The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Tolstoy's Dictaphone: Technology and the Muse by Sven Birkerts
Paul L. Maliszewski

Sven Birkerts. Tolstoy’s Dictaphone: Technology and the Muse. Graywolf, 1996. 262 pp. Paper: $16.00.

Tolstoy’s Dictaphone represents nineteen writers’ thoughts on the Internet, computers, typewriters, and telephones. These are essays about culture and its relationship to technology; to speak as broadly as possible, these are essays about being creative Homo sapiens at a time that may not honor the attempt. Included here are new essays by past RCF contributors Sven Birkerts, Jonathan Franzen, and Paul West. Essays by Gerald Howard and Carole Maso originally appeared in the “Future of Fiction” issue (Spring 1996).

Most of these essays present more than an argument for or against the encroaching technology. The better essays eschew the “for or against” line of thinking entirely, blur the obvious either/or reaction implicit in such a debate and rhetorically bushwhack a more difficult, third road. Each of the essays provides an argument about how reading, writing, and the business of meaning has changed or how the writers suppose it will change in the future, but what distinguishes the third-roaders from their shriller cousins is that they freely (and wisely) apply techniques of memoir, research, and observation, and cite historical precedents and examples; in the end they achieve much more than the complaints of cranks.

A great and unexpected highlight in this collection is finding out that writers are only slightly less superstitious than star relief pitchers but probably bigger fetishists when it comes to their tools. There is Wulf Rehder’s “gold-and-black fountain pen,” Daniel Mark Epstein’s “oak desk with an arabesque book rail,” and Paul West’s DeVille 470s. Albert Goldbarth reveals he wrote his essay with “a Bic Pen in a one-dollar spiral-bound notebook.” Everyone who uses a typewriter mentions the brand name, all loyal to their Royals. Franzen and Askold Melnyczuk talk about their first typewriters with the sort of hushed tones and adjective-studded prose most people reserve for first loves, and Paul West, by the way, writes in the nude.

Being unfortunately unable to discuss any of these essays at length, I’ll choose Birkerts’s own for some inspection. His essay, not surprisingly, continues in much the same vein as the sharper and more critical chapters of his 1994 book, The Gutenberg Elegies. In that book, an earlier collection called American Energies, and more recent reviews, Birkerts has called for a fiction responsive to and aware of the culture around it, a fiction that arrests the culture or at the very least does not hide from it. It has always seemed strangely incompatible for Birkerts to ask certain things of fiction that imply that the work and its author must be embroiled in the muck of the culture at the same time that Birkerts himself opts out of the disagreeable elements of that culture.

One can begin to see the steep price of turning off and going unplugged, of saying “Refuse it” as Birkerts does at the conclusion of Gutenberg. When Birkerts tries to describe how the experience of reading from a screen is different from reading a book, he can’t. Or rather he can’t without reaching for the following awful metaphor: “To which I can only reply that outwardly nothing about our fiscal processes changed when we went off the gold standard (nobody but tourists ever saw the vaults at Fort Knox), but that an untethered dollar feels different, spends differently, than one secured by its minim of bullion.” I wanted to believe this was ill-considered, but I found the same metaphor posed in nearly the same context in Gutenberg. Someone needs to take Birkerts aside and kindly explain to him that invoking the gold standard has next to no rhetorical force, and even then only with an audience of Steve Forbes, Lyndon LaRouche, and certain segments of the militia community is Birkerts likely to curry favor.

Ironically (or maybe sadly), the decision to refuse any and all encounters with the new technology has stolen from Birkerts any chance of anecdotal argument and will eventually lessen the impact and authority of his writing on the subject itself. The reader of this anthology need only compare Birkerts’s essay with contributions by Robert Pinsky or Alice Fulton, whose essay on screens relies on the sort of metaphors (of computers, screens, and information) that Birkerts will not access and therefore cannot know.

Tolstoy’s Dictaphone is the first in a projected series of book-length forums from Graywolf Press. The idea is to gather a good, thoughtful bunch of writers and to have those writers address topics other than their own writing. Not very remarkable sounding, but when you consider that an entire generation of minimalist writers has grown up, gotten old, and received tenure while only rarely giving themselves to the task of writing an essay (excepting the occasional book review, of course), you can see how exceptional a book like this is. This is a shame. Writers should write more than only fiction or poetry. If the new writers (and readers) set out to create the sort of fiction Birkerts describes as fiction critical of its culture, then they should not miss the opportunity offered by these Graywolf Forums to show how the metaphorical worlds of their fiction or poetry refer to, bump and brush up against, mock, mourn, or mimic the modern world, our world. [Paul L. Maliszewski]


