Excerpt from Tolstoy's Dictaphone

"Introduction" by Sven Birkerts:

If the media fate of the Orwell year—1984—is any indication, we are likely to be deluged by and done with the millennium long before the appointed hour ever arrives. There is nothing to be done about this short of pulling all the plugs from all the sockets, and much as some of us might wish it, it won't happen. We must try, instead, to see it as part of the millennial experience to be millennially overwhelmed. There is no exit, and the show must go on.

While Tolstoy's Dictaphone has not been calculated to be a millennium book as such, it has grown out of a set of controversies that will surely have a great deal to do with how we do business in the year 2000 and beyond. Here I must, as editor and contributor, come clean. The idea of compiling this "reader" grew directly out of the thinking I was doing when I wrote the final essays of The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age. In that book I made the argument that the historically sudden arrival and adoption of computer technologies was changing everything about the way we lived and thought and related to one another. I further proposed that these changes were not automatically for the good, that we were very possibly compromising our subjectivity, mediating our already deeply mediated relation to the world, and in a number of ways putting ourselves at risk. I saw book culture and electronic culture as polarized in crucial ways and argued against the view that the new technologies are merely tools of convenience, or powerful augmentations of the existing.

I said these things and many people disagreed, either with my fundamental premise or with the kinds of conclusions I was drawing. Wherever I traveled, I found myself embroiled in discussion—debate—and as the lights in whatever hall or bookstore were dimmed, there were always people clustered around wearing the look of too mucb to say, too little time.

To carry the exploration further, then, seemed not only natural, but inevitable. But now it made sense to open things up a bit, to bring like- and unlike-minded others into the discussion. This I have done, and a few words about the procedure are probably in order.

To begin with, the subject— the coming of the electronic millennium —is so large that one has to narrow the aperture. Accordingly, I decided to formulate a general question, one that would give my contributors some sense of personal stake and allow them a considerable latitude of response. In a letter sent to prospective anthology-mates I asked the following:

What will be the place of self, of soul— of artist, writer, individual— in the society we are so hell-bent on creating? I'm thinking in terms of our collective ingesting of electronic communications, but other transformations may figure in your thoughts. Does anyone doubt that the world will have changed more between 1950 and 2000 than during the long centuries preceding? Or that the place of the solitary self, the Emersonian individual—formerly the origin and destination of all expressive work—is being altered radically? What will be the role of writer and thinker in the millennium? What will be the terms of struggle and debate?

As you can see, I was not able to keep the idea of the millennium out of my formulation. Beyond this, I urged only creative, subjectively satisfying responses.

And whom did I urge these on? Preemptively I would offer that while many of the writers I contacted were in some ways kindred spirits, I did not consciously set out to stack the deck. Indeed, I monitored myself, and when I saw that I was pulling too hard toward the unreconstructed humanists, I redoubled my efforts to bring in voices that might somehow oppose theirs. While I pretty much knew that writers like Daniel Mark Epstein and Mark Slouka would lend support to some of my own darker intimations, I had a strong suspicion that more technologically oriented writers like Ralph Lombreglia and Carolyn Guyer would deliver countering words. Then, too, there were writers who could go either way, if not down the middle. What would I hear, say, from Robert Pinsky, who has recently translated Dante's Inferno (a humanist activity if there ever was one), but who has also written interactive computer texts? Or from Wulf Rehder, whose learned and playful essays I have long admired, and who works in the bowels of Silicon Valley at Hewlett-Packard? Then what might Alice Fulton conjure, a poet who has woven scientific language and concepts so elegantly into her poems? Or Paul West, who has never not surprised me?

Now that the essays have all been amassed and await only their final arrangement, I am flabbergasted both by their range and their idiosyncracy. Every last writer took the melody and riffed on a different instrument and in an original key. Reading the essays, stacking them this way and that, I feel a happy-making sense of surfeit. These are not mere ideas and arguments. These are, in the best sense, conjectures embodied in experience. Stories, memories, fantasies, laments, rants, and exuberant expostulations—all of them somehow addressing our lives in the present and the outlook for things when the last millennial TV special has gone into electronic limbo, not to be broadcast again for one thousand years.

Copyright 1996 by Sven Birkerts. All rights reserved.