DISTRACTIONS

Tom Bissell

 

 

 

All this new technology
will eventually give us new feelings
that will never completely displace the old ones,
leaving everyone feeling quite nervous
and split in two.

—DAVID BERMAN, “SELF PORTRAIT AT 28”

 

 

 

Ours is an infantile generation—though I do not intend this as an attack. If you were born in the fourteenth century, you were a part of the Plague Generation whether you liked it or not. Video games, action films, the power ballad—many of us are endlessly distracted by the infantile and, however ironically, love it, consume it, defend it. Comic books were my greatest distraction. This is not exactly a blockbuster confession. With all the people coming out of the comic closet these days, I keep expecting Louis Farrakhan to cop to a secret love of The Uncanny X-Men or The New Mutants or The Legion of Superheroes. Of course, I loved all three, as well as Swamp Thing and The Avengers. They were My Favorites. Needless to say, I have not kept up. At a certain point, the travails of Kitty Pryde, Sunspot, Dr. Alec Holland, Lightning Lad, and Vision ceased to command my attention. Comics typically attend to a peculiar sort of adolescent alienation. The genius of early Marvel comics, as many have previously noted, was their introduction of profound emotional estrangement into the lives of superheroes. DC comics, until the mid-1970s (when the Green Arrow and Green Lantern, most memorably, found the former’s young ward, Speedy, in a grimy men’s room with a heroin needle plunged into his arm), had virtually none of this. Yet Peter Parker was a weak, dateless dork who lived with his skeletal aunt, Bruce Banner endured a constant terror of his own emotions, the Fantastic Four were riven by a longstanding love triangle, and the X-Men lived within the oasis of a Westchester County mansion that protected them from the very society they had pledged to safeguard. Anger, frustration, rejection: These heroes felt it, too.

Eventually, however, one grows up. The alienation inherent in donning colored spandex and going head-to-head with Kraven the Hunter ultimately proves less compelling than the alienations one begins to feel around the age of fourteen or fifteen. Having been hopelessly transformed into a reader by comics, I turned to books. Opening Rabbit, Run in study hall as a fourteen-year-old high-school freshman, stumbling dumbfoundedly across lines such as “Rabbit goes to his wife and, putting his arms around her, has a vivid experience of her—her tear-hot breath, the blood-tinged whites of her eyes” made me conscious for the first time of a writer’s individual voice. Prior to Rabbit, Run, I merely read books for their stories. Even Stephen King, whose novels I ripped through one after the other, did not affect me the way Updike affected me because I read King for what he wrote about, not how he wrote about it. But I felt behind Updike’s prose an unfamiliar urgency, a need to communicate some larger, scarier truth than automotive demon possession or the vampire next door, no matter what pains King took to ground such phenomena in the soil of the convincingly mundane. Rabbit, Run implanted within me an awareness of what I can only call writerly consciousness.

Updike once told The Paris Review, “When I write, I aim in my mind not toward New York but toward a vague spot a little to the east of Kansas. I think of the books on library shelves, without their jackets, years old, and a countryish teenage boy finding them, and having them speak to him.” I grew up quite a lot, rather than a little, to the east—and way north—of Kansas, but I was certainly a “countryish” teenage boy, and the Rabbit, Run hardcover I read had long shed its dust jacket and was not years but decades old. I will not succumb to the narcissism of believing that Updike was foreseeing me, or even anyone like me. I will, however, admit that the first time I read this interview I wrote Updike a fan letter in which I succumbed to the narcissism of telling Updike he was foreseeing me. Enough, though. The book spoke to me, just as he had hoped it would, and by the time I finished Rabbit, Run I wanted to read writers, not books. I was getting drunk on the hard stuff of literature, and I read with the reckless greed of a fresh and emboldened addict.

As for my comic books, I said my own good-bye to all that and sold them for a song to a particularly unpleasant eighth-grader named Mike Myers (no relation). Occasionally I am bitter about this, as many of my comics would today be worth good coin. I owned the entire Chris Claremont-John Byrne run on the X-Men, for instance, the first fifty issues of The New Mutants, Byrne’s entire Fantastic Four run, the first Alan Moore Swamp Thing, and many of Frank Miller’s now priceless Dare-devil s. When I am honest with myself, though, I remember that most of these issues were too mugged and scruffy from my constant reading to have been very profitable, as only “mint” and “near-mint” comics are worth much of anything. That said, I can scarcely bear even getting into how one Gus Hookinson, my neighborhood bully, connived his friendship-feigning way into my home in order to pilfer from my collection The Incredible Hulk #180 and #181, the first and second appearances of the Wolverine (“The world’s first and greatest Canadian superhero!”). At the time of the Hookinson Deception, these comics, which I kept in Mylar bags and never read, were worth forty and eighty dollars, respectively, as Wolverine was, even in the pre-Hugh Jackman era, one of the planet’s most popular comic book characters. Today, both issues are worth thousands. I should, alas, point out how I came into Hulk #180 and #181. The teenage son of a friend of my mother’s drowned in Lake Michigan, and she gave me his collection. When I first came across Hulk #180 and #181 in the drowned boy’s bedroom I knew perfectly well that they were worth quantitatively more than their twenty-five-cent cover price, but I said nothing. The still heartbroken mother would have given them to me anyway, I am sure, but I believed—I still believe—that my moral failure to inform her of the real worth of her dead son’s comics propelled Gus Hookinson into his damnable though fated errand of karma redistribution. Even so—goodbye to all that. However, there exists in my childhood another, defiantly unadult pursuit at similarly distracting loggerheads with the calling of serious literature. I speak of video games, which I am, to my mild alarm, still playing.

