Interview with Paul Socken, Editor of “Why Read Literature in the Digital Age?"

Anyone who cares about literature and the act of reading should read the collection of essays, The Edge of the Precipice Why Read Literature in the Digital Age? The book’s contributions run the gamut from distress to sangfroid about the future of reading, culture and the development of the individual intellect in the age of the Internet. Paul Socken is the editor of this collection, and I asked him some questions about the book’s impact on the future of reading.

Thank you for agreeing to this interview, Paul. First of all, would you please tell us the origins of the phrase, “The Edge of the Precipice" and why you chose it as part of the title of your book?

The edge of the precipice is a phrase taken from a short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald in which he invites the reader to join him at “the edge of the precipice" where he will read him a story.

Why the edge of the precipice? Presumably, as I suggest in my introduction, because the literary exercise is at once exhilarating, full of adventure and the possibility of viewing new perspectives and vistas, but also dangerous in that one may see the world and life differently and be challenged in one’s fundamental thoughts and beliefs. I think the phrase powerfully sums up the excitement and opportunity that literature affords.

How did you go about choosing your contributors?

I knew some people personally whom I knew would be interested and would write beautifully on the topic. For others, I consulted what was then a new publication from Oxford on the history of publishing. I found extraordinary essays there and invited some of the contributors to join this project. My goal was to assemble a group of people with different kinds of experience from all over the world — academics, editors, writers, philosophers, archivists and librarians – who would provide a broad range of opinion. I asked them for personal essays based on their experience, not an academic treatise, about the importance of reading in the 21^st century’s digital age.

I found the essay, “Why I Read War and Peace on a Kindle (and Bought the Book When I Was Done)" by Michael Austin quite fascinating because I have “absorbed" War and Peace but never “read" it. I listened to it around 20 years ago on cassette tapes from the Books On Tape. As I recall, there were 44 or so tapes. I listened to the book over perhaps a year. What I found fascinating in Austin’s account is that after he read the novel on his Kindle he felt compelled to buy a paper copy of the book as a tangible token of both the pleasure he had found in reading it and of his sense of accomplishment in having tackled one of the monuments of literature.

Austin says, “…the two most endangered aspects of what we now call “reading" are solitude and concentration." But don’t Kindles and other e-readers plunge people into those very things just as much as print books do? Certainly, the passengers I have sat next to on airplanes seem just as absorbed in their Kindles as I am with my print magazine. Good writing is good writing isn’t it? Is the mode via which we read it all that important?

I was very taken with Austin’s piece because it seems to bridge two generations. He fully acknowledges the usefulness and inevitability of the digital book and at the same time needed to have a physical copy. It’s almost as if the book didn’t really exist, as if his relationship with that particular work weren’t real, if he didn’t “possess" it as a book as well. I fully understand that mentality because I share it and I think a lot of readers will, as well. We don’t go from one technology to another, leaving the first behind. There is a transition and often both survive. TV didn’t replace movies or even radio. Austin’s point, I think, is well taken.

You ask if Kindles don’t plunge readers into the same things as print books do. Kindle, perhaps, because it’s an e-reader. It’s basically a digital book. However, Kindle Fire and other such devices aren’t. They give the reader, already seeing everything in a multiple screen universe, a lot of opportunity to be distracted, whereas serious reading requires uninterrupted time, concentration, and depth of thinking. That’s the concern of many of my contributors, and I share that feeling.

In his essay, “Reading in a Digital Age: Notes on Why the Novel and the Internet Are Opposites, and Why the Latter Both Undermines the Former and Makes It More Necessary" Sven Birkerts echoes Austin’s concerns that we are losing the ability to concentrate. Birkerts writes, “Concentration is no longer a given; it has to be strategized, fought for." But I kept wondering if there was not something rather alarmist and self-indulgent in the concern of both men about what they seem to regard as the effrontery of the 21st century to intrude into their own neuro make-ups. Haven’t we heard all this before? Every new medium is predicted to presage the downfall of civilization. But this time, the doomsayers are glomming onto neuroscience to support their position that pretty soon we will all become stimuli-seeking airheads. Do you agree with Austin and Birkerts that the neurocircuitry of humankind is being fundamentally altered to the detriment of our collective capacity for contemplation? Couldn’t it be the case that we are simply evolving away from a single track focus on overly long narratives of little relevance to our own time?

