The Gutenberg Elegies

It was in the early nineties that an American literature professor named Sven Birkerts noticed that his students were changing. In 1992, Birkerts, a bespectacled man with a small cloud of woolly hair and an air of avuncular bohemianism, was teaching a course in ‘The American Short Story’ at a local college. He was leading his class through the familiar highlights of the genre: Washington Irving, Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne. But as the course went on, he had the nagging feeling that something was off with his students. Irving’s ‘The Legend of Sleepy Hollow’ would naturally appeal to them, he had thought, with ‘its caricatures and ghost-story element’. In fact, his pupils found it ‘over-long, verbose, a chore’.

But the real trouble began with Henry James’s short story ‘Brooksmith’. James is a famously elaborate prose stylist, a master of long, drifting, periphrastic sentences which trace the subtleties and ambiguities of human psychology more keenly than perhaps any other writing. And reading Henry James with his class, Birkerts was met with a response he had not encountered before: ‘My students could barely muster the energy for a thumbs-up or -down,’ he recalled. ‘It was as though some pneumatic pump had sucked out the last dregs of their spirits.’

Driving home afterwards and puzzling over the problem, it struck Birkerts that what he had experienced was ‘more than just a bad class’. What he had glimpsed, he thought, was ‘a break in historical continuity … a corroboration of something I had been on the verge of grasping for years’. He believed his students had been ‘entirely defeated by James’s prose – the medium of it – as well as by the assumptions that underlie it’. They were the products of the hectic, blatant, chaotic age of television. The ‘inward and subtle’ world of James’s story with its complex syntax, its ‘ironies and indirections’ and its tremendous demands on the reader’s powers of concentration no longer made sense. Birkerts found

that they had difficulty slowing down enough to concentrate on prose of any density; that they had problems with what they thought of as archaic diction, with allusions, with vocabulary that seemed ‘pretentious’; that they were especially uncomfortable with indirect or interior passages, indeed with any deviations from straight plot; and that they were put off by ironic tone because it flaunted superiority and made them feel that they were missing something.
Birkerts concluded that he was watching a whole way of paying attention to the world beginning to die away. The screen, he suggested, had ‘rendered a vast part of our cultural heritage utterly alien’.

His experiences inspired a book – The Gutenberg Elegies – which was published in 1994 and was one of the first warning lights that a major cultural change was under way.

James Marriott
THE NEW DARK AGES
The End of Reading and the Dawn of a Post-Literate Society