The Gutenberg Elegies

This is a personal book, and so merits a personal review. To be frank, it's against my normal principles to bring the first person into a review. To me a book of this kind is an intellectual dialogue in which author and reader dispassionately evaluate ideas. When personalities obtrude,the ideas can get coated in extraneous gloss. I would prefer, as a reviewer, that the self should be opaque - his, mine.

But Sven Birkerts agonizes, and in his processes gives out swathes of self. I found this unwelcome and annoying, while at the same time finding his observations and turns of phrase stimulating and provocative. I could have done without his social life in Ann Arbor, a history of the novel he didn't write, his 5-year old daughter's prattlings, or a catalogue of what books he was reading. I cared only that he was reading and what he has to say about the process itself.


What he says is thoughtful, challenging and illuminating. Birkerts would argue that a subjective ecology of reading is a fundamental starting point; that internal examination and reverie are preconditions for evaluating the imaginative power of words on the page - a power, which, if I read his message right, the electronic age is unlikely to nurture. Quite why he sees ink squeezed on paper as fundamentally more valid than light signals on a screen as a decoding mechanism between one person's imagination and another's, I do not know.

I suspect it is, in part, technophobia - an assumption that the electronic age has got its emphases wrong because its terminology highlights 'information', 'retrieval' and 'data' rather than the print idiom of 'insight', 'review' and 'detail'. I think he is wrong, because I believe the two cultures of reading print and reading on screen can live side by side. It is not a case of 'either/or' but 'and/together'. 

'Refuse it' is Birkerts' final cry. But refuse what? Refuse the devil's forked tail: the sweet-flavoured seduction of cyberspace? Refuse the next generation its engagement with reading, its way of interacting with ideas? Why so little faith? Scientists claim that for every predicted catastrophe (holes in the ozone layer, decimation of the rainforest) research and evolution produce a solution. So 'reading' encompasses different kinds of reading that will have new stimuli on our ways of thinking. 

In spite of this fundamental disagreement, I enjoyed the book. My copy has grown fatter by the turned down corners everywhere marking where margins tick an arresting thought or visionary turn of phrase that has made me want to revisit the page. I wish I had the space to quote a few ideas that had me gazing off into the middle distance of thought. But my admiration is tempered by unease.

With a publication date of 1994, the book is looking dated - he must have been writing it in 1992-3. Not a Cassandra call to rescue reading from the wired web of data delivery, but a bleat about a battle that has already been decided. The electronic age is not going to be refused. It is here. And it has a value: we are keeping our cake and eating others. I reject your mourning, Mr Birkerts. Mr Gutenberg needs no elegy. He lives on in generations of souls moved by what he initiated. He is not dead; he has merely moved on. His was an age of movable type; ours is an age of movable text. Let it continue to progress.