In the wired world, a plea for older ways of thinking and reading

Author: By Melvin Jules Bukiet

Date: SUNDAY, February 21, 1999

Page: C3

Section: Books

Although the family of literary critics is not always a happy one, Sven Birkerts is less happy than most. He's also smarter. Whereas the majority of his colleagues rest content with admiring certain books and disdaining others, Birkerts sees a vastly wider universe that demands more careful scrutiny and brutal excoriation. Yes, he addresses individual authors, but more so he sees the context they emerge from. As in his previous book, ``The Gutenberg Elegies,'' as well as in the splendid anthology he edited, ``Tolstoy's Dictaphone,'' Birkerts's latest collection, ``Readings,'' charts not only specific works, here ranging from the poetry of John Keats to Don Delillo's ``Underworld,'' but also uses those books to read the tea leaves of the culture today.

The unnatural nature of our world -- though Birkerts personally does his best to keep it at bay by hand-writing letters and walking them to an antiquated post office -- is obvious; it's a place of incessant, Internetted media/information blast. Words and images fly out of the ether into our computers, the plastic boxes that dominate our lives, and dissolve therein. At the same moment, we have access to astonishing breadth of knowledge, yet find ourselves disinclined and increasingly unable to perceive the depth of that abundance.

If that was all there was to ``Readings,'' one might call its author a journalist, skimming the surface of premillenial trends. Birkerts, however, does more than describe the state of affairs. He notes the subtle shifts that technology effects in the very manner in which we read, think, and are. In a way, he believes the hype attached to contemporary notions of ``progress'' no less than this week's crop of Silicon Valley billionaire/genius/prophets, yet where they see good, he is appalled and laments the disappearance of human quiddity amid the flux.

``[S]omething in the nature of time -- or in our experience of it -- has changed radically,'' he writes. ``[T]he shape of the very frame of things has altered. . . . this is the first time, ever, that the perceptions of events and the transmission of the perceptions have become as important as the events themselves.''

Breaking this transformation into its constituent elements, Birkerts probes the differences between the past and the future, delineating closure vs. openendedness, hierarchy vs. the leveling of hierarchy, sincerity vs. irony, the absolute vs. the relational. Moreover, he sees the triumph of the latter everywhere -- from the easy glibness of postmodernism, to the current infatuation with biography (which he deems ``compensation, to gather in vicariously what we are losing in the private sphere''), to the ``forces that threaten selfhood.''

Although the chosen terrain of Birkerts's battle is primarily that of literature, mostly it's the self -- as it's been assumed to be since consciousness arose from primordial muck -- whose brief he pleads. Yet still he wonders, ``Thinking in these terms, we begin to consider that . . . the subjective individual, may be less a natural given than a phase in a large evolutionary process. Is bounded autonomy a desirable characteristic in an age dominated by network communications and mediated (and increasingly virtual) experience?''

Clearly Birkerts's question is rhetorical, its answer implied, ``for upon our long-standing notions of self (public and private) are predicated our laws, our social customs, our civic institutions, our conceptions of community, of art -- of everything.'' Thus, in his less ragingly Cassandra-like moments, Birkerts conveys a tender sorrow for loss of the verities of the past, often exemplified for him by small-town life, and different kinds of human connection that the conquering Yahoos of the world can't imagine.

On the other hand, when he further describes the nature and terms of the change by noting that ``[w]e have freed ourselves significantly from the confinements of slow time and fixed place,'' one might ask if this oughtn't be considered a victory? And if vicariousness and abstraction are the enemy, aren't books ultimately the ``virtual'' commodities, things that can be written in one place and time and taken elsewhere and read later?

Well, no, because the duration it takes to read a novel or a poem or a collection of essays occurs in time and the finiteness of the pages between ``Once upon . . .'' and ``The End'' echoes space. Books are ultimately actual rather than virtual, and fiction -- with its truth superseding mere fact -- is the most perfect analog for reality, especially compared to computers, which only create addicted subservience to the unreal.

Birkerts hammers these basic themes home, but just as he starts to become repetitive, he makes it new. After telling us, again, that ``[w]hat started out as a tool, a combination package of public service and commercial entertainment, has slipped out of individual control and has taken on a life of its own,'' he concludes, ``Now the image in the mirror moves and the body follows,'' thus compelling the reader of ``Readings'' to think by using the metaphorical tools of art. Birkerts may be a moralist, but he's also a writer of the first rank whose prose is full of elegant, intelligent curiosity and love for the primal ``mystery'' of life and literature.

Sometimes Birkerts comes across as willfully anachronistic or unduly self-congratulatory, but so what? The point is that he's right. Heed should be taken. It won't. There's too much money, too much speed, too much hubris at stake. After Birkerts, the deluge, and perhaps the best we can hope for is refuge. Fortunately -- if terrifyingly temporarily -- we still have books and with them the likes of this gloriously impassioned defender of their worth, their beauty, their undying necessity.