Language & Communication, Vol. 9, No. 213, pp. 159-173, 1989 Printed in Great Britain.

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LITERACY CRISES, OLD AND NEW INFORMATION TECHNOLOGIES AND CULTURAL CHANGE

ALVIN KERNAN

The present day decrease in reading skills is not just a remediable breakdown in education, but is one sign of an extensive and probably irreversible transition of the culture from print to electronics. The change in the eighteenth century from a still predominantly oral to a full Gutenberg culture, as focused in the reading life of Samuel Johnson (1709-1784), shows that radical changes in so central a cultural activity as the means by which reliable information is acquired destabilize the established social order and disorient the individual’s sense of himself or herself in relation to the world. The resulting anxieties were resolved by the creation of new myths of reading, as in Boswell’s portrait of Johnson the omnivorous reader, and the construction of a new social role for readers, Johnson’s famous ‘common reader’.The contemporary ‘literacy crisis’-too little rather than, as in the eighteenth century, too much reading-accompanying the shift from print to electronics also shows extensive disturbances, some of them fortuitous, paradoxical or unanticipated, such as the disintegration of acid-paper books, overproduction-not a shortage-of material to be read, deconstructive types of literary criticism that provide apologetics for inaccurate and incomplete reading, and the new economics of publishing. The eighteenth century example does not predict what will happen in the electronic future but gives a sense of the range and the anxieties, social and psychological, that will be encountered.

As the pace of technological change has increased, its effects on social life and upon consciousness have become increasingly apparent. Technology, we realise more and more, doesn’t just change the way things are done, it changes the way people think about things, and, beyond this, it changes the way that they think (Pool, 1977). Because they are the means and the form by which knowledge is defined and known the technologies by which information is stored, ordered and transmitted have particularly far-reaching effects. Each of the major information technologies-oral, written, printed and electronic-has created a different kind of ‘truth’-wisdom, knowledge, information, and, now, data-and the transitions from one mode to another have marked the major historical changes in Western society. We are in the middle of another such change, from print to electronics, and looking at the ‘literacy crisis’ that accompanied the transition from orality to print in the eighteenth century can give us some understanding of the nature and the dimensions of the social and intellectual changes involved in the literacy crisis we are now facing.

‘Literacy crisis’ is a term coined in the 1960s for a sharp decrease in the schools of the linked language skills of reading and writing. A survey conducted by the U.S. Census Bureau in 1982, based on a literacy test given to 3400 adults and described as extremely easy, found that 13% of U.S. adults are illiterate (Statistical Abstracts, 1984, p. 236). And among those who can read, various surveys show that the amount of reading, particularly of books, is steadily diminishing. Something like 60% of adult Americans apparently never read a book, and a majority of the remainder read only one book a year on the average. The numbers in Britain have not yet fallen so sharply, and the following description of the literacy crisis in America may sound exaggerated, but it is real enough here, and the trends

Correspondence relating to this paper should be addressed to Professor Alvin Kernan, Department of English, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08544, U.S.A.

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are the same in both countries. In America itself the numbers differ widely in the many various samplings of literacy-there are some who even contend that there has been no real decrease in literacy at present-and it may be that illiteracy is one of those many things that, contrary to the usual simple faith in numbers, can neither be defined precisely nor counted exactly. But there is no doubt that, whatever the facts, there is a widespread social perception that illiteracy is increasing and that this is a most serious matter, so serious that ‘the nation is at risk’ (Kozol, 1985, p. 9). And in the social world, as opposed to the natural world that science studies, what is perceived to be the fact shapes the future at least as much as what may objectively be the fact, which in this as in other social ‘realities’ may finally have no very solid being.

At the present time, there is also a widespread perception that illiteracy in the schools is only one, though a very significant aspect of a much more extensive literacy crisis that marks the end of the print era. As people write and read less, while watching television and using telephones, computers, and other electronic modes of communication more and more, it begins to look ‘as if we are now seeing, all of us today, the gradual end of the classical age of reading. Of an age of high and privileged literacy, of a certain attitude toward books which, very roughly, lasted from, say, the period of Erasmus (ca 15001 to the partial collapse of the middle-class world order . . . and of the systems of education and values we associate with it’ (Steiner, 1985, p. 44). It is important to be clear that there is, of course, no question of reading or of printed materials disappearing-there were 36,071 new books published in the United States in 1970, and 51,058 in 1984-and there may well be in the future an even greater flood of print in new forms of computer printouts and desktop publishing, microfilm and fiche, laser discs storing millions of words, and masses of information in readable form in computer databases. It may well be that what we are experiencing is not the end of literacy but the end of the book, which may be paradoxically, being brought on, as Diderot predicted, by the flood of printed materials saying so many different, and frequently contradictory, things: ‘As long as the centuries continue to unfold, the number of books will grow continually, and one can predict that a time will come when it will be almost as difficult to learn anything from books as from the direct study of the whole universe. ’ ‘The printing press, which never rests’, will fill ‘huge buildings with books’ in which readers ‘will not do very much reading, but will instead devote themselves to investigations which will be new, or which they will believe to be new (for if we are even now ignorant of a part of what is contained in so many volumes published in all sorts of languages, they will know still less of what is contained in those same books, augmented as they be by a hundred-a thousand-times as many more) . . . And eventually the world of learning-our world-may drown in books’ (Diderot, 1755, pp. 234-235).

