I’ve been re-reading Wolf’s writing about the ‘manifoldness of phenomena[1]’ and a very curious passage on page 262 summarizing the writing of the historian Fritz Schachermeyr:
“In cultures which have no written language…there are…only two ways to make the past accessible…the formation of lists and the concentration on what the poetic imagination perceives as essential. This concentration process…simplifies the quantity of human figures, reducing them to just a few vivid and vital, ideal figures….Vast stretches of time are fused together…What meaning does this observation have for a literature which no longer wants to create large-scale, vital, ideal figures; no longer wants to tell coherent stories held together by war and murder and homicide and the heroic deeds which accrue to them?...Why should the brain be able to “retain” a linear narrative better than a narrative network, give that the brain itself is often compared with a network?”
One interesting corollary to this idea is the present-day existence of the Internet, the largest and most complicated network connecting the world that we have yet known. Is the internet perhaps changing the way we use and incorporate information, making it associative rather than linear, reducing the tendency to prioritize knowledge according to hierarchy? A few days ago, one of the inventors of the web said that he felt it was “still in its infancy,” despite being around for fifteen years or more[2]. Therefore, we hardly even know what this incredible network will mean to our lives in fifty years, a hundred years or more. How can the dominant aesthetic structures of literature, which were formed before the creation of written language, be maintained in the wake of such an enormous wave of networked information and written text? It seems to me that they will eventually be swept away, the sharper edges fading first (this is already happening) until the structure can no longer maintain its integrity and it dissolves, to be replaced by newer structures which have more meaning for our networked descendents.
That last image is very like the series of growing and fading structures created in Stanislaus Lem’s alien ocean. Or the ever-expanding forms revived and propagated by the Oulipo movement. In light of these ideas, Wolf’s Cassandra-like prognostications of inevitable failure in women’s writing seems overly pessimistic to me now. But am I ascribing to Wolf a darker sentiment than she is really suggesting? To what extent does the dark shadow of her historical moment (nuclear arms build-up and cold war of the early 1980s) define her feelings about the state of literature?
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