GO EAST, YOUNG MAN

I'm off the New York to cover the superb PEN World Voices festival, and will do my level best to get posts up in something approaching real time, although we all know what they say about the road to hell.  And if you're a New York reader, I urge you to attend Marisa Silver's reading on Monday at McNally Jackson, where I will have the great pleasure of introducing her.  (The website says we will be "in conversation" which is sorta news to me, but it's not like we don't have plenty to talk about.)

In the meantime, I would like to direct your attention to Sven Birkerts' American Scholar essay, "Reading in a Digital Age."  It has been wdely linked elsewhere, and I certainly have my differences with his take on things.  But two sections having less to do with his central point struck me and I want to highlight them here.  First, he wrote:

HAVING JUST THE OTHER DAY FINISHED Netherland, I can testify about the residue a novel leaves, not in terms of culture so much as specific personal resonance. Effects and impacts change constantly, and there’s no telling what, if anything, I will find myself preserving a year from now. But even now, with the scenes and characters still available to ready recall, I can see how certain things start to fade and others leave their mark. The process of this tells on me as a reader, no question. With O’Neill’s novel—and for me this is almost always true with fiction—the details of plot fall away first, and so rapidly that in a few months’ time I will only have the most general précis left. I will find myself getting nervous in party conversations if the book is mentioned, my sensible worry being that if I can’t remember what happened in a novel, how it ended, can I say in good conscience that I have read it? Indeed, if I invoke plot memory as my stricture, then I have to confess that I’ve read almost nothing at all, never mind these decades of turning pages.

What—I ask it again—what has been the point of my reading? One way for me to try to answer is to ask what I do retain. Honest answer? A distinct tonal memory, a conviction of having been inside an author’s own language world, and along with that some hard-to-pinpoint understanding of his or her psyche. Certainly I believe I have gained something important, though to hold that conviction I have to argue that memory access cannot be the sole criterion of impact; that there are other ways that we might possess information, impressions, and even understanding. For I will insist that my reading has done a great deal for me even if I cannot account for most of it. Also, there are different kinds of memory access. You can shine the interrogation lamp in my face and ask me to describe Shirley Hazzard’s The Transit of Venus and I will fail miserably, even though I have listed it as one of the novels I most admire. But I know that traces of its intelligence are in me, that I can, depending on the prompt, call up scenes from that novel in bright, unexpected flashes: it has not vanished completely. And possibly something similar explains Ortega’s “culture is what remains” aphorism.

In a lifetime of reading, which maps closely to a lifetime of forgetting, we store impressions willy-nilly, according to private systems of distribution, keeping factual information on one plane; acquired psychological insight (how humans act when jealous, what romantic compulsion feels like) on another; ideas on a third, and so on. I believe that I know a great deal without knowing what I know. And that, further, insights from one source join with those from another. I may be, unbeknownst to myself, quite a student of human nature based on my reading. But I no longer know in every case that my insights are from reading. The source may fade as the sensation remains.

When I read this, I was overjoyed - for years I have had the same, shameful secret: that I often cannot recall many of the details of what I have read.  I imagined this had to be some defect, the coarsening of a once-fine mind.  But, like Birkerts, I can always summon back the sensation, that tonal memory of the work.  And if that's good enough for a reader and thinker of his caliber - and, for all our differences, his seriousness and thoughtfulness are inarguable - it's good enough for me.

In the same essay, he writes of Netherland:

WHEN READING Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland, I am less caught in the action—there is not that much of it—than the tonality. I have the familiar, necessary sense of being privy to the thoughts (and rhythmic inner workings) of Hans, the narrator, and I am interested in him. Though to be accurate I don’t know that it’s as much Hans himself that I am drawn to as the feeling of eavesdropping on another consciousness. All aspects of this compel me, his thoughts and observations, the unexpected detours his memories provide, his efforts to engage in his own feeling-life. I am flickeringly aware as I read that he is being written, and sometimes there is a swerve into literary self-consciousness. But this doesn’t disturb me, doesn’t break the fourth wall: I am perfectly content to see these shifts as the product of the author’s own efforts, which suggests that I tend to view the author as on a continuum with his characters, their extension. It is the proximity to and belief in the other consciousness that matters, more than its source or location. Sometimes everything else seems a contrivance that makes this one connection possible. It is what I have always mainly read for.

I loved this passage because, again, it echoed my own experience, and it helped me articulate something I have struggled to convey to those who have criticized the novel for its lack of incident, of propulsion.  And I also find it immensely reassuring as I have finally reached the 100-page mark of my second novel, a book that owes much in its design and intention to O'Neill (and Banville) and other eavesdroppers.  As I sacrifice some of the safety and comfort of the kind of narrative propulsion that drove Harry, Revised, I find passages like this one inspiring and validating.