In this and many other ways, print and its typical product, the book, are losing the privileged position in the world of knowledge-‘what is printed is true’-that they have held for about 500 years, and in our culture reading books is ceasing to be the primary way of knowing. More than half of my students now tell me that what they see on a computer screen has more truth for them than does a printed page. As this becomes more and more the case, the reading rooms and stacks of the great research libraries are ceasing to be the definitive scenes of knowledge, and the single figure sitting alone, silently reading to himself or herself is less and less the distinctive image of human beings acquiring knowledge.

As if to objectify our perception that the era of the book and of reading is ending, large

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numbers of books are literally disappearing before our eyes from the shelves of those monuments of the book and of print culture, the great research libraries. It has long been known that the pulp paper made after ca 1870 disintegrates over a period of time because the alum-rosin that helps it take ink evenly, combines with moisture to form an acid that unlocks the binding between the pulp fibers. The process can be halted by a difficult process of deacidification, and some of the books can be saved by being microfilmed. But these responses are both so labor-intensive and expensive as to make it possible to save only a relatively few of the many books at risk. ‘For the rest it is too late.’ ‘At least 40 percent of the books in major research collections in the United States will soon be too fragile to handle’ (Stange, 1987, pp. 3, 38). A statistical evaluation of ‘more than 36,500 volumes [in Yale’s Sterling Library] showed that 37% of the books had brittle paper (i.e. paper which broke after two double folds) and that 83% had acidic paper (i.e. having a pH of below 5.4)‘. ‘The fact is’, said a 1987 report on the Yale Library, ‘that all book repositories are self-destructing time bombs’ (Yale, 1987, p. 24).

Economics as well as chemistry seem to favor the electronic future over the printed past. The cost of books, as well as the expense of cataloguing and handling them in libraries, has been rising at inflationary rates, and the Federal government has recently begun to tax unsold inventories of published books in a way that makes it uneconomic to keep printed books in stock past the end of any tax year. The great publishing houses associated with bibliographic high culture, Knopf and Scribners most recently, have been disappearing through takeovers and conglomerations into communications empires and other types of holding companies (Solotaroff, 1987). The small bookstore is being replaced by the big high-volume shopping-center chain, like Waldenbooks and B. Daltons. Book proliferate in this big corporation setting, but costs rise, quality and range narrow, works with low sales are eliminated, and the half-life of all books is sharply curtailed. Unsold books go quickly to that sad limbo of the book, the remainder house, or to the shredding machine to save warehousing costs and taxes on inventory.

Among the institutions that are affected by these radical changes in the status of the book, the effects stand out in the literary world, which is keyed closely to the printed book. The extensive work in this century on Greek and Yugoslav oral poetry has demonstrated how deeply involved all aspects of poetry-style, subject matter, narrative structure, tropes, performance-are with the manner in which it is assembled and presented (Lord, 1960); and the body of writings we have become accustomed to call literature since the romantics is no less closely tied to the printed book. Literature is essentially a group of printed books- The Iliad, The Aeneid, The Divine Comedy, Hamlet, etc.-and its defining qualities, such as subtle meanings, structure, or the minutiae of an exact style are book products. Any interference with reading is bound to have immediate and serious effects on literature, which is dependent on the book. The difficulties need not begin in society and its technology. In literature there was early in this century a turn away from readers and the readable as writing became increasingly cryptic, unreadable and unread. ‘As high literature turned against the middle-class reader who had given to the nineteenth century so much of its optimistic elan and breadth of feeling, the world of Balzac and Dickens begins to pass away. In the world of Mallarme . . . Proust and Joyce, that consensus of expectation began to break down. The esoteric, the hermetic, the experimental, disassociate themselves from . . . the energy of the middlebrow . . . and values as old as those of Erasmus, of Bacon, of Montaigne, who marked the beginnings of our classic age of reading, fade. . . . what is now happening is the search for the secret book, the hidden book, the book

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understandable only to the initiate, as in Finnegans Wake, as in parts of Ulysses (Steiner, 1985, p. 45).

