Print is Dead: Books in Our Digital Age

Via MJ Rose’s blog, today I found what seems to be the third part of a four-part conversation with Corrections author Jonathan Franzen. After making what seems to me some terribly shaky reasoning when it comes to publishing work about the lives of his friends and family (Franzen says that it hurts them less to read about themselves in print than it would hurt him not to write the material; WTF?), he then goes on give his “assessment of online reading,” which Franzen acknowledges is “harsh”:

Kafka is about as substantive as a writer can be, and it may be an interesting exercise to spell out the text of “Before the Law” in skywriting over Miami Beach, but I don’t think it will satisfy readers who care about Kafka’s substance. Part of the magic of literature resides in the making of the indelible mark — in our belief in its indelibility. Serious readers are able to invest even the crappiest, most beat-up paperback with a kind of magical permanence. To read Virginia Woolf on a little plastic screen that five seconds ago was filled with Ann Coulter is to undermine one of the basic conditions of literary reading. It’s to make all texts more or less equal and equally provisional. I admit that I may be particularly resistant to reading on a screen because I use a computer to write. When I see words are floating on a screen, I assume they’re still subject to revision. And it’s not that I assume they’re bad — I’m sure there’s plenty of interesting stuff getting published online. It’s more like the difference between fluorescence and a candle. Nothing you can do to a fluorescent fixture can make me want to have a romantic dinner by its light. Writing on the Web is at its best when it’s quick and spontaneous and in process. If there’s great fiction getting published online, I look forward to seeing it in print someday soon.

For me, Franzen basically undermines his own theory, because if “serious readers are able to invest even the crappiest, most beat-up paperback with a kind of magical permanence,” then why can’t serious readers do the same thing with a computer screen? And if they indeed can’t, all it shows is their prejudice for paper over plastic. Which is a shame since — as more and more important work begins to appear online — more and more “serious readers” are going to seriously limit themselves.

Also, for Franzen to use the example of Kafka (in terms of being a writer who must be read in print) is a poor choice. I actually think the writer of The Metamorphosis would find a certain kind of symmetry (if not downright poetry) in the fact that words he wrote on paper have been transformed to fit on a computer screen. Not to mention that the only place Kafka wanted his work to appear was a fireplace (he asked that upon his death his friend Max Brod destroy all of his work, a plea that Brod obviously ignored). So any talk of Kafka having to appear in book format goes against the wishes of the author himself.

Anyway, arguing about Virginia Woolf and Kafka is one thing, but we also need to focus on the new kinds of writing that will be created with computers, websites, blogs and RSS forming an integral part. And of course the bottom-line is that no one’s going to be forced to go digital, no more than stormtroopers are going to storm, or troop, into Franzen’s apartment and make him have romantic dinners by LED rather than candles. However, if he chooses to continue to ignore online writing, or just wait for everything to appear in print, he’s going to miss out on a lot.