The Image (19 page)

In the world of dramatic arts, the Graphic Revolution has produced a still subtler and more widespread confusion of forms. The English novel, we must remember, did not arrive as a popular literary form until the eighteenth century. English drama was, of course, much older, reaching back to the medieval mystery and morality plays, and coming to a climax with Shakespeare and the other Elizabethan dramatists. For a number of reasons, however, the two forms—the novel and the play—long remained quite distinct in English literature. It was not usual for a successful novel to be put into dramatic form, much less for a play to be cast into a novel. The obvious limitations of the stage had something to do with this.

The sweep of landscape and the panoramas of violent action seen in the pages of novels could not be convincingly transferred to the stage. How could you make sets for
War and Peace
? With the rise of motion pictures, however, these limits were almost destroyed. The new technique made it possible to change scenery in the flash of an eye, to bring vast landscapes and wild action into the theater—now on the screen. The new possibilities of the movie camera (especially in the early days before sound) tempted movie makers to exploit
the peculiar capacity of the movie screen to depict what could not have been physically represented on the stage. The first great box-office success (still a record-holder) was D. W. Griffith’s
Birth of a Nation
(1915), which attracted millions by its expansive battle scenes, its torrential action, and its close-ups of the faces of leering villains and of dead soldiers. This was the first movie ever shown in the White House. After seeing it, President Wilson is said to have remarked, “It is like writing history with lightning.” The man-made lightning was important not only because it had created a new dramatic form. Equally significant, if less noted, was the simple fact that scenes which before could be vividly depicted only in the pages of a book (but not on the stage) now for the first time could appear in another form: on the movie screen. This new apparent interchangeableness of dramatic forms was seductive. Before long it helped produce a new amorphousness and elusiveness of all literary-dramatic form. From the point of view of the individual’s experience, too, this was epoch-making. It made the world of literary forms blurry as it had never been before.

Now, for the first time, you
could
dramatize almost any scene from any novel. The grander the expanses of scenery, the more violent and wide-sweeping the action, the more rapid the changes of scene—in other words, the more ill-suited any drama was to the narrowly confining stage, with its real men and women and its real stage sets physically present in the theater—the more appealing was the story for movie purposes. It was now only a rare novel (which depended on unique and intricate literary devices) that could
not
be made into a movie. Often the movie was more widely appealing, as it was of course more visually vivid, than its literary original. There were few plays and (after the addition of sound, signalized by Al Jolson’s
Jazz Singer
in 1927) few musicals which could not better attract the public from the screen.

One consequence of the movie form was to make it possible (or even common) for a spectator to arrive in the middle
of one performance, and then to see the beginning afterwards. The fragmentation of experience was increased by the invention of television, when a viewer could turn the knob at will and enter programs one after another free of charge, seeing only a piece of each. The distracting possibilities of television reached a climax when, during the much-publicized quarrel between Jack Paar and Ed Sullivan, De Forest Television advertised in the Chicago
Sun-Times
on March 12, 1961 sets with two or three screens in the same cabinet:

The increasing technical possibilities of movies and television did have the effect of leaving the novel with an entirely new role. It was now a kind of residuary legatee: of radio, of movies, of television. Some of the ablest literary artists (like James Joyce, William Faulkner, and Henry Miller) more and more now explored the inner world—the world of eroticism, obscenity, blasphemy, symbolism, stream of consciousness, and introspection—which could not be acceptably displayed on the movie screen. The novelist, then, has been encouraged to explore the boundless non-visual world, as the movie maker has taken over much of his former jurisdiction over the fantasy world of sight, sound, and action.

A clue to the new interchangeability of dramatic forms appeared in America in the emergence of a new meaning for the phrase “legitimate theater.” In England the word “legitimate” had long been used in this phrase to distinguish
the body of plays, Shakespearean and other, which had a recognized theatrical and literary merit, as contrasted, for example, with light musical entertainment, farce, and melodrama. In the United States after the rise of movies, “legitimate theater” expressed a distinction not of quality but of technology. “Legitimate theater” here came to mean any drama, including musicals, farces, and melodramas, performed by live actors on a stage, as opposed to performances in movies, on radio, or television.

Before I explore these subtler influences of the Graphic Revolution on our expectations and our experience, I will begin by recalling one of the most elementary and widespread symptoms of dissolving literary forms. This is the rise and popularization of the abridgment and the digest.

I
N EARLIER
times in Europe the “abridgment” or “digest” was a highly specialized literary form. It was used for technical (usually legal) materials. The most famous was the “Digests” (533
A.D
.) of the Byzantine-Roman Emperor Justinian, who selected the writings of earlier Roman jurists and so preserved Roman Law for future ages. English lawyers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries made comparable digests of the common law. The pioneer American work was Nathan Dane’s
General Abridgment and Digest of American Law
(eight volumes, 1823). It has been followed by still more elaborate abridgments and digests. Prosperous American law publishers (for example, the West Publishing Company of St. Paul, Minnesota) have made big business out of reducing to accessible form our ever-multiplying statutes and judicial precedents.

In the past it was usually for the student of some special subject matter (needing, for professional reasons, to be informed about essential points in a vast literature) that publishers prepared abridgments or digests. The general reader,
whether reading for pleasure or for instruction, selected his book for its total character and content. He chose a novel—his Cooper, Dickens, or Thackeray—because he liked what the author put in, what he left out, and how he told the story. In a work of nonfiction—in Jared Sparks, George Bancroft, Francis Parkman, Ralph Waldo Emerson, William Hickling Prescott—he liked what the author told him and he was attracted by the author’s peculiar way of expanding, compressing, and discoursing. Since the later nineteenth century much of this has changed. The popular abridgment is the great symptom of the change.