Steiner is pointing out a kind of willed illiteracy in literature, a refusal to be read by the unelect, but, as literacy began actually to decrease, and new communication technologies began to displace the book, literacy increasingly became the issue that, though in odd indirect ways and without acknowledgement, engaged literary criticism. If romantic literature began in the nineteenth century with an emphasis on the writer, and modernism stressed the text, then the last 20 years, or post-modernist period, have been the age of the reader, providing apologies, in curious ways, for illiteracy. Harold Bloom gave us a writer-hero, the ‘strong poet’, who by means of misprision, creatively misreads earlier texts to avoid being influenced into sounding like his predecessors. Structuralists prefer ‘readerly’ over ‘writerly’ texts, that is books in which the reader constructs meaning rather than reading it out, in the usual sense of literacy, from an authoritarian text and author. Various phenomenological ‘reader-response’ and ‘reception aesthetic’ types of literary criticism have described texts filled with gaps, making reading a ‘problematic’ activity, not a science, and allowing a multiplicity of interpretations, no one of which is right or ‘privileged’ over any other. The extreme democratic view, in which anyone’s reading of a text is as true as any other, is legitimated by hermeneutics, a science of interpretation that posits that meaning is never in the text but always in the theory of interpretation applied to it. Deconstruction, the most radical of the modern literary theories, posits a radical indeterminacy in all language and a consequent total indeterminacy of meaning in any text, making reading always uncertain, relative and problematic because the text always contains its opposite, and at the extreme, there isn’t finally anything there to read. Perhaps the best summary of how literary criticism has met the problem of reading is post-modernist criticism’s rejection of the concept of ‘the book’-ordered, controlled, teleological, referential and meaningful-for ‘the text’, which is fragmented, contradictory, incomplete, relativistic, arbitrary and fictional.

At this sophisticated level of discourse, there is, of course, no question of illiteracy in any schoolroom sense, and ‘misprision’ is an epistemological, not a practical, issue, But what might, not altogether jokingly, be styled the ‘poetics of illiteracy’ has provided a highly sophisticated apologetics for the breakdown of literacy at more fundamental levels, explaining it as inevitable, the consequence of certain inadequacies in language and texts, not some moral failure on the part of society or its readers. Illiteracy, which from the direction of society looks catastrophic, is treated by the advanced criticism not as a failure or a breakdown of important skills but as a revolutionary emancipation of the imagination from limits imposed by old authority, opportunities for expanded creativity, and release of individual freedom. The liberal political orientation of this critical attitude is obvious in its anti-authoritarianism and its democratic emphasis on freedom, but it also offers an insight into the paradoxically conservative way in which an institution and its legitimating activity, literary criticism, relate to the larger society. Literature as we have known it has been a social institution based on the printed book, and any threat to the skills, reading and writing, that are needed for the book endangers literature itself. Criticism’s chief social business is to meet and explain away, or deal with in some fashion, threats to literature. In the present circumstances of steadily increasing ‘illiteracy’ the threat has been met by a criticism that says, in effect, ‘Yes, it is true, people read less and read less accurately by the old standard of strict adherence to the text, but, given the nature of language, reading was probably always a fairly loose activity, and, besides, a relativistic understanding of

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what it means to read, one that recognizes the reality of growing illiteracy, can be really

quite advantageous, offering opportunities for freedom, individuality, and creativity, all very highly prized qualities in modern society’. As a defense, this may seem somewhat odd, even perverse, but its very oddity gives some sense of how extensive and elaborate can be the changes in the social world brought about by the pressures of new technologies of communication.

But, except for nostalgia, does it really matter? This is not the first radical change in the primary mode of information storage and transmission of knowledge in western culture. The Greek world was transformed in the fifth century nc-Plato for Homer-by the appearance of writing in an oral society (Havelock, 1963), and the Western world was transformed once again by the appearance of print in the mid-fifteenth century (Eisenstein, 1979; Ong, 1982). And now it looks in the late twentieth century as if print culture were giving way to an electronic culture that stores and transmits information by means of such electric devices as the telegraph, telephone, radio, television and computer (Horowitz, 1987; McLuhan, 1962). The primary mode of communication and information storage changes from time to time, and changes rapidly, it would seem, in a high-technology culture such as ours. Historically, it appears that individuals learn the new required kinds of ‘literacy’ fairly quickly, and social institutions soon adjust to new information technologies, so there is certainly no need to feel that a decrease in Gutenberg literacy is the end of civilization. But, at the same time, we should not underestimate the effects on social, political and personal life of this radical change in our primary mode of communication. We can live with it, but a change in the ways we know and communicate with others has profound effects not only on the way people live but on the ways in which they understand the world and themselves (Scribner and Cole, 1981). It is, in my opinion, impossible to predict exactly what kind of changes the electronic revolution is going eventually to bring, but we can perhaps get some kind of a fix on what generally will be involved by looking backwards to the time when during the course of the eighteenth century an old oral-scribal culture

gave way finally to a print culture. Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) was the greatest reader of books and writer for the printing press in that time of change, and his personal experiences as a reader provide a sharp image of what was involved experientially and socially in the last great historical shift of the primary mode of communication.

