The Future of the Book. Edited by Geoffrey Nunberg. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1996. Pp. 306. $45.00 (cloth); $14.95 (paper). ISBN 0-520-20450-6 (cloth); ISBN 0-520-20451-4 (paper).

If reviews in this journal bore titles, this review's title would be "Our Love Is Here to Stay." Those words come from a 1938 song by George Gershwin, "Love Is Here to Stay" (The Great Songs of George Gershwin [Secaucus, NJ: Warner Bros. Publications, (1985?)], pp. 50-53). Gershwin's song celebrates emotions that are precisely what most of the essays in Geoffrey Nunberg's anthology on The Future of the Book also celebrate, and for the same reasons. Singing bravely in an atmosphere characterized by unspecific dread ("The more I read the papers The less I comprehend . . . Nothing seems to be lasting"), the speaker seeks reassurance from the "something permanent" (emphasis added) that "we've got": "The radio and the telephone and the movies that we know May just be passing fancies, And in time may go. But, oh my dear, Our love is here to stay." Nunberg's audience, of course, isn't worried about the future of radio, telephone, or movies. It is worried about the pressures produced on "the book" by our computerized and digital environment. Pressures schmessures: the overall burden of these essays, despite some scattered sour notes, is, like that of Gershwin's lyrics, reassurance. Not to worry. The book is here to stay.

So Umberto Eco himself writes in the book's "Afterword": "in the history of culture it has never happened that something has simply killed something else" (p. 304). This Boorstinian aperçu reinforces a point Eco had made just a few pages ago: "Books will remain indispensable not only for literature, but for any circumstance in which one needs to read carefully, not only to receive information but also to speculate and to reflect about it." Helpfully, lest those of us who are not Eco miss the point, he immediately adds: "To read a computer screen is not the same as to read a book" (p. 300). Like the worm uroboros -- or do I mean "like T. S. Eliot"? -- this book thus carries its end in its beginning, for Nunberg, too, has reassured us in just this way at its outset: "by the end of the decade all our current talk of the 'end of the book' will sound . . . dated and quaint" (p. 13).

What do we actually encounter in Nunberg's anthology? Nunberg himself provides an introductory overview, from which I have just quoted the single most salient point. Carla Hesse follows with a chapter that one can only regret appeared years too late for inclusion in Professor Murphy A. Sweat's well-known "large Freshman anthology," All Previous Thought (which, to be sure, I have not seen; but it is cited by Professor Frederick C. Crews in The Pooh Perplex: A Freshman Casebook [1963; rpt. New York: Dutton, 1965], p. [64]). In a breathlessly quick historical summary, Hesse points to the contingency, not the inevitability, of the creation of "print culture." The quotation marks, hers, indicate that the history of the means of cultural production, the printing press, is distinctly not the same as the history of the mode of cultural production, which she calls "the modern literary system" (p. 21). Skepticism about the book as "an archaic and inefficient cultural form," and about such ancillary notions as authorship, arose relatively quickly in the course of these developments -- by the third page (23) of Hesse's essay, in fact -- and, because their long tradition makes them venerable, current reincarnations of such doubts need not be frightening. Hesse sees us as experiencing "the public reinvention of intellectual community" at a time when "the key institutions of modern literary culture" are being reconceptualized (p. 30). The "escape of writing from fixity" at a time of digitalized writing ("a new terrain upon which the literary system will now operate" [p. 32]) leaves the book with an uncertain future. Hesse can imagine that, "if performative modes of writing supersede structural ones, the history of the book will become nothing more than memory" (p. 33). Such an outcome is speculative only, she makes clear; things need not happen that way.

In the next essay, informed by general skepticism about prophecy, by a narrowly-focused historical perspective, and by a great deal of experience with digital cultures, James O'Donnell (in the interests of full disclosure, he is my colleague) speaks about "the unnaturalness of this whole affair our culture has had with books" (p. 54). Like Hesse, O'Donnell is unafraid of whatever changes may be coming. Paul Duguid's essay tells us that neither "simple supersession (the separation of the past from the present)", and thus the end of the book, nor "liberation (the separation of information from technology)", are genuinely foreseeable outcomes of our present situation. Both dystopian and utopian projections are "oversimplifications" (p. 89). Geoffrey Nunberg sees electronic and print media as learning to work complementarily with one another (p. 133). Although he feels obliged once again to remind us, lest we forget, that, "For the indefinite future . . . there will be printed books" (p. 105), this essay is useful in ways that his "Introduction" would like to be. Building, and fascinatingly, on the exemplary edifice of Sartre's Les mots, Régis Debray erects a discussion of the symbolic resonance of the book, a resonance that "calls for a lasting and hardened symbolic form" (p. 150).

