print and the information revolution happening around us. His delicious descriptions of a lifelong love affair with books urged me to drop everything and get to work on the pile beside the bed. His use of language is brilliant, evocative and precise. Postman's TECHNOPOLY (Vintage, 1993) illustrated the unseen impact of various techniques/technologies, from language to microelectronics. Birkerts brings our focus to bear on Gutenberg's converted cider press. The shift from oral to print culture changed how we thought, how we stored those thoughts and how we exchanged them. Authorship and the concept of owning a creative work emerged. Knowledge rapidly became global and general rather than local and specific. Learning priorities shifted from memorization and observation to the deciphering and enciphering of code. Today we are in the throes of a similar shift. This time the change is from vertical understanding to lateral -- that is, the printed book moves from beginning to end, and our personal reading history stacks up (often literally! see above) to compose our world view, while the electronic media experience is all-at-once. If the old method was step by step, the new is essentially channel surfing. It is, in many ways, a return to the sensibility of the preprint oral culture. What does that do to our understanding? Birkerts reports that most of his college students are unable to read deeply -- that is, they come equipped to read the words but not the meaning of texts, and are increasingly uncomfortable with the pace and linearity of the written word. They get the story line but not the irony, the pathos, the juxtaposition of assertion and intent, the metaphors or the nuances of great fiction. He sees a widening gulf between two cultures. While reading this author's piercing assessment of new media, I found myself musing about the strange duality of this computer age. The technology which is undoing literacy has delivered desktop publishing -- and makes this Soupletter affordable for both you and me, as a case in point. But amidst the avalanche of print, readership is dwindling. Publishers are cutting back on serious books for lack of a market. Meaningless data and advertising abound. Books-on-tape receive Birkerts' mixed review: Better than exhaust sounds or radio commercials, occasionally excellent, but definitely not the same as reading. His observation that listening to a recorded book ensconces him in the comfy memory of being read to by his mother rings very true. The fact that most books-on-tape are somewhat or massively excerpted comes in for his particular wrath. Again, we get the story line without the depth. Hypertext fiction is here deemed a failure, entirely sacrificing thoughtfulness to action. One hallmark of a great novel is the co-creation of a complex world by a writer and reader, the depth and power of which depends on associations brought by each. Linearity allows us to attune to the writer's view, to absorb the profundities, and to be involved enough with the characters to laugh or weep at the finale, to be viscerally wrenched by ill fortune or injustice. Hypertext sends us skittering around the mansion in a high tech version of the board game Clue. At best, we are impressed with the author's cleverness in arranging the hyper-links, at worst we are left with a meaningless jumble of trivialities. When hypertext is used to permit interactive story telling, everything dissolves into randomness. Without the tyranny of authorship (as some cyber-fans would paint the old paradigm), that is, the inspiration, thought and voice of a directing intelligence, why would anyone bother to read? Interactivity gives us the inspiring intellectual opportunity to gabble in a chat room, where timeless questions become FAQs, and gadflies are flamed. Like, wow. In assessing the shift from book to instantized networks, Birkerts observes, "The slow conventions of narrative will be overwhelmed by simultaneity. The time line, that organizing fiction that served us for so long, will go the way of Ptolemaic reckoning, we will have it only as a vestige." Whether or not you reach agreement with Birkerts, THE GUTENBERG ELEGIES will stretch your understanding of both print and the brave new multimedia world, as well as your relationship to each. His words again, "To me it is more a question of how I want to position myself as history makes a swerve, not only ushering in new circumstances and alignments, but changing its own deeper nature as well."

To argue his point effectively, Sven Birkerts would have needed to show evidence of some direct correlation between the internet and declining literacy. Indeed, he repeatedly states the correlation, but offers no numbers, no data, no evidence, to substantiate his claim. The bulk of his argument relies on a single experince, a catalyst for the diatribe that consumes the second half of the book. As a college professor, Birkerts claims, he experienced a kind of gap in reading ability when asking his students to read some of what we call the classics of American literature. Bothered by student's inability to grasp the prose of Henry James, Birkerts sees a generation in decline, and he blames technology.

Birkerts claims are old. A hundred and fifty years ago, Henry Thoreau bemoaned the lack of deep reading on the part of his neighbors. While Thoreau didn't have a demon straw man anywhere near the internet to blame, he did have a culture in general to critique. Most people, he claimed, practiced "little reading" back in 1850, perusing superficial books on romance, travel, and the like, but having no deep grounding in the classics, in literature. We can gather from Thoreau's remarks that way back in the halcyon days of print, very few people read, and fewer still read deeply and contemplatively.

If we look closely at Birkerts catalytic event, his professorial experience, and try to consider what else has changed in the past century of two, a good deal of his argument deflates. First, and perhaps most importantly, colleges have boomed in size and number. Today's average college student, who once might have been trained in a guild or by family members, expects a technical degree and a job immediately after graduation. Since companies and corporations expect their employees to come pre-trained, and are unwilling to bear the cost of training employees themselves, colleges are seen as service industries, and professors, especially English professors, bear the brunt of this new approach. In all the world, meanwhile, most people can't read, and less than one percent of people obtain any kind of college education at all. People who once might have owned two or three books still own about that many. The book really hasn't been replaced by technology of any kind; TV, internet, radio, or what have you.

A displacement of sorts has happened, though, but Birkerts misses it entirely. Technology didn't replace the book. It replaced the grandfather, the parents, the story-tellers, not the story writers. And this displacement grew out of the kind of gradual historical accumulation that, as Birkerts points out, can only be retraced when we have a literate sense of history as a narrative. Books were the first link in a chain of events that gradually displaced commonality. The internet is an extenssion of Guttenberg's press, from which the first two mass-printed books in history rolled out back in the 1450s. These were, not just the Bible, as we are told, but a book on how to hunt and torture witches as well. From propigating and encouraging the Biblical and social hysterias and bigotries of the late Middle Age, to catalyzing an intensive Reformation, to cranking out the latest "literary fiction," books have evolved with us, but one fact has remained unchanged for the past five hundred years: relatively few people have read them.

A decline in bibliocentric reading then, given all these factors, can only be a universal moan by professors, and not a quantitative fact. Birkerts tone, his praise of reading, echos many of my own sentiments, but his social critique simply crumbles before the raw numbers. The world, hardly literate before the internet revolution, has not become less so. Superficiality has apparently been around at least since 1850, and bad novels have received the same invective from Thoreau that Birkerts reserves for the net...