There was this French guy in the later 19th century who wrote a controversial Life of Jesus. Ernest Renan’s premise was that Jesus was a historical figure who should be investigated scientifically just like any other historical figure. This would give you a worldly Christ without miracles, without heaven, who lived at such and such a time and place and said certain things.
It was Nietzsche, of all people, who attacked this approach as superficial. Nietzsche’s argument was that you couldn’t have a Christ that abandoned the traditional trappings of Christianity without jettisoning the whole moral/ethical code that the church supported. N was shooting down the upper middle class complacency that said you could enjoy a modern secular mindset but still go on with the same traditional values in your private life as if nothing had changed.
In the early days of Hollywood talkies, sound equipment was primitive. Think of the plot line in the classic 50’s musical Singin in the Rain.
Those must have been exciting days; figuring out how to make sound pictures when there was no precedent. So early producers settled on taking smash theater plays from Broadway or London and sticking a camera in front of the actors, often the same stage actors, and filming them performing the play.
Maybe you have seen some of these early sound pictures. They are pretty static. And the stage actors that producers employed often used the same repertoire of performance techniques that had made them stars on the live stage. You had to learn how to project to the rear of the house without amplification and to use gestures that could be read by the audience thirty rows back.
Before there were movie actors there were stage actors. These early sound pictures are duds as film. But their first audiences didn’t care much. They were thrilled to death to see anything at all. A genuine film language and a style of acting more suited to talking pictures developed through trial and error. But it didn’t take that long. Audiences quickly tired of the filmed play approach to making movies. Meanwhile stage productions flourished as theater, going on much as before. Different audiences.
This preamble leads me to my topic, dead tree readers in an environment where the concept of the book undergoes a Great Divorce from the physical book and books as dead trees become an antiquarian interest.
Like with the followers of Renan in the 19th century and the first talkie producers in Hollywood in the 20th, the new complacency in the book business is that transferring the text of a book to a radically different media, the tablet reader, won’t change the book. Should we still call them books? Should we call them texts instead?
There was a bit of controversy a while back when Amazon took back texts from readers that it had already sold to them. And consider that when you underline a passage in a tablet reader or when a student makes a note in an electronic textbook, the supplier of the text probably can retain a record of that activity and use it for marketing purposes. If I email the Guys about our blog and mention the word “ducks” will I see some kind of advert involving ducks in the margins of my Gmail page? I mention ducks and Google quacks?
At first I was appalled by this lack of privacy. But wasn’t it some Google executive who assured us that we had no privacy to lose? And if I lose or break my tablet reader, I like that I can retrieve my bookmarks, highlighting and notes from my source.
Texts in a tablet reader don’t have to be static. I can imagine a form of electronic literature where the writer goes back into the text and changes it after you have bought it, maybe adds a new character, adds a new chapter, or changes the ending. Or how about buying a book on current events that updates itself in your Nook or Kindle as conditions change in the world? How about a work of romantic fiction where the reader gets to decide who the heroine is going to marry, the boyfriend or his best friend? I can imagine the revival of the Victorian serial. You would buy a subscription to the new Zadie Smith novel. Then as the great ZS wrote the book, you would get chapters delivered to your reading device one at a time. You and other fans of Smith would probably be at the same place in the story at the same time, as if the novel were a current TV series.
These dynamic features would change the character of literature. The text would consist of lines of black lightning on a screen and move a bit closer to functioning like video games. I first came across the dead tree phrase in a Guardian article. And after I wrote this post, I saw that there was a fine review of this topic in the LA Times.
It’s the nature of Eden to be recognized only when you are leaving it. The studious, private, tactile appropriation of the text in the self-imposed isolation of a physical book, shielded from the ten thousand-eyed monster of marketing, may become a rare experience, celebrated by a bereft band of book connoisseurs, dead tree readers.
Our desolated libraries would become temples to our lost gods. Our perilously surviving indie bookstores would become shrines to our forgotten saints. We may truly love the book when we are losing it.
