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By David Rothman

Moderator’s note: The post below contains earlier material. – D.R.

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Norman Mailer and e-books—what an unlikely mix of words. The image I most associate with Mailer, who died this morning at 84, is neither the feisty face nor the dark hair from his younger days. Nor the older Mailer I met decades ago as a newspaper reporter when he informally lectured at a small Ohio college, joshing with the students, assuring them that writers aren’t handsome enough to be actors or smart enough to be surgeons. Instead, it’s the green cover on my old hardback of The Naked and the Dead. A moment ago I wandered over to one of my favorite e-book stores online, stocking tens of thousands of titles; but I could find just four Mailer books: The Castle in the Forest, Oswald’s Tale, Harlot’s Ghost and Oh God. Yes, oh, God—the amnesia of technology!

Actually Mailer himself had a little of a techie in him. He studied aeronautical engineering at Harvard, after all, and he even made a quick stab at blogging for the Huffington Report. Luckily, however, I could locate only two posts. With only so much writing time left, he wisely focused on his natural form, the full-length narrative; and that in turn leads me to a warning Mailer accidentally made about the current direction of the Internet.

An alarum for the YouTube era

Mailer wasn’t beating up on the Net, as best I can reconstruct things, but rather on an old foe of his, televison. Still, we can easily extrapolate in the YouTube era—a time, too, when some high-tech-oriented educators and even certain librarians are downplaying novels and other narratives in favor of the practical and the quick lookup. Yes, we want reference material online, and even snippets, Updike notwithstanding, but let’s not kill off fiction. I’d recommend that the Gradgrinds and Babbitts pay close attention to the points Mailer made during a recent audio interview with Radio Open Source. Here’s an MP3 excerpt—yes, I do see a place for intelligent multimedia—and below I’ll serve up some of his comments for your screen:

“…Democracy depends upon enough people in that country being willing to read and learn, and learn from literature, and there’s no question in my mind that children are being discouraged from reading by the commercials they watch on TV all the time…When you’re a child, at least when I was a child, the love of narrative was so important to us. [If] someone started to tell a story or we’d be reading a book, the idea of what came next was so important that it really began to give us a sense of how to approach the world, which was the world is a narrative. And now the world is now longer a narrative to the child watching television. On the contrary. The world is a set of interruptions… stimulations and frustrations. That’s what it is for a child watching TV. They’re watching a show and boom the commercial comes in every five, seven or twelve minutes or whatever… It shatters the desire the desire to read. We become a nation where people read less and less as the decades go by.”

Gripe against TV commercials might apply to the Twitter, too

Notice? Although Mailer is attacking the usual TV commercials, much of he says might apply to Net-based media, if you consider all the interruptions in the Twitter vein. As I see it, the cure is more focus on narrative. Toward this goal, e-books have an important role to play—given all the possibilities that cheaper distribution and well-used interactivity can provide (constant interactivity can be just as disruptive as the commercials). But getting the best literature online isn’t enough. We also need narratives to be presented in context and tightly integrated with schools and libraries. There’ll never be another Mailer, but with luck, however, YouTube or not, maybe future generations can appreciate his better works.

Meanwhile, not to totally knock the Net, many parts of which I dearly love, especially Project Gutenberg, Manybooks.net, Feedbooks, and similar efforts. What’s more, I’m looking forward to a flood of digitized titles from publishers to augment the wares currently online at e-bookstores. So, no, it’s not as if people online will be entirely ignoring Mailer and the other greats. His Wikipedia item is already updated.

 
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