Readings.
Brown, John L.
Sven Birkerts. Readings. St. Paul, Mn. Graywolf. 1999. 263 pages.
$16. ISBN 1-55597-283-7.
Most of the twenty-nine essays in Readings have already been
published in various periodicals and anthologies. They continue to dwell
on Sven Birkerts's preoccupation with the electronic revolution
treated in his earlier book, The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading
in an Electronic Age (1994).
The volume is organized in three sections, of which the first deals
principally with the impact of the computer on the life of society and
of the individual. In "The Millennium Warp" he expresses his
"anxieties that keep me fixated on the idea that the human time
experience may be undergoing a fundamental mutation." Two other
texts, "Sense and Sensibility: The Implications of Virtuality"
and "The Idea of the Internet," dwell on the perils of the
electronic age. The second section, closely linked with the first,
explores certain significant trends in modern literature: the vogue of
biography ("Biography and the Dissolving Self"); the relation
of poetry and politics; the dying art of reading ("My depiction of
the exalted potential of the text and the no less exalted transformation
of the reader of the text"); the rise of docufiction, such as The
Executioner's Song and In Cold Blood, "nonfiction novels"
in which "life gets the upper hand and drives art out into the
wilderness." The third section discusses various writers whom
Birkerts admires, especially Robert Lowell, Rilke, Seamus Heaney, and
Elizabeth Bishop, and also includes texts on Flaubert, Don DeLillo, and
Jack Kerouac. The tone ranges from "serious" (and occasionally
pretentious) philosophizing, when lamenting the vertiginous changes
brought about by cybernetics, to ironic (and more readable) comments on
contemporary culture ("The media is a serpent eating its own
tail"), to frequent autobiographical references in which
"I" speaks of his personal tastes and anxieties.
The publication of Readings, which clearly did not attract any
large commercial presses, was made possible by several official grants
as well as by funding from business organizations. In denouncing our
computer society, the media, and postmodernism ("a terrifying
cultural phenomenon"), the author beats his breast and regrets that
he is being carried away "by apocalyptic fancy." Postmodernism
has proclaimed "the death of styles" which he claims are
"a revolving wheel," one that completes its revolutions so
swiftly that "all styles look like one" and history becomes
"a rummage sale." He cites William Burroughs, John Barth,
Italo Calvino, and Umberto Eco among the most prominent practitioners of
postmodern fiction.
Birkerts's vision of the future is somber. With the
acceleration of the rhythm of history, everything has been speeded up,
and "leisure, silence, and stillness" have disappeared. This
change will transform the biographies of the future. How will it be
possible to write lives which have lost their distinctiveness? And who
would want to read them? Essays such as "Against the Current"
deal with the implications of superabundance, when there is so much of
everything that nothing is really important. We have become incapable of
paying attention to anything, even to poetry. "Politics and
Poetry" insists that comfort and security do not inspire the
greatest verse. Birkerts cites Czeslaw Milosz to the effect that, in
totalitarian dictatorships, poetry becomes "the last arena of
freedom." Poetry, he claims, is "marginal" in the United
States-a debatable opinion at a time when there have never been so many
poetry associations, enthusiastic poetry readings, and "little
magazines" specializing in poetry. "Where the Lightning
Strikes" emphasizes the mystery of poetic creation. The ancient
belief that the poet is a "chosen instrument of the gods" may
not be so farfetched. Among modern poets, none possessed this mystical
quality more profoundly than Rilke.
With the appearance of The Gutenberg Elegies, admirers hailed
Birkerts as a wunderkind. But in this "age of speed" against
which he holds forth so frequently, a wunderkind's existence is
brief, as Readings tempts us to think. This miscellany of republished
texts lacks the excitement of The Gutenberg Elegies and would have
benefited from some good editing (such as the addition of notes, a
bibliography, and an index), which would have eliminated much
already-familiar material.
John L Brown
Washington, D.C.
