The Invented Part

by Rodrigo Fresán

  Or: “Personally, I don’t worry about the future of the literary book. There will always be a happy resistance reading Proust and Joyce and, probably, courtesy of gratuitous pirating or sold authors’ rights, there might even be more people trying, at least for a few pages, to read Proust and Joyce. There’s no crisis there; in what we call literature. Literature will find a way to survive; and a few days ago I read a book where it was suggested that literature’s salvation would come from wealthy melancholics who would take exclusive control of their favorite authors’ novels, to be read by them alone, in exchange for sizable sums. The equivalent of what a prestigious author would collect if at some point—some more and more improbable point—he or she managed to write one of those global bestsellers. But with only one reader. This might disturb an artist at first. But—apart from the economic aspect—they’d soon see its advantages: they could dare to do what they’d never dared to do. And there’d be no critics or colleagues in sight. So a book would be like a painting or a sculpture. A unique and original piece. A manuscript to be studied and read by just one person. A status symbol and a kind of investment and competition. ‘Okay, your yacht is really nice, but how do you like my new Martin Amis? I bet it’s way better than that Michael Ondaatje of yours.’ And writers might end up being just that—organic luxury items with a touch of electricity. More exclusive all the time. We could call ourselves iScherezade: beings in service of the rich who’ll be devoted, night after night, sitting on the edges of soft and immense beds, to telling stories to magnates, anxious faced with the coming darkness, like when they were erudite invalid children and not the nearly-illiterate ferocious wolves they’d become, reading in the highest and sweetest of voices, convincing them that only a good story will bring them the luxury of sweet dreams. The opposite of a massive and easy to falsify bestseller. There is a crisis there. A serious crisis. With bestsellers. Those books that functioned like a diving board to leap off of and learn to swim, to later strike out with powerful strokes toward the oceanic depths. And now, on the other hand . . . All you have to do is take a look and compare today’s vampires with yesterday’s vampires, the conspiracies of now with the conspiracies of then, the sex here with the sex there. And, ah, those young adult books that sell so well and end up being the hope of the industry, consumed voraciously by young adult readers who, with time, I suppose, grow up, and stop reading or, with luck, are pre-programmed to swallow the latest bestseller. Or, maybe, who knows, become Peter Pan readers—eighty-year-olds reading young adult books, dystopias and romances, jumping from here to there. The same books as before. Books for readers who don’t want to grow up, happy to live trapped in the loop of adolescent stories that begin and end in themselves and that don’t build bridges or open doors to other territories. And I remember that magic moment when I leapt from the island of Captain Grant’s Children to the island of the children in The Lord of the Flies. And, then, the discovery of the limitless horizon and of infinite space. I remember that excitement of tracing my own maps and singular itineraries on the basis of what others had written. Free association of readings, yes. And it’s not that it’s no longer possible, it’s that it’s no longer done. The strategy, now, is for everyone to be in their own place and always connected, telling each other what they’re reading. How can you leap from these days—as I once leapt from Somerset Maugham or from Herman Hesse, perfect diving boards—toward the deepest or most dangerous or pleasurable or surprising oceanic pools. The majority of today’s bestsellers only lead—like machines that are broken or fully functional in their solipsism—to other bestsellers. And to the lost illusion and the siren song that—light, diet—result in storylines that are perfect to be downloaded and consumed on light, thin, luminous tablets shining in the phosphorescent darkness of times when we read and write more than ever, yes; but also times when we read and write worse than ever and when orthography has, for many, turned into a kind of annoying and antiquated governess who insists that words be written whole, in their entirety, and not compressed into abbreviated noises. In the crackling argot of locusts that swallow tongue and language down to the root, and question and request: how many of you are sending poorly composed text messages right now, telling virtual strangers what I’m saying and how demented I seem, leaving out letters and putting an emoticon of a Bonaparte hat or thumbs down? Raise your hands!”

