“Asked how technology is changing fiction, [Don DeLillo] speculated that novels would become ‘user-generated’, and wondered if the 'human need for narrative’ would be reduced. 'The world is becoming increasingly customised, altered to individual specifications. This shrinking context will necessarily change the language that people speak, write, and read,’ he said. 'Here’s a stray question (or a metaphysical leap): Will language have the same depth and richness in electronic form that it can reach on the printed page? Does the beauty and variability of our language depend to an important degree on the medium that carries the words? Does poetry need paper?’”
From DeLillo’s statement issued on receiving the PEN/Saul Bellow Prize yesterday, as reported by the The Guardian.
Few days pass, it seems, without a new report or commentary on the state of print and on the future of the electronic word. Some eulogize print while railing against the bytes that bleed the plasma of our mind. Some declare imminent victory for the electronic book, and necessarily see the novel in print as the illuminated manuscript of our future. Most often, they strike a fair and balanced tone, noting that, of course, we will enjoy a farrago of media, meaning that we will need to come to a more acute understanding of the contexts, content and qualities unique to print and electronic texts.
The day before I left London to move to Ankara, I took a brief excursion to the Victoria and Albert Museum, where I found myself spellbound by the medieval manuscripts on display, by the vibrancy of color, the idiosyncratic richness of the script, and the uncanny collusion of form and content.
These manuscripts helped me understand what Benjamin meant when he proposed his notion of ‘aura.’ (Maybe I never understood this concept as well as I’d convinced myself I had.) Between the content of the gospels and the beauty of the text, both contained within the V&A manuscripts, there was a “third” meaning that superseded both, while remaining elusive.
And yet. Soon after peering into the glass boxes containing the manuscripts, I wandered into a side-hall lined with computers containing educational programs designed to flesh out and clarify the manuscripts. The digital representations allowed me to range over the intricacies of the text and color, to zoom in and out according to the vagaries of my curiosity.
And I loved it. But maybe I was craven, and needed the comfort provided by losing the physical object’s property of evasive ambiguity. Maybe the permanence hinted at but only falsely achieved by the physical page is what this elusiveness was all about.
