Papyrus
Infinite Jest is a big book. I took it with me on a vacation to Florida three years ago. It was the only thing in my messenger bag besides my inhaler, because there was no space for anything else. I knew I wouldn’t read during the Disney World portion of our trip, but the second half of the excursion consisted of sitting-reclining-lounging in-around-nearby a beach house on a modest land formation that is geographically referred to as an island, though nothing like Hawaii or any of those other celebrated islands. Rather, it resembles a diminutive, sandy landing strip, connected to the hardly-idyllic Florida peninsula by a two-lane blue bridge with a sign that reads “Water Warning”, which, translated, means: You thought you got a good deal renting one of these superb shacks during hurricane season, but now you’re going to die here on this lost coastline.
I didn’t read Infinite Jest on the plane – whether I feared breaking the tray table with its fierce weight or appearing pretentious due to its tremendous gravity, I do not know. (But I do know: it’s because I was and still am afraid that I am not good enough to read it.) Still, during my layover at Dallas Fort Worth airport, I imagined that the DFWs painted on the doors and shuttles and bathroom stalls were hints that David Foster Wallace was still alive if only I’d open the damn blue book and converse with his words and fight off loneliness: all alone, together with him.
I read a few times while supine on the beach, but gradually it seemed much easier to simply be supine on the beach and do Nothing At All.
Two years later I tried to read Infinite Jest again. I bumbled through the same opening scenes, but my distracted thoughts murmured about fractal structure and Sierpinski gaskets and that inspirational introduction by Dave Eggers where he says the language used by David Foster Wallace isn’t really difficult at all which has the opposite effect that I suppose Dave Eggers intended, because every time I shamefully touch my thumb on the Kindle screen to look up a word I’m imagining Dave Eggers breezing through the damn book while also teaching kids how to write in a pirate-themed tutoring center, which makes it really hard to hate the guy for telling me that this would be easy.
At which point I start to think about Jonathan Franzen’s essay “Mr. Difficult”, in which he discusses Contract versus Status novels, the general conclusion of which duel is that Status sucks. Status writers, he says, take it that
the best novels are great works of art, the people who manage to write them deserve extraordinary credit, and if the average reader rejects the work it’s because the average reader is a philistine.
Contract writers, on the other hand, think that
a novel represents a compact between the writer and the reader, with the writer providing words out of which the reader creates a pleasurable experience. Writing thus entails a balancing of self-expression and communication within a group, whether the group consists of “Finnegans Wake” enthusiasts or fans of Barbara Cartland.
The strangest thing about Franzen’s divison (which, it must be said, is specious) is that the two groups are not against one another as he supposes. Rather it is clear that Status novels are Contract novels with a different contract, than, say, a romance Contract novel. Where a romance contract would grant the undersigned certain tropes and certain subversions of aforementioned tropes, a Status contract grants the contractee a period of indentured reading in a certain fictionalized something-like-a-universe shaped by words of varying lengths and interesting cadences and probably characters who do things or at least talk about doing things in a way that is realistic or perhaps odd.
You eat tomatoes, I read literary fiction. What’s the big deal? We’re all cultural relativists, right? But you don’t have to be if you don’t wanna be dude, that’s cool too. Just leave us alone.
Well, for me the big deal is that Franzen has the biggest megaphone in contemporary American literature and he often speaks too broadly with his mouth on it. And his novels tend to do the same. The Corrections had excellent characters who Franzen weakened by forcing them to wear capitalized words-turned-themes like Family and The Midwest and Old Age and What Is Overmedication Doing To Our Society?
Freedom is a novel in which Franzen embodies a number of different characters and has sex with himself in several banal positions, during which he thinks (out loud, to the “Contract” reader’s dismay) about Overpopulation and Songbirds and Loud Music and Television. For Franzen, the novel too often seems to be a vessel that lugs around Messages in a Convenient and Entertaining form.
Franzen’s appraisal of the purpose of the novel, on my view, has too much cost-benefit analysis, too much frisking of the common denominator, too much “agenda” in that negative way that politicians have an agenda, and very little novel insight into the way that a novel tells us something about us. And not us-listening-to-Bright-Eyes-and-tweeting-and-contributing-to-global-warming, but us-here-I-am-what-now?
Which is why I was surprised that Franzen, host of This American Zeitgeist, opposes e-books because they are allegedly impermanent.
Maybe nobody will care about printed books 50 years from now, but I do. When I read a book, I’m handling a specific object in a specific time and place. The fact that when I take the book off the shelf it still says the same thing – that’s reassuring.
I think, for serious readers, a sense of permanence has always been part of the experience. Everything else in your life is fluid, but here is this text that doesn’t change.
I’m not sure exactly what voodoo Jonathan Franzen believes is living inside my Kindle, but I assure all desperate seekers of permanence that my experience with reading novels on the Kindle has never involved spontaneous transmutations of words on the “page”. In fact, one might argue that it’s much easier to alter a physical book than an electronic one – coffee stains, missing pages, strange notes (like the book I found in which the previous owner underlined vicious passages and wrote in the margins: “FUCK YOU DAD!”).
But if I’m being charitable, I take it that Franzen is talking about some kind of psuedo-permanence that he associates with a physical object: it’s not really eternal, but it’s like my friend Aidan’s description of footprints on the rug that say we were here. A cave painting. Yet I don’t think that physical books are tarnished by electronic books to the extent that Franzen presumes. I recently read Middlemarch on my Kindle and, even as I flipped pages by tapping a screen, I had a distinct sense of the unvarying text, ageless characters, and timeless insights.
Franzen is right to say that the act of reading contrasts the you-can’t-step-in-the-same-river-onceness of usual experience. He’s wrong to think that a change of medium undermines the act of reading. Franzen would see the transition from paperback to e-book as analogous to the transition from film cameras to digital cameras: it changes the way we produce and view pictures. On the other hand, I think the movement is more similar to the transition from VHS to DVD: films aren’t made any differently as a result, nor do we experience the finished product in a different way – the only notable change is convenience. And this is nice, because Infinite Jest is a big book.
Certainly there are ways in which electronic books can be created in a way that is unsuited to actually reading. A good indication is marketing language that promises to “enhance” the reading experience. Example: the application Booktrack promises a “new and engaging way to read” that plays music and sound effects while you read, which supposedly “brings another level of energy and engagement to e-reading”. That sounds horrible.
But that isn’t what happens on my Kindle. Instead, what happens is this: I take it out of my bag and turn it on (I know, I know, books don’t have power switches, and and and Kindles don’t smell like books and what about bookshelves?!) and I read the text on the screen. I forget what device I’m holding, just like a paperback pageturner forgets while reading that the cookies are burning and the person listening to a poem forgets that breath carries sound and the film viewer forgets that it’s just light on the screen and the guy who first sees his niece on Skype has no idea where she is – is she here on this screen? or there? how is this possible? – but only knows that she is, thank God that she is.