The Future of Literary Culture
by Harold Augenbraum
Copyright 2008 – All Rights Reserved

I have been asked to talk about the future of literary reading, some of which will necessarily include predictions for the future, which is a bit like eating jello with a fork, but I would also like to discuss the future of literary culture, a more general condition that encompasses literary reading and many other aspects of the literary world. Pierre Bayard’s recent book “How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read” is an acknowledgement that literary culture indeed exists apart from literary reading itself, beyond reviewing and the feuds of Norman Mailer and Gore Vidal and Gore Vidal and William F. Buckley, Jr. and Gore Vidal and (place any name here), literary awards, and childhood education in literacy.

To begin, I would like to note that the current pessimism over literary reading, the result of several flawed but valuable studies, has been around for a long time. I was just re-reading Philip Roth’s acceptance speech for the National Book Award for Goodbye, Columbus, delivered in March of 1960. He quotes Norman Mailer, Dwight Macdonald, Ralph Ellison, and Mark Harris at a symposium sponsored by Esquire magazine, about the terrible state of literary reading in this country. Norman Mailer said almost exactly the same thing two years ago when he accepted the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters from the National Book Foundation as he did in 1960. Philip Roth himself was quoted in France Soir twice in the past thirty years saying the number of literary readers in the United States halves every ten years, Well, this suggests a couple of things. One, looking at the current state of fiction in mainstream magazines, there is good reason to be pessimistic. The Atlantic Monthly, after over a century of publishing fiction in its magazine, stopped doing so last year.

Now why is this important? It’s important because the fewer mainstream publications that publish fiction removes fiction from the general culture, which in the long run tends to marginalize it. We can debate the merits or demerits of this, since I firmly believe that change takes place on the margins, but not here.

In the late December issue of The New Yorker, writer Caleb Crain outlined the various studies that showed the decrease of literary readers and the decline in deep reading—an interesting acknowledgment since the magazine is, after all, printed matter to be read—as part of a review of Maryanne Wolf’s Proust and The Squid, a book-length analysis of the neuroscience of reading, a field that seems to grow in inverse proportion to the decline in the rate of literary reading. Proust also appeared in Jonah Lehrer’s Proust was a Neuroscientist, making Marcel 2007’s trade-book neuroscience hero.

Pessimism, like guilt, can serve a positive purpose, and the publishing industry has it in spades, from the writers to editors to publishers to the booksellers to the readers. It keeps those in the business forging ahead, with an attitude of righteousness, and as long as hangdogs don’t turn into depressives, they’ll continue to print and market good and bad books and continue to try to convince kids and adults that the literary arts provide an extraordinary personal experience. And don’t tell me that kids and teenagers are not interested in reading. The increase in teen book sales is the highest in the business. The Simpsons is the most literary show on television, though in terms of its references more than in its structure, an important distinction.

In the 1970s and ‘80s, when U.S. business seemed to give way to the Japanese model, commentators generally fell into two camps, called “declinists” and “revivalists”, ‘though one would be hard-pressed to find any revivalists for literary reading, except perhaps for the evangelistic digital crowd. Decreased literary reading has been a topic of conversation for decades, and Wolf notes the various studies that reach back to the beginning of the century. The sociology of reading also took center stage last year with the publication in English of How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read, which most reviewers took lightly, but which had a lot to say about the prestige of reading à Pierre Bourdieu. Then there were the studies. The National Endowment for the Arts produced its second study on reading in four years, entitled To Read or Not To Read, which, despite its limitations, focused attention on the subject. Last year Sony introduced the Sony Reader, which they claim has sold lots. Amazon recently introduced the Kindle, which is oversubscribed, and rumors abound—despite Steve Jobs’ denials—that Apple will soon emerge with the iReader, especially since lots of people are reading literature on their iPhones. All the major publishers are digitizing their front- and backlists, awaiting the holy day of the great e-reader. Important blogs like If:Book foster discussion of technology and reading. In the end, perhaps our idea of literary reading (and writing) will have to change as the technologists and neuroscientists weigh in. Perhaps this has already begun. The pages of Mark Danielewski’s Only Revolutions are visually structured like web pages.

So what is the future of literary culture, whose entry-point is generally the enjoyment of early literary reading? Since I don’t have all the answers, I’d like to muse a bit on the interplay of technology and reading, which seems to be on everyone’s mind, and look at the latest developments in technology and how I think they have affected or will affect the way people write, publish and purchase literary books.

