Print is Dead: Books in Our Digital Age

Slate recently had a retrospective of their ongoing discussion concerning the decision of Nabokov’s son in terms of whether or not he’s going to destroy his father’s final manuscript. It seems that the elder Nabokov wanted the book burned, but the younger Nabokov is considering publishing it instead. There’s a long history of this kind of thing; sometimes for the best, sometimes for the worst. After all, Kafka wanted his good friend Max Brod to burn all of his unpublished work after his premature death at the age of 40. Yet Brod went against the wishes of his friend, and to this date pretty much every scrap that Kafka ever wrote has been collected between covers (and, I would say, the world is better off because of it). And yet Hemingway’s legacy has been somewhat tarnished by all of the half-baked books that appeared after his death (Islands in the Stream, Garden of Eden, and even the relatively recent True at First Light), manuscripts that Hemingway never truly completed and which were sewn together after his death. However, whatever happens to the Nabokov book, his reputation will remain intact. But still, it’s an interesting question. Because, after all, whose manuscript is it anyway? The guy who wrote it or the person who now has possession of it? Which, in a way, is part of a bigger discussion of books in general. I mean, whose words are they anyway? Once the writer writes them, they’re free; certainly we’re then free to read them in whatever formant we choose. (Of course, we also have the freedom to not read them at all.) Whether that means in print, or on screen, or in funny voices or while hanging upside-down, the choice is up to us.