DORIS LESSINC
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Doris Lessing:
Well, good.
Dorothea Straus:
It seems to me that children in Africa who have not
had our privileges read everything with equal excitement. Today we have
a glut, we have too much of everything, and I think that has done some–
thing to the brain. I don't know if it's physiological but I think there 's been
a deterioration fj-om glut. Everything comes at you in great quantities.
Television has not affected the number of books published, but I think it
probably has affected our joy in books.
Morris Dickstein:
I think it's ironic that on a flight across the Atlantic
you felt bombarded by things that were coming at you too rapidly. If you
were still ab le to take the Queen Mary across the Atlantic, no doubt
you'd have curled up with Cibbon's
The Rise
IlIl!I
FilII.
The fact is that the
whole world has speeded up- information, conlmunicatioll, travel, and
so
011,
and there's no reason in the world why the media and literature,
which to some degree reflect the pace of life in the world, should not
also have speeded up. My point is that of course, for those of us who
grew up in a more print-oriented period, it's very hard to adjust. No one
has ever said that the twentieth century was an age of narrative, and argu–
ments and complaints about discontinuity were registered about
Ulysses.
They were registered about all the modernist experiments from futur–
ism to expressionism. They are part of the literary core as well as the
electronic core of the twentieth century. Now we may say that today it's
often being done
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a very banal fashion , but nevertheless this kind of
discontinuous mood, a more jazz-like, collage-like mode, is central to the
twentieth century. Of course it has created a great nostalgia for the older
kind of narrative.I've heard that in England, two-thirds of the country
got deeply involved in the miniseries based on
Pride (/Ild Prejlldirc.
That's
not literature but it's a nostalgia for the older, more luxuriant kind of
narrative, which is sti ll avaiLlble in various ways, but it represents some–
thing that we associate with the nineteenth century and it does not really
reflect the rhythm of li fe as we experience it in the twentieth century.
Doris Lessing:
I knew I was going to get into trouble if I mentioned
narrative at all.
William Phillips:
I'm surprised that severa l people, in one way or
another, have sort of gotten away from the centra l fact that is implicit to
what Doris Lessing has been saying, that there has been a cu ltural decline.
The fact that technology produces this naturally or the fact that thou–
sands of books which are worthless have been printed every year doesn't
