I imagine many of you will already have seen it, so I apologise. The current issue of that key journal of comparative papyrology of the Romanian Academy has an enormously interesting fragment, recently deciphered. It appears to be a conversation from 5th century BC Corinth about the first public readings of the Iliad and the Odyssey. It is quite clear from the conversation that these are judged to have no future whatsoever. The issue is whether to waste expensive sheep skin-and a great many sheep-on transcription when the story is so manifestly too long, too repetitive, full of endless formulas, with that rosy fingered dawn every ten lines, so full of dull patches and with such a messy ending. Is Odysseus going to stay at home, or is he leaving? No one can really make it out. It was a very brave effort, but destined for oblivion.
The point is obvious. When did literature have a future? Probably never. What we know as literature has had a very, very short run. Scholars say we can start with St Augustine's famous observation of his master and teacher, St Ambrose, in the courtyard in Milan. Augustine says: "This is the first man in the west who could read without moving his lips." A man reading in silence, having a relationship to a text which is more or less that of a modern act of reading. This sense of a private and personal relationship to the text, of remembrance and return, and of text engendering text, breaks down around 1914-the beginning of the catastrophe of our culture in the west.
Today, we need to address these themes again for two reasons: technology and talent. Gutenberg was not a fundamental revolution. It extended the life of the written word. In the 80 years following Gutenberg, there were more illuminated manuscripts produced and commissioned than in the previous century. It was not a revolution of the kind we may now be experiencing. What will virtual reality mean for the imagination, for the habits of narrative and imagining of its practitioners? It is not only virtual reality. My colleagues in the Cambridge engineering department tell me that they are very close to a "small-scale, portable, total display" computer-meaning that you will carry with you or have on your desk or by your bed, for bedtime reading, this small and versatile screen. It will be on-line to the libraries of the world; the 14m books of the Library of Congress will be at your fingertips and it will be clearer, easier to carry, infinitely more responsive to your interests and needs than any book. Then, we are in a new world. Then, we are truly in a new world.
But it takes two. There can be no literature without readers. Readers shape literature. Literature shapes readers and has done so since the beginning of the notion of literacy. So if readers change altogether, as they will with the new possibilities, what they are reading will change also, however ancient it is. A CD-ROM presentation of Homer, now available, is completely different from the papyrus version, the print version, the comic book version. They all have a metaphysic of their own in terms of narrative, pace, excitement, stimulus.
From my boyhood I remember the smell of books, immensely different, the different kinds of savour, the paper, the print. Books are complex phenomena. The way we hold them. Where we store them. The way we can return to them. The paperback is a revolution of its own, as was the folio, the quarto, the duodecimo. Books, and the libraries in which they were kept, shaped much of what we think of as literature, history, and philosophy. If the book is to be replaced by electronic means, many of them as yet unimagined, if it is to become an archive of remembrance, an archaeology of dead love, then literature itself will change very profoundly.
Marxism taught us a brilliant, simple observation (the big thoughts are so simple and yet one does not have them!): that there is no chamber music before chambers. That is to say, what you and I know as chamber music-particularly the quartet, the dominant form of high music-could only occur under very specific spatial, economic and sociological conditions. If there are no more private spaces for chamber music, no new chamber music will be commissioned or written; and that vast musical literature will have to find, as it does now, an essentially museum character. It will be the historical reproduction of conditions which are no longer immediate or natural to performer and listener. This will also become true of literature and the book.
let me move from technology to talent. We do not know why it is, but in any given historical moment, the amount of creative talent is not infinite. There are phenomena here which we do not understand. Thank God there is something for us not to understand! Why should certain periods produce a floreat of great writers and others be barren for long periods. Why should great literatures-Portuguese, Spanish, Italian are cases in point-know two or three high moments of concentrated force? What determines, on a distribution curve, the cluster of talent in a given moment and what that talent wants to do? Very roughly-and these figures, of course, are always open to challenge-the latest evidence we have on IQ curves or any comparable measure (to be treated with care, of course) is that over 80 per cent of the top of the curve today are in the sciences. Less than 20 per cent are doing anything we could identify as the humanities at the top end of the curve-top in intelligence, will, energy, ambition. If I had lived in Florence in the quattrocento I would, from time to time, have begged breakfast off a painter. Instead, I have tried all my life to be among scientists because today that is where the joy is, that is where the hope is, the energy, the sense of world upon world opening up.