You ask about Birkerts’s and Austin’s alarmist tone, as if the digital age presaged the end of civilisation. As writers, they are writing from a place of deep concern, but I don’t read them as overreacting. They are questioning the direction we are going and raising legitimate issues. As for the brain and its neurons, I have no idea and I doubt anyone writing on that topic really knows much about it either. What I do know from my teaching at the university level for 37 years is that there was a marked difference over time in the ability of the student to concentrate and to cope with the same amount of material that had previously been considered normal. My observations are echoed by many colleagues in different disciplines and constituted one of the reasons for my thinking of putting this collection together.

In his contribution to the book, “Solitary Reading in an Age of Compulsory Sharing" Drew Nelles writes, “Facebook is altering the way we read, and the way we share what we read." Do you agree with that?

I am a generation older than Nelles, so when I read this passage from his essay, “Do you want all your reading to be mediated by so few corporations?" I thought, “No—and it is not." I was born in 1963 and grew up in a time when big media dominated America far more than they do today. We got our news from a handful of networks. There are far more voices on the media landscape now. Corporations have been part of the North American cultural landscape for a good century or more. Do you agree are with Nelles here, “By forcing you to socialize your online life, these tech giants also force you to as unpaid ambassadors for their services." But who is really being forced—and one big company can help average people beard another, as some corporations have learned with bad PR days on Twitter. Is there really so much compulsory sharing?

You make a good point when you challenge Nelles and point out that we have many voices today rather than a few networks, for example, dominating the airwaves. However, although there is a great deal of information from different sources, many of those sources are themselves giant corporate empires with far more intrusive power than has ever been the case in the past, whether that power is obvious or not. Like the other writers in the collection, Nelles is forcefully presenting a legitimate point of view for the thoughtful reader to consider.

I admire many of the contributors to the book for their willingness to straightforwardly argue for the value of the book as a printed medium. But still I wondered … For example, in his essay, “Physical and Philosophical Approaches A World without Books?" Vincent Giroud says, “…for anything one reads—and you don’t read a dictionary unless you happen to be one of its editors—books remain irreplaceable." Anything? What about the growing number of digital humanities projects that have never been in printed form? And do we really get anything less out of huge editions of correspondence of Victorian political or literary figures by reading them online rather than in unwieldy printed volumes (if you could afford them or happen to live near and have privileges are a large academic library)?

You’re right, of course, that digital humanities projects are wonderful contributions to our culture and that reading Victorian literature or poetry online can be greatly moving experiences. But I thought that, of all the contributors, Giroud, as former curator of rare manuscripts at Yale, was especially well qualified to write about the special place of printed books in the history of scholarship. His long, professional history with the editions of printed works was a revelation to me. I had not before thought of the importance of first, second, third and fourth editions in quite that way before. I realized the importance of the original texts and the loss incurred by going completely digital by reading his essay and thought of it as one of the highlights of the volume.

Like Michael Austin and Vincent Giroud, Alberto Manguel seems very pro-printed book as opposed to digital text. In his essay, “The End of Reading," Manguel says, “Context, material support, the physical history and experience of a text are part of the text, as much as its vocabulary and its music. In the most literal sense, matter is not immaterial." But again, aren’t these men arguing for connoisseurship not necessarily a love of literature per se? Can’t I just listen to a volunteer-read version of James’ The Golden Bowl courtesy of LibriVox, benefit from James’ prose read competently enough and go on to the next audio book? Do I need to caress and collect pricey texts? Does a love of “literature" ever slide into snobbish consumerism?

I don’t think that Alberto Manguel is suggesting that literature can be appreciated in only one way, what you call “snobbish consumerism," but he does take a highly personal approach which reflects his own experience. His contribution is included in a part of the book titled “Poetic Readings," readings that are individualistic and deeply personal.