The print revolution began in the mid 1400s and print began to affect culture at once, producing, in place of the two books a year that a scribe could copy, between 10 and 15 thousand different titles, or, at the smallest normal runs of 500 copies, up to 7.5 million books, in the 50 years after 1450 (Febvre and Martin, 1976). The cultural effects of widely available printed books, such as legal codes and vernacular Bibles, were obvious at once, but the old oral-scribal society was not fully transformed to a print culture until the eighteenth century (Engelsing, 1969; Darnton, 1986). It was only then, by way of trivial but telling instances, that common articles like theater tickets, marriage licenses (no one could produce portable ‘lines’ until the 175Os), and indentures began to be printed, indicating print’s intrusion into the weave of ordinary life. Printing, as the economists say, ‘took off’ during the eighteenth century, as newspapers and magazines began to appear, the overt restraints of censorship disappeared, professional writers for a public marketplace appeared, and printing houses in London grew from the 20 allowed when the Licensing Act lapsed in 1695 to 124 by 1785 (Watt, 1959). Figures from the recently completed-kept on computer and microfiche, not, ironically, printed-Eighteenth Century Short Title Catalogue (Alston and Crump, 1984), show that the number of English titles printed in England doubled-

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along with presses, printers and booksellers-during the eighteenth century, going from 9267 in the decade ending 1710 to 20,068 in the decade ending 1800 (Mitchell, 1985).

The disturbances occasioned by this increase in printing appeared most dramatically in social life as a ‘literacy crisis’ which was the exact reverse-too much rather than too little reading-of our own literacy crisis. There is a continuing argument about the actual increase of literacy in the eighteenth century (Altick, 1957, p. 30), but the record is clear that the establishment believed that there was increasingly too much reading, particularly by the wrong kind of people, meaning the lower orders, and that it was dangerous. Swift in The Battle of the Books (1696/1697) and Pope in The Dunciad (1728-1744) two great early eighteenth-century attacks on print, both portray the new writers and readers as democratic mobs, ‘For ever reading, never to be read’:

A motley mixture1 in long wigs, in bags, In silks, in crapes, in Garters, and in rags, From drawing rooms, from colleges, from garrets, On horse, on foot, in hacks, and gilded chariots. (Pope, 1744, II, 21-24)

Conservative opinion generally feared that too many readers would undermine the established order and bring about social, religious and political revolution. Locke did not, for example, favor educating the poor, and others less broad-minded considered ignorance as the opiate of Providence that kept the lower classes from feeling their misery. Only toward the end of the eighteenth century were means provided for the teaching of reading among the poor, and then with the idea of instructing them in Christian doctrine in order to ‘civilize’ them (Altick, 1957). The fear of literacy found expression in attacks on what was called a craze for a reading, a Iesewut, that foresaw results of reading much like what has been predicted for too much television viewing in the late twentieth-century America. ‘Those who deplored /reading] did not simply condemn its effects on morals and politics; they feared it would damage public health. A 1795 tract listed the physical consequence of excessive reading: “susceptibility to colds, headaches, weakening of the eyes, heat rashes, gout, arthritis, hemorrhoids, asthma, apoplexy, pulmonary disease, indigestion, blocking of the bowels, nervous disorder, migraines, epilesy, hypochondria, and melancholy” ’ (Darnton, 1986, p. 16).

The major argument repeated regularly and mindlessly against reading ‘that a general diffusion of knowledge among a people was a disadvantage; for it made the vulgar rise above their humble sphere’ (Boswell, 1791, III, p. 37) was emphatically rejected by Samuel Johnson, who continued to insist that ‘merely to read and write was a distinction at first; but we see when reading and writing have become general, the common people keep their stations’ (Boswell, 1791, II, p. 185). As a professional writer who made his living producing books for the marketplace, Johnson, like the printers and booksellers for whom he worked, had an economic stake in supporting literacy and thereby increasing the size of his market, but he was also deeply and personally committed to the Gutenberg belief, which he helped to fix, that only by reading can people become wise and society civilized. Nowhere does this attitude emerge more charmingly than in the pleasant scene where he asked the boy sculling him and Boswell on the river what he would give to be able to read the story of the Argonauts, ‘Sir’, replied the boy, to Johnson’s delight, ‘I would give what 1 have’ (Boswell, 1791, I, p. 458).

Johnson not only publicly advocated the increase of literacy, he was also a hero of reading, who enacted in his own life a deep commitment to reading, and a superb mastery of those readerly skills needed to make effective use of the numerous books that were becoming

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increasingly available to all. Boswell tells the story of Johnson as a toddler being given a passage from the Bible to memorize by his mother, following her up the stairs instantly and reciting it letter perfect. The story tells us not only of the precision and concentration with which he read, but also that he had read as an infant, before going to school, as if reading had become instinctual in Gutenberg man. There were plenty of opportunities to read in the bookshop his father ran, and Johnson, a sickly child, read his way through the stock, so that he was considered one of the best-read students ever to have entered Pembroke College, Oxford. Throughout his life he unsystematically and voraciously read anything and everything that came his way. The required Gutenberg skills seem to have been innate in him, and he was famous for never reading books through, needing only to read the first few pages of a book or to look at its table of contents to grasp its argument. His familiarity with books rather than engendering the absolute trust in the written word that marks manuscript and early book societies, led him, however, to understand the inadequacies of books as the ‘products of imperfect human imagination. . . . a tissue of unavoidably partial insights, incomplete lines of reasoning, overdrawn conclusions, mistaken emphases, arbitrary connections and patterns of development. Writing [he understood] is always contrived and never complete’ (Knoblauch, 1980, p. 245).