There are fewer and fewer prerequisites to studying the humanities. But in today's Cambridge, in today's MIT, in today's Princeton or, until recently still, in Moscow, the entrance exams in mathematics and physics for the first year student now include what was classified as post-doctoral research only 15 years ago. That is your accelerando. That is the measure of what is being asked of the young and what they are able to supply.
There is no law which says that great literature gets produced in any given time or that a language will renew its poetic and creative energies. There are periods of tiredness and exhaustion in certain great literatures. Probably fewer people are at the top end of excellence today in the production of literary artistic works. Does this mean that less is being produced? No. We have a paradox of prodigality and plethora. More books are being published and remaindered and pulped very rapidly. There is a huge amount being produced; very little of it seems to be of commanding stature. Talent is going into the competing media of television, film and their allied arts. Again and again there will crackle off our screen a piece of dialogue, a confrontation, a scene, where you say-"My God, that is better than any novel I have read in a long time." It is more insightful, it is better written, it is sharper.
The film is already in a condition where it can proudly speak of its classics, of classics which have changed perception, which have changed imagining, which have altered our sense of what a narrative is-of how you tell a story. It is not the same thing as in the novel. It can resemble the novel, and it is fascinating to watch the interaction between classic fiction and television.
The commissioning of a book is now often done with a view to its reproduction in other media. The calculation of the print run is almost unimportant compared to the hope of its acquisition for television or film rights which, in turn, presses on the structure of the written text. There are masters of this form who write knowing that if the television or cinema production is a great success, people will return to the book. It is a creative boomerang of the most interesting kind. There are even cases where the book has been commissioned after the film or the television version. The book is no longer the pretext, it is the post-text of its distribution.
None of us can measure the quantum of intelligence, of imagining going into the media. It is prodigious-even the quantum of intelligence that can go into a great advertising campaign. The difference between poetry and jingles is difficult to distinguish. There are advertising people who can write one-liners of which Restoration comedy would have been proud-you can compare the skill, the caricature skill of a human situation exploding into an unforgettable bon mot or repartee. Imagination, fun, energy, even serious political and social comment often see in the book a form that is too slow, when in other media they can get through immediately on a vast scale to a great public, and to the shapers of political opinion.
but can "literature" be preserved? A very, very difficult question. Some years ago, you remember, a number of young publishers began publishing film scripts. It did not work out well. That does not mean it will not. Certain great television artists, Dennis Potter and others, have hoped that their works would be preserved in some literary form so that people could read with the play or film.
There is an oral dimension as well. This became clear to me on a recent visit to Harvard University. Casablanca was being shown for the millionth time. There was a queue outside of students who had seen it ten or 15 times. At a certain point, about ten minutes from the end, hands shot up and they switched off the sound and the students got up, crossed their arms, and recited in chorus the last ten minutes, which are quite complex. I was yelling with them: "Arrest the usual suspects." These are students who, if you said to them, "Would you please learn a poem by heart," would blench with dismay; but they see no difficulty whatsoever in learning the polyphonic, six or eight voices of those last ten minutes.
This suggests a tenacity in the oral form. Poetry has an immense future-limitless, I think. Russian poetry survived orally and then in readings to ten and 20 thousands-Yevgeny Yevtushenko, Andrey Voznesensky. Also Allen Ginsberg. Poetry always has behind it the possibility of the oral, of being spoken together and learnt by heart if you love it. We are in a period of great poets and many, many are to come; they will work with music, with drama, with choreography, forms as yet unimagined, which go back to the origins of poetry in ancient Greece so far as we can make them out.
Poetry means every form of drama, and I would like to be around for it. Television drama, amateur drama, audience participation. The world of drama for children seems, at the moment, almost boundless. The theatre in the largest sense-the art of the human body-is opening up. The elimination of the human body from so much of high literature is a brief phenomenon which took place roughly between Christianity's triumph in late Hellenism and the academic, mandarin, high bourgeois cultures at the beginning of this century. It is no longer on. The body is reasserting its presence at every range of the culture. Language is, after all, a bodily function, deeply and intensely.
Hegel said it so clearly. The novel is inseparable from the triumph of the middle classes, their habits of leisure, of privacy, the space for reading, the time for reading; the novel philosophically is a narrative in a large, rich, stable, social context, even if its own particular narrative is one of chaos, revolution or disorder. The way Georg Luk?cs, the greatest of Marxist critics, put it was: "No novel ends unhappily." That is not a stupid statement. What he referred to was the fact that after you have read a novel, you can go back to it; there is always a window on the future, on the story continuing, and it is in essence a middle class story.
