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The Text Entire
Last week, I said that the answers to our industry’s most pressing questions will not be technological. I know that needs clarification; I imagine it sounds luddite in the purest sense. There’s some old-fashioned (and overly simplistic—because I’m old and forgetful) McLuhanism lurking in there (which probably now seems luddite, too). I’ll try to be short in these next few postings, will try to lay this down in small pieces.
I understand that Manolis Kelaidis’s bLink received a standing ovation at the Tools for Change conference. In this futurist morass of ours, any new approach to “publishing,” any synthesis of the print vs. digital conundrum, should be lauded. And bLink (or blueBook) is clearly a proposed synthesis of two opposing thoughts about what is certain to come. But still, this seems to me another manifestation of the industry’s belief that the digitized text will change more than just the delivery system.
I just keep thinking this: We as publishers and editors and book reviewers (and writers) certainly must be ready for a more technical, “disintermediated” future, but that has always been an imperative for every industry. What’s going on now is something different. Today, within the text-based industry of publishing, we seem to believe that the next step in technology will actually eliminate the text itself as a unified, consumable whole. This reminds me quite a bit of the Tang years, when we were constantly being told that in the future all of our nutritional needs would be met in pill form, as though our palates were not an integral part of who we are.
There have always been two types of readers of narrative—or, more accurately, two ways of reading narrative. At times, we read straight through. Perhaps this is for entertainment; perhaps it is to ingest the tale as quickly as possible for reasons of our own, or for reasons of reading context. At other times, some readers open themselves to a story with what we now think of as a hypertextual approach. But this, too, has always been the case, this reading of a story that leads us immediately to other reading. I remember an old New Yorker cartoon of a scholar with his finger in a reference book looking back and forth between the information there and the manuscript he is writing. As I recall, the caption was, “If memory serves . . .”
Once Stuart Gilbert’s book was published most folks I knew read it, Ulysses, and The Odyssey side-by-side-by-side.
This is old-fashioned reading as inquiry. In fact it gave rise to literature departments.
I know those departments are disappearing, but it’s hard to believe that the habit of reading this way will simply dissolve along with them. A good many readers read because reading is reflective. And this kind of reading confirms that books require action from a reader. That is, a novel is best suited to the cool medium of print.
Yes, I know that last statement needs a lot of honing. Another time, maybe.
When I say that the answers to our questions about what is to come will not be technological, I mean that they will be behavioral first. I figure any successful step toward the next technology of “publishing”—at least as it applies to novels and history and memoir and biography—has to take into consideration the reality of the readers’ collective palate.
. . . what readers there still are . . .
But this isn’t all. What I wonder most about is how we can be discussing the Digital Universal Library and the searchable text of a novel and the end of intellectual property rights without considering the behavior of future authors. With that question arises what I think of as The Text Entire — an old given that we seem no longer to consider.
More later still.
Fred Ramey
Posted 7/18/07