The curse of the unread
Like thousands of other wretched souls on Thursday, Dec. 13, I, too, was stuck in my car for hours, in this case trying to make the last 5 miles into Worcester to pick up my son from college. I did get there but had to leave him in his dorm, while I spent the night in a hotel. This, I thought, was going to be exciting, what with little vials of complimentary shampoo to examine and lots of pillows and cable TV. Exhilaration reigned - until I realized I had left home with nothing to read, that I was bookless in Worcester. It was horrible beyond horrible, and, unexpectedly, the gigantic flat-screen TV that presided over the room made it worse. Its crouching hugeness had a triumphal air that said: "Get used to it."
I must, of course: Reading books, novels especially, is becoming obsolete - I read about it all the time. To be sure, the ancient practice still retains a certain cachet, and a book such as the recently published "How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read," by Pierre Bayard (Bloomsbury, $19.95), is titillating in the way that "How to Talk About TV Programs You Haven't Watched" wouldn't be. On the other hand, no one is actually going to read Bayard's book who isn't paid to do so - though people will buy it, probably for a friend. (You got a copy? Bit of a cheat, eh?) And the idea of the playful reader dies hard as well: "The Black Lizard Big Book of Pulps: The Best Crime Stories From the Pulps During Their Golden Age - The '20s, '30s, and '40s," edited by Otto Penzler (Vintage, paperback, $25) is directed at that roguish character. The book, at 1,084 pages, is massive and bears on its splashy cover the image of a blond female in the clutches of a gun-wielding brute. I tried to read this book, God knows, and failed. It is rotten with dull prose, implausible plots, and hashed-up characters. What's more, it's clear that I'm not the only reader who has given up. Not one review of this book (and I've read many) suggests that the reviewer has actually read more than a few of the stories in its endless pages. The book is, in sum, unreadable - but of course it was not published for reading, but for buying and, once again, probably for someone else. (You got that, too? Oh, dear.)
In this melancholy frame of mind I turned to "The Paris Review Interviews, Vol. II" (introduced by Orhan Pamuk and edited by Philip Gourevitch; Picador, paperback, $16), which consists of the interviews of 16 writers, members of a species bound for extinction if you assume writing demands reading to exist fully. Mind you, that is an assumption that the modernist William Faulkner, interviewed here in all his peremptoriness, does not accept. For him a work of art is dependent on neither audience nor, for that matter, artist. "If I had not existed," he declares, "someone else would have written me. . . . The artist is of no importance. Only what he creates is important, since there is nothing new to be said. Shakespeare, Balzac, Homer have all written about the same things, and if they had lived one thousand, two thousand years longer, the publishers wouldn't have needed anyone since."
In other words, the truths of art are essentially transcendental, and the artist, though possessed of "supreme vanity," is merely the instrument by whose genius these truths are reproduced and set before us again. I don't see things that way, but I do agree with the conclusion that logically follows, that not to read is to be oblivious and ignorant in a profound way. And, indeed, Faulkner wonders if "the pictorial magazines and comic strips [will] finally atrophy man's capacity to read, and literature really is on its way back to the picture writing in the Neanderthal cave." These words, should you be interested, were uttered in 1956.
One might expect that Isaac Bashevis Singer, who wrote in Yiddish, a vanishing language, would be the most inclined to see doom, but not at all. Interviewed in 1968, he was asked whether TV and electronic entertainments, present and to come, would render stories and novels obsolete. He replied with what I call crazy optimism that "the more technology, the more people will be interested in what the human mind can produce without the help of electronics." I'd like to know what he believed when he died, in 1991.
Most of the writers interviewed here don't talk about the end of reading, however. Instead they talk revealingly about their paths to literature, about what they see their mission as writers to be, about the creative process, and their working habits and lives as a whole. Their personalities emerge clearly, if not always fetchingly. The most likable of those interviewed, if that matters, are Eudora Welty and Alice Munro, both of whom retain an air of modesty in discussing their writing and its inspiration.
Among those interviewed is Philip Larkin, expressing distaste for poetry readings. (I'm with him there: Poetry should be seen and not heard.) Readings, he says, "grew up on a false analogy with music: the text is the score that doesn't come to life unless it's performed. It's false because people can read words, whereas they can't read music." Finally, one learns from Harold Bloom that he loves TV evangelists, especially Jimmy Swaggart, over whose disgrace he gloats wearisomely. But that is not the most depressing of his revelations: "I watch MTV endlessly, my dear, because what is going on there, not just in the lyrics but in its whole ambience, is the real vision of what the country needs and desires." In that lumbering friskiness I hear the last trump.
Katherine A. Powers lives in Cambridge. She can be reached by e-mail at pow3@verizon.net. 