BEYOND THE TWILIGHT OF REASON
429
tations of
Ulysses.
But you do not get the particular critical capacity
~c
quired from reading the words on the page. That remains as it were the
great unknown, the great darkness. So it seems to me we should not
equate the ability to read with receptivity to a vast bulk of information.
There has never been a lack of information, but the capacity to read, in
the sense that we speak of reading in the context of literary criticism, still
seems to me to remain. Nobody is teaching that.
Robert Hass:
But if people get all this information about
Ulysses,
couldn't
it give them the impetus or curiousity to go back and read it, and get a lot
more out of it?
Denis Donogbue:
I think it might have precisely the opposite effect, in the
sense that it will give them the feeling that they know it all already.
Elizabeth Spires:
I think you could argue that the CD/ROM you're de–
scribing is actually a limit on the imagination, in the sense that when you
read you create these pictures as well as trying to understand what's going
on in the story. But if you're given all the pictures, "the right answers,"
the photos, it could be quite distracting.
Robert Hass:
I don't disagree with either of you. The temptation to add
so much information that this thing becomes identical to reality in its
meaninglessness only means it's going to require of us the invention of a
newly nuanced vocabulary to think well and create engaged readers in
this media. I'm sure that there are going to be a lot of false steps, that
we're going to get a lot of bad performance poetry, for example. But I
think we're also going to have to find ways to use that instrument to cul–
tivate in people the values we care about. That will continue to happen in
the kind of give-and-take that goes on in real teaching in a classroom.
Igor Webb:
Thank you.