With the spread of literacy and the cheapening of books since the Graphic Revolution, the printed matter available to the citizen has multiplied. The same technological advances which account for modern journalism and for the flood of political pseudo-events also account for the flood of magazines and books. The rising American standard of living has enabled more people to buy them at the same time that improvements in paper making and printing have made them cheaper to buy. The diffusion of secondary and higher education has made more people want to buy printed matter. Improvements in merchandising have made books and magazines handier. Advertising has supported more and more magazines. Democratic faith in an informed, participating citizenry has persuaded people they ought to read more and more.

The intimate impact of world events, the ever-present threats of depression and war, the spectacular pace of scientific advance—all these remind the citizen of more things he should know about. Magazines themselves, trading on the duty to be informed, prick the citizen’s conscience. He must be up on the latest book, conversational about the most recently notorious magazine article, “informed” about the world in which he lives. James Bryant Conant, former president of Harvard, said in October 1960 that the minimum goal in reading skill for almost all pupils at the end of Grade 9 is “that these future voters should be able to read with comprehension
the front page of a newspaper at the rate of about 200 words a minute.” Everybody must know more and more about more and more. How to do it?

Today, therefore, everybody feels the need for “abridgment,” for digests and summaries of the world’s culture, the world’s opinions, and the world’s happenings. Not merely the specialist, the lawyer or the doctor, but the common citizen needs help. In twentieth-century America—a literate, prosperous, earnest democracy—the digest has become the citizen’s tool.

Digests have taken many different forms. One of the earliest and most straightforward was the
Literary Digest
(1890–1938). Its first issue, in March 1890, abridged notable articles from leading magazines, summarized stories and editorials from newspapers, offered “Book Digests,” an “Index of Current Literature,” and a “Chronicle of Current Events.” The emphasis was emphatically highbrow: the opening sections were entitled “Sociological,” “Industrial,” and “Political.” The lead article in Volume I, Number 1, by Professor Thomas H. Huxley, “On the Natural Inequality of Men,” was taken from the issue of an English review,
The Nineteenth Century
, which had appeared two months before. There followed heavy selections from French, German, Italian, and Russian reviews. “The articles in the Review and Press Departments,” the editors explained, “are condensations or summaries of the original articles, or of salient points in those articles. In no case do they represent the personal opinions of the editors of the
Literary Digest
, whose constant endeavor is to present the thought of the author from his own standpoint.”
The Review of Reviews
, begun in England in the same year, within a few months was being separately edited and published in America. It professed a more grandiose purpose. Expressly adapting Matthew Arnold’s definition of culture, the editors aimed “to make the best thoughts of the best writers in our periodicals universally accessible. To enable the busiest and the poorest in the community to know the best thoughts of the wisest;
to follow with intelligent interest the movement of contemporary history.”

Digests of books and magazines would not long remain so highfalutin. By the early twentieth century the
Literary Digest
had come down to the level of the newspaper reader. It was then read mostly for its summaries of journalistic reactions to current events, and for its items of popular interest discovered in the less popular magazines.

With the founding of
The Reader’s Digest
by De Witt Wallace, in February 1922, a new era of abridgments began. Wallace, son of a Presbyterian preacher-professor in a small midwestern denominational college, proved to be an editorial genius. His
Digest
was soon far more popular than any of the magazines it digested. It became the publishing phenomenon of the twentieth century. During the year 1959, for example, when the American Bible Society distributed a total of seventeen and a half million volumes of Scripture,
The Reader’s Digest
was published in some thirty editions (including Braille) and in thirteen languages, totaling a world circulation of about twenty-one million copies a month. In the United States alone its monthly circulation was then well over twelve million, which was almost twice the circulation of the next most popular American magazine. A reliable survey estimated that
The Reader’s Digest
was read every month by at least thirty-two million Americans—one of every four adults in the nation.

There is no better clue than the rise of
The Reader’s Digest
to the dissolution of forms and to the increasing secondhandness of our experience in twentieth-century America. This, the most popular magazine in the United States, has offered itself not as an “original,” but as a digest. The shadow outsells the substance. Abridging and digesting is no longer a device to lead the reader to an original which will give him what he really wants. The digest itself is what he wants. The shadow has become the substance.

The story of
The Reader’s Digest
is an epic (perhaps we should say a “pseudo-epic”) of the production of pseudo-events,
of the dilution and tautologizing of American experience. Since 1939, when the
Digest
moved into a specially designed one-and-a-half-million-dollar Georgian-style office building, its headquarters have been an eighty-acre estate of park and wooded hills outside of Chappaqua, New York, employing about 100 editors and 2,500 clerical workers. It has offices also in New York, London, Paris, Copenhagen, Havana, Helsinki, Quebec, Madrid, Milan, Oslo, Rio de Janeiro, Stockholm, Stuttgart, Sydney, Toronto, and Tokyo. Its writers are constantly traveling the world. But the magazine had modest beginnings. The first issue was prepared in a one-room basement office under a Greenwich Village speakeasy, by De Witt Wallace and his wife, Lila Acheson Wallace, a former English teacher and social worker. They put it together with their own scissors and paste and carried the mail sacks to the post office. It was an immediate success.