The Future of Literature

and the Literature of the Future

       At a symposium on the subject above, held at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1976, I seem actually to have spoken to the topic, perhaps for mere relief.

       To speculate about the literature of the future, what it might be like, is to beg at least two much larger questions. Let's do it, breathtaking as those twin presumptions are: namely, that the future will contain, in some no doubt attenuated form, that we have got used to calling Western Civilization; and that in that civilization the survivors will continue to produce and consume something like what we have got used to thinking of as literature.

       Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren's textbook definition of literature will do: "the artistic rendering of human experience into words." I shall qualify it with the adjective written words, to distinguish what I imagine to be our subject from, on the one hand, stage plays, operas, films, television dramas, and laser holography or whatever gets invented next, and on the other hand from the oral tradition out of which written literature springs and toward which, in a modest way, it has been inclining since the 1960s, when live readings became more popular than they'd been since the nineteenth century and some of us began to explore the possibilities of electronic tape as a medium for fiction and poetry.

       I am no prophet. Furthermore, I'm not very interested in prophesying the future of the arts: a category of speculation wherein -- unlike energy development or international relations -- the consequences of erroneous prediction approach zero. On the Baltimore Beltway, between Exit 19 and Exit 20, there is another exit sign very plainly marked FUTURE; but if you spend your time looking for the ramp, you just go around and around Baltimore instead of getting where you want to go. My profession is the opposite of soothsaying: A writer of fiction spends his time making up stories attractive enough to induce people to spend their time reading what he writes precisely despite the presumption that it's all made up in his head. That is a mystery I only half understand, though my living depends upon it.

       There is a historical connection between prophesy and poetry. Between prophesy and prose fiction, that connection gets debased (some would say elevated) into "science fiction": fiction about the future, which of course is no more the same thing as the fiction of the future than science fiction is the same as scientific fiction. I shall not concern myself here with science fiction.

       For what one storyteller's opinion is worth, I'll hazard ayes, at least a probably, to both of our great presumptions aforementioned. As to the first: I am not particularly optimistic about the rest of this century and the next one, to look no farther, but I'm not quite apocalyptic about them, either. The only view of history that squares with my experience, education, and intuitions is the tragic view; I see no reason not to extend it to the future as well. Elizabeth Bishop has called ours "the most dreadful human century," and perhaps she's right: To think about what we've done to our planet and to one another in the last seventy-five years is almost unbearable. But the nineteenth century was a horror show, too: the butchery of the Napoleonic wars, the butchery of imperial colonialization. And consider the centuries before that: catastrophic, every one of them. I try to believe Jacob Bronowski's affirmation (in his television series The Ascent of Man) that humankind is in fact ascending despite Dachau and Auschwitz and the "Gulag archipelago"; I guess I finally do believe it, if only because I'm a healthy, moderately successful white American with a color TV set and enough leisure to watch The Ascent of Man. But oh, my: Capitalism really does seem to be ruinously exploitative and inherently self-destructive; large-scale socialism is dreary, bureaucratic, inefficient, stifling; anarchy is impossible; everything else is repressive and authoritarian at best, totalitarian at worst, and especially noxious for artists and intellectuals. I fear that we're in for catastrophic nuclear accidents before the century's done; maybe even at least limited thermonuclear wars, heaven forfend. Surely cataclysms of overpopulation, inadequate food production and distribution, and insufficient energy lie down the road for our children if not ourselves to suffer. We may be ascending, but the cost is immeasurable and the ascent so gradual that we'll need all the Bronowskis we can find to assure the survivors that they're going up at all. That's what I mean by the tragic view.

       Compared to the first, the second presumption seems insignificant, though for some of us it would be a necessary condition of civilization that it have a written literature. Literature will no doubt be indispensable as long as language is indispensable, and written literature is important, if not necessary, exactly for its peculiar limitations, which people like Marshall McLuhan made so much of in the 1960s. These limitations (I'm going to call them virtues, but characteristics is a more accurate term than either) can be summed up in four adjectives: written literature is semiotic, anesthetic, linear, and solitary. I shall now speak to these adjectives one at a time, in reverse order.