First, let me talk about the people who don’t want the new literary reading to emerge if it means losing the value of the old literary reading. Some people call them Luddites, but I would prefer the term Inevitability and Its Discontent(ed)s. A few weeks ago, I received an interesting pamphlet, The Necessity of Reference Books in the Digital Age, published by The Print Conservancy and made up of three essays: “Research Libraries Without Reference Books” by Matthew J. Bruccoli, “Seduced by Bits and Bytes” by Richard Layman, and “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly” by Joel Myerson. The points these three scholars make suggest that the coming digital era is a tidal event that will undermine many of the foundations of traditional scholarship. What interests me, however, is not what they propose, but that they feel compelled to try to hold back the waters of change. And they are not the first, of course. Nicholson Baker’s Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper mounted a sturdy defense against the destruction of paper records, for example. Transitions are rarely comfortable, and much is lost in the movement between technologies. However, the current debate is not always “not if, but when”. Instead, thoughtful heads, even among the digi-nabobs at Google, wonder whether printed books will survive the crossing, and no one is sure. Bruccoli, et al focus almost exclusively on reference works. The printed gathering of knowledge—the reference work’s specialty— by a single sensibility—Diderot and D’Alembert, Johnson—may indeed be coming to an end, despite its defenders’ hard work. Indeed, their work was less informational than literary and we live in an era of data. As far back as eighteen months ago, the writer Stacy Schiff compared the Encyclopedia Britannica to Wikipedia and found three errors in the former for four in the latter, not a bad record for a new-fangled approach.

My one prediction, a safe one, of course, is that the transition is indeed inevitable, as printed books took the field from hand-written ones, as print took the field from orality. Some have no choice but to rail against the dying of “the light”. Others will slam the door on the past’s less efficient, but perhaps more experiential and immersive approach. But when The Celestial Jukebox is in working order and we pay for our pieces of the universal pie of information, the procrusteans will still have a point. However, like their brothers of the late middle ages, no one will remember their names, except if you do a universal gathering on the successor to Google. What then, do we lose? Camille Paglia once said that the physical search in library stacks is an intrinsic part of the research project. In other words, the quest begins not with the information, but with the tectonic interplay of the human and the object. Feel becomes research. Touch, smell, sight, sound, the senses as important elements of the process. Of course, you can always claim that this tainted the product, making it more personal and useful as intellectual stimulant. Proponents of the new, developing process of research say it will comprise an open, more playful approach to intellectual development, more ancient Greek than pre-modern German.

If this is the case, the digital world will have to develop a new approach if research is important not only for the information it provides but for the experience it offers, i.e., not the reading, but the participation in literary culture, which leads to the improved experience of the individual. But let’s look at the literary consumer’s experience, not the researcher’s. In the sense of trade publishing and bookstore purchases, if browsing is part of the literary experience, how does browsing occur on-line? It is certainly different, not superior or inferior perhaps, except to those of us who cling to bookstore and library browsing.

A few weeks ago the Perseus Book Group announced it would increase its commitment to print-on-demand, which greatly expands the number of publishers with access to the technology, particularly among independent presses, which Perseus distributes. Jason Epstein, who co-founded of The New York Review of Books and says he created the paperback revolution of the early 1950s, has been pushing this technology for years. It will expand the book market because of ease of use and limited need for space (one machine the size of a desk or dozens of bookshelves). It also acknowledges that the book continues to be a useful technology. Imagine book vending machines in every airport, with tens of thousands of available titles. Which would you prefer, digital download to your Apple iReader or a printed book from the Espresso Book Machine? Put in your credit card and out comes a printed copy of Lonely Planet Paris, just before you board your Air France flight.

Print-on-demand and digital downloads may, however, diminish the literary desire to browse, which browsers in particular claim is an important aspect of book culture. Bookstores with wide aisles and coffee shops (and sometimes chairs) recreate the public space in which browsers can be alone with other like-minded people.

As shifts occur in the marketing of books and the number of dedicated bookstores decreases, browsing will have to change. Of course, bookstore browsing has always been fraught. In small, literary stores, one waited for the frosty clerk to look askance, turn up his or her nose, and sniff mightily. Superstore browsing includes the smell of Starbucks' coffee, one retail chain memorializing another, and the visuals of browsing are often dictated by coop fees. Supermarket, drugstore and big box browsing is limited to bestsellers, in most cases, thereby defeating the possible goal of discovery.

