Final Fridays Read Online Free PDF Page A

SHORT, THERE are lots of things you can do with a camera that you can’t do on the printed page, but there are also important things that you can do on the printed page that can’t be done with a camera. Most important among these, obviously, is the rendering of sensibility , as apart from sensation itself. Fiction can’t give us the sights, sounds, feels, and smells themselves—language itself cannot, except for occasional onomatopoeic suggestion—but fiction is uniquely privileged to tell us what things look/taste/sound/feel/smell like , to particular human sensibilities in particular situations. Aristotle declares that the subject of literature is “the human experience of life, its happiness and its misery.” I would add that the true subject of
printed lit is the human experiencing of that experience: not sensation, but the registering of sensation in language; the typically interior, unphotographable universe of perceiving, feeling, and reflecting, as well as the visible manifestations of those feelings and perceptions. (Compare the sensuousness of Diane Ackerman’s Natural History of the Senses [the book] with the surprising aridity of its PBS-TV version.)
    Forget for a moment television, movies, stage plays, and virtual-reality devices. Why can hypertext narrative, for example, not do all that I’ve just been praising print for doing, since its medium remains (mainly) “written” words? Well, it can, to some extent, and the proponents of electronic fiction incline to declare further that their medium “sets us free from the domination of reader by writer, from the traditional concepts of beginning and middle and end, and of fixed, permanent texts”—from, in Coover’s own words, “the tyranny of the line,” not to mention the traditional concepts of copyright versus public domain. But what’s typically missing from e-fiction, precisely, are good old linearity and those traditional job-descriptions of Author and Reader, which at least some of us find to be not oppressive or tyrannical at all. On the contrary. 7
    It is in this connection that the aforementioned critic Sven Birkerts (in The Gutenberg Elegies , his lament for the passing of the Age of Print) speaks of “meditative space.” Interactivity can be fun; improvisation and collaboration can be fun; freedom is jolly. But there are dominations that one may freely enjoy without being at all masochistic, and among those, for many of us, is the willing, provisional, and temporary surrender of our noisy little egos to great artistry: a surrender which, so far from diminishing, quite enlarges us. As my Hopkins coachees pointed out, reading a splendid writer,
or even just a very entertaining writer, is not a particularly passive business. An accomplished artist is giving us his or her best shots, in what she or he regards as their most effective sequence—of words, of actions, of foreshadowings and plot-twists and insights and carefully prepared dramatic moments. It’s up to us to respond to those best shots with our minds and hearts and spirits and our accumulated experience of life and of art—and that’s interaction aplenty, for some of us, without our presuming to grab the steering wheel and diddle the driver’s itinerary. The kind of reading I’ve just described requires not only meditative space but, as Birkerts observes, a sense that the text before us is not a provisional version , up for grabs, the way texts in the cyberspace of a computer memory always are, but rather the author’s very best: what he or she is ready to be judged by for keeps.
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    THE UBIQUITOUS APOCALYPTICISM of the High Sixties turns out to have marked, in the aesthetic sphere, the wind-up not of printed literature or even of the novel, quite, but of High Modernism, for better or worse, as a “cultural dominant.” Here in America, the writers who perhaps commanded the most