Unless you are the late
John Leonard, the symphony-of-words book reviewer whose essays and reviews on
culture and the life of the mind appeared in literally every major publication
in the universe, your collection of reviews assembled in a book will probably gather
dust in the remainder bin. (To find such
a bin, you would first need to find a bricks and mortar book store). Thankfully, critic, novelist, translator and
essayist Tim Parks opted to address a particular theme in his latest book, Where I’m Reading From: The Changing World of Books (The New York
Review of Books, 2015) rather than collect his voluminous, challenging,
thoughtful reviews from the pages of the NYRB.
And the tome could not have arrived at a better time, seeing that a
number of articles have appeared in a variety of publications recently
bemoaning the loss of interest in long form journalism and essays. Everything now must be boiled down to a
Twitter post—as few characters as possible with points added for a clever
picture or meme.
In his own four
movement symphony, Parks breaks down the book world as it has come to be in the
second decade of the century. He begins,
aptly enough, with an examination of the world around the book, particularly,
how narrative speaks to the human condition.
For one, in this brave new world with all its blogs and Tweets and fifty
shades of grey, will anyone even pay to read what has been written with urgency
and importance? More to the point, will
writers still write if they are not paid, because that is exactly what’s
happening at the sites of news aggregators.
A writer these days should be honored
that an essay appears on the Huffington Post. Payment?
You must be joking. But you
cannot eat or clothe yourself when you are forced to give away your work. Worse, it would seem that the narcissistic promotion
involved in posting some self-proclaimed, brilliant thought makes everyone a
writer. Singlehandedly, the digital age
has devalued the well written essay, the long form piece, the wise novel, the
thoughtful critical review written by someone who has studied the art and recognizes
its place in the culture.
Parks observes that
there is a growing gap between academia and the common reader. Academics write for a selective audience of a
few people, couching their ideas in obtuse and needlessly jargonistic
lingo. Publishing for them is a means to
an end: secure a job and hopefully,
tenure. It does not matter how many of
their books are sold or if anyone outside of the rarified circles in which they
roam actually reads their work. The
writer on the street creates because he or she wants readers. And now, more than ever, the writer must love
the work because most often, there is very little money to be made from it. In our culture, information is shared freely,
and with the exception of an occasional pay wall or subscriber-only access,
most readers find what they need on the web and want it in as brief a dose as
possible. He concludes that “What seems
doomed to disappear, or at least to risk neglect, is the kind of work that
revels in the subtle nuances of its own language and literary culture, the kind
of writing that can savage or celebrate the way this or that linguistic group
really lives.” Of course, Parks is a
translator of literature as well as a reviewer and practitioner of the literary
arts so he is deeply sensitive to how the word travels through languages and
linguistic rhythms around the globe. And
he is correct: we have no patience for
the intricate story, the deeper essay.
We have too many other things to do like update our Facebook status.
One issue within this
discussion of readers that Parks addresses is the homogenization of languages—namely,
English is becoming the world’s voice.
He quotes David Crystal’s book, Language Death (Cambridge University Press, 2002) that “by 2100 between 50 and 90
percent of the world’s languages will have disappeared.” So we are not just losing readers and
writers; the entire paradigm of language and ideas is changing. Most people become readers because they have
been encouraged to do so as children.
The emphasis on books and writing is modeled by parents and those who
have books in the home and actively see their parents engaged with a text are
more likely to become readers themselves.
Yet, how many parents are actually encouraging this deeper engagement
with a novel or book of essays? Like
their children, given a free moment most people focus on their phones, reading
texts and Tweets and studying pictures, including the inane selfies. If it is true, as David Shields says in
quoting Montaigne that “Every man contains within himself the entire human condition,”
the kid who nearly ran into me in the mall while frantically tapping on his
phone demonstrates a bleak and distracted snapshot of the human condition.
Most days it seems
that our culture has descended into a morass of gossip and irrelevancy. Why is Donald Trump getting so much
publicity? Well, he is a blowhard who
will say anything and insult anyone to keep his ridiculous hair and blustery
face front and center in the media storm, and guess what? It works.
CNN cannot get enough of his antics giving him a nightly forum to spout
his ignorance. And America loves
it. We want the reality show. We want to elect him president. The press conferences, state of the union
addresses, the inaugurations, all will be vastly more interesting because the
whole country cannot wait to see what Trump says next. But there is no depth there. He is as insubstantial as his wispy comb-over. He trivializes American politics and American
culture. He insults hardworking
immigrants and women. However, he is a
symptom of a greater problem, a product of our own drunken narcissism, the cult
of us. With his wealth he can buy a seat
at the grown-ups’ table and run his mouth.
Gone are the days when we looked for something deeper. America never was a country that put
philosophers on television every night.
The closest we came to that was William F. Buckley, Gore Vidal, and
Norman Mailer. They had more meat on
their intellectual bones than Trump, but if we look closely, we can see the
resemblance and the lineage. Discourse
in America is screaming heads. It is not
a discussion; it is a verbal assault.
Parks relates these
ideas to the “chloroformed sanctuary,” the world of the academics who are more
interested in performing research tricks for a few of their peers than teaching
students to be deep readers and thinkers.
They kill everything they touch, including the love of literature and
inquiry, he tells us. So it is no wonder
that people have lost interest in sustained narratives, long form essays, or a
simple book review. If no one fosters
that need to read or emphasizes the importance of thought and critical analysis—not
parents, not teachers, not anyone—why would
there be a culture of reading?
The last third of the
book involves Parks’ thoughts on translation where he presents many astute
observations about how different novels and texts translate, or do not
translate, across cultures. Two examples
show us the irony of our world today. He
talks about Giacomo Leopardi’s great work, Zibaldone
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015), and how, if he were writing today, the
entire work would probably be broken up into a blog. On its own, who would pick up a 2,600-page
book of philosophy, history, theology, and literature. We would need it parceled out in 500-word
blog posts to garner a smidgen of interest from internet-surfing readers. Even then, its lasting impact on our culture
might be minimal at best. He writes that
he “translated Machiavelli’s The Prince
during the Iraq War. States invading
distant foreign countries with authoritarian governments, Machiavelli warned,
should think twice about disbanding the army and bureaucracy that opposed them,
since these institutions may offer the best opportunity of maintaining law and
order after the war is over.” Obviously,
those in power did not read their Machiavelli.
There is great wisdom
and insight embedded in all literature, but if we are not readers, it’s all
just blowing sand in the dust storm.
While we frantically tap out our Tweets and texts, and pose ourselves
with selfie stick extended for that killer shot at the mall, our sagging
intellects become ever more flaccid and impotent. Tim Parks makes the case that the world of
books has been warped into something very different in the social media age,
the digital me-revolution. He sounds the
alarm and bears witness to the fall while the pages, like those chased by the
figures on his book’s cover, blow away into the gusting wind of our own ignorance. The world is indeed changing, and not for the
better.