Final Fridays by John Barth

much of a bummer as reading books, but I do like to slug the old VCR if there’s nothing on Cable.”
    What can a mere novelist say? Echoing Robert Frost’s famous definition of poetry as “that which gets lost in translation,” William H. Gass defines story as “that which is extracted from a novel to make a movie.” I agree, I guess, although for me the element of story remains first among equals in the ingredients of fiction. But in a good novel (it goes without saying) the story is truly inseparable from the language it’s told in and the voice that tells it. Movies are, literally, another story altogether, and videocassettes another story yet. As it happens, the best I can say even for a good movie-adaptation of a good novel—such as Anthony Minghella’s film of Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient or Emma Thompson’s screenplay for Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility— is what Thomas Mann said about reading Shakespeare in German translation: “It’s like taking a hundred thousand dollars from a millionaire,” Mann declared: “He remains a very rich man.”
    It now appears evident that what movies and network television did to live theater earlier in this century (not to mention what they did to the audience for printed fiction), the VCR and cable TV are doing to the movie houses and to some extent to the film industry. That’s just a fact of technological life. Of more interest to me is a different analogy: If movies and television have affected the art of prose fiction in the 20th century in something like the way that still photography affected the art of painting in the latter 19th, then
we can reasonably expect that the development of interactive television and high-tech “virtualism” in the century to come will have a comparable effect on movies and videos as we know them today. We are told by another of my fellow American scribblers, Robert Coover, that electronic fiction and computer hypertext generally will have a comparable revolutionary impact on what remains of printed-book culture, with its obsolescent notions of author, reader, text, publisher, copyright, and the like. 10 I confess that I won’t at all regret missing that particular technological revolution, which along with electronic virtuality offers to do to the audience for “p-fiction” what the rise of the novel since the 17th century did to the audience for poetry. It gives me some comfort to note, however, that while in my lifetime I’ve had to replace my 78 rpm records with 45s and then with 33.3 LPs, and then those with audiocassettes and then those with compact disks, each time discarding and expensively rebuilding the Barths’ recorded-music library, the oldest volumes in our book library remain by and large as conveniently accessible as they were on their publication-day, perhaps centuries ago. If fewer and fewer people read printed fiction in the century to come, that won’t be because the marvelously low-tech, high-protein medium of the book is outmoded, but because the pleasures of reading will have been displaced by glitzy and evanescent high-tech distractions for which civilization may on balance be the poorer. If thus it must go, then I shall with some small relief go first.
    That curmudgeonly sentiment brings me to the last of these evolving but nevertheless routine questions, after which we’ll move on to a couple of less routine ones and then have done.
    Q: What effect does your university teaching have on your novels?

    A: My reply to this gee-whizzer used to be, “It delays their completion.” In this case, however, although the question remains the same, the respondent’s altered circumstances require a different answer. As afore-established, I was indeed for four decades a full-time teacher as well as a full-time writer, and for the first two of those four decades I was a full-time parent as