Let me say that I do not really believe that anything, other than rank stupidity, is in itself antithetical to literature. But to live a life that values literature above all else requires some stark decisions about what one will and will not devote time to. This question of wasted time is, I believe, of especial importance to writers my age, as we grew up in and now live amid a world filled with an unprecedented number of time-sucking lures. Probably every writer comes of age believing that, at least in terms of distraction, writing is harder for her generation than for all those that came before. Every writer has been correct in that belief. Human culture keeps producing newer and technologically cannier things with which to distract itself. For instance, while writing this essay, I have been playing speed games of computer chess. No doubt Willa Cather and John Cheever had their own distractions from writing, but the ability to swap queens with their typewriters was not one of them.

What chance, then, will future writers have against this onslaught of infernal machines? A good number of older writers and critics have written of their fear that the corpus of literature will turn slowly rigor-mortic as the energy and devotion of the young are consumed by the jumpy pixels of visual entertainment, be they in films or video games. I have some sympathy for this position, for I fear the same thing. But might this not be vanity? We all enjoy believing we are the final keepers of a sacred flame. Only the sturdiest sort of crank would hold that films, as an art form, are inferior to literature anyway. Films demand a different sort of commitment than literature, certainly, and provide a separate kind of pleasure, and though I personally believe that the commitment to and pleasures of literature are of a higher caliber than those of film, I also know I say this as a writer and devoted reader. In other words, I recognize my belief for what it is: chauvinism. Which does not mean I believe it any less. Artists need their convictions, especially those that protect and justify their allegiance to their art. Less chauvinistic is my belief that the written word, the bridge that spans recorded history, is central to human civilization. Moving images are central only to the twentieth century, if that.

As for video games, very few people over the age of forty would recognize them as even a lower form of art. I am always wavering about where I would locate video games along art’s fairly forgiving sliding scale. All I know is that, art or no, my enslavement began with a refrigerator-sized stand-up console known as Space Invaders. The Midway game, which first appeared in 1978, four years after I was born, was already regarded as a bit of a relic by the time I discovered it in the opening months of the 1980s (meanwhile Nintendo was still a playing-card manufacturer). I remember the first time I played Space Invaders so vividly because my stepfather had just suffered a massive heart attack and was undergoing emergency bypass surgery in Milwaukee. My mother was relieved that the hotel we were staying in had a modest arcade because it distracted me from the very likely possibility that my new stepfather, to whom my mother had been married for less than a year, might not survive. Thus, sitting on a hard and sticky barstool, my pockets leaden with quarters, a hotel worker in my mother’s secret employ watching over me, I played Space Invaders for hours. The Upper Peninsula of Michigan, where I grew up, did not yet have any video games, and during the following months of checkups and tests I returned with my family to Milwaukee several times. I think I believed that only Milwaukee had Space Invaders. To this day, the word Milwaukee floods my mind with involuntary images of dive-bombing amoebas and digital bulwarks slowly annihilated by enemy-insect offensives. My mother claims I went into something like clinical withdrawal whenever we left Milwaukee.

