Final Fridays

by John Barth

  Very well: But if that is the case, where, then, are the Charles Dickenses and the Mark Twains of our postmodern era; our novelists at once popular and excellent, acclaimed widely in their own time by critics and lay readers alike and likely to be so by generations to come? If the genre’s Golden Age extended some 100-plus years, from Fielding to Flaubert, let’s say, Tom Jones to Madame Bovary, and its more self-conscious Silver age through the big Modernists—certainly excellent, though scarcely popular—from Proust and Joyce to Nabokov and Beckett, aren’t we by comparison Bronze-Agers at best, maybe even (biodegradable) plastic? My reply is that I don’t know, really, although several considerations come to mind. Alternative media really have altered the audience for printed fiction, not only since Dickens and Twain, who didn’t have movies to compete with, but since Hemingway and Faulkner as well, who weren’t in the ring with television, really, not to mention with VCRs and the Internet. And we ought to remember, e.g., that while Twain was indeed a popular success, the novel of his that we most treasure nowadays had a rough critical lift-off indeed, and is still found offensive by distressingly many Americans. We should remember too that the likes of Cervantes and Dickens and Tolstoy and Twain are not common in any era—pre-modern, modern, or postmodern. And that in J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, for instance, Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 and Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude (even in translation), we have after all at least three classics from the past half-century that meet our criteria: a not-inconsiderable number, to which other novel-aficionados will certainly rush to make additions or substitutions. So maybe things are just fine, anyhow quite okay, though less so than formerly?

  I half-suspect that to be the case; but an abiding sense of malaise’round about our subject resists dispelling. What will the effect on print-lit be of hypertext, for example, whose evangels have called it “the third great advance in the technology of writing, after the alphabet and the printing press,” but whose nature precludes the fixative of print? And how about e-fiction, those ingenious interactive hypertextual computer-novels that effectively redefine the job-descriptions of Author and Reader? This is the medium that prompted Robert Coover’s landmark 1993 essay “The End of Books?” in the New York Times Book Review, which prompted in turn a little essay of mine called “The State of the Art”—to which I refer any who thirst for my extended take on the subject of e-fiction. For now let’s merely ask, “Aren’t e-novels the coup de grace for the old-fashioned p-variety? Don’t Hypertext & Co. render all print-lit more or less obsolete—The End Of The Word As We’ve Known It?”

  After much and deep consideration, I reply: Nah. It’s a fascinating medium indeed, is hypertext; and electronic fiction is an intriguing genre for sure. Just a few years ago, when one couldn’t take for granted that everybody in the room understood what hypertext is, I used to illustrate it by asking my auditors to imagine on their computer-screens the innocent old test-proposition The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog, its key elements “loaded” in such a way that“clicking” on any of them opens a window menu of associations available for exploring, from the relative nimbleness of temperate-zone quadrupeds, through the history of fox hunting and its representation in painting, music, and literature, to soundtracks of hounds in full cry (with or without expert commentary) and disquisitions on animal rights—and every one of those associated “lexias” similarly loaded, another ring of keys with which one may open yet further doors, and on and on and on—no two routes through the maze ever likely to be the same, and every venturer thereinto not only a Theseus but a Daedalus, remodeling the labyrinth at will en route through it.

  End of quote from that aforementioned “State of the Art” essay. A recent communication from my aforementioned fellow print-novelist Robert Coover informs me that one of the “writers,” if that’s the correct term, in his Electronic Fiction seminar at Brown University has in fact taken that Quick Brown Fox of mine and run with it: An electronic multimedia QBF is now several years into its elaborate gestation, Coover reports, and not finished yet. Stay tuned.

  But aside from a general curiosity about all Edges of the Envelope of the art I practice, my own interest in the medium of e-fiction is mainly metaphorical. Hypertext, like the World Wide Web itself, reminds us of the real interconnectedness of things, and the many-layeredness of our experience of life: It reminds us that to “click,” figuratively speaking, on anything we pause to consider—the waterglass on this lectern, the pattern of that fellow’s necktie, the earrings that his companion chose to wear this evening—is to open stories within stories, “hot-linked” to further stories, et cetera literally ad infinitum: what I’ve called elsewhere the Hypertextuality of Everyday Life. I like that sense of narrative depth, that vertiginous dimension of nonlinearity; so too, I believe, would my muse like it, the all-but-inexhaustible Ms. Scheherazade. And so, in the same way that those earlier digressions of mine on Calypso and the hills of Úbeda could be said to have been an awkward linear approximation of hypertext, I have sportingly included in a forthcoming novel [Coming Soon!!!] some faux-electronic menus and option-buttons, for example, the way my Modernist forebears incorporated faux-newspaper headlines and such into their novels.3

