czytanie teksty

The Futurę of Reading

George Steiner

It is hardly necessary for me to cite all the evidence of the depressing State of literacy. These figures from the Department of Education are sufficient: 27 million Americans cannot read at all, and a further 35 million read at a level that is less than sufficient to survive in our society.

taneous conflicting input, but every common-sense hunch sug-gests we should be profoundly alarmed. This breach of eon-    ied and preserved. Private libraries may once again become as

centration, silence, solitude goes to the very~heart of our    notable and rare as they were when Erasmus and Montaigne

But my own worry today is less that of the overwhelm-ing problem of elemental literacy than it is of the slightly morę luxurious problem of the decline in the skills even of the middle-class reader, of his unwillingness to afford those spaces of silence, those luxuries of domesticity and time and concentration, that. surround the image of the classic act of reading. It has been suggested that almost 80 percent of America^ literate, educated teenagers can no longer read without an attendant noise (musie) in the background or a television screen flickering at the corner of their field of perception. We know very little about the cortex and how it deals with simul-

notion of literały; this new form of part-reading, of part-perception against background distraction, renders impossi-ble certain essential acts of apprehension and concentration, łet alone that most important tribute any human being can pay to a poem or a piece of prose he or she really loves, which is to learn it by heart. Not by brain, by heart; the ex-pression is vital.

Under these circumstances, the ąuestion of what futurę there is for the arts of reading is a real one. Ahead of us lie technical, psychic, and social transformations probably much morę dramatic than those brought about by Gutenberg. The Gutenberg revolution, as we now know it, took a long time; its effects are still being debated. The information revolution will touch every facet of composition, publication, distribution, and reading. Ńo one in the book industry can say with any confidence what will happen to' the book as we’ve known it.

It now looks as if the arts of reading will fali into three distinct categories. The first will continue to~6e the vast, amorohous mass of reading for distraction, for momentary en-;ertainment—the airport book. I suspect that this kind of read-ng will morę and morę involve not cheap paperbacks but ca-ole transmissions to home screens. You will select the book /ou wish, the speed at which you wish it to be presented on he screen, the speed at which you wish the pages to be umed. Some texts will be read to the viewer by a professional reader. Whether or not the text will appear on the screen as ii is being read is an open que$tion.

The second kind of reading will be for information— what De Quincey calfed “the literaturę of knowledge,” to dis-tinguish it from fiction, poetry, and drama, whięh he called “the literaturę of power.’’ The means to acquire the literaturę of knowledge—the micro Circuit, the Silicon chip, the lasei disc—will alter our habits beyond anything we can now con-ceive. “The Library of Babel,” the library of all possible li-braries that Borges imagined in his fable, will be literally and concretely accessible for personal and institutional use. We will be able to summon it up on a screen, and here the possi-bility of a basie change in the structures of attention and un-derstanding is almost incommensurable.

What about reading jn the old_t private-silent sense? This may become as specializerLa^skill and (ąvocation,4s it was in the scriptoria ahd Iibranes of monasteries during the so-called Dark Ages. We now know these were in fact key ages, radiant in their-patience, radiant in their sense of what had to be cop-were famous for theirs. The habit of fumishing a room, a large room, possibly, with sneives and filling them with books, not paperbacks but bound books, the attempt to collect the com-plete editions of an author (itself a very special concept) as well as the first editions, not necessarily the rare books of the Morgan Library but the first editions of a modem author, with the hope of owning everything by a writer—good, bad, or in-

3    different—whom one loves; the ability—above all, the wish— to attend to a demanding text, to master the grammar, the arts of memory, the tactics of repose and concentration that great books demand—these may once morę become the practices of, ^an elite, of a mandarinate of silence.

Such a mandarinate, such an elite of book men and book women, will not have the power, the political reach, or the prestige that it had during the Renaissance and the Enlighten-ment, and almost to the end of the Victorian age. That power

4    almost inevitably will belong ^ojhj^aliterate. It will belong to the^n u mer ateTI t will belong increasingly to those who, while

techmcally almost unable to read a serious book and mostly unwilling to do so, can in preadolescence produce software of great delicacy, logical power, and conceptual depth. The power relations are shifting to them, to men and women who, having freed themselves from the heavy burden of actual al-phabetic literacy and its constant referential habits, from the fact that almost all great literaturę refers to other great literaturę, are creators—nonreaders, but creators of a new kind.

Retuming home one night, Erasmus is said to have seen a tom piece of print besmirched in the mud. As he bent to pick it up, he uttered a ery of joy, overcome by the wonder of the book, by the sheer miracle of what lies behind picking up such a message. Today, in a vast traffic jam on a highway or in a Manhattan grid, we can insert a cassette of the Missa Solem-nis into a tape deck. We can, via paperbacks and soon cable television, demand, command, and compel the world’s great-est, most exigent, most tragic or delightful literaturę to be served up for us, packaged and cellophaned for immediacy. These are great luxuries. But it is not certain that they really help the constant, renewed miracle that is the encounter with a book.