Print is Dead: Books in Our Digital Age

Earlier this week, Doris Lessing delivered her acceptance speech for the 2007 Nobel Prize for fiction (though not in person; the speech was delivered by her publisher). The speech has now been published in its entirety online (you can read it here in four languages.) And while not as focused as some of the other great speeches that come to mind (such as Faulkner’s, with the rousing sign-off: “The poet’s voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail), Lessing makes some interesting comments.

Of course, she also makes a few curmudgeonly missteps. For instance, Lessing states that both writers and writing “do not come out of houses without books.” Lessing then goes on to relate the literary awakenings found in the speeches of past Nobel-prize winners:

I have been looking at the speeches by some of your recent prizewinners. Take the magnificent Pamuk. He said his father had 1,500 books. His talent did not come out of the air, he was connected with the great tradition.

Take V.S. Naipaul. He mentions that the Indian Vedas were close behind the memory of his family. His father encouraged him to write. And when he got to England by right he used the British Library. So he was close to the great tradition.

Let us take John Coetzee. He was not only close to the great tradition, he was the tradition: he taught literature in Cape Town. And how sorry I am that I was never in one of his classes: taught by that wonderfully brave bold mind.

In order to write, in order to make literature, there must be a close connection with libraries, books, the Tradition

And while it stands to reason that men and women who came of age during the period of what we may end up calling “Literature 1.0” will have a very print-based view of things, the “Tradition” as Lessing describes it is changing in real and profound ways. Indeed, she laments this in her speech, saying that we currently live in a “fragmenting” culture, and that “it is common for young men and women who have had years of education, to know nothing about the world, to have read nothing, knowing only some speciality or other, for instance, computers.”

Here Lessing makes a huge mistake; she makes it sound like people who spend time with computers are all just staring at nothing but circuits, wires and plastic. Instead, people spend their time using their computers to learn about a variety of topics (including, of course, books). And they’re not just learning; they’re also contributing, interacting, and participating (things that were hardly possible in the world of Lessing’s “Tradition”).

Instead, today’s Digital Natives are forging and creating their own traditions. Indeed, as James Joyce (a great writer who never had the chance to win a Nobel; my mind reels wondering what his acceptance speech would look like) wrote at the end of his Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, “I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.” The same way that Dedalus and countless others like him created their own worlds and works of art, so too will upcoming generations shatter and remake our age-old Traditions to fit their new world. And, one day — perhaps soon — both writers and writing will indeed come “out of houses without books.” But, I guarantee you, they won’t come out of houses without computers.