ON A GRAY AFTERNOON I sit in a silent room and contemplate din. In the street a single car passes—a rapid bass vowel—and then it is quiet again. So what is this uproar, this hubbub, this heaving rumble of zigzag static I keep hearing? This echo chamber spooling out spirals of chaos? An unmistakable noise as clearly mine as fingerprint or twist of DNA: the thrum of regret, of memory, of defeat, of mutability, of bitter fear, made up of shame and ambition and anger and vanity and wishing. The soundtrack of a movie of the future, an anticipatory ribbon of scenes long dreaded, or daydreams without a prayer of materializing. Or else: the replay of unforgotten conversations, humiliating, awkward, indelible. Mainly it is the buzz of the inescapably mundane, the little daily voice that insists and insists: right now, not now, too late, too soon, why not, better not, turn it on, turn it off, notice this, notice that, be sure to take care of, remember not to. The nonstop chatter that gossips, worries, envies, invokes, yearns, condemns, self-condemns.
But innerness—this persistent internal hum—is more than lamentation and desire. It is the quiver of intuition that catches experience and draws it close, to be examined, interpreted, judged. Innerness is discernment; penetration; imagination; self-knowledge. The inner life is the enemy of crowds, because the life of crowds snuffs the mind's murmurings. Mind is many-threaded, mazy, meandering, while every crowd turns out to be a machine—a collectivity of parts united as to purpose.
And with the ratcheting up of technology, every machine turns out to be a crowd. All these contemporary story-grinding contrivances and appliances that purport to capture, sometimes to mimic, the inner life—what are they, really, if not the brute extrusions of the principle of Crowd? Films, with their scores of collaborators, belong to crowds. Films are addressed to crowds (even if you are alone in front of your TV screen). As for those other machine-generated probings—television confessionals, radio psychologists, telephone marketing quizzers, the retrograde e-mail contagion that reduces letter-writing to stunted nineteenth-century telegraphese, electronic "chat rooms" and "blogs" and "magazines" that debase discourse through hollow breeziness and the incessant scramble for the cutting edge—what are they, really, if not the dwarfing gyrations of crowds? Superhero cybernetics, but lacking flight. Picture Clark Kent entering a handy telephone booth not to rise up as a universal god, but to sidle out diminished and stuttering, still wearing his glasses and hat. The very disappearance of telephone booths—those private cells for the whisperings of lovers and conspirators—serves the mentality of crowds, where ubiquitously public cell phones announce confidential assignations to the teeming streets.
Tête-à-tête gone flagrante delicto.
Yet there remains a countervailing power. Its sign blazes from the title of Thomas Hardy's depiction of the English countryside, with its lost old phrase: Far from the Madding Crowd. How, in this madding American hour, to put a distance between the frenzy of crowds and the mind's whispered necessities? Get thee to the novel!—the novel, that word-woven submarine, piloted by intimation and intuition, that will dive you to the deeps of the heart's maelstrom.
The electronic revolution, with its accelerating development of this or that apparatus, is frequently compared to the invention of movable type—but the digital is antithetical to the inward life of letters. Print first made possible the individual's solitary engagement with an intimate text; the Gutenberg era moved human awareness from the collective to the reflective. Electronic devices promote the collective, the much-touted "global community"—again the crowd. Microchip chat employs a ghostly simulacrum of print, but chat is not an essay. Film reels out plots, but a movie is not a novel. The inner life dwells elsewhere, occasionally depositing its conscious vibrations in what we think of as the "personal" essay. Though journalism floods us with masses of articles—verbal packets of information suitable to crowds—there are, nowadays, few essays of the meditative kind.
And what of the utterly free precincts of the novel? Is the literary novel, like the personal essay, in danger of obsolescence? An academic alarm goes up every so often, and I suppose the novel may fall out of luck or fashion, at least in the long run. Where, after all, are the sovereign forms of yesteryear—the epic, the saga, the Byronic narrative poem, the autobiographical Wordsworthian ode? Literary grandeur is out of style. If Melville lived among us, would he dare to grapple with the mammoth rhapsody that is Moby-Dick? Forms and genres, like all breathing things, have their natural life spans. They are born into a set of societal conditions and become moribund when those conditions attenuate. But if the novel were to wither—if, say, it metamorphosed altogether into a species of journalism or movies, as many popular novels already have—then the last trustworthy vessel of the inner life (aside from our heads) would crumble away.