He has some reflections that are gems, such as “We know that every book holds within it all its possible readings, past present and future…" and his comment on reading Cervantes is striking: “…my own Don Quixotes, the ones that correspond to each of my several readings, the ones invented by my memory and edited by my oblivion, can find a place only in the library of the mind". I wanted good arguments in the book but can never resist meaningful and beautifully expressed insights, and I think Alberto Manguel is one of the masters.

In sharp contrast to the fierce devotion to the printed book of Austin, Giroud, and Manguel is the jaunty pragmatism on display in “Fragments from an Entirely Subjective Story of Reading," by Lori Saint-Martin, who says, “Books are heavy and cumbersome, their content is fixed, they cannot be updated. So, online encyclopedia, dictionaries, works of reference in general. Still books, but in another format." Later in her essay she says, “…an incompatibility between literature and a digital age? I don’t see it. Why choose?" She doesn’t seem at all worried by the dire prognostications of some in neuroscience of imminent global cognitive catastrophe. Where do you fall, Paul, on this spectrum among your contributors?

After your comments on Lori Saint-Martin’s wonderful contribution, you ask where I stand on the spectrum of printed book versus digital universe. I would say that I agree largely with Lori. As I mentioned earlier, I have grave concerns about the possible losses in shifting to the digital world. My contributors excellently outline those – not having a variety of editions as well as fragmented concentration and other issues. However, the one will not entirely erase the other. As long as we have both, then we will have the two worlds interacting and readers will have some choice and some decisions to make. They may be like Austin who wants to read on his Kindle and buy the printed book or like Saint-Martin who is entirely unconcerned by the format.  They may be like Katia Grubisic who dismisses e-books as inferior to the “real thing." The digital world is here and we must deal with it. I just want readers and the general public to be aware of the benefits and the problems.

The book seems to sometimes to equate “literature" with “pre-1950 novel almost certainly written by a white male." Am I mischaracterizing things there? Poetry does make appearances in the book, but most of the poets quoted or referred to are male.

You point out that there is little discussion of poetry and that much of the literature mentioned is the pre-1950s novel. That’s true. I didn’t have any preconceived notions once I chose my contributors and established the general parameters. Perhaps I should have asked them to think about poetry or contemporary works, but I didn’t.

Whom do you see as the ideal reader of this book? Do you hope that technologists will be one of its main audiences? Would you want Jeff Bezos to read it? People with the authority to allocate money to humanities departments (e.g., university administrators)?

I hope the book will find readers well beyond the academy. I conceived of this as a book for the general public. I wanted to start a discussion about the role of literature in a society that is clearly concerned about jobs and advocating for immediate, concrete, results-oriented education. My conviction throughout my career was that I was providing my students, by teaching them language and literature, important tools to assist them as educated citizens and that would be ultimately useful to them in whatever work they would undertake.

Finally, given that part of your title comes from F. Scott Fitzgerald, how do you think he (who was quite a celebrity in his early years) might have fared in our celebrity-obsessed culture? He didn’t seem to have liked the kind of solitude so many of your contributors (e.g., Nelles) laud and yet he did fairly well in the great literature production department. Who among contemporary writers would you say is destined to rank as a literary giant or is the age of giants no more?

As you mention, we live in a celebrity culture. It was wonderful to see the reaction to Alice Munro winning the Nobel Prize for literature. To me, it meant that celebrity isn’t limited to sports figures and movie and television stars. The coverage she has received and the letters to the editors to all the newspapers are testimonials to the importance of literature in our supposedly utilitarian and pragmatic society.

As a final comment, I would point out to the readers of Critical Margins that there are other contributors to this volume whose essays are illuminating and thought-provoking. I refer to Leonard Rosmarin for his entertaining personal experience, Mark Kingwell’s philosophical approach, J. Hillis Miller’s paean to poetry, Keith Oatley’s psychological reading, Ekaterina Rogatchevskaia of the British Library and South Africa’s Gerhard van der Linde for a global perspective.

Thank you for your time.

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