[In the following review, Tolson describes the principal themes of The Gutenberg Elegies, explaining the deficiencies of Birkerts's arguments yet admiring his passion for reading.]

It's not easy to pick up a book about the impending death of a practice once thought to be at the heart of the well-lived life. I mean the practice of reading, especially the kind of serious reading we were taught was not only the means to an education, but its self-delighting end. And though it may be comforting to hear one's twilight fears echoed and elaborated by someone so steadily persuasive as Sven Birkerts, it's hard to shake the feeling that his book would more profitably sit in the hands of those who are least likely to turn to it: the growing number of "wired" citizens who consider books, and book-reading, quaint atavisms in the evolution of information technology. This book's message is apt to seem to them as distant as its medium.

The medium in this case is the old-fashioned discursive essay—personal, reflective, edifying and (true to the title of the collection) elegiac. Through the fifteen essays gathered here, two themes march solemnly, purposefully and often hand in hand. The first is that the reading of good books is an essential, and essentializing, activity: that it deepens and individualizes us, cultivates our inwardness and even our souls. The second is that the act of reading—specifically, the serious and solitary engagement with works of great literature—is endangered by the rise and expansion of the modern technology of electronic "interactivity."

Few readers will have difficulty embracing the first theme. Indeed, as readers, they will have a harder time believing that anyone who doesn't engage with great books can possess a soul worth wondering about. This readerly species of hubris in fact merits consideration, not least because it persists despite the efforts of some of the more canny modernist writers to challenge its blinkered arrogance. Joyce's Leopold Bloom is a perfect case in point. This supreme creature of the Dublin middle class, this urban stroller and relisher of the everyday, is not a reader in the sense Birkerts would understand. That is. Bloom would never sit down to an evening with a novel by Flaubert; a line from Yeats would probably baffle him. Yet Joyce makes it abundantly clear—it is practically the point of his novel—that Bloom, in another sense, is a profoundly discerning reader of the world's manifold and seemingly random signs, whether they be details from ephemeral newspaper stories or advertising slogans, the muttered words of his fellow citizens, or the shifting moods of his wife. That a writer of such exquisitely mandarin learning could have arrived at so democratic an appreciation of the interior life of an extraordinary ordinary man is one of the marvels of Ulysses.

The matter of Bloom is not tangential to Birkerts's larger argument, as Birkerts well knows. One of his essays explicitly takes on the charge that literary sensibility (or what Birkerts calls "coherent inwardness") is no more than an elitist affectation. To some extent, though, all of the essays here force one to ask whether "people of the book" are indeed guardians of the sacred and the true, or just well-intentioned but ultimately misguided idolaters who mistake the vessel for the contents in their efforts to perpetuate a cult of esotericism, high learning, difficulty.

Birkerts makes a good case against the second conclusion and in favor of the broadest, most democratic claims of a literary education. He does so partly through a sympathetic autobiographia literaria that tells how he came to books and how his life has been shaped in service to them. Birkerts's literary education had a very unstuffy, American quality—after college, he supported himself by working in bookstores, fighting off depression and self-doubt with voracious reading—and the self-mocking candor with which he describes himself is winning. "I saw my role," he writes of his bookstore years, "as quasi-priestly: I was channeling the nourishing word to the people who wanted it most. I had to feel that because, otherwise, I was just putting in time at a low-paying retail job, not at all ministering to the life of the culture or moving along a worthy career path."

But even while the priestly metaphor is ironic here, it hints at a somewhat less democratic notion of the literary life. Simply put, Birkerts believes that literature has a salvific purpose, though salvation, to him, is very much a worldly matter: its other name is individuality. We go to serious reading, Birkerts suggests, out of a sense of self-insufficiency (a secular variant, one might say, of Original Sin): "To open a book voluntarily is at some level to remark the insufficiency either of one's life or of one's orientation toward it." And what do readers accomplish in reading? Typically, Birkerts explains, they establish their "inwardness, the more reflective component of their self, in the space that reading opened up." That space is more temporal than physical—not the time of sequential, measurable units but time beyond time, in which the reader can see that, "God or no God, life has a unitary pattern inscribed within it, a pattern that we could discern for ourselves if we could somehow lay the whole of our experience out like a map."

If such arguments have a familiar ring, it is because Birkerts embraces the Arnoldian ideal of art as the last stay against anarchy, the noble stand-in for the lost established creeds. He is an epigone among the literary intellectuals, critical and creative, who self-consciously defined their labors in priestly terms. According to the high modernist tradition elaborated by this clerisy, the artist creates the works whose unity, clarity and integrity the critic then identifies and sets forth before the Common Reader.

Over the years, the critical terminology—objective correlative, negative capability, dissociation of sensibility, irony, authenticity, the anxiety of influence—has come to form a kind of catechism for initiates into the literary culture. The terms have become precepts not only for reading well but also for living well. They constitute an ethos and a doctrine, at whose center is an act of submission. One submits, Birkerts makes clear, to the authority of the author:

This "domination" by the author has been, at least until now, the point of reading and writing. The author masters the resources of language to create a vision that will engage and in some way overpower the reader, the reader goes to the work to be subjected to the creative will of another.