The novel has not withered; it holds on, held in the warmth of the hand. "It can do simply everything," Henry James wrote a century ago, "and that is its strength and its life. Its plasticity, its elasticity is infinite." These words appeared tinder the head "The Future of the Novel." There are advanced minds who may wish to apply them to the Internet—with predictive truth, no doubt, on their side. Communications technology may indeed widen and widen, and in ways beyond even our current fantasies. But the novel commands a realm far more perceptive than the "exchange of ideas" that, in familiar lingo, is heralded as communication, and means only what the crowd knows. Talk-show hosts who stimulate the public outpourings of the injured are themselves hedged behind the inquisitive sympathy of crowds, which is no sympathy at all. Downloading specialized knowledge—one of the encyclopedic triumphs of communications technology—is an act equal in practicality to a wooden leg; it will support your standing in the world, but there is no blood in it.
What does the novel know? It has no practical or educational aim; yet it knows what ordinary knowledge cannot seize. The novel's intricate tangle of character-and-incident alights on the senses with a hundred cobwebby knowings fanning their tiny threads, stirring up nuances and disclosures. The arcane designs and driftings of metaphor—what James called the figure in the carpet, what Keats called negative capability, what Kafka called explaining the inexplicable—are what the novel knows. It can make sentient even the furniture in a room:
Pavel Petrovich meanwhile had gone back to his elegant study. Its walls were covered with grayish wallpaper and hung with an assortment of weapons on a many-hued Persian tapestry. The walnut furniture was upholstered in dark green velvet. There was a Renaissance bookcase of old black oak, bronze statuettes on the magnificent writing-table, an open hearth. He threw himself on the sofa, clasped his hands behind his head and remained motionless, staring at the ceiling with an expression verging on despair. Perhaps because he wanted to hide from the very walls what was reflected in his face, or for some other reason—anyway, he got up, unfastened the heavy window curtains and threw himself back on the sofa.
That is Turgenev. A modernist would have omitted that "expression verging on despair." The despair is in the wallpaper, as Turgenev hinted; it was the literary habits of the nineteenth century that made him say the word outright. Virginia Woolf's wallpaper is sentient, too—though, because she is a modernist, she never explicitly names its mood:
Only through the rusty hinges and swollen sea-moistened woodwork certain airs, detached from the body of the wind (the house was ramshackle after all) crept round corners and ventured indoors. Almost one might imagine them, as they entered the drawing-room questioning and wondering, toying with the flaps of the wallpaper, asking, would it hang much longer, when will it fall? Then smoothly brushing the walls, they passed on musingly as if asking the red and yellow roses on the wallpaper whether they would fade, questioning (gendy, for there was time at their disposal) the torn letters in the waste-paper basket, the flowers, the books, all of which were open to them and asking, Were they allies? Were they enemies? How long would they endure?
Two small portraits, each of a room—but the subject of both (if such wavering tendrils of sensation can be termed a subject) is incorporeal, intuitional, deeply interior. A weight of sorrow inheres in Turgenev's heavy black bookcase; the feather-tap of the ephemeral touches Woolf's torn letters. And both scenes breathe out the one primordial cry: Life! Life!
Life—the inner life—is not in the production of story lines alone, or movies would suffice. The micro-universe of the modem? Never mind. The secret voices in the marrow elude these multiplying high-tech implements that facilitate the spread of information. (High tech! Facilitate the spread of information! The jargon of the wooden leg, the wooden tongue.) The din in our heads, that relentless inward hum of fragility and hope and transcendence and dread—where, in an age of machines addressing crowds, and crowds mad for machines, can it be found? In the art of the novel; in the novel's infinity of plasticity and elasticity; in a flap of imaginary wallpaper. And nowhere else.