Boswell portrays Johnson as being perfectly at home in the new print world. Born, as one his admirers said, to ‘grapple with whole libraries’, he helped to catalogue the Harleian library with its 50,000 books, 350,000 pamphlets, 7000 volumes of manuscripts, and he knew how to find his way around other large libraries by using catalogues and bibliographies. So familiar with books as to be careless with them, of an evening Johnson sat with a pile of books on one side of his chair, picking up one at a time, spending a few minutes looking it over and then discarding it in favor of something new. His three favorite books were Robinson Crusoe, Pilgrim’s Progress and Don Quixote (that image of the difficulties of reading at the beginning of the Gutenberg age), but because of his painful bouts of depression, to the point of madness at times, the only book he would get up early to read was, he said, Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy. He had a good library of about 3000 volumes, which sold for a bit more than &290 after his death, but he seems not to have made regular use of it. Boswell once visited the library and saw there ‘a number of good books, but very dusty, and in great confusion. The floor was strewed with manuscript leaves, in Johnson’s own handwriting’ (Boswell, 1791, I, p. 435).

In the age of manuscripts, and when books are few, the available texts are numinous, magical in their physical being like the early Bibles, and wisdom comes from poring over them again and again, reading with the intensity that produces midrash or talmud. ‘From the Middle Ages until sometime after 1750, men read “intensively”. They had only a few books-the Bible, an almanack, a devotional work or two-and they read them over and over again, usually aloud and in groups, so that a narrow range of traditional literature became deeply impressed on their consciousness. By 1800 men were reading “extensively”. They read all kinds of material, especially periodicals and newspapers, and read it only once, then raced on to the next item’ (Darnton, 1986, p. 12). Johnson shows us the attitudes and information-gathering skills of one of the new extensive readers, not awed by books but aware of their imperfections, able to use lots of books that say contradictory things without getting confused, to move easily and to discriminate among the variety and plenitude of ideas they offered. In this, the public aspect of his reading, Johnson’s literacy is a model of Gutenberg practical skills, and a demonstration of the fact that a new medium of information generates new skills and new attitudes towards the materials used. But

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Johnson’s example also reveals that new information media rearrange deeper habits of mind and that the adjustment to these new ways of understanding involves considerable psychic tension for the individual.

The world in which primary information comes from talking and the world in which it comes from reading are phenomenologically very different (Ong, 1982). In the talking situation, speaker and listener are face to face and able to interact in ways that allow for adjustments that insure understanding. Talking is an immediate public occasion in which the response of each person involved is guided by the responses of the speaker and those around him, and the group interaction tends to rule out eccentric, individual responses in favor of social norms. Orality, it would seem, reinforces communal, public life and favors the outgoing personality, but literacy makes for the private, inward-turned self and the separated individuals who make up the ‘lonely crowd’ of modern society. In print society, writers and readers are separated from one another (Bronson, 1968), and the solitary reader, in the isolation and silence of the study or library, rather than hearing human voices, confronts reality as a text made up of abstract symbols to be interpreted without the context provided by public performance. To the reader in the privacy of study and library, information always comes not from an immediate present but from a told and therefore completed past, and in these removed circumstances interpretation becomes problematic and ‘meaning’ a source of difficulty (Tompkins, 1980). Reading is not only a useful skill, necessary to the business of earning a living and communicating with others, but a definitive internalized image of the order of the world and the individual’s place in it. Once it became, as it increasingly did in the eighteenth century, the primary way people approach and understand the world, then the conditions of reading-solitude, silence, reality as a problematic set of decontextualized abstract signs-began to define the human condition as isolated individuals confronting a removed and mysterious world that is hard to understand. At the same time, the reality of the world takes shape with the structural and logical characteristics of the printed page: uniformity, linearity, and coherence.

Becoming literate in a society changing from a primarily oral to a print orientation was, and still is, as each of us knows from our experiences of learning to read, an intense, profound and deeply personal experience-has anyone forgotten it?-which shapes our deep conception of ourselves and the world we live in. The remarkable portrait of Johnson (Sir Joshua Reynolds, 1773, copied here, shows Johnson, nearly blind from birth, holding a book up close to his eye and reading with such intensity that he seems to be devouring the print. Johnson disliked the portrait, which he thought showed him as ‘blinking Sam’, but it does convey something of the simultaneous hostility toward the book and the fascination with it that characterized both Johnson and his age. Johnson’s experiences as a reader, coming as they did at the historical point at which the entire culture was experiencing the shock of leaving orality behind and, as it were, learning to read, offer a vivid image of the psychological energies at work in this kind of transition. Orality never entirely disappears from any culture, of course, but in Johnson, as in his world, the old oral values and ways were still much more potent than they are in a culture like our own where reading has long ago become so much the authentic mode of knowing that it laps over and shapes oral activity. Johnson’s prodigious, we would say photographic, memory for everything he heard and read provides a good example of his deep involvement in the old oral world, where exact memory, aided by various mnemonic devices like meter (he strongly preferred rhymed over blank verse), was the only means of fixing and retaining wisdom, like laws or prayers, that had to be preserved in identical form. Memory is a much

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Samuel Johnson, 1776 by Sir Joshua Reynolds. Reproduced by kind permission of Courage Limited, London.

honored and cultivated skill in oral societies, but print society, having little need of it, neglects memory-how few students can nowadays quote so much as a line-since what needs to be remembered can be locked exactly into print.

