Computers and Writing: Two Laments

    
   
It may be too late for this essay. Perhaps the last thing that can reasonably be said about the impact of computers on the human spirit has been said. Most of us have made our choices: to compute or not, IBM or MacIntosh, Word Perfect or Microsoft Word. A few colorful rapscallions hold out for the typewriter, as some must have held out for the burnt stick. The converts appreciate their harmless eccentricity and go their way.
   
But perhaps there is room for one last lament (from a convert) about the way things used to be. The lament makes two points. The first has to do with finality and departs from an essay in the NYTBR some months ago, by  Louis Simpson,  a very thoughtful man who got on the right track but didn't quite draw out the implications of his own point.
   
His point is that computers are inappropriate for poetry,  because computers make things easy to change, but the language of  poetry, at its best is given "with absolute finality." The computer "tells you your writing is not final," while the language of poetry has "an absolute language and form." Simpson thinks computers are all right for prose because with prose, "it's the content that counts," and--with most prose writers--it doesn't matter which words come next."
   
Simpson is thinking about the process of writing, the poet siting in front of blotted foolscap vs. the poet sitting in front the glowing screen. One could quibble with this on its own terms.  The distinction between poetry and prose seems unfair to prose, let along grammar. Even to grammar it makes some difference which words come first (which words first come?  come first words which?). And is it really that much easier to delete a line than to cross it out?
    
But if we shift Simpson perspective--from the poet composing the poem to what is left there on the table when the poet gets up and walks away--it seems to me we glimpse another, and  more crucial point.  The poet with a pen leaves his drafts behind; the poet with a computer does not. Here Simpson's point picks up larger implications. Simpson says the drafts are the poet's assurance that the final words are really final. But we can go beyond that and say that they are the reader's assurance too. Else why do we we hoard a writer's drafts in air conditioned libraries and write endless books with titles that begin "The Making of. . ."  Word processing, by vaporizing the false starts and false phrasing, deprives both authors and readers of the archaeological sub-stratum which underpins both poetry and prose.
   
Drafts tell us two things. One is that writing is rewriting, that well-constructed phrases in prose or poetry are hard-won. Students, as well as poets,  need to be reminded of that. But drafts tell another story. They tell us it could have gone another way. "There was much the writer could have said," say the drafts. "The writer left left out some things in order to say what got said." Drafts and cross-outs communicate a sense of inclusiveness. They are post-modern. Derrida so loves cross-outs he has taken to putting in crossed-out terms, sur rature--under erasure--to make the point that some shades of meaning are only communicated by a word which is half crossed-out and half not.  So, if we have no drafts we lose two ways, once by not seeing how hard-won those final words are (Simpson's point), and once by not seeing the other side of the coin--how tentative and tenuous words are.
   
 If writers really do begin using computers, the loss could be serious for scholarship, and even for reading. I suppose we can worry least about the  dissertations lost because graduate students will  not have the texts of poems to work with. But even then, something will be lost if future poets bequeath to their alma mater's library, not the delicious boxes of notebooks, like those of Theodore Roethke--among which I once lived for six wonderful months--but a case of disks, each with the last version of the poem, perhaps exactly as it was transmitted over the modem to the publisher.  More serious, we might have no more wonderful facsimile texts, like that of the original "The Wasteland" with Pound's irascible comments in the margins: "You Tiresias." If Eliot had taken his MacIntosh to the shores of lake Lascernne (and made no hardcopy),  Pound could later have sat in front of it, mouse at hand, vaporizing whole sections at a click.  
   
In short, the drafts of a poem are part of the text in important  ways. They are like the gold in Ft. Knox that used to stand behind the paper money. But the computer truncates the writing process and leaves manuscripts curiously incomplete. Serious writers and readers should be legitimately made uneasy by the departure of a part of the text that both need to fully apprehend the published version.
   
Now I come to my second lament. I have been talking about the ways the computer  might undermine the security of a writer and change the ways we respond to texts. But there is another side to this. The computer makes things easier to change and leaves no trace. But it also makes things easier to finish, or to appear finished. This is what Simpson refers to when he says the computer "enables you to think you are writing when when you are not, when you are only making notes or the outline of a poem you may write at a later time."
   
More explicitly, computers make things too easy to submit. "Of the making of books there is no end," the Old Testament noted, but it hadn't seen anything yet. The printing press launched the flood, and the computer is making it worse. All the tedious typing and retyping used to form a natural barrier between a magazine and an author. Only those with something important to say (or a secretary) could penetrate it. The sheer patience required to produce a finished draft separated the men from the boys.
   
Not only does the computer produce more for editors to read, but it has made obsolete the  silly careless errors that used to make quick rejections so much easier. Once upon a time, an editor could read along until he found "believe" spelled "beleived," and chuck the manuscript aside, confident that anyone who couldn't proofread couldn't have anything important to say. I still smart under the lash of the famous poet on my dissertation committee who used all of his commentary space to make a brilliant sarcastic attack on five spelling and typing errors in a penultimate draft. No more. Now it all comes in spell-checked, sometimes grammar checked,  laserprinted, and no-o-o-o-o whiteout.  Editors  are having to read the stuff. And teachers are suffering the same problem.
    
In other words, the trouble with computers is that they produce a false sense of finality. It looks so good, it must be publishable. Let's send it off.
   
Already there are too many journals, too many submissions, too many people doing scribble, scribble, scribble. Except for my articles (and yours of course) much of it is not significant. The result can only be more trees felled to make more journals, most of them piling up unread on desks and in libraries, more lists of marketplaces, more books on how to get published (one hint: write a book on how to get published; they sell like hotcakes) more stamps paper-clipped to more self-addressed manila envelopes. Less is not always more. Sometimes more is more, and it is too much.
   
We need to go backward, not forward. We need to go back to charcoal on the wall, back to stone tablets and chisels, back to wedge-shaped sticks and soft clay tablets. To hell with the electronic village. We need to go back to a time when people could die happily having shared their  thoughts with a few friends around a campfire and no one wrote anything who couldn't memorize a few thousand lines of Greek hexameters.
   
That's what I think. And as soon as I  print it out and send it off, you can think so too.