Exchange: "The Gutenberg Elegies"

Abstract

Dear Editors, I was gratified to read Wen Stephenson's lucid and concept-focused review of my book, The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age (The Message Is the Medium, Chicago Review 41:4 [Fall 1995]). Read thus feels seen. Seen, and in some important ways disagreed with, which at some level wants (and if I don't get rid of this one I'm going to drive myself crazy). I have various quibbles with Mr. Stephenson's quibbles, but I will save those for another occasion. I would like to address myself instead to what I see as our key point of difference, a point which, as I think about it, seems to enlarge itself concentrically until it embraces everything. It comes down to this: Mr. Stephenson does not think that the medium through or by which the word is transmitted changes in any way its fundamental essence. I maintain that it does. And since Mr. Stephenson more or less recapitulates my argument in the body of his essay, I will not repeat it here. Let me fasten upon his closing salvo, however, the point of which is to reassure us that verbal content survives the transfer between media unchanged. Mr. Stephenson writes: ...I jump to another page that I've 'bookmarked,' where I find the poem that's been going through my head for the last few days, ever since I discovered it here on the Internet Poetry Archive site. I open the sound file I've saved on my hard disk, and the soft Irish voice of Seamus Heaney comes over the speakers of my computer. I follow his voice through the eight concentrated lines of Song: A rowan like a lipsticked girl. Between the by-road and the main road Alder trees at a wet and dripping distance Stand off among the rashes. There are the mud-flowers of dialect And the immortelles of perfect pitch And that moment when the bird sings very close To the music of what happens. What does happen when I am reading or listening to a poem? And does it matter that it is transmitted to me, voice and word, through a computer? The second part of the question is beginning to bore me by now. The first part I doubt I'll ever answer. And so I print out...Heaney's poems and take them with me to pore over on the train-ride home.(1) Mr. Stephenson is, of course, playing a game here, representing in a few sentences his reliance on all of our modes of interacting with a given literary expression - from oral memory (the poem that's been going through my head) to print (so I print it out), to electronic (since I discovered it here on the Internet Poetry Archive site) to electronic multimedia (I open the sound file). It is supremely ironic, however, that the content itself should be Heaney's lovely Song, the whole point of which is to reenact through language a kind of stripping away of the veils in order to arrive at a pure perceptual recognition, uncontaminated by any of our myriad devices of mediation. Mr. Stephenson would no doubt reply that mediation or no, his absorption in the Heaney poem is proof positive that the word is like the patterned energy of of those knots that can be slipped intact from rope to rope provided that the ends are connected; that, in other words, the medium of transmission is functional and nothing more. To that I would counter that the sense of presence that literature seeks to create is primarily - not exclusively - focused on the private and social circumstance of the individual, and that this sense is fundamentally at odds with the electronic system that would store and present it. That the world that brings us the Web is already at a significant remove from the worlds conjured to exist in a book. So that even if it did not matter on level - even if Mr. Stephenson were encountering his text as purely as he claims - it would matter on another. To deny this is tantamount to asserting that the automobile has had no impact on the natural world because with it we are able to get to more remote places than before. …