  Or: “The machine—or MAChine, with the elegant lines of all Mac devices—thing has displaced, for a lot of people, the desire for a good story with the desire for the object, crossing the thin yet definitive red line that separates deep passion from the superficial hook. The important thing now is not what you read but where you read it. And maybe I should clarify: I’m not a fanatical Luddite. I don’t understand (but I do respect) writers who even today sing the praises of the typewriter or the quill pen. And yes, I understand today’s comfortable pleasure of being able to run through the halls of the Louvre without leaving your house, your city, your country, your continent. But it’s clear that every technological advance implies the loss of a gift and the gain of a power. The same thing goes for artists—for every gift that’s given a gift is taken away. And the gift that’s taken away tends to be related to the practical and functional part of life. Attaining a superior plane of existence doesn’t, necessarily, mean becoming a superior person. And I’ve never forgotten what Saint Augustine—probably the best writer among the saints—said. Words I used to recite at full volume in my youth, high on the crest of a seism of illegal chemistry, standing atop an afterhours table, almost catching fire: “By Your Gift we are inflamed, and are borne upward; we wax hot inwardly, and go forward.” So, the man who could disentangle the string of a mathematic equation at age five might live a whole life without learning to use a can opener. But now I’m getting entangled, I who never knew and won’t ever know how to tie or untie a knot . . . True; with the printing press a lot more people learned to read and write. But with the gramophone many others—who would’ve been hard pressed to hear their favorite Mozart or Beethoven piece more than once or twice in their lifetime—renounced the ability to read scores and play an instrument. Similarily, we’ve renounced the superpower of memorizing addresses and telephone numbers and more or less important dates. I, also, know about the virtues of greater velocity and the capacity for instant access when it comes to disseminating culture. But yes—and I suppose I’ll sound just like them to more than one of you—I can say that I’m a little disturbed by the insupportable tech fanatics’ disproportionate praise in support of it, over and above any appreciation of what’s been supporting the whole structure for centuries. Now, not so much, now the thing seems to pass not through written matter but through the reading masses. Interest or expectation don’t pass so much through the evolution of ideas, but through the constant and uninterrupted evolution and design of a device that’s supposedly intended for reading, when actually, mostly, it’s looked at and touched and loved the way automobiles used to be loved. With that kind of love that thinks only about the next model, about the latest model that’ll never be the last. With that junkie anxiety that, suddenly, finds itself more addicted to the needle than the drug. And, true, the Internet and the mobile phone are turning the concept of the office into a dispensable space, but—like with all more or less Mephistophelian pacts—all they do is extend the workday beyond its natural space and schedule. Not to mention the constant tension of staying up to date and learning increasingly complex systems designed more for those who, generationally, received their first computer along with their first wind-up toy car. Learning to read and write is already a complex process and—even today—not entirely explainable. Now, it seems, you have to add to it, to that figurative and glorious abstraction, learning, first, the use and operation of devices that subsequently allow you to read and write.”

  Or: “And a few years ago, I rejoiced when the live transmission of Steve Jobs presenting the first ever iPad was interrupted—at least for a few seconds—by the bad news of the
death of J. D. Salinger. It seemed an act of poetic justice. A brief victory for literature and for someone who wrote few/enough/immortal books over the ephemeral and almost immediately dated device, capable of storing thousands of titles that’ll never be read. Because, clearly, who’s going to have time to read vast nineteenth-century novels when you have to be checking on and replying to and updating all your many friends, anxious to know what we ate and what the subsequent consistency and tonality of the fecal matter resulting from our lunch was? Bon appétit and as a kind of digestive infusion: at the moment of truth, I’m afraid no one will care at all and to be is not the same thing as being. Now, Jobs is no longer here. But his imprint remains. Because—back to the thing from the beginning—it seems to me that the future of the book isn’t in any danger. There are books and there is the future. Look at them, read them. But do it right: yes to looking to the future and reading books and no to looking at books and reading the future, right? The book of the future—all those more or less novel devices that dust does damage—are at greater and much more immediate risk, I think. You already know: a frenetic succession of new models getting announced like headline news and replacing (and degrading and denigrating, for being anachronistic) previous models. And their users, desperate, chasing after one only to, when they catch it, discover that they have to chase another. And—it’s really hard to read while running—on and on, all the time. Today, thanks to Jobs, we’re all a little like Job.”

