Repercussus Mirabilis: Literary Journalism and Technological Possibility By David Abrahamson Northwestern University Presented at Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication Annual Conference, Miami, FL, 8/8/02 One of the great joys of going last in an exceptional panel like this is that many of my major points have already been made far more eloquently than I ever will. However, there are a few areas of disagreement which I hope will be provocative to you, our beloved audience. And we'll try to save some time to engage in a conversation afterwards with you about that. The title of my presentation is "Repercussus Mirabilis: Literary Journalism and Technological Possibility." Literary journalism. Technology. There's something of a disconnect there, isn't it? We have in our minds when we think about literary journalism starving writers in drafty garrets, quill pens scratching at midnight by candlelight, a larger, more ascetic, more artistic vocation. Technology has a harder edge -- the metallic clicks, the flickering screens -- that does not accord with our notions of literary effort. It will be my argument today that, perhaps more than we might imagine, they do indeed fit together -- often with profound repercussions, often for miraculous effect. In a phrase, "repercussus mirabilis." First, a quick definition of literary journalism. The first, one I think is particularly valid, comes from Ron Rosenbaum, one of the best practitioners of literary journalism presently writing for The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, The New York Observer and occasionally for Esquire. He once said in an interview that literary journalism was about neither literary flourishes nor literary references, but rather it was a form of journalism that asks the same kinds of questions that literature does -- and, in effect, journalism that offers insights into human nature. Another definition, a more graphic one, can be derived if one imagines two circles. Label one literature; the other, journalism. Note that there is an area where the two circles overlap. Literary journalism lies at the intersection of those two circles. What I hope to examine in this presentation, however, is another intersection: that between literary journalism and technology, broadly defined. With your permission, we will explore two major themes. One is technology as a subject; that is, technology as a topic about which literary journalists might write. The second will focus on technology as an agent of facilitation. Technology as a subject for literary journalists has a long history. It can be argued, as many scholars have, that technological developments are often a locus for fundamental societal change. And over the last century or more, literary journalism has flourished at times of social change, particularly when the transformation has in part been driven by technological development. The reasons why this is often the case are, perforce, somewhat speculative, but perhaps it is one of society's ways to internalize and accommodate large- scale change, which is often disruptive. Or, more certainly from a writer's point of view, it is in times of disruptive social and cultural change that there are wonderful tales to be told, compelling stories that demand to be to written, pieces of long-form journalism with the potential to both motivate us as writers and move our readers. There are a large number of examples of literary journalism which demonstrate this. The work of Stephen Crane in the 1890s was clearly informed by the dislocations brought on by America's industrialization. In the 1940s, I would argue that no piece of nonfiction prose did more to usher in the nuclear age than John Hersey's New Yorker article, "Hiroshima," which was later published in book form. Simply for the sake of provocation, from the 1960s I looked for examples that might be outliers. If we listen to Neil Postman, for instance, and broaden our definition of technology to include drugs as a technology, then certainly the work of Hunter S. Thompson and Tom Wolfe quickly come to mind. More recently there are many examples of accomplished literary journalists finding topical fodder in the realm of technology. Perhaps one of the key monuments of the genre -- now almost twenty years old, which of course is a couple of eons in terms of technological development, but still an extraordinary piece of work -- is Tracy Kidder's "The Soul of a New Machine." From John Seabrook's early work about the Internet, I would offer that wonderful 1992 New Yorker piece entitled "Email from Bill" -- Bill being Bill Gates of Microsoft. Another example might be James Gleick's explication of the emerging new forms of science in his works on chaos theory and the physicist Richard Feynman, as well as the seminal 1995 New York Times Magazine piece, "Making Microsoft Safe for Capitalism," that first drew public attention to the possible perils of Microsoft's software monopoly. It led, one could argue, to the Justice Department's antitrust investigation and a significant new public perception of the firm. Other examples are Michael Lewis's expeditions into the arrhythmic heart of Silicon Valley ("The New New Thing") and, to finish the list, one of my personal favorites: Malcolm Gladwell and his ongoing examination of the consequences of technology, most recently in a book entitled "The Tipping Point." My second theme, technology as an agent of facilitation, is a little more illusive one, and certainly more speculative. It asks the question: What might be the effects on literary journalism of two new technological realities that have emerged