Although there is much that is appealing about this metaphysics of reading as "self-making," it is a doctrine grounded in specific historical conditions, with problematic origins and an equally problematic demise. Birkerts, however, scants the historical question, and thus exposes his defense of the reading culture to easy attack. When, exactly, does he see the emergence of those practices of reading that nurtured the modern ideal of the individual? Does he find them in the stirrings of the Renaissance, in the efforts of the humanists to extend and expand the educational uses of reading? What is the significance of the fact that the kind of reading Birkerts values emerged precisely as revealed religion was beginning to lose its absolute and universal hold? Was it, at least at first, an alternative mode of the religious life, with Protestantism being the church of self-justification through the unmediated encounter with the Word?

Some acknowledgement of the historical dimension might have led Birkerts to see that the demise of literary culture is no more the death of reading than the collapse of Christendom was the end of Christianity. What we may be seeing in this "reading reformation" is the end of a certain institutionalized, hieratic approach to reading, one that subtly reified itself as a sacred thing. Reading, as it literally escapes the confines of the book—and the authority of the clerisy that instructs in the correct ways of reading—may lose much of its mystique, but it's possible, at least arguable, that there was something far too rarefied and precious about that mystique.

It's possible, too, that there was something terribly confused about the confidence that the Romantics and their Modernist successors placed in the moral and spiritual adequacy of art. There were hints early on—in Pound, in Yeats, in Eliot and indeed throughout post-Romantic European culture—that the literary ethos comported quite easily with self-delusion, moral vacuity and barbarism. Art can produce monsters, just as it can be made by monsters. Then, too, to force art into the role of moral or spiritual guide is in some ways to trivialize and overdomesticate it. As Lionel Trilling suggested, great books can lead to the abyss as well as to the Grail.

It may be for the good, then, that reading is turning renegade in our time. As reading resituates itself under less strongly institutionalized conditions, we may need fewer Jeremiahs of the literary culture and more critics who accept the variety of ways in which people find a "coherent inwardness." Birkerts is surely right to say that reading teaches us how to cultivate our solitude. But he forgets the lesson of Leopold Bloom by suggesting that reading is the only way to cultivate such inwardness. The dire either/or arguments about reading won't work. The wired generation has heard them too many times, from the likes of Neil Postman and Theodore Roszak and others who bemoan the incursions of the buzzing electronic media upon the quieter, more solitary business of "self-making." Such admonitions, often delivered with Sunday school solemnity, now provoke titters from the pews, if not indifference.

Similarly, to Birkerts's assertions that electronic interactivity spells the end of "a society of isolated individuals," the wired generation will have a ready retort: "What was so great about that splendid isolation? And aren't we building communities through the Net, truly democratic communities in which authority—derived from knowledge—is dissolved or at least spread among more people?" For that matter, I'm not sure they'll be convinced by Birkerts's claim that readers are the last of the heroic individualists. Under the new dispensation, Birkerts says, we "no longer prize the loner, the dreamer, the disaffected protester, or the tormented misfit." As poorly as I understand the world of the Internet, I do know that the very idea of the hacker is bound up with renegade individualism.

A more nuanced argument is called for, one that includes greater sympathy for the wired world and its human complexities, and perhaps a little more honesty about the failures of literary culture. In the world of electronic interactivity, for example, there has been, and will continue to be, a struggle to protect the freedom, spontaneity and individuality of the early Net (personified, again, by the hacker) against great public and commercial interests that want to dominate, control and profit from the expanding network. The politics of this struggle have been widely reported upon in the press. But the human dimensions of the conflict have been largely ignored by high literature, possibly to its peril.

The reasons for such neglect are not hard to find. Literary people are famously impatient with technology. It vexes them when it doesn't bore them; technophiles seem juvenile in their fascination with gadgets and tinkering. Birkerts, to his credit, chides writers for such genteel disdain and calls on contemporary novelists to attempt to make sense of the new consciousness now being created by the emerging media. He even suggests that this might be the great theme of our time, and mentions briefly—too briefly for the purposes of his book—some of the better writers who have ventured into the new territory. Yet from what Birkerts says elsewhere, one would have a hard time understanding why this new consciousness would be anything worth exploring.

Birkerts should insist on more from the literary culture he so passionately defends: more daring on the part of our best writers in confronting the electronic culture, and (simplistic as it may sound) more confidence among our teachers in the value of pleasurable engagements with great literary work. Birkerts would like to update the arguments of Trilling, to extend the defense of the liberal uses of a literary imagination into our electronic age. This is a worthy goal, and he has taken a step toward it. The next step would be to acknowledge more bravely the darker side of literary experience, its power to disorder the senses as well as to order them. Literature's window onto chaos and unpredictability may even be what keeps serious reading alive in the uncentered virtual worlds that are now emerging.