  Or: “The tool cannot and must not attain the category of creator. And, in addition, it should wear the name that suits it, an honest name. In other words: why instead of emphasizing the book particle don’t they opt for the screen particle? A screen is a screen is a screen. And, let’s admit it: books are more beautiful. Books, by comparison, are like flesh and bone. And we have to go out and look for them. And find them. For me, the experience of a book, of its enjoyment and reading, begins the moment I order it and is perpetuated when I’m notified that it has arrived, when I go to the bookstore and encounter my book and one or various other books whose existence I was unaware of and dreamed of and . . .”

  Or: “I’d never want to have to go back to clean-copying everything. Page after page. To that correction tape or white-out liquid. I don’t believe, either, in maintaining the ability to use a typewriter to write. But it’s true too that everything I’ve written on a word processor seems to lack the definitive solidity, like a finished sculpture, of my first book, the only one I wrote on an Olivetti. Since that time, everything seems more liquid, capable of being retouched again and again, without limit or an end that isn’t the obligatory surrender and farewell, because the time for navigating has run out. Which, inevitably, makes me wonder whether this new form of writing might not also influence the way that ideas occur and occur to you; previously they appeared like closed circles and now like perfect smoke rings that you have to write down quickly, without thinking about it too much, before they vanish. And then we’ll see, we’ll read.”

  Or: “And now let’s all howl together: Kindle, iPad, ebook, tablet, and whatever we call that thing that opens the Pandora’s box of enhanced reality and that obliges us to put up with Tom Sawyer sleeping in the guest room . . . The differences between them—and their differences in the fight to capture the consumed consumer—have to do with the brightness of the screen and lightness of body. And, yes, reading on a tablet there’s no smell, no cover, nothing to give us a sense of the volume of the volume, impossible for us to find an ancient note or old photo or cryptic annotation inside it, something that made that book ours and only ours. And we can’t get the author to sign it, thereby increasing the sentimental and material value of the copy. You can’t—with a Kindle or whatever the preferred brand might be—enter a stranger’s house and walk directly to the library and start reading spines to learn something about your host. And we can’t throw it against a wall (well, we can, but it’d end up a very expensive gesture) when it exhausts our patience. And is it imaginable to imagine ourselves rereading—rereading is the most sublime condition of reading—on an antique model e-reader many years later? Nobody steals—or lends—a Kindle for the love of art, but only for lust of merchandise. To be just one more, the same, among the many. And how to preserve all of that. Will iPads and Kindles be auctioned off like bookshelves are auctioned off? And if they break? And if the electricity runs out? And if we can’t unplug? And if, being so addicted and dependent and fast, but suddenly so very batteries not included, and we’ve forgotten the art of memorizing and we won’t even have the subversive consolation of knowing novels and stories and poems letter for letter, like those lyrical book men at the end of Fahrenheit 451?”

  Or: “And I don’t like to say ‘my reader.’ I like to keep thinking that I am still my reader. And I keep reading books that open like doors so I can step inside them, instead of screens that remain closed and allow me to see, from outside, only what they want me to see.”

  Or, in conclusion: “Now, all around us, everything is in doubt. Talking and trembling with fear about the end of an era for everything written and printed. But the always-imprecise writers always had their doubts. That’s why they write, isn’t it? And that’s why not a week goes by that a writer isn’t called on for a response or an opinion about some feature of nonfiction, of reality. Because it’s assumed that they’re wise and prophetic. Crass error and crude errata, my friends. Writers know nothing. That’s why they still insist on writing. If writers had any certainties they wouldn’t write. It wouldn’t make any sense. And yet, they try to say something more or less coherent when they’re asked about the perpetual death of the novel (I don’t believe in that and I ask myself why don’t they ever talk about the hypothetical death of the story?), the difference between the story and the tale (no idea, I could care less), or the best way to tell a story (I think it should have four parts: beginning, middle, end, and blow me away). To be clear: for good or ill, for the blows we’ve suffered or because our kingdom is not of this world, we writers—in the middle of the road between Protestantism and Zen Buddhism—worry more about duties than about rights. That said and still awaiting the arrival of a book from the planet Tralfamadore that will allow me to contemplate, as Kurt Vonnegut, one of my favorite writers, prophesied, ‘the depths of many marvelous moments seen all at one time,’ I’ll say goodbye with something that another of my favorite writers, John Cheever, said in his journal at the end of his life: ‘I will say that literature is the only consciousness we possess, and that its role as a consciousness must inform us of our inability to comprehend the hideous danger of nuclear power. Literature has been the salvation of the damned; literature, literature has inspired and guided lovers, routed despair, and can perhaps, in this case, save the world.’ Goodnight and drive safe, home and to the rest of your lives.”