So what happens to bookstore browsing? The next generation browses on social networks such as Facebook, while dedicated book sites such as Shelfari vie for the social book network eye. Will they satisfy the traditional definition of browsing: 1) shifting one’s body and eyes along a myriad of selections, 2) choosing an individual item based on a variety of criteria, including graphics and words, 3) examining the item, based somewhat on the criteria of attraction, and 4) replacing the item in its place or purchasing it. This is, indeed, an active, physical approach, as Camille Paglia suggested about the more focused concept of humanistic inquiry. Will social networks re-create the input of such an active approach? And does that matter to the selection and enjoyment of reading that leads to intellectual stimulation? What will constitute the new browsing leading to its new place in the literary culture?

How will other technologies affect literary reading and culture? Let’s talk about the future of the page. A story in The New York Times a few weeks ago brought me back to the idea of microfilm and the machines used to read it. Five years ago, I did a lot of research for an anthology of Latino Literature in the microfilm rooms of the Sterling Memorial Library at Yale University. Sterling has a full complement of microfilmed, Spanish-language southwestern newspapers from the United States Newspaper Project, where much Mexican-American literature was published between 1880 and 1910.

After holding my hand on the button for an hour, I discovered that I could put the machine on automatic and the pages would scroll by at the pace I had selected. I spent about twelve hours on two successive days reading poems, short stories and criticism. I could stop it when I wanted, print out an image, and then resume from where I had left off.
The new e-readers are based primarily on mimicking a book page, but this may not be necessary for certain types of reading in the future.

Printed pages are static: the reader must add an active, internal movement to read and interpret the content (the making of what is absent—the images the words suggest—into something present: the images the reader supplies). But what if the new literature is written as continuous text, perhaps like Jack Kerouac’s scroll for On the Road? The e-reader could be set to a timed scrolling, and reading would become slightly more externally dynamic. The movies discovered this back in the thirties, when introductory and background information longer than a single screen would scroll or crawl. Perhaps the most famous of these is the opening to Star Wars, which embedded the movie in a printed story-telling tradition.

And what of cross-generic questions? We have passed (are passing?) through a period of dominance of popular culture. “Pure high culture”, whatever that term ever meant, seems to have lost whatever elitist social significance it ever had, even to many of the creators of its cultural products. If a grizzled resignation pervades the last generation of literary lions and a feeling of toothlessness the next generation, borderlessness excites the following generation. Granted, literary conservatives still exist, as well as the formerly hip generation who fought against literary quietude, but cross-genre reading (and writing) holds the hip quotient of the day. The same person who reads Heidi Julavits can read Jane Austen and Alan Moore, without embarrassment. Dave Eggers can re-imagine the life of an African refugee without too many accusations of inauthenticity that dogged the earnest heels of the fifties and sixties generation, John Updike, for example. Perhaps this is the promise of Don Quixote and Tristram Shandy finally fulfilled. To paraphrase Duke Ellington: if it reads good, it is good.

Then there was the article The New York Times several weeks ago about Japan’s cell phone novel craze is interesting for U.S. literary publishing. It confirms the ability of new media to test the market (call it a form of literary “sampling”). It also affirms the print publication of the novel after digital market research. So far, other than various experimental texts, such “novels” seem to be more like blogs or growing-up stories. Whether “substantive” literature can be composed on a cell phone is an open question.

Japan has a history of piecemeal literature: in the mid-1990s the writer Banana Yoshimoto published the short story Newlywed exclusively on signage on commuter railways around Tokyo. How better to embed literature in the general culture? Yet serialization doesn’t seem to have captured the U.S. imagination, at least not from what I can see. Stephen King’s The Plant online novel didn’t generate enough interest in serialized, digital form so he abandoned it. Despite its good reviews, Walter Kirn’s 2006 serialized, digital novel for Slate.com, The Unbinding (and his subsequent Slate exchange with Gary Shteyngart) didn't make a big splash. Perhaps their time has not arrived and we are still awaiting an e-reader for such efforts.