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The Review of Contemporary Fiction Tolstoy's Dictaphone: Technology and the Muse by Sven Birkerts Paul L. Maliszewski Sven Birkerts. Tolstoy’s Dictaphone: Technology and the Muse. Graywolf, 1996. 262 pp. Paper: $16.00. Tolstoy’s Dictaphone represents nineteen writers’ thoughts on the Internet, computers, typewriters, and telephones. These are essays about culture and its relationship to technology; to speak as broadly as possible, these are essays about being creative Homo sapiens at a time that may not honor the attempt. Included here are new essays by past RCF contributors Sven Birkerts, Jonathan Franzen, and Paul West. Essays by Gerald Howard and Carole Maso originally appeared in the “Future of Fiction” issue (Spring 1996). Most of these essays present more than an argument for or against the encroaching technology. The better essays eschew the “for or against” line of thinking entirely, blur the obvious either/or reaction implicit in such a debate and rhetorically bushwhack a more difficult, third road. Each of the essays provides an argument about how reading, writing, and the business of meaning has changed or how the writers suppose it will change in the future, but what distinguishes the third-roaders from their shriller cousins is that they freely (and wisely) apply techniques of memoir, research, and observation, and cite historical precedents and examples; in the end they achieve much more than the complaints of cranks. A great and unexpected highlight in this collection is finding out that writers are only slightly less superstitious than star relief pitchers but probably bigger fetishists when it comes to their tools. There is Wulf Rehder’s “gold-and-black fountain pen,” Daniel Mark Epstein’s “oak desk with an arabesque book rail,” and Paul West’s DeVille 470s. Albert Goldbarth reveals he wrote his essay with “a Bic Pen in a one-dollar spiral-bound notebook.” Everyone who uses a typewriter mentions the brand name, all loyal to their Royals. Franzen and Askold Melnyczuk talk about their first typewriters with the sort of hushed tones and adjective-studded prose most people reserve for first loves, and Paul West, by the way, writes in the nude. Being unfortunately unable to discuss any of these essays at length, I’ll choose Birkerts’s own for some inspection. His essay, not surprisingly, continues in much the same vein as the sharper and more critical chapters of his 1994 book, The Gutenberg Elegies. In that book, an earlier collection called American Energies, and more recent reviews, Birkerts has called for a fiction responsive to and aware of the culture around it, a fiction that arrests the culture or at the very least does not hide from it. It has always seemed strangely incompatible for Birkerts to ask certain things of fiction that imply that the work and its author must be embroiled in the muck of the culture at the same time that Birkerts himself opts out of the disagreeable elements of that culture. One can begin to see the steep price of turning off and going unplugged, of saying “Refuse it” as Birkerts does at the conclusion of Gutenberg. When Birkerts tries to describe how the experience of reading from a screen is different from reading a book, he can’t. Or rather he can’t without reaching for the following awful metaphor: “To which I can only reply that outwardly nothing about our fiscal processes changed when we went off the gold standard (nobody but tourists ever saw the vaults at Fort Knox), but that an untethered dollar feels different, spends differently, than one secured by its minim of bullion.” I wanted to believe this was ill-considered, but I found the same metaphor posed in nearly the same context in Gutenberg. Someone needs to take Birkerts aside and kindly explain to him that invoking the gold standard has next to no rhetorical force, and even then only with an audience of Steve Forbes, Lyndon LaRouche, and certain segments of the militia community is Birkerts likely to curry favor. Ironically (or maybe sadly), the decision to refuse any and all encounters with the new technology has stolen from Birkerts any chance of anecdotal argument and will eventually lessen the impact and authority of his writing on the subject itself. The reader of this anthology need only compare Birkerts’s essay with contributions by Robert Pinsky or Alice Fulton, whose essay on screens relies on the sort of metaphors (of computers, screens, and information) that Birkerts will not access and therefore cannot know. Tolstoy’s Dictaphone is the first in a projected series of book-length forums from Graywolf Press. The idea is to gather a good, thoughtful bunch of writers and to have those writers address topics other than their own writing. Not very remarkable sounding, but when you consider that an entire generation of minimalist writers has grown up, gotten old, and received tenure while only rarely giving themselves to the task of writing an essay (excepting the occasional book review, of course), you can see how exceptional a book like this is. This is a shame. Writers should write more than only fiction or poetry. If the new writers (and readers) set out to create the sort of fiction Birkerts describes as fiction critical of its culture, then they should not miss the opportunity offered by these Graywolf Forums to show how the metaphorical worlds of their fiction or poetry refer to, bump and brush up against, mock, mourn, or mimic the modern world, our world. [Paul L. Maliszewski]

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