Patrick Bazin, noting the "bright future" of the book, adds that it has nonetheless been "outstripped by a process of metareading that is becoming a new driving force of culture" (p. 154). Rooting his arguments in his experience as Director of the Bibliothèque de Lyon, Bazin looks at the altered ways in which libraries organize themselves, increasingly, he suggests, on the basis of "content" (p. 156). He notes that hypertextuality has "exploded" the text, opening it to "the heterogeneous field of shifting experience" (pp. 160-1). A "dynamic textuality" has "freed itself from the straitjacket of the book" (p. 163), while multimedia has made "text-image complementarity into a true hybridization" (p. 165). These developments have combined to make, not the book, but "the reading process" our central concern. "[A]s its complexity [i.e., the complexity of the reading process] grows and it combines numerous forms or levels of reading," it becomes the "metareading" that Bazin focuses on (p. 165). How libraries can make such new forms of reading lead to "'meaning'" and thus help to "give . . . coherence to the fact of communal life" is the question with which Bazin's essay concludes (p. 166).

Luca Toschi writes about how concepts of hypertextuality have shifted concepts of authorship. His essay uses Manzoni's revision of the 1827 I promessi sposi for the 1840 illustrated edition as an example of "hypertextuality" avant la lettre and, too, as an example of the difficulties text-oriented editors and scholars have had in accounting for the non-textual aspects of the literary works with which they deal. George P. Landow writes cheerily about new forms of digitalized fictions in a discussion that starts by assuming that, "in many ways, we have, for better or worse, already moved beyond the book" (p. 209). Raffaele Simone follows with a discussion of articulated (closed, impermeable) and disarticulated (open, permeable) textual bodies and how, in the new digital environment, the latter form is the one likely to triumph. Like Hesse, he demonstrates the venerability of the open text in order to rob it of its strangeness and ability to frighten. Jay David Bolter points out that it is not "the mere survival of the printed book" but rather "whether . . . [it] will survive as a cultural ideal" that is at stake in much current debate (p. 255). He goes on to note that, "if hypertext calls into question the future of the printed book, digital graphics call into question the future of alphabetic writing itself" (p. 256). Images, natural signs, a new form of ekphrasis: consideration of such matters leads him to speculate about "a kind of written communication in which the primary mode of imitation is visual rather than oral" (p. 270).

One more essay, and Eco's "Afterword," complete the volume. About that last essay, by Michael Joyce, I can begin only by recalling a story -- it used to be told by a quondam governor of the State whose University Press published this anthology, a governor who later moved on to even greater heights of public service -- the punchline of which, as I recall it, ran, "There must be a pony in here somewhere." Unfortunately, it is not the pony I have found. In a sentence all too representative of the essay, I find myself reading:

The storm circles inward and disperses, belief structures saturate the electronic text, raining down like manna, driving skyward through us like the gravitron, sustaining and anchoring its continual replacement.

A friend who used to teach freshman composition used to describe essays where her first thought was not mere dismay but rather the question, "Where do I begin?" Where, I wonder, would she have begun here? Might it be with the word "its"? Which of the many possible antecedents provided for it in the preceding congeries of words could the author have had in mind as the one he wanted his reader to think about? Or might she instead admire Joyce's creation of belief structures able at once to rain down like manna while simultaneously driving skyward ("like the gravitron")? The marginal comment in my review copy reads simply, and I quote, "golly." I am tempted to leave it at that.

There are many things admirable and thought-provoking in Nunberg's anthology, its last essay to the contrary notwithstanding. The sort of survey of its contents in which this review has engaged does none of them justice. Have I said anything that would even begin to suggest the richness of Toschi's discussion of Manzoni? Have I sufficiently emphasized the uncommonly common sense of the essays by, say, O'Donnell and Eco? Nor are these unique. Even those essays which do not compel immediate assent nonetheless often compel useful disagreement, or even prove agreeable in significant part. But while its parts have many virtues, about the whole anthology I am far less sanguine.

