90
PARTISAN REVIEW
some of the intellectual kinds of observations characters have in
Thomas Mann but we do not expect or get much of in American fiction,
some people are talking about the fact that different kinds of technol–
ogy try to imitate what the writer can do. They give the user of that
technology a freedom close to that of reading. What one of the charac–
ters observes is that the CD player allows a musician to program six or
seven seconds so that it can play over and over until the musician can
hear all of the notes, where they fit in the meter and how the accents
work and so on. The electronics people are trying to give you techno–
logical access to the same thing that happens when
YOll
read a passage
in a book over and over again, either because you love it, because you
are attempting to memorize it, or get deeper into it.
Now, when a person wants to be a filmmaker, he can take a VCR and
rewind a scene, and look at it over and over again, and come to under–
stand the lighting, the camera position, etc. Now everybody sitting here
and everybody in this room who's written has experienced the magic of
the repetition of a passage in Shakespeare. I think therefore that the
reading and writing experience anticipates many of the things we see in
the world of technology. I was on a panel on the
Charlie Rose Show,
and a woman was talking about the great leap that had been made in
technology that allows a director to use computers
to
create more peo–
ple in a scene, and to make a building bigger, as the guy did in the movie
Gladiator.
And I said, "The writer was already there." Five thousand
people come to the Coliseum on that Sunday, and then the writer says,
"No, that's not enough." So he writes, "Ten thousand people came to
the Coliseum that day." "No, that's not enough either." So he writes,
"So many people were excited by the contest to the death that was to
take place on that Sunday that the entire city and the surrounding com–
munities all converged on the Coliseum. Even they who could not get in
were thrilled to be close enough to hear the roar of the crowd inside."
What people are doing with computers right now writers have always
been doing. Five thousand, ten thousand, a hundred thousand, a mil–
lion-however many you want. So we're always ahead of everybody
else, I'd say, and that's just how it is. As they say, they'll never catch us.
Norman Manea :
One note to what Stanley said. In this very rapid evo lu–
tion of technology I see only one hope: the difference between the human
brain and the most sophisticated computer is that the computer cannot be
imprecise. I am relieved sometimes,
to
take imprecision as a chance.
Geoffrey Hartman :
Thank you all very much for coming.