On the other hand, short forms of literature downloaded to the personal computer have proliferated, though readership is limited compared to Japan’s cell phone genre. Narrative and Words Without Borders are two of the more well-known on-line literary magazines, but there are many others. The One Story publishing program seems to have succeeded in print and will most likely succeed when a good e-reader is widely available. When last I looked, Narrative had about 25,000 subscribers, not bad for a literary magazine.
Poetry has also made inroads, and is available on the iPhone through the Academy of American Poets. The Writer's Almanac arrives in my inbox every morning, topped by a poem, and smart phones may be the next literary realm. Right now one would have to broadband The Writer’s Almanac, but a simple phone download to a smart phone would be a good way to start the day, especially since it can encompass both visual and sound. Short, short stories—the shorter ones from Symphony Space’s Selected Shorts, for example—would be a welcome direct download so I don’t have to haze through my computer beforehand to get it onto an iPod. Give it to me straight from the ether, I say.

Speaking of Apple, at MacWorld last month, Apple introduced the new MacBook Air, an ultra-thin laptop that incorporates many features developed for the much smaller iPhone, including three that will easily have implications for any future iReader, particularly on the touchpad. First, it downloads and plays music and film. Second, Air is totally wireless. Imagine downloading any of the 2 million books Google is now digitizing directly to an iReader. Third, the screen text, graphics and sound allow manipulation of text and graphics. To increase font size, you put your thumb and index finger on the touchpad and simply draw them apart. To reduce the size, you do the opposite. To move to the next page on a web site, you swipe a finger across the touchpad (imagine the ease of turning pages in a book: no need to lick your finger).

But, as I noted before, will the future ebook have pages? Openlibrary.org, whose approach already seems outdated, included a transitional technology that made the electronic page seem as if it were turning like a traditional paper one, complete with the sound of rustling. We’re beyond the need for accommodation in transition. Even the discussion of whether ebooks are the wave of the future seems to be over. In ten years, what will have replaced e-ink?

With the domination of technology, for those who continue to read older books, everything from Homer to Steinbeck, in the past hundreds of years written exclusively for the printed book, how will the consumption of the book itself change when read on future devices? I used to lead discussions of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, and when we neared the end, I would ask the participants how they knew they were getting to the end, after 3,300 pages. They suggested many text-based ideas, but the real reason was that there were no more pages or volumes. By approaching the end of the physical object, their reading of the story changed, even though they hadn’t realized it. How is a multimedia Iliad “read” differently from its oral or written versions?

Our daily reading habits—and almost all literate people read something daily—will influence our literary reading habits, just as watching television, surfing the Internet, or playing video games affect our reading habits today, altering our visual and aural musculature and the parts of the brain trained to read. Automated collecting replaces browsing as a literary activity or research tool, which does not in itself diminish either experience. It does, however, alter the experience by presenting a different “interface”, generally a long list of possible and related bits of information. After reading Elizabeth Swanstrom’s discussion of reading as gathering on the Transliteracies site, I was struck my its relevance to the work of one of my favorite contemporary writers, David Markson.

Over the years, Markson has whittled his story line from single, disaffected, possible lone humans talking about their possible fictional relationship with great artists to one shadowy “narrator” who simply repeats (or perhaps creates) the work of great artists and thinkers of the past and present. His most recent work, The Last Novel, is purportedly a compendium of writings, sayings, quotations, and paraphrases put together by Author, who may or may not be Markson (probably not). The book’s layout: no entry more than five lines. In “googling” David Markson, I came up with 33,700 hits, none of which was more than five lines (full disclosure: I didn’t go beyond about five screens to check). In both cases—Markson and Google—many entry lines were of uneven length.

To create his book, Markson has “collected work” from dozens of well-known people from various centuries and given them to us, his readers, in what was to me an unrecognizable hierarchy. Which quotation is more important than the other? After searching through the vast storehouses available to him does Markson as “gatherer” have a hierarchy? And what is Google’s hierarchy when it does its own gathering, in a matter of microseconds, rather than years? Markson’s Boolean may be more advanced than a simple Google search but is our comfort with (even affection for) his book a reflection of our love of search engines?

Markson began the process of whittling his literary output long before Google came onto the scene. For all intents and purposes, we who read books with thirty or forty lines a page in a rectangle of letters should be visually unable to accede to such a change. Yet Markson’s The Last Novel and Danielewski’s Only Revolutions have assumed the visual comfort of the computer to create a new visual complexity for us older readers, while catering to the comfort of the new readers who are so used to reading multiple columns of varying lengths. It is Google, filled with information more than plot, and it makes us comfortable.

So will kids who have been brought up on Facebook, Google, Amazon, Narrative, and Fandango stop reading? I hope not. What will be interesting is to see how literature itself changes as that generation comes of age and begins to write its literary work, where it will get its book recommendations, and, perhaps most important, how it will participate in literary culture.

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