       First, solitary. Literature is the only art I can think of that is normally both produced and consumed, or received, by individuals as individuals. Its audience is one person at a time even when everybody on the beach is reading Jaws or Ragtime (they're not at all at the same word at the same moment; even if by extraordinary coincidence they were, their experience wouldn't be communal as the experience of a concert or even a symposium is). Reading is as private as thinking or dreaming, exactly; one imagines that it will be valued (and permitted) as long as private thinking and dreaming are valued and permitted.

       As to literature's linearity -- the literal lines of print on the page and the normal one-word-at-a-timeness of language -- some of us believe, Dr. McLuhan to the contrary notwithstanding, that to be linear, even continuous, is not necessarily to be wicked. While many important aspects of experience are no doubt "gestaltic," discontinuous, or otherwise nonlinear, many other aspects are in fact linear and more or less continuous. Other media may deal more effectively than writing with the nonlinear and the discontinuous, but it may be that writing is uniquely suited to deal with the linear and the continuous aspects of human experience. To be less than absolute is not to be obsolete; to be unable to do everything is not to be unable to do anything. And in fact we writers can even suggest, in our linear and continuous way, the experience of nonlinearity and discontinuity. Such suggestion was part of the program of literary modernism. But it is only a suggestion, just as a statement about the sea, or a metaphor for the sea, or for that matter the mere word sea, is a different thing from the sea itself.

       Solitary, linear, anesthetic. When I say that literature is anesthetic, I don't mean that it numbs sensation or puts us to sleep, though either of the two novels I mentioned a while back might have that effect upon readers who enjoyed the other. What I mean is that written literature, remarkably, is the only one of the arts that appeals directly to none of the physical senses, though it may appeal indirectly to all of them. One needs the faculty of sight to read the print, or the faculty of touch if you're reading in Braille, and there is a very real but incidental pleasure (ever rarer) in reading well designed and well manufactured books. But except for the few poets and fewer fiction-writers who deploy typography, layout, and other graphic effects as an essential part of their sense, the visual and tactile aspects of reading aren't central to the experience of the literary text. Obviously that's not the case with oral literature: One would have enjoyed hearing Dylan Thomas read the alphabet (some good declaimers have done it, as a stunt); the man in charge of the Library of Congress program of recordings for the blind tells me that his clients don't ask "What else do you have written by James Joyce?" but "What else do you have narrated by Alexander Scourby?" Nobody ever asked a bookseller what else he had by Alfred A. Knopf in Janson or Caslon typefaces.

       Written literature, most especially prose fiction, is ineluctably anesthetic because it is essentially semiotic. It transpires in the mind. It can't deal directly with qualities, sensations, emotions, actions, things; it can't even deal directly, as theater can, with imitations of actions and emotions. It can deal only with their signs, their names: pain, blue, courage, Venezuela, walking around, once upon a time. Writers who are also philosophers, like William H. Gass, have explored the metaphysical implications of this state of affairs. As a professional writer who is only an interested amateur of metaphysics, indeed of reality, I find the chief implication to be that written literature can deal most appropriately -- at least more effectively than any other art -- with just those aspects of our experience that are at some remove from direct sensation: not only the whole silent life of the mind -- cognition, reflection, speculation, recollection, calculation, and the rest -- but even the registration of sensation, so to speak: what perception is like.

       That's the famous fact about metaphor, of course, a main property of language and mainly a property of literature (nonverbal metaphors, like the ones film makers sometimes attempt, seem to me to be metaphors for metaphors): to call the sea "wine-dark" and the dawn "rosy-fingered" is to say something about the sea and the dawn (and about wine, roses, and fingers) that can't really be photographed, just as photographs and paintings show us things that can't finally be said. As long as the private, verbal registration of experience has a future -- and, just as important, the registration of verbal experience, the experience of language, which can take us beyond the possibilities of reality -- literature has a future.

       "Sun so hot I froze to death; Susanna don't you cry." " 'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves / Did gyre and gimble on the wabe. / All mimsy were the borogoves, / And the mome raths outgrabe." Try making a movie out of those.

       I have now said more than I had thought I had to say, in the general way, about the future of literature. I have a few other opinions about the short-range future of my particular branch of literature -- long and short prose fictions -- but they'll keep till some future conversation.

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