I was far from alone in my youthful enchantment. Space Invaders was so popular the world over that Japan suffered an economic crisis due to a serious shortage of 100-yen coins, England held public hearings on the problem of Space Invaders-caused truancy, and the New England Journal of Medicine recognized “Space Invader wrist” as a medical condition. The machines were not only affecting children. In 1982, the novelist Martin Amis published a little-known (and, today, impossible to find) work of nonfiction entitled Invasion of the Space Invaders: An Addict’s Guide to Battle Tactics, Big Scores and the Best Machines. The book’s foreword was surreally provided by Steven Spielberg, and the jacket photo showed Amis leaning familiarly against a stand-up Missile Command console. “Now I had played quite a few bar machines in my time,” Amis wrote of Space Invaders, “but I knew instantly that this was something different, something special. Cinematic melodrama blazing on the screen, infinite firing capacity, the beautiful responsiveness of the defending turret, the sting and pow of the missiles, the background pulse of the quickening heartbeat, the inexorable descent of the bomb-dumping monsters: my awesome task, to save Earth from destruction!” It is oddly inspiring to read one of my favorite living writers address video games with such rapture—and weirdly dissonant with the Amis who would later write of nuclear weaponry with such brilliant scorn. Amis, more troublingly, went on, “Now, after nearly three years, the passion has not cooled. I don’t see much of Space Invaders any more, it’s true. ... These days I fool around with a whole harem of newer, brasher machines. When I get bored with one of them, a younger replacement is always available. . . . The only trouble is, they take up all my time and all my money. And I can’t seem to find any girlfriends.” Girlfriends, indeed: the anti-video game. I am reminded, here, of the end of a highly pleasant date with a former girlfriend. When the cab pulled up to her apartment, she invited me, unambiguously, inside. I told her, with convincing regret, that I had to work early the next morning. Ten minutes later the cab dropped me off at my friend Jeff’s, where we commenced with a Tolstoyan sally of video-game playing that lasted nine hours. When I confessed my lie to Jeff, he said something that still manages to turn my circulatory system arctic: “Would you ever have imagined when you were fourteen that one day you’d be turning down sex to play video games?”

The fact is, if anyone told me at fourteen that when I was thirty I would still be playing video games I might not have lived to see fifteen. Much of this self-hatred, though, is theoretical. When I am actually playing video games I do not mind so terribly, since I typically play with friends. When I play alone for any extended period of time, on the other hand, I am by session’s end typically ready for a hemlock gimlet. But just as I could not have imagined at fourteen my video-game-playing life as a thirty-year-old, I would have proved as powerless in imagining how amazingly good video games were going to get. It happened so quickly! We went from Space Invaders to Frogger to Centipede to Donkey Kong to Tron to Colecovision to Intellivision to the Great Leap Forward of the first Nintendo home system. This is a climactic event in the typical video-game player’s narrative. Virtually everyone I know played Kung-Fu and Double Dribble and Super Mario Brothers on Nintendo. But it took special determination to stick with gaming and move on to the Sega Genesis (which hosted what is still the best hockey game ever made: EA Sports’ NHL 97), and it took yet another kind of commitment to hang in there and purchase a Nintendo 64. Here games began to get so complicated that those who abandoned the pastime at the 8-bit Nintendo level were doomed to feel lost. The controllers sprouted carbuncles of new buttons, at the touch of which any number of menus and submenus would slide, drop, or blink onto the screen. The Playstation 2’s controller, for instance, has no fewer than seventeen buttons, and games such as Desert Storm II: Back to Baghdad offer such elaborations of command and movement that mastering them fills one with a sense of achievement not unlike playing a piece of complicated music.

It should be said that, not terribly long ago, the novel was often seen as being indicative of supposed cultural depravity— before films came along and stole its debauched crown. Video games now seem to be our major briar of cultural entanglement. For better or worse, resistance is a powerful indicator of a given medium’s vigor, by that metric, video games are the most powerful cultural force we now have. We are no longer worried that children are missing school because of video games, though. We are worried that they are murdering their classmates because of video games.

Entertainment is not a neutral property. Art, obligated to address questions allergic to mere entertainment, is even less a neutral property. In my humble estimation, no video game has yet crossed the Rubicon from entertainment to true art, but something is happening, and in some of the violent spasms linked to video games we may be seeing the first signs of their eventual growth into something that cares more about story and character than blowing the head off a rival drug lord. They are, in other words, learning what they can do. Nonetheless, the connection between video games and real-life violence remains more sensed than proven. In The Effect of Videogames on Children: The Myth Unmasked, U.K. journalism professor Barry Gunter points out several studies’ suggestion that video games actually enhance many kids’ problem-solving abilities and teach them to think abstractly. Video games without question positively affect measurable abilities such as hand-eye coordination, as I learned when I picked up the banjo a few years ago and found fretting and chord making much easier than I had anticipated. The video-game scholar J. C. Herz, in her landmark book Joystick Nation, agrees: “Those to the joystick born have a built-in advantage. . . . They’re simply acclimated to a world that increasingly resembles some kind of arcade experience.”

