Book critic Philip Marchand of the Toronto Star recently noted two important literary anniversaries in the year quickly escaping us.
One is the centenary of the June day in 1904 that James Joyce recorded in Ulysses. As this is a book that is as widely celebrated as unread, it's worth noting that it chronicles a Dublin day of one Leopold Bloom as he wanders the city and experiences its pubs and people, signs and billboards. The title in part implies that the decade of tribulations Homer's hero endured returning from Troy could be condensed into an average day of an average person at the dawn of the 20th century.
Marchand's other key anniversary was the 1704 publication of Jonathan Swift's A Tale of a Tub—also, although incidentally, with a connection to Dublin. Swift later became dean of the St. Patrick's Cathedral, and his tomb there is one of the capital's landmark tourist attractions. Swift was a caustic and bitter observer of human frailties, partly because life's letdowns included a dreary outpost on the River Liffey. A Tale of a Tub was written before this appointment, but it satirizes, among other things, the notion that you could capture all the world's knowledge in a book.
As Marchand points out, Swift's argument goes back to Socrates, whose relentless quizzing exposed his confident pupils' ignorance. The philosopher held that writing and books erroneously persuaded readers that they knew something. Anyone who has lost an electronic text to a hard-drive crash understands the difference between merely allowing words to pass through a processor and prudently "saving" them. Similarly, shelves full of books do not guarantee the owner's wisdom, even if he or she has read them all. Book-smart is not necessarily smart-smart.
Conflating these two points—modernity's information burden and mistaking data for sagacity—was Marchand's overture to a review of a book titled The Experts' Guide To 100 Things Everyone Should Know How To Do, which purports seriously to do what Swift promises satirically, to tell you everything worth knowing in a book. Marchand laments that he'd rather question a live person about tying a Windsor knot than follow written instructions.
It's a clever framing device for a witty review, and Marchand, whose column appeared in Arts Journal (artsjournal.com), is a gifted critic. But enlisting Joyce and Swift to dismiss a quick-hit paperback is like cruising a coastal two-lane to the world's second-largest ball of twine. You wish he'd taken that turnoff for the mountains. Well, toss your bag in the back and buckle up.
The issue here is memory, and again the computer analogy is apt. Memory is not only what we have stored in our brains, but that which is accessible and useable. It is also, somewhat in the sense of RAM, the crucial fuel of action: what we know and what we do with it. Writing was the first external storage device, and this was Socrates' problem with it. If you could record thought somewhere other than your brain, or—worse—keep others' thoughts stored, you were relieved of the necessity of thinking.
That is why the ancients, and most thinkers well past the time of Gutenberg's clever invention, so highly valued rhetoric—not merely the skill to speak well, but to cache, correlate and state ideas. This included the ability to recite from heart crucial texts of the culture, which is how Homer's wandering hero got most of the way from Troy to today. When texts were set down, a type of Darwinian selection tended the process. As Marchand notes, inscribing texts by hand was laborious work, insuring that only texts that mattered survived—many of them Judeo-Christian scripture, sure, but also pagan and secular texts.
It is silly to suggest that books have done more harm than good, of course. Still, there's little question that a lot of bushwa has found its way between book covers—Ann Coulter—that would have withered waiting for a monk with a quill. More to the point, moveable type accelerated the alienation of memory, although the process took several centuries.
Mass-produced books launched us down Mont Blanc, but the downhill destination of the Electronic Era appears to be Mind Blank. When Joyce collapsed a decade into a day, he reduced the epic deeds of Ulysses to the frequently bathetic experiences of Leopold Bloom, knight errant amid the welter of messages, printed and others, of the modern city. You have to wonder how a Joyce of coming decades would reflect on a day in 2004. Would his hero queue for a soymilk cappuccino while listening to a mobile-clutching Molly Bloom rhapsodize about her boob job? Perhaps he would pine for a day when people read books instead of compiling blogs.
The media blossom of the last few decades in sinister ways complemented contemporary educational strategy. No doubt "analytical skills" are required, but "memorization" had it uses, too. The word simply sounds evil these days, resonant with the knuckle-whack of rulers, but it encouraged at least the active exercise of memory. As each generation stores less and less in brains worked almost exclusively by external devices, it surrenders broad frontiers of interior life. Increasingly, we must be attached to something or someone else to certify our existence to ourselves.
Not surprisingly, both marketers and campaign managers prey on brains bred to be critical without perspective. The empty mind is ever aggrieved.
Chuck Twardy is a really smart guy who has written for several daily newspapers and for magazines such as Metropolis.