The Literary Life
by John "Der Überpseud" FitzGerald, publisher emeritus, NEW IMPROVED HEAD.
The following article was first published on our old site in 2001.Literature has played an important role in my life. And in recent days I have been spending much time in a great steaming pile of it.The pile is the Toronto Reference Library, a giant mound of literature made even more giant by the cunning tactic of hollowing out its middle. The library is built in tiers round an atrium, much like recent Holiday Inns. It even has glass-sided elevators crawling up the wall of the atrium.
The result is that the actual floor space on the storeys above the ground floor is about a quarter of the building's footprint. On the higher floors the gap is so wide that to get someone's attention on the other side of it you need a flare gun.
So from the outside the library looks imposing, but when you enter you find a small collection, much of it old and irrelevant, and much of it inappropriate. It has been padded out, for example, with novels, which are not the sort of thing you go to a reference library for.
The truth is, though, that these days most of us serious literati don't pay much attention to the hard copy. Instead we sit at computers stolidly clicking our mice as we rummage through databases. We no longer need hard copy. The database I was rummaging through today allowed me to send myself copies of the articles I was interested in by e-mail. [Editor's note: That was in 2001. Today you can do these searches from home on the library website. Maybe the Toronto Reference Library will soon be a giant Second Cup.]
But our rummaging is still homage to literature. It's just that our way of expressing homage has changed because there's so much literature these days. The Toronto Reference Library still catalogues some ephemeral research reports of mine from the 1970s. I don't myself think there's much chance anyone will come to the library looking for surveys of managers' opinions of part time employment at Toronto Board of Education in 1978, but the library seems to be of a different opinion.
In fact, the reason is simply that libraries are now overwhelmed by literature. So much is being published that libraries are no longer able to make judicious selections of it, or to record it properly. They put some cursory records in a database and let the consumers do the selecting.
That may seem democratic, but in effect it means that consulting the literature is often equivalent to trying to find a bottle somebody ten thousand miles away dropped in the ocean. Go looking for statistics about part time employment, enter part time into the database, and up comes, among many other things, FitzGerald & Gershman (1978).
Literature has become the proverbial 800-lb. gorilla. It does whatever it wants. We have no way to control it, so we defer to it. Or we just keep out of its way, which is what most people seem to be doing.
A similar phenomenon is occurring in the monster bookstores which have spread across our land. Books are being churned out at such a rate that the bookstores can no longer give them enough attention to be able to make a reasonable selection. They just rent more space and order more shelves. And, as we have seen recently in Canada, they can't interest enough people to keep two chains of monster bookstores operating. Browsing in a bookstore has simply become overwhelming.
The life of the mind, I confidently predict, is about to collapse under its own weight, if it hasn't already. For the last twenty years or so scholars have been continually narrowing the scope of their work to give themselves a fighting chance of acquainting themselves with the relevant literature. Soon no two scholars will share the same interest, and communication will cease.
We in the general populace have adopted a similar strategy. We have so reduced the scope of our interest in the world that the last remaining part of it we are interested in is that part which is coextensive with ourselves. We revere self-esteem because the self is the only thing left we can cope with. We have got to a point where we believe the proper study of mankind is Me.
Unfortunately I didn't realize this as quickly as Ms Oprah Winfrey did. Her book club specializes in works which people can use to assess their own lives. These books have been so popular that monster bookstores have Oprah shrines, and smaller bookstores slap huge stickers on her selections to help people find them.
Of course some minds will continue to operate. We can easily see, however, that fewer minds are operating today than formerly. The idea that two specimens like George W. Bush or William J. Clinton could become President of the United States would have seemed like a joke fifty years ago, and Kurt Vonnegut's novel of that era which depicted a future United States headed by an actor was classified as science fiction. But in a society alienated from the discussion of serious ideas which literature promotes, Mr. Bush, Mr. Clinton, and Mr. Reagan, and Mr. Chrétien, seem like wonderful choices. They are Just Like Us.
The Literary Life © Coolth, 2001
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