But if Johnson’s memory reminds us of the old oral ways, his extensive reading shows in exaggerated ways the kinds of deep, powerful satisfactions the printed book could provide. Because of being a blue baby-not breathing for a time after birth-and contracting scrofula, the King’s Evil, from his wet nurse, Johnson was not only a sickly child in general, with some odd tics that never left him, but nearly blind and partly deaf. The world that the senses make real for the rest of us was never quite so solidly there for him. Biological marginality led in time to social marginality, and enormous amounts of reading compensated this outsider for felt deficiencies of the world. Something of the satisfaction that he found in reading, and what it defended against, are suggested by his remark to Boswell that any attempt to think down black thoughts was doomed; instead, he said, one ‘should have a lamp constantly burning in his bed-chamber during the night, and if wakefully disturbed, take a book, and read, and compose himself to rest’ (Boswell, 1791, II, p. 440). It is a modest example, but enough to suggest that throughout his life reading was for Johnson not just amusement or escape but an artificial reality that could substitute for an actuality that appeared to his melancholic mind as meaningless and chaotic. His life was a struggle

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with vacuity that was experienced, in Boswell’s memorable metaphor of his mind, as a ‘vast amphitheatre, the Colisaeum at Rome. In the centre stood his judgment, which, like a mighty gladiator, combated those apprehensions that, like the wild beasts of the Arena, were all around in cells, ready to be let out upon him. After a conflict, he drove them back into their dens; but not killing them, they were still assailing him’ (Boswell, 1791, II, p. 106). To master the wild beasts of meaninglessness, he perfected a variety of order- making devices, many of them like prayer or friendship, familiar and normal enough, but others, like rocking as he talked, touching every post on the way home, turning around before being able to go through a door, or stretching his steps to be standing always on a crack, are odd enough to seem like clinical symptoms of neurosis rather than the defenses against it that they are, ways of dealing with emptiness by creating and living in totally artificial structures of meaning. In this arsenal of defenses against anomie, reading, as well as writing, had a critical place, and the intensity with which he read, beginning as a child in petticoats, the exact retention in memory of every page ever looked at, the absorption of the page in a glance and the book in a few moments, the enormous amount of reading of anything and everything that came his way-he was acknowledged, by Adam Smith, for example, to be the best-read man in England-all establish the critical importance of reading in Johnson’s psychic economy. His ravenous need of books, particularly at times of stress, appears in his bizarre behavior at a dinner where before going to the table he ‘seized upon Mr Charles Sheridan’s “Account of the late Revolution in Sweden”, and seemed to read it ravenously, as if he devoured it, which was to all appearance his method of studying. “He knows how to read better than any one (said Mrs. Knowles); he gets at the substance of a book directly, he tears out the heart of it”. He kept it wrapt up in the tablecloth in his lap during the time of dinner, from an avidity to have one entertainment in readiness when he should have finished another; resembling (if I may use so coarse a simile) a dog who holds a bone in his paws in reserve, while he eats something else which has been thrown to him’ (Boswell, 1791, III, p. 284). The totality of his absorption with the book is better pictured if we remember Boswell’s description elsewhere of Johnson’s manner of eating, face down in the plate, shoveling in the food, while sweating profusely and giving off a distinctly unpleasant odor.

Johnson’s reading offers an extreme, a neurotic, example of the manner in which the primary mode of knowing not only provides information but in doing so protects against the always-present, though seldom so immediate and fearful as to Johnson, threats of chaos and emptiness. Johnson’s example further tells us that at times of sharp transition, the change can be experienced by the individual as a painful tension and disorientation. Johnson did not experience talking and reading as complementary but as competitive, even antithetic, anxiety-generating ways of knowing and communicating. Though he read and wrote with total intensity, as he had to in order to earn his living as a man of letters, he avoided and delayed working until the last moment possible, and he would whenever possible escape the isolation and silence of study for the talk of taverns, teas, dinners; for conversation in the backrooms of booksellers’ shops, gossip with Boswell and other friends, the Thrales, Anna Williams; for the conviviality of various clubs and their protracted dinner meetings. No one expresses better than he the sharp longing of the isolated reader for company: ‘If by the necessity of solitary application ]a person] is secluded from the world, he listens with a beating heart to distant noises, longs to mingle with living beings, and resolves to take hereafter his fill of diversions, or display his abilities on the universal theatre and enjoy the pleasure of distinction and applause’ (Johnson, 1750-1752, p. 207).

