Let's save literature from the literati

Despite more gloom and doom on the Op-Ed pages, books have not been killed off by the "visual culture."

By Charles Taylor

Jul 14, 2004 | Isn't it about time the literati stopped blaming their troubles on them newfangled movin' pitchers? OK, so Andrew Solomon's opinion piece in last Saturday's New York Times, "The Closing of the American Book," is targeted at television and the Internet. It amounts to the same thing. In her book "Terrible Honesty" Ann Douglas wrote about how the advent of movies fostered the mistaken assumption that society was about to become divided between literacy and illiteracy. The real contrast, Douglas writes, is between different models of literacy.

Solomon, the author of a much-praised study of depression, "The Noonday Demon," is writing in response to a recent poll that showed reading for pleasure is down among Americans of every race, age, gender and economic class. He's concerned and depressed about that, and he should be. It is depressing, as Solomon notes, that we have one of the most literate societies in history but a decreasing number of readers.

What's wrong with his piece, and with almost every other literary attack on visual culture, is the inability to understand that there is such a thing as visual literacy, and the assumption that reading is a mentally active experience and looking a passive one.

The surface absurdity of that opposition is easy to expose. Anyone who thinks that reading cannot be passive should attempt any paragraph written by James Fenimore Cooper. Anyone who thinks looking cannot be active should, to paraphrase a line from "The Dick Van Dyke Show," try sleeping through "The Guns of Navarone." Those are smartass examples, but the point is that our level of engagement depends on both the quality of what we are reading or watching and what we choose to bring to it. You no more plop down in front of Jean-Luc Godard's "La Chinoise" than you just pick up "Ulysses." Reading can be the cheapest pulp as easily as the greatest literature, and the latter can be a washout if we choose to be lazy when we're reading it. Looking can be "The Rules of the Game" or "The Ghost and Mr. Chicken." It doesn't even have to divide along a high-low split (usually a false division anyway). Someone who lazily watches the "good television" that even Solomon acknowledges is going to be baffled by a lot of pop culture. Try to follow the labyrinthine plot of "Alias" or "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" without paying attention.

Solomon is right that an infobyte culture leads to an infobyte attention span. And since journalism of one sort of another is the reading most Americans are exposed to, it has to take some blame for degrading reading. (If the news can be done so scantily and tidily, what chance does literature stand?) Solomon is also not wrong when he suggests that electronic media can have a soporific effect. (An hour spent reading or browsing online leaves me logy in a way that several hours of reading magazines or a book does not.)

But Solomon contradicts himself when it comes to the visual. He notes that "people who read for pleasure are many times more likely than those who don't to visit museums," but laments that "the electronic media, on the other hand, tend to be torpid." Let me get this straight -- some looking is just fine, provided it's done in a museum, but the visual media encourage passivity. What, would Solomon contend, is the difference then between someone looking at a Picasso reproduced in an art monograph or called up online?

And isn't reading a visual experience? The eye has to recognize the patterns formed by visual hieroglyphs in order to make sense of them. As Douglas points out, words "exist nowhere save in our minds and in books." What visual culture shows us, she contends, are concrete things that exist in the world and can be recognized without words. So which, based on those descriptions, denotes a more insular experience? "The retreat from civic to virtual life is a retreat from engaged democracy," Solomon writes. Tell it to the folks at MoveOn, or the ones at Free Republic, for that matter.

Next Page: "Without books, we cannot succeed in our great struggle against terrorism." Um, where did the terrorists get their ideas?

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