The ideal of the great novel was an ideal of a monument in
literacy. Despite the technology for writing, such as word
processing machines and the hypertext programs for interactive,
collaborative authoring, writing the great novel is not only
impossible, but irrelevant. Expectations associated with the
great novel are expectations of unity, homogeneity,
universality. Such a novel would address everyone, as the great
novels of the civilization of literacy tended to do. The extreme
segmentation of the world, its heterogeneity, the new rhythms of
change and of human experiences, the continuous decline of the
ideal embodied in literacy, education included, are arguments
against the possibility of such a novel. An all-encompassing
language, which the practical experience of writing such a novel
implies, is simply no longer possible. We live in a civilization
of partial languages, with their corresponding creative,
non-standard writing experiences, in a disembodied domain of
expression, communication, and signification. If, ad absurdum,
various literary works could talk to each other (as their authors
can and do), they would soon conclude that the shared background
is so limited that, beyond the phrases of socializing and some
political statements (more circumstantial than substantial),
little else could be said.
Furthermore, writing itself has changed. And since there is a
consubstantiality among all elements involved in the experience,
the change affects the self-constitution of the writer, and
subsequently that of the reader. Technology takes care of
spelling and even syntax; more recently it even prompts semantic
choices. This use of technology in creative writing is far from
being neutral. Different rhythms and patterns of association, as
embodied in our practice with interface language-the language
mediating between us and the machine-are projected volens-nolens
into the realm of literature. Moreover, different kinds of
reading, corresponding to the new kinds of human interaction,
become possible. One can already have a novel delivered on tape,
to be listened to while driving to work. The age of the
electronic book brings other reading possibilities to the
public. An animated host can introduce a short story; a hand-
held scanner can pick up words the reader does not know and
activate a synthetic voice to read their definitions from the
on-line dictionary. And this is not all!
Language used to be the medium for bridging between generations
in the framework of homogeneous practical experiences. Edmund
Carpenter correctly pointed out that for the civilization of
literacy, the book-and what, if not the literary book, best
embodies the notion of a book?-"became the organizing principle
for all existence." Yes, the book seemed almost the projection
of our own reality: beginning (we are all born), middle, and end
(at which moment we become memory, the book itself being a form
of memory), followed by new books. Carpenter went on to say,
"Even as written manuscript, the book served as a model for both
machine and bureaucracy. It encouraged a habit of thought that
divided experience into specialized units and organized these
serially and causally. Translated into gears and levers, the book
became machine. Translated into people, it became army, chain of
command, assembly line, etc." Handwriting, typing, dictation,
and word-processing define a context for the practical
experience of self-identification as novelist, poet, playwright,
screenplay author, and scriptwriter. Interaction with
word-processing programs produces a fluidity of writing that
testifies to endless self-correction, and to rewriting driven by
association. Word-processing is cognitively a different effort
from writing with a pen or typewriter. And no one should be
surprised that what is written with the new media cannot be the
same as the works of Shakespeare, Balzac, and Tolstoi, entrusted
by hand to paper. A distributed narrative effort of many people,
via network interaction, is a practical experience above and
beyond anything we could have had in the framework of literacy.
The first comic strip in America (1896) announced the age of
complementary expression (text and drawing). Nobody really
understood how far the genre would go, or how many
literacy-based conventions would be undone in the process.
Comic-strip characters occupied a large part of the memory of
those who grew up with the names of characters from books. The
influence of new media (film, in particular) on the narrative of
the strip opened avenues of experiments in writing. When classics
of literature (even the Bible) were presented in comic-strip
form, and when comic strips were united under the cover of
books, the book itself changed. Structural characteristics of
the strip (fast, dense, focused, short, expressive) correspond
to those of the pragmatic framework of the civilization of
illiteracy.
Does the civilization of illiteracy herald the end of the book?
As far as the practice of creative writing goes, it might as
well, since writing does not necessarily have to take a book
format. Narrative, as we know from oral tradition, can take
forms other than the book. My opinion in regard to books should
not be understood as prophecy. Pointing to alternatives (such as
digital books, electronic publications distributed on networks
and stored on disks), some perhaps not thought through as yet,
keeps the influence of our own framework of reference at a
distance. A video format, as poor and unsatisfying a substitute
as it might seem to someone raised with the book, is a candidate
everyone can name. After all, the majority of the books studied a
generation ago are known to the students of this time mainly
through television and movie adaptations. The majority of
today's children's books are released together with their video
simuli. Computer-supported artifacts, endowed or not with
literary intelligence, are another candidate for replacing the
book. What we know is that paper can be handled only so much and
preserved only so long (even if it is non-acid paper).
Furthermore, it becomes more and more an issue of efficiency
whether we can afford transforming our forests into books, which
humankind, faced with many challenges, may no longer be able to
afford, or which are so disconnected from current pragmatics
that they have lost their relevance.
Today, while still entirely devoted to the ideal of literacy,
societies subsidize literary practical experiences which are
only peripherally relevant to human experience. A large number
of grants go to writers who will probably never be read; many
more to contests (themselves anchored in the obsession with
hierarchy peculiar to literacy) open to students lost in the
labyrinth of an illusion; and even more to schools and seminars
of marginal or very narrow interest, or to publications that
barely justify the effort and expense of their endeavor. From
the perspective of the beneficiaries, awarding such grants is
the right thing to do. In the long run, this altruism will not
save more of the literacy-based literature than highly
specialized contemporary society perceives as necessary in
respect to efficiency requirements facing the world at the
current scale. In labor division, the literate writer and reader
constitute their systematic domain of interaction.
The book will no doubt remain in some form or another (words on
paper or dots on an electronic page of a portable reading
device) as long as people derive pleasure or profit from the
printed word. But as opposed to the past, this is only one among
many literary and non-literary domains of interaction. It is,
for example, very difficult to say whether the artists of the
graffiti movement were writers, using an alphabet reminiscent of
Egyptian hieroglyphs, or painters with words, or both. Keith
Haring, their best known representative, covered every available
square inch-horror vacui-with expressions that constituted a new
systematic domain of interaction among people, as well as a new
space for his own self-constitution as a different type of
artist.
Instead of decrying the end of an ideal, we should celebrate the
victory of diversity. Those who really feel that their destiny
relies on the ideal of literature might choose to give up some
of their expectations, stimulated by the literate model, in order
to preserve the structure within which literacy is possible and
necessary. The demand for more at the lowest price that heralds
the multi-headed creature called the civilization of illiteracy
affects more than the production of clothes and dishes, or of
cars and an insatiable appetite for travel. It affects our ways
of writing, reading, painting, singing, dancing, composing,
interpreting, and acting-our entire aesthetic experience.