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Johnson’s talk was not that of a great public speaker before large audiences, a scene in which he was self-admittedly ineffective and unpersuasive. The old oral world was contracting steadily during the eighteenth century, and though a few of Johnson’s contemporaries, Wesley, Chesterfield, Burke and Wilkes, for example, were still great orators, smaller conventional groups were increasingly becoming the center of social life (Broadhead, 1980), and it was in these circumstances that Johnson shone so brightly that, largely thanks to Boswell’s record of his talk, he is still known as a great talker as well as a great writer.

But his problem with reading went much deeper than any mere desire for company. Boswell tells us: ‘Whenever he was not engaged in conversation, [melancholy] thoughts were sure to rush into his mind; and, for this reason, any company, any employment whatever, he preferred to being alone. The great business of his life (he said) was to escape from himself; this disposition he considered as the disease of his mind, which nothing cured but company’ (Boswell, 1791, II, p. 144). This is, of course, an irrational, exaggerated fear but it illuminates, with all the painful clarity of neurotic behavior, an existential uneasiness, a fear of solipsism, that is always present in some form in the reading situation, where people are cut off and confronted with only a set of abstract marks on the printed page. Reading, or any other information technology that removes people from direct sensory experience of the world, will always be experienced, as it was by Johnson, as an uneasy removal from reality. In Johnson’s case-at least as Boswell describes it-reading was like another fall from Eden and from direct gnostic participation in the fullness of being. He began to read when he took down a volume in his father’s bookshop while searching for an apple that he believed his deeply resented younger brother, Nathaniel, to have hidden behind the books, and then he began to turn the pages. . . .

Johnson’s example makes clear that there is a profound psychological adjustment required in the change from an oral to a reading world with their two very different iconographies of self and knowing. That change also has a social dimension, and society has a large stake in seeing that the change is made in the least disruptive and most effective way. The social problem appeared in the eighteenth century as the first literacy crisis, an increase in the number of readers, a vast expansion of information, and a broadening of the class of people who read. It was often noted that women began to read then in large numbers. This larger, more democratic audience made for a much freer circulation of ideas, and, by virtue of their power as buyers of books in the marketplace, readers increasingly controlled what was printed. That book is good in vain which finds no buyers or readers, a sentiment often expressed in a number of ways by Johnson, states briefly but forcefully the power that the reading public, rather than crown censorship or a group of noble patrons, began to exercise over what was printed in the eighteenth century.

In these new circumstances, which greatly alarmed conservative opinion and political authority, there were at first attempts to limit the growing literacy, by censorship and restricting schooling, but the long-range social response was to make the best of the matter. Johnson not only consistently supported the increase of literacy but recognized the legitimacy of the public’s rule over the domain of letters. When his play Irene was performed and failed, he accepted-though it must have cost him much pain-the judgment of the public without evasion: ‘A man . . . who writes a book, thinks himself wiser or wittier than the rest of mankind; he supposes that he can instruct or amuse them, and the publick to whom he appeals, must, after all, be the judges of his pretensions’ (Boswell, 1791, I, p. 200).

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He even conceded infallibility, dejure as well as de facto, to a ‘publick, which . . . never corrupted, nor often deceived, [will] pass the last sentence on literacy claims’ (Johnson, 1750-1752, p. 52).

There was in this something of a professional writer’s recognition of the raw economic power of those from whom he earned his living, and the necessity of pleasing them. But Johnson grasped the fact that in print circumstances things really had changed in fundamental ways and that those who worked with words and books had to change as well. His own adjustment appears nowhere better than in his literary criticism, where he abandoned authoritative formal standards, the neoclassical rules, for an affective criticism that centered on the intelligent responses of the reading public to literature. Fame itself, he recogizes, is no longer the reward of genius or the result of particular literary qualities but is determined by no other ‘test . . . than the length of duration and continuance of esteem. What mankind have long possessed, they have often examined and compared, and if they persist to value the possession, it is because frequent comparisons have confirmed opinion in its favour’ (Johnson, 1750-1752, No. 23). Johnson’s literary criticism was written to shape the taste of the new reading public, but it acknowledges, even as it instructs, the power of the reader over letters by grounding its judgments in the feelings and responses of readers to the books they read. His was basically a democratic affective criticism, rejecting aristocratic, neoclassical formalist theories of unities and decorums derived from idealized classical texts, in favor of the responses of living people to the texts (Keast, 1952; Damrosch, 1976). The prohibition in neoclassical poetics of mixing tragedy and comedy, he says, for example, is meaningless because it never really bofhered anyone who lives in ‘the real state of sublunary nature, which partakes of good and evil, joy and sorrow’ (Johnson, 1765, p. 66). Good criticism, he remarks elsewhere, will always show how a piece of writing affects its readers: ‘There is no great merit in telling how many plays have ghosts in them, and how this ghost is better than that. You must shew how terrour is impressed on the human heart’ (Boswell, 1791, II, p. 290).