It is no accident that the industrial revolution, the French revolution, occurred in the great age of the novel. It is almost axiomatic that today the great novels are coming from the far rim, from India, from the Caribbean, from Latin America-from countries which are in an earlier stage of bourgeois culture, in a rougher, more problematic form.
We are getting very tired in our novel writing; that makes perfect sense, there is nothing apocalyptic about it. Genres rise, genres fall, the epic, the verse epic, the formal verse tragedy, all have great moments, then they ebb. Novels will continue to be written for some time, but increasingly the search is on for hybrid forms, what we call fact/fiction. This alerts us to something important. What novel can today compete with the best of reportage, the best of immediate narrative? Not only the media, but also journalism in the high and legitimate sense, the masters of the immediate whom we can read every day.
James Joyce was certain that Finnegans Wake would be the end of the novel. It is a very deliberate attempt, marvellously arrogant, to say: "Not after this, that is it. In Ulysses I had once more done the totality, once more held the world in one grasp, now Finnegans Wake is the chaos of the night," and when told it was unreadable he said, "Of course, that is the point, then you have understood. This is meant to be the epilogue." There are still excellent novels after Finnegans Wake. But my guess is that nothing at the moment is more artificial, in some ways more a gamble against reality, than a first novel, and I think many publishers know this.
we have a very exciting time ahead, when literature itself will have to re-examine what literacy is. Who is literate today? There are children who are finding "beautiful" solutions to problems on their computers, on their holographic screens. (Patiently, my colleagues try to get it into my head that you can have five solutions; all are technically correct but four of them are very ugly and one is beautiful. Apparently you are no mathematician if you do not see that, feel it at the tip of your fingers. It is true because it is beautiful. Keats meets higher mathematics.)
I meet one of these children; I am told he can neither read nor write, or barely; he resents any attempt to pull him away from the screen and make him read. I lose my temper and shout, "You are illiterate" and the child says, "You are illiterate" because, indeed, I cannot follow what he is doing. If you have watched some of these children, their fingers are like those of a great piano virtuoso. I cannot put this intelligently-their fingers are thinking and creating. The way the fingers move is the way a musician with a motif, or the sketch of a motif or a bar relation, comes back to it through his fingers to re-examine its possibilities, to correct it. And the child says I am illiterate. Dialogue de sourds. We stare at each other.
And what next? Who is going to be literate? Who will define basic literacy? It is a very frightening period. That is what makes it so exciting and rewarding. Underlying it may be a slow, glacial shift in western culture's attitude towards death. The way we think of death, the way we experience it, imagine it; the way we turn our consciousness towards it. Literature, as we have known it, springs out of a wild and magnificent piece of arrogance, old as Pindar, Horace and Ovid. Exegi aere perennius-what I have written will outlive time. Stronger than bronze, less breakable than marble, this poem. Pindar was the first man on record to say that his poem will be sung when the city which commissioned it has ceased to exist. Literature's immense boast against death. Even the greatest poet, I dare venture, would be profoundly embarrassed to be quoted saying such a thing today.
Something enormous is happening, due in part to the barbarism of this century, perhaps due to DNA, perhaps due to fundamental changes in longevity, in cellular biology, in the conception of what it is to have children. We cannot phrase it with any confidence, but it will profoundly affect the great classical vainglory of literature-I am stronger than death! I can speak about death in poetry, drama, the novel, because I have overcome it; I am more or less permanent.
That is no longer available. A quite different order of imagining is beginning to arise and it may be that when we look back on this time we will suddenly see that the very great artists, in the sense of changing our views-of what is art, what is human identity-are not the ones we usually name but rather exasperating, surrealist jokers. Marcel Duchamp. If I call this pissoir a great work of art and sign it, who are you to disprove that? Or, even more so, the artist Jean Tinguely, who built immense structures which he then set on fire, saying: "I want this to be ephemeral. I want it to have happened only once."
That is the contrary of literature as we have known it, literature which always says: "I want to be returned to over and over and over." This does not mean that the new work will be any less exciting. It does not mean that it will be any less inventive. It just means that to be a publisher in the next century is going to be a very chancy enterprise.
