Earlier today, as I sat in a cyber-cafe in Kisumu, Kenya, I read Noam Cohen's article in the New York Times Book Review, reflecting on the Google Book Search proposed legal settlement and Robert Darnton's article in the New York Review of Books about same. Although Cohen seems generally to take a positive view of Google Book Search, resistance to the project is common, typically on one or both of the following grounds: (1) concerns about copyright violations, and/or (2) fear of Google controlling access to information.
Neither of these concerns resonate with me. In brief, I think both concerns are informed by a general resistance to change and a misguided perception that refusing to adapt to a changing distribution landscape will somehow protect vested interests (it won't). And while I don't think that Google's "Don't Be Evil" slogan means anything in substance, I think Google will either learn from the Microsoft anti-trust trial or be doomed to repeat it.
What interests me more are the positive aspects of Google Book Search. Cohen's article (not without reason) is targeted towards American readers, but what struck me, sitting in Kisumu, was how promising a tool Google Book Search is for places outside the United States.
I'm in Kenya doing communications work for a social justice organization, and I've been spending significant time strategizing about how to communicate with people. Apparently, reading isn't high on the list here. Repeatedly, I've been told, "There's no reading culture in Africa." I've heard this from colleagues who spend their days publishing a journal and various other written media. I've been interrupted mid-chapter in my own pleasure reading to be informed of this fact, as if maybe I'd be shamed into putting down the book ("We don't do that here.").
That my Kenyan companions should be so adamant about the lack of a reading culture is interesting. Generally speaking, the Kenyans I've met are well-educated, politically-informed and socially-engaged people. They're exactly the sorts of folks who'd be big readers in the States.
Part of the reason for this situation may have to do with a problem J.M.G. Le Clezio identified in his Nobel lecture: books are too expensive. Their cost is a pity because, as Le Clezio pointed out, a book is "the ideal tool" for knowledge spreading and banking. As he said, a book is "practical, easy to handle, economical. It does
not require any particular technological prowess, and keeps well in any
climate."
Sitting in this cyber cafe, I've been watching my co-users log onto Facebook and Yahoo!, to fill out online job applications, and to calculate expenditures on spread-sheets. These are people who likely don't have regular access to the Internet in their homes or offices, and they're living in a town that lacks physical book resources. They probably wouldn't frequent a library or buy a book (other than a text book), but they are nonetheless Internet-savvy. Kenya's book-to-Internet relationship reminds me of developing countries that leap-frog physical phone lines and go straight to mobile.
Is it not possible that Kisumu's Internet savvy cyber-cafe users could find Google Book Search enormously useful? In his Nobel lecture, Le Clezio proposed a number of solutions for the high cost of books -- joint publishing with developing countries, greater funds for book mobiles and libraries -- but he didn't mention Google Book Search. Perhaps Google Book Search has a future as the great leveler of the economic barriers that restrict reading cultures to societies that can afford them.
Notwithstanding the tremendous differences in style, setting and story between Gone with the Wind and Emma (as well as the 121 years between their publications), Scarlett O'Hara and Emma Woodhouse are remarkably similar. They are both strong-willed and rich. They are both treated by society as beautiful, but handled by their authors somewhat less deferentially. (The first clause of Gone with the Wind is, "Scarlett O'Hara was not beautiful." And Emma, though pretty, is second in beauty to Harriet Smith.) They are both quick witted but narrowly focused in their interests. They are both selfish and lack self-awareness. And, perhaps most importantly, at the time we meet them, they have -- neither of them -- been in love.
"I never have been in love: it is not my way, or my nature; and I do not think I ever shall," says Emma (at page 75). The fact that, by the end of the book, she has fallen in love with Mr. Knightley is what salvages her from perpetual bratdom. In gaining self-awareness of her own heart, she grows up. Most significantly, she ventures beyond the safety of her self-sufficient life, willing to risk the ever-present failure that lurks when any of us trades our solitary satisfactions for the hope of greater bliss in pairs.
Scarlett, on the other hand, thinks she's in love with Ashley, but her love for him has always struck me as false. Ashley doesn't possess any of the qualities -- pragmatism, forthrightness, gumption -- that Scarlett prizes most highly, and perhaps it is for this reason that she can't comprehend him. Ashley's function is not as the love of her life, but as the shield to protect her from ever truly falling in love.
For all the horror that Scarlett confronts, the one thing she fears is falling in love. Scarlett, who reacts to the atrocities of war by committing passionately to survival, equates that survival with self-sufficiency. She can envision (indeed, tolerate) a survival that burdens her with dependents for whom she must provide; but she cannot fathom a survival in which she is dependent -- even in a situation of mutual and reciprocal dependency, as (presumably is possible) in marriage. Falling in love would deprive her of the independent self-sufficiency that she feels is necessary for her existence.
A woman who doesn't want to fall in love is a challenging character. Jane Austen remarked that Emma was a character that only she could like, and Scarlett is far from sympathetic. And yet both characters are compelling, both books masterpieces and -- not incidentally -- popularly acclaimed.
Perhaps that combination of tough character and popular appeal arises from the humiliation both women endure. Emma is mortified when Mr. Knightley criticizes her sharp treatment of Miss Bates. Scarlett is humiliated so profoundly and so frequently that Margaret Mitchell appears almost sado-masochistic.
That audiences can endure strong female characters as long as they get their comeuppance is received wisdom. But maybe audiences are also warming to an uncomfortable truth fundamental to both tales: openness to the humiliations and tribulations of dependency is a prerequisite to falling in love; but a refusal to countenance such indignity is no protection against it.
Reading Gone with the Wind, I was struck by Scarlett's response to Rhett in Chapter 19, when he proposes that she become his mistress:
"Dear," he said quietly, "I am complimenting your intelligence by asking you to be my mistress without having first seduced you." . . . "Mistress! What would I get out of that except a passel of brats?"
Of course, moments earlier in the scene, he'd preempted her question. In a passage that made my eyes widen and twisted my mouth into a smirk (the sad facial composition that results when I goofily try to repress an expression betraying keen interest), Rhett tenderly kisses Scarlett's palm (always a sexy move, gentlemen), prompting in Scarlett a "treacherous warm tide of feeling that made her want to run her hands through his hair, to feel his lips upon her mouth." Yes!
But by the time Rhett defines (confines) his desire with the label "mistress," Scarlett has forgotten this treacherous tide of feeling -- which, along with the passel of brats (and maybe some money), is what she'd have gotten out of an affair with Rhett. This forgetfulness is a symptom of Scarlett's fear of sex, and the attendant pleasure, humiliation, and loss of control -- to say nothing of the irrationality, incomprehensibility and general difficulty maintaining one's dignity -- that accompanies it.
This fear (not shared and underestimated by) Rhett is what dooms their romance. "Only when like marries like can there be any happiness," warns Gerald, Scarlett's father, in Chapter 2, and Rhett agrees: "I love you, Scarlett, because we are so much alike, renegades, both of us, dear, and selfish rascals," he says in Chapter 23. Unfortunately, their sex drives aren't compatible, a problem that seems just as divisive of a marriage in the 19th century as it is in our own day.
The "passel of brats" betrays Scarlett's prudish fear -- along with the concomitant failure of imagination and lack of experience -- with the economy of a punch. Reading that line felled me with pity, compassion and a gentle (but nonetheless mocking) incredulity of Scarlett, this silly, willful, immature girl whose vocabulary includes "passel," but not "orgasm."
