Erica Wagner on why reports of literature’s demise are exaggerated – Times Online
Erica Wagner on why reports of literature’s demise are exaggeratedI’m working on my thesis – have I mentioned it? Perhaps not, but that could be because I started working on it only when I came to consider what I might say in my column. Still, it’s going to be a good ‘un – “Google in Literature”.
We hear a great deal about how The Great God Google is invading our lives: how we travel, what ads we see, how we type in the names of our old boyfriends – oh, you know what I’m driving at. But I’ve also come to consider how the mighty search engine is affecting how we read – and write – novels.
I’m a Johnny-come-lately, I know, but the other day I found myself on an airplane reading Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo – a novel you may have read about in Books only two weeks ago. At one point our heroine types some vague details of a long-ago murder victim into Google and … whaddya know, an Important Clue pops up, top of the list. I found myself snorting in exasperation, considering all the times I’d typed something much, much less arcane into Google and found myself scrolling through everything but what I needed. (That, however, is another discussion, to be filed under: Why novels are more satisfying than life.)
Aspiring Luddite that I am, I found myself yearning for the days, in books, when someone on the hunt for something would actually have to go somewhere, or talk to someone else, even if that somewhere and someone else was only a library and a librarian. Of course, people go places and talk to people in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo; but more and more in books this disembodied form of research – stealthy, safe, silent and invisible to all but the Google Gods – crops up. What will this mean for the way novelists construct their work, and what will it mean for the people who read it? We have yet to discover: we can only wait and see.
Critics have worried about this kind of thing forever, of course. Hey, it’s our job. Perhaps the advent of the railroads, or the steam engine, would mean the death of literature. The television and the telephone – surely. Yet literature has not died; literature is not even waiting in A&E with a sprained ankle. My thesis, then? That while I and some other readers may occasionally snort, the stories we tell and the way we tell them will survive the big bad G – just as they’ve survived the wheel, the typewriter and the telegraph.