Off to New York I go.  Hope to see some of my East Coast readers around PEN and at McNally Jackson.  And I will see my L.A. friends at the Peter Carey event on Wednesday.

Comments

[Daniel Hartley]

Hi Mark, I just wrote a critique of Sven Birkerts' essay:
http://thinkingblueguitars.wordpress.com/2010/04/29/sven-birkerts-reading-in-a-digital-age-a-challenge/

All the best in New York - I look forward to reading about it!

Dan Hartley

[Diane Mutmansky]

Wonderful to read Birkert's essay and know I am not the only one who can say "my favorite book" but then not remember many of the details. He writes so well about the forgetting process. And yes it still does become part of who you are and helps shape who you become. Thanks.

[Ward]

Reading and memory, the subject of Sven Birkerts' peice, is something I've often thought about, wondered like he has, why I can't retain more, talk more about what I've read. Not that anyone, even my wife, would want to hear it. It's more than age, I think, as Mr. Birkert suggested, it's a kind of crowding out of all the books that are stacked into your mind, so that only the most recent---in my case the wonderful "Summons to Memphis" recommended by Marisa Silver---that is real enough to describe, should someone ask. They don't, not at the cocktail parties I go to, they ask about golf, whether I've played lately, and then mention a charity event they've been to. At the Celebration of Reading, presided over by the George and Barbara Bush, the high point, for me at least, was that Sarah Palin had to cancel because of a trial, someone tried to hack into her computer, for which I was grateful.

[Niall]

I tend to be more of a plot-oriented person, so I will retain more memory of that than some others, but the point is generally valid, and not just in literature. This is true in movies too. Last night I watched LA Confidential for the first time in years, and I think it ws also the first time I really understood its plot. I think one takeaway from this phenomenon, that Birkerts does not mention is the importance of REREADING books you love, precisely so that you can appreciate everything wonderful that is in them, including plot.

[waller]

Thank you for posting this. My experience as well. I say it all the time regarding a book that comes up in conversation or at the two book groups I take part in: "Oh yes yes, I loved that book." But I really don't remember it. But in the time of reading it, I loved it and wanted it to last. Before a book group, I have to read that book immediately before, maybe finishing it that very afternoon. If it is even a week before, I will have read 2-3 books and have a hard time holding all the details in memory.

[Niall]

Now that I've read Birkerts very long-winded and poorly focused essay, I have the following responses:

He's constantly conflating narrative/fiction/the novel, as though these were interchangeable things. But everyone (?) knows they aren't (narrative doesn't have to be fictive; fiction doesn't have to be a novel, etc). The "digital age" could be adversely affecting the novel, without also adversely affecting fiction as such or narrative as such.

Moreover, for all the reminiscing he does in the piece, his analysis is very ahistorical. The type of narrative fiction that he sees as central - the novel - only came into existence in the West in the 17th century. It didn't become central to our cultural experience until the 19th century. The novel conquered with the creation of a bourgeois reading public at that time, and reflects that classes interests and illusions.

The narrative conventions of the novel are entirely absent from most of what we would consider the canon on great literature. The Iliad is not a novel. The Song of Roland is not a novel. The Bible is not a novel. The Decameron is not a novel. And so forth. So argue that everything we treasure about narrative fiction lives or dies with the fortunes of the novel is just silly.

Because of this ahistoricism, Berkerts is unable to analyze that the triumph of the novel itself brought about exactly the kinds of deep, and to many negative, changes in how art and literature were experienced. The novel succeeded in privatizing these experiences in much the way the iPod has radically privatized the experience of listening to music. What before had been ritual and communal, suddenly became hermetically sealed off from the community of others. It reduced literature to a species of radical inwardness, which some would argue is a catastrophe we are only now recovering from. But Berkerts is blissfully free of any understanding of this. He writes as though the novel were always with us, and always defined our experience of literature. Until the evil internet came along.

Lastly, he systematically confuses the phenomenon of "the internet" with the digitization of reading and the reading experience. They are two very differnt things, even if they overlap to a certain extent.

In short - Sven, you're just a grumpy old man yelling back at CNN.

[Miriamlevine]

I read "Netherland" as an ode to cricket.

[Bill]

Birkerts' remarks read like a rather long-winded and humorless explication of similar remarks in Nicholson Baker's "U and I". But he's right on. And I love the guy for being such a passionate reader (and a fellow nostalgist of The Wooden Spoon bookstore in Ann Arbor).