late in the last century? The question actually has two parts. One concerns the act of writing literary journalism, and probably must focus on the advent of the microcomputer and its effect on the production of literary journalism. The second, a matter of consumption rather than production, relates to the reading of literary journalism, and concerns the rise of the Internet. In the realm of writing and computers' effects thereupon, I must admit to being an agnostic. Devout Luddites aside, most observers who have examined the question find mixed results. But if you read closely, they are probably gently skewed toward the positive, in that they see no great harm in the advent of the microcomputer. We all know that computers do make writing easier; more crucially, they also make revising easier. If we believe that the best sort of art, to use David Nord's interpretation, does not spring forth fully formed in final-draft form most of the time, it is hard to argue against the ease with which the computer allows us to revisit, revise and, one hopes, improve. The issue brings to mind a 1887 letter from Robert Louis Stevenson to an aspiring young journalist: "The swiftly done work of the journalist, and the cheap finish and ready-made methods to which it leads, you must try to counteract by writing with the most considerate slowness and on the most ambitious models. And when I say 'writing' -- O, believe me, it is rewriting that I have chiefly in mind." It is also likely that we would have to admit that the microcomputer is responsible in part for the marked increase in the quantity of writing. Twenty years of studies about paper consumption all suggest that this is true. Without putting too arithmetically fine a point on the argument, one could logically assume that the result is not only an increased volume of bad writing, but also an increased quantity of good writing. It is terribly hard, of course, to make any definitive statements about the relationship between the two quantities, but I imagine the case could be made using something approximating a simply linear ratio. There are, of course, some very accomplished literary journalists who refuse the computer's temptation. Ron Rosenbaum, who I mentioned earlier, is an excellent example. If any of you has ever had Ron Rosenbaum as a guest in your classroom, I'm sure you have heard him tell this tale. It's a wonderful story that leaves the students in awe. Rosenbaum writes on a manual typewriter. He does his reporting, he organizes his notes, he writes the first page of the story. He puts the page beside him and puts a new piece of paper in the typewriter. He then retypes the first page, editing, shaping, making it more precise, more effective. He then moves on to write the first draft of the second page of the story. He puts the rewrite of the first page on top of the old first page, puts the second page beside it, and puts new blank sheet in the typewriter. It is not hard to guess what he does next: He retypes (and edits) the first page again, then he retypes (and edits) the second page, and then writes the third page. So in a 20-page piece, the first page retyped and edited twenty times, the second page retyped nineteen times, etc. This, I think it is fair to say, is a believer in revision. Robert Louis Stevenson would no doubt approve. Rosenbaum is also, one might argue, a bit obsessive- compulsive. But he's got a jeweler's eye, and he is a very successful literary journalist. While on some level I, like my students, am in awe of Rosenbaum's level of rigor, I suppose that in the end I can in all fairness represent no position other than my own. When sitting down to attempt a piece of journalism with, shall we say, higher aspirations, I have since the mid-1980s yet to turn my computer off and rummage around in the closet for the old Olivetti 35, while muttering to myself, "No, no, this piece has such promise that it deserves to be written on a typewriter." My last point about technological possibility concerns the potential that the Internet, not the microcomputer, represents for literary journalism. Despite the events since March 2000 -- and clearly the last two years suggest that the Internet was oversold as an economic entity...remember the phrase "the New Economy?" -- it can be argued that the Internet has had and will continue to have a profound sociocultural influence. With particular regard to its effects on literary journalism, it has significantly increased the number of voices available to the reading public, as well as the number of readers. As a result, it has been a boom to both the creation and appreciation of literary journalism. Sites such as Feed, McSweeney's, perhaps Salon and some of the better 'zines, (argot for online magazines) often feature work of extraordinary quality. Part of the good news in that is not only are there venues for this kind of quality writing, but also that the tyranny of limitation on length has been completely obviated online. If a piece deserves to be 10,000 words long, it can be 10,000 words long. Length and physical cost have been forever de-coupled. It sometimes seems to me that new sites of this kind appear almost weekly. In fact, one could argue that this first decade of the twenty-first century may in the future be regarded, at least as far as literary journalism is concerned, as a new "golden age" -- a parallel to the originality and the fecundity of the 1960s. And the fact that technology, so far removed from the literary romanticism of the quill pen, might have a role in making this so, is, if not miraculous, at least worthy, I suspect, of note. Thank you very much.