  Or: Oh.

  Things that now—all of a sudden and as if he’d received an alarm-clock blow to the head—sounded like nothing more and nothing less than the most ingenuous and ingenious refried aphorisms inside XL-sized fortune cookies. Did he still believe all of that? Did he care? Was this the foolish and easy enemy that luck—bad luck, oh so comfortable luck—had given him? That he’d chosen with a clenched-toothed smile and that each and every brief and sloganistic boutade devoted to it got more inches in the press—courtesy of young cultural journalists given orders that “nothing sound too cultural” and, hence, titles like “Frenzied Diatribe” or “Apocalyptic Preoccupation” about the plugged-in future of humanity—than his own lengthy books, which were occupied and preoccupied with anything but that? Devices, little devices? Batteries Not Included? Who was laughing at whom? Who would laugh last when there was no reception left? Had this become his subject? Why not choose a rival/accomplice instead of an enemy? Fight through the admirable foliage of the nineteenth-century novel not to defeat it but to convert it, to bring it into these twenty-first-century wastelands so it can blossom again with equal power and modernized modalities? (Just thinking of such a c
hallenge produces vertigo, dizziness, sighs more arrhythmic than romantic.) Or maybe it’s just that you got the enemy you deserved, at your level; and he got the flattened plains of screens and tablets? Was he really worried about the whole electrified world? Was he really going to comment again about how the new and insensate phones had done away with the need to check the time on the faces of watches, of normal watches, not watches bursting with functions like counting your heartbeats and the calories you consumed at breakfast; to evoke the lost pleasure of hanging up the phone like someone delivering a slap, or leaving it off the hook like someone turning his back; to laugh at that religious app that allows you to confess via multiple choice thumb strokes; to compare letters on blank paper like those photos of chromosomes; to throw a wink more stupid than nervous, referencing the selfie of Dorian Gray; to quote Borges from “Coleridge’s Flower” when he says “For the classical mind, the literature is the essential thing, not the individuals”; to lament looking at photos of families no longer gathered around the warm glow of a fire but around the cold glow of individual screens; to call attention to the not at all coincidental fact that they call those data hunters search engines and not discover engines; that he and those of his caste have always surfed on the crest of waves of cerebral electricity, that there is nothing new in thinking about everything and nothing; to conclude with something like “for the first time in history writing is the enemy of writing”? Nah: the truth is that in the dark and stormy nights of the soul, at his three o’clocks in the morning, he thought that he was thinking about all of that because someone still thought it was worth it to pay him to think like that, out loud. Because, if he’d written it down to read later, he had to have thought about it somewhat seriously before, right? Sure, he still felt certain indignation when on nights of channel surfing he came across some supposedly funny commercial for tablets and telephones in which the clients and users were presented as brainless zombies who couldn’t even unglue their eyes from the screen to kiss their spouses or hug their children, and yet, even still, as chosen and privileged. But at this point, he wasn’t sure that he cared: he felt like a comedian who at one time had seriously studied the art of his profession (Shakespeare, Wilde, Twain, Marx, SNL, Seinfeld) and was now plummeting in free fall, having passed through a New York club, through the best Vegas casinos, to end up alone, laughing at himself in a dive bar in Reno, patronized exclusively by second-and third-class gangsters who got together to blubber, quoting lines from Corleone or the Sopranos. The next thing, the last thing, the no-return, he shuddered, would be the cold floor of Lenny Bruce’s bathroom. A final unfinished joke in front of the dirty mirror and then the dirty floor of the dirty bathroom. And the dirty cold. And nobody to finish him off with a final punchline.