  HOWEVER (AS I’VE remarked elsewhere), while much of our life-experience is inarguably of a non-linear character—all our senses operating at once—it happens that on the other hand much of our experience is decidedly linear: this apparently leading to this, evidently followed by that. It is an aspect of our living ineluctably in linear time, which is the basis of all narrative no matter how we might diddle its linearity for effect. 2000 years ago the Roman poet Horace4 was already recommending, in his Epistle on the Art of Poetry, that storytellers would do well to hit the ground running by starting their stories in medias res, “in the middle of things” rather than way back at Square One. But even when we heed that sage advice, as more often than not most storytellers do, we still necessarily proceed sequentially from unit to unit of action, event to event in time, as language proceeds linearly word by word and our lives proceed linearly from birth to death. For rendering or at least suggesting simultaneity , film is unquestionably a better medium than either printed or pixelated language: Onscreen, several people can talk at the same time, as they often do in life but can’t on the page; what’s more, they can do so as we see their car moving through city streets, with attendant urban sights and sounds and a musical score to enhance the effect. But even the camera can “narrate” only one scene at a time (split-screen or multiple-screen effects can show simultaneously occurring though spatially separated segments of action, but our minds can’t simultaneously follow them unless they’re radically simplified and abbreviated). In film-narrative as well as print-narrative, it’s usually “Meanwhile, back at the ranch . . .”—and in print we have to read, one word at a time, While Myrtle fiddled with the fancy new microwave and tried once more to tell Fred about that afternoon’s scary phone call, her loser of a husband unfridged and deflowered yet another St. Pauli Girl beer, wondering dully which lie he would tell his wife this time....

  I could deliver a whole separate talk on what’s being done in that rudimentary narrative sentence that can’t be done as readily if at all with a camera: the interpretations (“fiddled,” “fancy,” “loser,” “scary”), the expository information (“new microwave,” “tried once more,” “her husband,” “yet another beer,” “tell his wife this time”), the voltaged metaphor (his “deflowering” a “St. Pauli Girl”), the transcription of interiority (“wondering dully which lie,” et cetera)—but never mind. My point is the unexceptionable one that various narrative/dramatic media have their various virtues and limitations. Just as you can do things on-page that you can’t on-screen and vice-versa (and I haven’t even mentioned such great paginary virtues as proceeding at one’s own pace, lingering over choice or difficult bits, thumbing back or even forward, making marginalia if the book is your own, marking passages for later reference o
r for sharing with a pal), so too the printed fictive page, for all its sensory limitations and its inability to let you wander the interactive hills of Úbeda, has virtues that hypertexted, interactive, even multimedial e-fiction lacks. Among them, for the present at least, is relative portability, convenience, and user-comfort. But even when, as is rapidly coming to pass, new technologies permit us to recline in our recliners with hypertexted pages almost as comfortable in the hand as a well-printed book and no harder on the eyes, the latter will still have things going for it that the former, by its very nature, will not. Allow me, please, a final self-quotation:5 Interactivity can be fun; improvisation and collaboration can be fun; freedom is jolly. But there are dominations that one may freely enjoy without being at all masochistic, and among those, for many of us, is the willing, provisional, and temporary surrender of our noisy little egos to great artistry: a surrender which, so far from diminishing, quite enlarges us. . . . Reading a splendid writer, or even just a very entertaining writer, is not a particularly passive business. An accomplished artist is giving us his or her best shots, in what she or he regards as their most effective sequence—of words, of actions, of foreshadowings and plot-twists and insights and carefully prepared dramatic moments. It’s up to us to respond to those best shots with our minds and hearts and spirits and our accumulated experience of life and of art—and that’s interaction aplenty, for some of us, without our presuming to grab the steering wheel and diddle the driver’s itinerary. The kind of reading I’ve just described requires not only [what the critic Sven Birkerts has called] “meditative space” but, as Birkerts observes, a sense that the text before us is not a provisional version, up for grabs, the way texts in the cyberspace of a computer memory always are, but rather the author’s very best: what he or she is ready to be judged by for keeps.

  Those virtues, I believe, are sufficient to keep hypertext, e-fiction, and other electronic wonders from being The End Of The Word As We’ve Known It, even before we play our ace: print’s marvelous low-technicity. Back in the late evening of the past century, the New York Times Magazine’s final wrap-up-the-millennium issue (in December 1999) featured a panel of experts discussing the best medium for storing information in a “Times capsule,” to be opened a thousand years hence. After considering a very wide array of high-tech possibilities, they decided that nothing in the nature of Zip disks and CD-ROMs would do, because the hardware required to run the software for accessing the “content” evolves so very rapidly, and the disks themselves have nothing like so long-term a shelf life. For the very long haul, they agreed, nothing beats plain old high-quality ink on plain old high-quality paper.