This is an interesting debate to be sure, but it is also, in my view, a distraction from the real issue, which is the far more disquieting possibility that video games and other electronic distractions are creating a culture literally afraid of interiority. Literature, of course, values interiority above all. Herz is right: The world does increasingly resemble some kind of “arcade experience,” but learning to live in an arcade, rather than knowing how to cope while occasionally visiting one, does not seem an appetizing, much less necessary, fate. I do not mean to succumb to Luddite wet-blanketism. After all, I play video games. I also try to be careful. When I play too many video games I begin to feel chubby-minded, caffeinated, bad. A mind in constant need of prodding along invisible wavelengths is not a mind I wish to have. Fun is not the same thing as fulfillment. The major problem with video games is that they give us the pleasure of a problem solved without requiring the kind of mental activity normally associated with problem solving. This carries over, in other ways, to similar digital distractions. A recent article in the New York Times noted how, ten years ago, teenage commuters in Japan could be counted upon to be reading comics or magazines or even novels; now most amuse themselves by sending out text messages on their cell phones. If one’s consciousness is bombarded relentlessly enough, it can grow less complex and more easily sated, and the world David Foster Wallace envisioned in Infinite Jest, where people die entertaining themselves, grows terrifyingly closer to being fulfilled.

Reading, like video games, is both an activity and a cultural phenomenon. Its popularity grows and fades, fades and grows; its human importance is not fixed, and it can be damaged, if not lost forever. But why read? After all, literacy as a pandemic social condition is around three hundred years old. I would argue that reading nourishes and protects one’s consciousness. It creates independence of mind (a trait to be valued above all else), fosters skepticism, and, perhaps most important, relieves simple human loneliness. Reading gives one something to think about other than oneself. The rise of literacy in the West and the collapse of despotism and the mortal wounding of Christian fundamentalism are surely not merely a happy coincidence. I will not make the spinachy claim that reading makes one a “better person” (the battlefield of literature is filled with too many psychic casualties for that to be true) or that a nation of readers guarantees social justice and harmony. The wicked can and have been astoundingly literate. But a nation of readers would go some way toward ridding a culture so afflicted by solipsism, parochialism, crudeness, and apathy. Talk to people who do not read for pleasure. Really talk to them. Notice the panic in their eyes as you steer the conversation toward anything related to the larger world; note the anger with which they respond to anything that requires them to step outside themselves. Most nonreaders are nothing but an agglomeration of third-hand opinion and blindly received wisdom. Nonreaders are also the majority, and they now have more opportunities than ever to flee even deeper into themselves while still leaving interiority behind.

In 1991, Saul Bellow wrote:

The modern reader (or viewer, or listener: let’s include everybody) is perilously overloaded. . . . Our consciousness is a staging area, a field of operations for all kinds of enterprises, which make free use of it. True, we are at liberty to think our own thoughts, but our independent ideas, such as they may be, must live with thousands of ideas and notions inculcated by influential teachers, or floated by “idea men,” advertisers, communications people, columnists, anchormen, et cetera. Better-regulated (educated) minds are less easily overcome by these gas clouds of opinion. But no one can have an easy time of it. In all fields we are forced to seek special instruction, expert guidance to the interpretation of the seeming facts we are stuffed with. This is in itself a full-time occupation. . . . Vast organizations exist to get our attention. They make cunning plans. They bite us with their ten-second bites. Our consciousness is their staple; they live on it. Think of consciousness just opening to settlement and exploitation, something like an Oklahoma land rush. Put it in color, set it to music, frame it in images—but even this fails to do justice to the vision. Obviously consciousness is infinitely bigger than Oklahoma.

Every literary person, then, is a conservationist in the fight for increasingly endangered consciousness. Antitechnology radicalism is not the answer to this endangerment, and neither is dourness about phenomena such as video games. But an enjoyment or even love of digital distraction needs fortification with something that appreciates and rewards the inner life. Without such fortification one is wading in the shallow end of an intellectual kiddie pool.

Any talk of “rewarding the inner life” admittedly sounds very Merchant and Ivory, very highfalutin. Our generation largely distrusts the highfalutin, a stance that has its benefits and deficits. One benefit is our suspicion of those who assume that a coming tribe of televisual zombies with the attention span of puppies will be the very doom of literary culture. Every literary generation has had its distractions, some far more toxic than video games—often literally so. Hemingway, for instance, had booze, broads, and big-game hunting. Fitzgerald had booze, screenwriting, and his wife’s insanity. Surely Hemingway’s and Fitzgerald’s distractions brought them a little more wisdom and worldly engagement than getting past the eleventh board of The Getaway, but it would be hard to argue that it made them more productive writers. (I sincerely doubt that either one of them would have been capable of getting past the eleventh board of The Getaways, at any rate.)

All writers waste time in innumerable ways. Gambling, shopping, football on a Sunday afternoon, sex, food: None are without their pleasures, or torments, and none are necessarily conducive to a literary life. The end of Rabbit, Run finds Updike’s eponymous hero running from his spouse, his dead child, his life, while “he feels his insides as very real suddenly, a pure blank space in the middle of a dense net.” Rabbit Angstrom’s distraction is something as square as basketball. Without it, he is nothing. How strange that a book about a young man losing track of himself allowed me to find myself. And how wonderful that, today, it reminds me that it does not matter, in the end, what distracts us. What matters is what we make of our distractions. Or choose not to make. Some distractions are merely distractions.