CYNTHIA OZICK
771
Then why did James plead for vocal imitation instead of
reading? He lived in a sea of reading, at the highest tide of literacy,
in the time of the crashing of its billows. He did not dream that the
sea would shrink, that it was impermanent, that we would return,
through the most refined technologies, to the aural culture. He had
had his own dealings with a continuing branch of the aural culture–
the theater. He had written for it as if for a body of
accompl~shed
readers and it turned on him with contempt. "Forget not," he warned
in the wake of his humiliation as a playwright, "that you write for the
stupid-that is, your maximum of refinement must meet the mini–
mum of intelligence of the audience- the intelligence, in other
words, of the biggest ass it may conceivably contain. It is a most
unholy trade!" He was judging, in this outcry, all those forms that
arrange for the verbal to bypass the eye and enter chiefly through the
ear. The ear is, for subtlety of interpretation, a coarser organ than
the eye; it follows that nearly all verbal culture designed for the ear is
broader, brighter, larger, louder, simpler, less intimate, more insis–
tent- more
theatrical-
than any page of any book.
For the population in general, the unholy trades- they are now
tremendously in the plural- have rendered reading nearly obsolete,
except as a source of data and as a means of record-keeping- "ware–
housing information." For this the computer is an admittedly startling
advance over Pharoah's indefatigably meticulous scribes, notwith–
standing the lofty liturgical poetry that adorned the ancient records,
offering a tendril of beauty among the granary lists. Pragmatic read–
ing cannot die, of course, but as the experience that feeds
homo ridens,
reading is already close to moribund. In the new aural culture of
America, intellectuals habitually define "film" as "art" in the most
solemn sense, as a counterpart of the literary novel, and ridicule sur–
vivors of the age of "movies" as nai'fs incapable of making the transition
from an old form of popular entertainment to a new form of serious
expression meriting a sober equation with written art- as if the issue
had anything to do with what is inherently complex in the medium,
rather than with what is inherently complex in the recipient of the
medium. Undoubtedly any movie is more "complicated" than any
book; and also more limited by the apparatus of the "real." As James
noted, the maker of aural culture brings to his medium a "maximum
of refinement"-i.e., he does the best he can with what he has to
work with; sometimes he is even Shakespeare. But the job of sitting
in a theater or in a movie house or at home in front of a television set
is not so reciprocally complex as the wheels-within-wheels job of
reading almost anything at all (including the comics) . Reading is an
