Is Literature Dying?
Is Literature Dying?
By Cesare A.X. Syjuco
Published in: The Manila Times, February 04, 1987
IN the recently concluded national conference of the Writers' Union of the Philippines (WUP), keynote speaker Bienvenido Santos confessed apprehension that the writer might even now be threatened by progressive extinction, losing valuable ground to modern communicational advances. Specific mention of those remarks were made in the Sunday Times coverage of the event. "Answering questions later from the floor," the news item read, "Santos expressed fears that the printed word was slowly losing out to the visual media — the television, the movies and the betamax."
While a bit far-fetched to most, Mr. Santos' observation was in fact a mild understatement. The current video renaissance is undoubtedly to conventional literature what the birth of photography was to painting — death's fist at the door.
We need only remember that when the photographic image was first introduced to the world in 1839, the entire field of painting was similarly plunged into turmoil, for so devastating were the implications of Daguerre's curious invention to visual representation in general. On record, at least one artist was seen running through the streets of Paris, delirious, lamenting the death of painting. And although it may have seemed ridiculously funny at that time, history was eventually to prove that doomsayer right; for apart from its tarnished value as commodity and cultural artifact, an abrupt end had befallen the traditional art of painting as the world knew it then.
Not that this was such a bad thing. The renowned painter and ideologue Piet Mondrian had said that each stage in the evolution of art results "solely from the destruction of prior creations." The advent of photography had virtually forced painting to re-evaluate its purpose beyond its original representational function, causing it to mutate and to rediscover itself on new ground. "Photography has covered so much," says the premier English painter Francis Bacon. "In a painting that's even worth looking at, the image must be twisted at least. . . if it is to make a renewed assault upon the nervous system . . . and that is the peculiar difficulty of all figurative painting today."
The striking parallelism between painting and literature, photography and video, has chilling implications. The video image, even as it becomes increasingly more accessible to the great working classes, will almost certainly bring on the rapid obsolescence of conventional writing as we know it today. To a great extent, this is already a foregone conclusion. Video is the ultimate communicational medium, combining portability and easy dissemination of material with touchpoint efficiency — the thinking man's limitless source of informational reference and the recreationalist's haven.
Whether literature will be harder to kill than painting is largely a technological question rather than an artistic one. Photography itself had first to be assimilated into the existing structure of things before it could monopolize pictorial representation. Optical equipment had to be mass-produced in order for enough cameras to be marketed at affordable prices; likewise, new printing processes had to be devised and put into functional operation before photography could become a vital part of the publishing industry. And of course, literature in print enjoys a mass base in most developed countries that will not die easily.
But the age of micro-electronics spawning its own industrial revolution renders all future prospects for conventional writing bleak. While literature in print may continue to serve specific functions, they will doubtless be of a greatly reduced significance in the course of our daily lives. Because of this, it will be taught less and less in schools, with the average individual possessing a diminishing facility in written communication. It is even more likely that creative writers will find themselves readily assimilated into others forms of expression with our renewed interest in transmedia — forging mutational links with painting, film and video, and the graphic arts, or having to seek alternative venues for self-expression in live or recorded oral recitation, performance art, and even contemporary music. For, given time, video movies shall have replaced literary fiction, even as electronic teaching-aids are already replacing textbooks and other printed source material. The creative writers of today could well become a vanishing breed like the pharmacist and the locomotive engineer, the glassblower and the minstrel.
No amount of resistance will retard the process of developmental change. The answer lies instead in our wholehearted receptiveness to growth, in our exploring possible avenues of literary mutation, and in forging new and more vital links with the future. The cycle of life, death and rebirth controls our very destinies. And how we align ourselves to it will ultimately spell the difference in the quality of our second lease on life.
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Cesare A.X. Syjuco, “Is Literature Dying?” (page 1 of 1), The Manila Times, February 04, 1987