In 1939, one year after Gershwin published "Love Is Here to Stay," Cole Porter published a song that I take to be a kind of "answer" to it. "Friendship" is characteristic Porter, providing in itself -- unlike Gershwin's songs -- no summary line or two. Porter seems to write variations on its first stanza refrain ("When other friendships have been forgot / Our friendship will still be hot") that keep within the same happy tonal range in the stanzas that follow (our friendship will still be it, will still be swell, oke, great, slick); but, in fact, the friendship celebrated in stanza one ("If you're ever in a jam, here I am") has cascaded down a steep curve by the final stanza ("If they ever make a cannibal stew of you, / Invite me too" -- I quote from The Complete Lyrics of Cole Porter, ed. Robert Kimball [New York: Knopf, 1983], p. 188). This friendship is not here to stay.

Is the book? The impulse to reassure us about its long-term staying power seems to me to have vitiated much that might have made this anthology useful, starting with some thought not about the book's "future" but about its present. Its authors tell us, for instance, about "postliteracy," a word that seems designed to make its user and reader both feel ultra-modern and up-to-date. By contrast, shabby old illiteracy, which is -- or is it? -- a problem for people who don't read or buy University of California Press imprints and therefore really don't count anyway, is not a word whose appearance I recall noticing in these pages at all. Has it nothing to do with that "communal life" that Bazin sees libraries, and book culture, as existing, in part, to promote?

Eco notes that we are inundated by "too many books" (p. 301). As someone whose professional (and personal!) life is spent buying and housing, and even now and again reading, too many books, I await impatiently some prognosticator who will tell me their fate. Personally, I am inclined to bet on landfill. Most of them, as Eco rightly notes, are garbage. (More polite than I am, he merely calls them "products of vanity presses".)

Who reads? To what audience is a book such as this one addressed? A person whose own book on libraries and the computer age is forthcoming from "a major university press" recently said to me, when we met on the street at -- where else? -- a major university, "How can you read ten volumes of Diderot on a computer screen?" Well, to such a question, what reply is possible? I agree completely. But first find me the last person -- find me any person -- who has read one volume of Diderot. Not as an assignment, but voluntarily. Hanging around universities, as writers (and readers?) of university press imprints are wont to do, is not a good way to discover what people read. If we teach, we can tell people to read something, and penalize them if they don't. If we are librarians, we can direct reading, at least in some part, by what we choose to acquire and by what we choose not to acquire. Our audiences are our captives. But when they get out of our classes, away from our libraries, how many of them, do you suppose, pack their Diderot as they trot off for a lovely weekend with Paul or Pauline á la plage?

When I was very young, a friend took me to a chicken slaughterhouse in the Bronx, where I watched for the first -- and, I am happy to say, last -- time what slaughtering chickens entails. The chicken is not a very smart bird. It takes a while for messages telling it that it no longer has a head to get through to the rest of its body. Or perhaps it is only a postmortem reflex that makes it continue to flop around for quite some time after being separated from its head. It may, as I saw, continue to flop around even after it has been completely de-feathered. This experience proved, for the city boy I was and am, both surprising and unattractive. But it also gave me potential for an analogy that, I fear, does indeed all too readily leap to mind in the present context. The book is no longer (if it ever really was) a valorized object conceived as containing one core of our culture. Do the young -- please: do we, whoever "we" may be -- read with anything like the excitement or fervor which, nostalgically but, we are sure, correctly, we attribute to the palmier days of our youth? Well, some of that sort of reading always was an elite activity: Diderot. No doubt it still is. What "books" are we speaking about? Forget the elites. How many people read Grisham? or Steel? How many, and out of what potential audience? How much of the stuff in our libraries ever circulates? After five years? After ten?

No one likes to write an unpleasant book review. The editors had to pull this one out of me with tongs. It's much longer than they wanted, probably nastier than they expected (and I warned them) -- and, even so, it manages to say nothing about how badly proofread this book is, or how light Nunberg's allegedly "editorial" hand, which, as it happens, could have been much heavier, to the book and its readers's advantage. Why burden Toschi, who has, after all, been translated into English, with such Italianate constructions as "the in dodicesimo female characters" (p. 171)? Perfectly adequate English words exist. Why allow Joyce the David Mamet-like repeats of gnomic little phrases (themselves perhaps better relegated to another place): ten (10!) "scene is seen" or "seen is scene"'s; three "I want to speak carefully"'s; two "print stays itself, electronic text replaces itself"'s -- three, if you count one slight variation.

My fundamental difficulty with this collection of essays, however, is that, so far as I can tell, none of the contributors has actually asked whether the head is still on the beast. Nor have they asked any of the hard questions -- only a very few of which I have tried to pose as examples -- that consideration of "the future of the book" might have raised. For all the talent that went into the making of this book, it seems to me to represent first and foremost an opportunity missed.

Daniel Traister
University of Pennsylvania