To begin with a wild assertion: Our current glut of apocalypses — arriving via climate catastrophe or nuclear war or aliens or plague or zombies or vampires (I’m thinking of Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven, Colson Whitehead’s Zone One, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, not to mention films ranging from Independence Day to The Day After Tomorrow) — comes in response to the collective cravings of a global audience that has taken a good long look at the modern world and grumbled something along the lines of, “Oh, well, just screw it.”
Changing the Subject
By Sven Birkerts (Graywolf Press)
Armageddons entertain by affirming cynicism. If this is correct, then we would all do well, every once in a while, to remind ourselves that despite the litany of death-wish fantasies, the world is not actually ending. We’re not all about to be tossed back to the Pleistocene, and thus there’s something better to do with our reading lives than thrill at authors preoccupied with how it’s all going to end. Rather, we should carefully attend to those writers who accept that it’s going to go on whether we like it or not. Writers like Sven Birkerts.
An essayist and critic who runs the much-vaunted low-residency M.F.A. program at Bennington College, Birkerts is the author of the now 20-year-old The Gutenberg Elegies, a volume widely regarded as the most elegant articulation of the angst we all felt as the digital invasion began its assault on literature. As such, The Gutenberg Elegies, it must be admitted, is itself a kind of doomsday narrative. Now, Birkerts offers a follow-up, Changing the Subject, a finely wrought and well-titled companion volume that fears the same dreadful end, but tacks from literature to consciousness, knowledge, data, and information. This is an unlikely cast of characters for a doomsday narrative, to be sure, but nevertheless the book becomes a necessary guide for surviving the ongoing e-pocalypse.
Changing the Subject is about the digital invasion, yes, but the core of the problem is that we have transitioned from trafficking in information to trafficking in data. “Data without context are inert,” Birkerts writes, but data within contexts become information, knowledge. Anxiety over “the information age,” then, isn’t really about information, but contextless data points. For Birkerts, “the essential human premise of context” has been besieged, the result being that the “idea of authorship” is threatened. The ideals of the Enlightenment are at stake, and he wonders whether “the very sources of artistic imagination might not be endangered, depleted.”
In short: Inert data create inert people. Hence, AMC’s latest spinoff: The Texting Dead.
Birkerts frets not only over the fact that we’re staring beguiled at an approaching extinction-level-event meteor. No, he’s also flabbergasted at the “cyberinsiders” who have embraced the end-times siege, who have shinnied down the castle walls and can be glimpsed at a distance, loading boulders into the catapults. If that seems a bit histrionic, credit the surprising effects of Birkerts’s understated tone. He writes that he wants “to understand what it is that we are collectively doing as we embrace e-culture.” He wonders why we have accepted the shift “without any extended dialogue about whether there are trade-offs involved.”
He’s striving to remain calm, I think, because he realizes that he’s a sheriff confronting a lynch mob of cybersector techpreneurs desperate to lynch, well, themselves. You can’t six-shoot your way through a mob — you have to try to reason with them. And this mob, full of irrational cranks, is beyond reason. “The reader has to adjust to the author, not vice versa,” Birkerts pleads. Alas, that’s not going to go down well with zombie hordes dying to read about zombie hordes.
Birkerts might be said to have traveled this less trodden path once before. So you might be thinking that you can just read a review of Changing the Subject — this review, say — instead of reading the book. But what Birkerts writes about reading in general — that plots don’t matter, that to read is to be neuroplastically impressed by an “author’s language world” — establishes why Changing the Subject is a must-read. For a review can offer only a description of an approximation of an experience. Even worse, it can reduce a book to data.
To say, for example that Changing the Subject is a collection of essays that includes riffs on Jeopardy!, GPS devices, Seamus Heaney, literary envy, and the unexpected joys of stationary bicycles is to say something that is true — but it is also to be guilty of what the book warns against, reducing an experience to contextless data points.
To go the other way is a little better. To say, for example, that Birkerts sometimes strikes the tone of one of those billionaire conservationists with a population of endangered horses and zebras protected out on a ranch somewhere, but who watches the worldwide extinctions happening anyway, powerless despite his riches; or to say that Birkerts sometimes sounds like an old sailor too weary for a last voyage on a sparkling new ship, and so stands at the end of the pier, waving at the liner cruising into iceberg-infested waters — these are better. These are context. But Changing the Subject is really both, data in context, and a responsible reviewer can’t tell you anything more than this: The information and the experience they provide are both essential, and not easily represented by hasty approximations of either.
Nor is it entirely fair to suggest that The Gutenberg Elegies and Changing the Subject are doomsday books, as I’ve been doing. For the latter, at least, includes a number of pieces not entirely absorbed with extended dialogues about apocalyptic trade-offs. When Birkerts writes, of Shirley Hazzard’s The Transit of Venus, that he was reminded anew of “how much pressure artistic language, held in a narrative shape, could exert on consciousness,” we heave a sigh of relief as our own consciousness settles into the warm bath of elegant praise. When he claims that when the illusion of books “is felt strongly enough, at full intensity, it trumps the sensations of living,” we rejoice with an intense recognition that confirms that very claim. Ditto when Birkerts describes mind-melding his way into the works of Joseph O’Neill and Roberto Bolaño. It’s in these moments that he affirms for us, all evidence aside, that the world will go on, survive. Hence, the true subject of Changing the Subject is hope, a hope that spites all those cynics pining for Judgment Day.
If you’re already a data-fied zombie, pass this book by. You’ve got better things to do, infection to spread, brains to eat. But if you’ve got a pulse, then find this book and immerse yourself in it. It will remind you that other souls remain, scattered thin through the waste.
J.C. Hallman is a visiting professor of creative writing at Colby College and the author, most recently, of B & Me: A True Story of Literary Arousal (Simon & Schuster).