One of society’s standard ways for shaping and controlling individual behavior is to construct a role or a model for certain important social types, such as parent, teacher, child, male or female, writer, artist, lover, and on, and on. We know who we are and how to act at any given point largely because society offers us a repertory of social roles to choose from-merchant, banker, beggarman, thief-and tells us how to act out these parts. There is a standardized role for the reader as well, and Samuel Johnson with his early reading and his enormous literary authority has been one of the successful role models of the reader. He also helped actively to construct the role of reader by creating and dramatizing an image of the reading public in the fictitious personage of ‘the Common Reader’, who became a prominent character in his criticism (Ong, 1977). The Common Reader legitimated the middleclassness of the audience he was actually addressing, now more common than aristocratic, more familiar than extraordinary. At the same time the common reader also idealized these new readers by telling them that what they had in common were the essential features of the universal man of the Enlightenment: the ‘basic man who was so much the preoccupation of seventeenth and eighteenth century thinkers, man deprived of innate ideas, of traditions, and of superficial differences owing to time, place, and culture, man, in short, reduced to the level on which all men’s minds work alike. The advantage possessed by the concept of the common reader was universality; what pleases him is what will please everybody everywhere, except readers who have been unable to shake themselves free from personal bias and ephemeral interests’ (Tracy, 1977, p. 410).

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It was this commonness considered as a virtue that Johnson consistently attributed to his readers, telling them that while they might be unsophisticated in literary matters, ‘uninstructed by percept’, and ‘unprejudiced by authority’, their lack of education need be no hindrance to their ability to read and understand whatever was placed before them. Indeed, he persistently argued, the reading public’s common human nature is ‘more decisive than learning’ in matters of literary judgment because it focuses not on trivia but on the fundamental ‘questions that relate to the heart of man’ (Johnson, 1750-1752, No. 52). In the common reader, Johnson provided the reading public with a role, a positive image of itself, which acknowledged their lack of formal education but accepted as right their new power over books and ideas, and at the same time encouraged them to use this power in the best possible way by employing their basic understanding, not some set of abstract rules, to seek in books what is most fundamental and permanent in human life. Johnson’s achievement in creating the common reader is a prime instance of that continuing social activity by which disturbing changes are managed by establishing new roles that make the best of new circumstances.

The paradox that states that the only lesson history teaches is that history teaches no lessons is probably true. History probably never does exactly repeat itself. But the literacy crisis in eighteenth century England, focused in Johnson’s intense personal involvement with readers and reading, can give the twentieth century at least some general sense of the dimensions of the present transformation of a print to an electronic culture. Radical transformations of the basic mode of knowing and communicating are not mere technological adjustments, but structural changes in culture that are experienced and dramatized as an extensive ‘crisis’ in many direct and indirect ways. In the eighteenth century, too much reading by an expanded public was thought to threaten the social order. In the twentieth, the breakdown of reading skills in the schools, our ‘literacy crisis’, dramatizes a much more extensive national uneasiness about what the shift from print to electronics is doing to a culture where television has already transformed politics, religion, and the ‘news’ to theatre, and where the computer is replacing the book and the library with new forms of data storage, retrieval, and combination.

Transformations of this magnitude in how we get information, the eighteenth century example tells us, are neither easily understood, accepted, nor managed. New skills have to be learned, and, with far greater difficulty, radical psychological adjustments have to be made. The primary means of communicating and getting information not only shape the entire social world but are woven into the fabric of individual life and consciousness, a critical part of the sustaining reality and the primary image of the self in the world. Individuals who live at a time of major transition in the primary information medium will, therefore, not only find their ways of living changing but will experience the change, from reading to television viewing, for example, as a troubling destabilization of their sense of where and what things are, and where they are in relation to them. In these circumstances, they may, like Johnson, move uneasily from the old to the new modes of knowing, as he did from reading to talking, never quite at ease in either, and therefore unable to derive from either or both the reassurances of an orderly meaningful world that a stable authoritative source of information provides its users. There may well be, that is to say, a heavy psychic price for those who live, as we still do, with one foot in the reading world, where things are fixed and stable, and one in the electronic world of secondary orality and visuality, where the images are unsettled and endlessly fluid.

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The eighteenth-century literacy crisis also suggests that, socially, the wiser course, and certainly the more pragmatic, given the irresistible power of new information technologies, is probably to go with the new kind of literacy. Not, Johnson’s example suggests, in a mindless fashion, accepting everything that comes along, but learning how to make the best use of the new opportunities, and developing the skills that make it possible to exploit the potentials of the new media for human ends. It is impossible to say whether society in time will develop some role of ‘the common viewer’, who offers a model that makes the best out of looking at ‘tiny screens’, even as the common reader did for reading; but history suggests that in the broadest sense the solution lies in the direction of adapting rather than resisting. This probably means giving up the old Gutenberg idea of universal literacy, and rejecting the shrill voices of the many who judge any decrease of literacy a moral failure and a social catastrophe marking the onset of barbarism. Instead, the eighteenth-century example suggests that in these circumstances of radical change, the most rewarding as well as the most interesting responses will be those that accept and make the best of the change, though not uncritically, with a clear historical understanding of the inevitability of such changes and their extensive effects on social and individual, as well as technological, life.

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