A Reader on Reading

It is unlikely that reading will lose, in the electronic revolution, its aristocratic qualities. In the blurred childhoods of the past, reading appears either as a duty destined to preserve certain notions of authority (as in the scriptoria of Mesopotamia and of the European Middle Ages) or as a leisure-class activity throughout our various histories, accorded to those with means or usurped by those without them. Most of our societies (by no means all) have assembled around a book, and for these the library became an essential symbol of power. Symbolically, the ancient world ends with the destruction of the Library of Alexandria; symbolically, the twentieth century ends with the rebuilding of the library of Sarajevo.

But the notion of true democratic reading is illusory. Andrew Carnegie’s nineteenth-century libraries were temples to his class, where the common readers were allowed to enter, mindful of their position, in veneration of established authority. Reading may bring some measure of social change, as Matthew Arnold believed, but it also can become a way of killing time or of slowing down time against the communality of death, arrogantly set against the monotonous cadence of time spent at work, “doing time” as it were in the countless illiterate sweatshops, mines, fields, and factories on which our societies are built.

What will certainly change is the idea of books as property. The notion of the book as an object of “pure value” (the expression belongs to Maurice Blanchot) because of its contents, its history, or its decorations has existed since the days of the scrolls, but it was not until the fourteenth century (in Europe at least) that the rise of a bourgeois audience, beyond the realms of the nobility and the clergy, created a market in which the possession of books became a mark of social standing and the production of books a profit-making business like any other. A whole modern industry arose to fill this commercial need, causing Doris Lessing to exhort her beleaguered fellow workers: “And it does no harm to repeat, as often as you can, ‘Without me the literary industry would not exist: the publishers, the agents, the sub-agents, the sub-sub-agents, the accountants, the libel lawyers, the departments of literature, the professors, the theses, the books of criticism, the reviewers, the book pages — all this vast and proliferating edifice is because of this small, patronized, put-down and underpaid person.’ ”

But in the days of the new technology, the industry (which will not disappear) will have to work otherwise in order to survive. Essays on the Internet, poems transmitted in blogs, books published electronically have begun to bypass editors and booksellers. Interactive novels question the very notion of authorship. Who will be paid royalties for a text scanned in Salamanca, received on e-mail in Recife, modified in Melbourne, expanded in Ecuador, saved on a key in San Francisco? Who in fact is the author of that multifarious text? Like the many contributors to the construction of a medieval cathedral or to the production of a Hollywood film, the new industry will find, no doubt, ways of securing a profit for someone, Church or multinational. And Doris Lessing’s small, underpaid person may have to resign herself to becoming even smaller and more underpaid.