Minae Mizumura - The Fall of Language in the Age of English

Theoretically, a book that becomes such a global phenomenon might be of any quality. It might even be a fine work of literature. More likely, it will leave much to be desired, for to spawn such frenzy, it must reach precisely those people who are not in the habit of reading. The sight of stacks upon stacks of best-selling books whose market value far outstrips their intrinsic value makes discriminating readers viscerally aware of the end of literature.

And yet it is unlikely that literature, broadly defined to include works of philosophy and religion, will ever come to an end. None of the historical changes that have weakened literature can possibly end it.

The advancement of science will never bring about the end of literature. It will only clearly define the realm beyond which science cannot provide answers and the realm that literature takes on as its proper task: the realm of meaning. Science may explain how humans came into being, but it has no answer to the slippery question of how humans should live. Only literature makes it possible to pose such questions in the first place. And if there is no answer, only literature can point to the impossibility of ever finding one.

Second, even if literature becomes just one of many inexpensive cultural goods, it will not come to an end. Most of us find it rather ridiculous that there are people who, after seeing a film, would eagerly pick up a “novelization” of the film. There are even people who, after seeing a film based on a novel, would pick up not the original but the novelization. Such an act seems like a profanation of literature, but it is just the opposite. It proves that however unsophisticated readers may be, there are still things they want to understand through written words, still pleasures they know they can gain no other way. Reading offers levels of understanding and dimensions of pleasure that other media simply cannot.

Finally, even amid accelerating mass consumerism, literature will not come to an end. Plenty of people are and will continue to be born with an ability to appreciate good art if given the opportunity, and the same holds true for literature. No matter how many dime-a-dozen books inundate the market, there will always be those people who want to read good literature—“the Happy Few” in the words of Stendhal, one of my favorite novelists.

Nonetheless, what is troubling, what seems ominous even, for those of us whose mother tongue is not English, is that we have entered the age of English. One or two hundred years from now, what will have become of literature in other languages? Entering the age of English means reentering the linguistic double structure of the universal and the local that covered different regions of Earth before the emergence of national languages. But this time, English will be the one and the only universal language — and will remain so for a long time.

THE INTERNET

This is perhaps a good juncture to bring the Internet into our discussion. We cannot talk about the reemergence of the linguistic double structure without taking into consideration the advent of this technology. With the rise of the Internet, the English language has further secured its status as the universal language par excellence. This is not to say that other languages will eventually disappear from the Internet. Far from it. When the U.S.-invented technology made its first appearance, only English circulated on the Web, yet soon all manner of languages joined in. Among them were some that had been denied their rightful place in the world — languages suppressed by the nation-state, languages overshadowed by neighboring powerful languages, even languages on the verge of extinction because they had no written form. The Internet made it possible for all those obscure languages to circulate, making people embrace the new medium as a tool for multilingualism. There is no contradiction between the dominance of English on the Internet and the diversification of languages that circulate on the Internet, for English and other languages circulate on different levels.

Let us imagine a library that allows us to access all existing texts in the world — a Library with a capital L. Since the founding of the ancient library of Alexandria in the third century B.C.E., humanity has long dreamed of a library that would contain all the books of the world — an ultimate Library to store all of human knowledge. Thanks to the Internet, that dream is now being realized. Tools like scanning, search engines, and cloud storage are enabling the Internet to whisk us to an age in which, at almost no cost we can instantly access any and all texts that have been turned into digitized data — in fact, all cultural heritage. All we need is a screen. We humans are an ungrateful lot who quickly attune ourselves to new technological worlds; thus the idea of the Library no longer fascinates us. Yet when it first came into being nearly ten years ago, it was received with much excitement. People were agog and eagerly discussed what it would be like to live in this new world, a paradise of knowledge, a utopia of information.

On May 14, 2006, the New York Times Magazine carried a long and much debated article called “Scan This Book!” dealing with the Library, which author Kevin Kelly, a founder of the computer magazine Wired , calls the “universal library.” While the second half of the article takes up copyright issues expected to emerge when the Library actually materializes, the first half is an enthusiastic depiction of how rapidly it is evolving and how wonderful it will be when completed.

According to Kelly, the human race took its first step toward establishing the Library in December 2004, when Google announced that it would collaborate with five principal libraries in the United States and Britain to digitize all the books in their collections, place them in a single database, and make them accessible from anywhere in the world. This project is officially called the Google Book Search Library Project, but here I will call it simply the Google Library Project. Two years later, at the time of the article’s publication, Stanford University Libraries had already scanned eight million books, using a state-of-the-art robot made in Switzerland, at the rate of a thousand pages per hour. Other universities and companies had begun similar projects. Carnegie Mellon University was shipping its books to China and India to have them scanned there; Amazon had already scanned several hundred thousand books. Today, millions of books throughout the world are being scanned and digitized without cease.

Kelly says the Library will eventually carry not just books but also newspapers and magazines; reproductions of visual arts such as paintings, sculptures, and photographs; not to mention films, music recordings, radio and television programs, commercials, and of course personal videos. Also included will be Web pages or blog posts that no longer appear online. The list of items that will enter the Library is limitless, and here is how Kelly portrays this information utopia:

From the days of Sumerian clay tablets till now, humans have “published” at least 32 million books, 750 million articles and essays, 25 million songs, 500 million images, 500,000 movies, 3 million videos, TV shows and short films and 100 billion public Web pages. All this material is currently contained in all the libraries and archives of the world. When fully digitized, the whole lot could be compressed (at current technological rates) onto 50 petabyte hard disks. Today you need a building about the size of a small-town library to house 50 petabytes. With tomorrow’s technology, it will all fit onto your iPod. When that happens, the library of all libraries will ride in your purse or wallet — if it doesn’t plug directly into your brain with thin white cords.