  That sounds encouraging to us POB’s—“print-oriented bastards,” as followers of the late Marshall MacLuhan used to call us even back in the pre-computerized 1960s. But before we break out the champagne and raise a toast to the Health of the Novel-in-Print, we need to remind ourselves that the persistence of our medium for long-term infostorage and other special applications does not in itself mean the persistence of a substantial audience for a particular art-form. Granted that what Joyce Carol Oates has called “pop apocalypses” usually turn out to be false alarms: Thomas Edison’s confidence, for example, that the invention of motion pictures would soon make textbooks obsolete in our schools; the publisher Henry Holt’s concern that the development of the bicycle might spell the end of reading books for pleasure. Granted too that one must guard against conflating one’s personal advanced age with the Decline of the West or the senescence of print-lit. All the same, it doesn’t seem at all unimaginable to me that reading novels may continue to become an ever more specialized pleasure for an ever-smaller “niche” audience, like (alas) the audience for short stories and for poetry: literary support-groups, really, akin to those for the clinically addicted and the terminally ill.

  Should we care?

  Yes and no. There are certainly graver concerns on the thoughtful citizen’s agenda than the Death of the Novel: the death of the planet, for starters. Art-forms rise and decline in popularity with artists as well as with audiences, without thereby going extinct: New symphonies and operas are still composed, though not in 19th-century abundance, and the classical repertoire has a faithful following. Should something analogous become the case with novels for print—if books themselves should become, as one commentator recently put it, “the vermiform appendix of the communications system”6—civilization won’t be the better for it, but it won’t be the end of the word, much less the end of the world. There’s more great stuff to read out there already than most of us can get to in a lifetime; and as for new novels, written by our contemporaries and speaking to the here and now, well: Unlike the rhinoceros and the pygmy owl or even the osprey and the eagle, the novel has from its beginnings been as elastic a critter as the octopus and as adaptable as the crow, the coyote, and the raccoon, able not only to survive but even to flourish in radically transformed environments. It cheers me that the population of Virginia white-tail deer where I come from is estimated to be larger nowadays than it was in the time of Powhatan and Pocahontas, when The Novel As We Know It was just being invented on the other side of the Atlantic. Those deer have become a downright nuisance: “rats with hooves,” the environmentalist Tom Horton has called them. The emergence of e-fiction and of electronic publishing are instances of that kind of adaptability on the novel’s part, and while I have no compelling interest in those phenomena myself, I take their appearance as a healthy development and do not doubt that there will be others, on and off the printed page.

  The king is dead? Long live the king!

  And the novel? Encore! Encore!

  “I’ve Lost My Place!”

  The popular Key West Literary Seminars, held each January at the southern tip of the USA, offer workshops for aspiring writers and guest appearances by more established ones. In 2001, the Seminar’s theme (which changes annually) was “The Spirit of Place.” That year’s writer-speakers included, among others, Merrill Joan Gerber, Peter Matthiesson, Annie Proulx, Susan Richards Shreve, Lee Smith, and myself; we participated in a spirited symposium on “The Loss of Place in Fiction: The Homogenization of American Life,” and then each of us delivered a talk on some particular aspect of the general subject. What follows are, in order, my symposium-statement and my presentation on the place of “place” in fiction.

  IT MAY BE worth noting that the title of this symposium comprises two separate or at least separable topics: the first general, the second more specific, and both interesting. I’ll make a few remarks first about the general subject of a writer’s being cut off for whatever reason from a geographical/cultural place that had been important to his/her creative imagination, and then about the specific loss of place-identity to what we’re calling “the homogenization of American life.” Both, I’m going to argue, are non-problems—at least in themselves.

  As for Topic 1: “I’ve lost my place!” is a lament almost as common among writers as among readers who neglect to use bookmarks. Among the former, the consequences of place-loss by voluntary or involuntary exile, for example, have historically been downright splendid for literature, however painful for particular writers as people. From Ovid through Dante to Joyce and Nabokov, and including the expatriate “Lost Generation” of Hemingway, Scott Fitzgerald, et al., the Literature of Exile is so rich a tradition that it might arguably be well for Place-Lit if all writers were obliged to spend a figurative Junior Year Abroad in the course of their apprenticeship, the way Professor Larry Chisholm at Yale used to require his doctoral candidates in American Studies to spend a year or two in Biafra or Zimbabwe, say, for the purpose of acquiring an anthropological detachment from their subject-matter. In my own case, it was when I left my native Chesapeake tidewaterland after graduate school to go teach in central Pennsylvania that the place I’d put behind me became the locale, if not quite the subject, of my first several novels. But of course writers are so different from one another that no generalizations about the benef
its of exile will do. Getting out of Ireland worked as well for Frank McCourt (of Angela’s Ashes fame) as it did for James Joyce; but whether that “Trieste/Zurich/Paris” at the end of Joyce’s very Irish Ulysses would have been good for Eudora Welty or Flannery O’Connor, for example, is another story.