Djelloul Marbrook

When we think of letters we think of literature, components of the alphabet or messages in envelopes. We don’t think of e-mail. But should we?

A major body of our literature consists of the letters sent by famous people. Indeed some people are famous primarily for their letters. But now that few of us send messages in envelopes, what, if anything, will supplant the illumination that the epistolary tradition sheds on writers and their thoughts?

I began thinking about this as I read Gabriel Josipovici’s thoughtful review of The Letters of Samuel Beckett in the March 13th issue of the Times Literary Supplement. Beckett was a prodigious letter writer, and his letters tell us a great deal about himself, others and his responses to his times.

But we don’t compose e-mail messages the way we compose letters. E-mail communication is more truly messaging than letter-writing; and text-messaging on cell phones is another thing entirely. There’s a kind of telegraphic immediacy to e-mails. The process is affected by staccato appearances of letters on a screen, by the muted sound of the keyboard, by our expectancy of prompt if not immediate responses, and an array of other expectations.

My own e-mail style is more formal than most, but that’s because I have lived through the transit of the radio era to the television and computer eras. I was taught to write formal letters, to stylize my handwriting, to be painstaking about salutation, punctuation, protocol, civility, format, and a host of other considerations. To some extent I carry these punctilious habits over to e-mail writing. But this is a generational rearguard action. I’m aware that the people I see in subways and cafés thumbing their messages into little sleek electronic steles are not observing the amenities I still observe.

What kind of light will our e-mails shed in the future? Will the e-mails of people who have left some kind of cultural mark be collected and edited for posterity? How can this happen? How will these communications be saved and later accessed? What kind of legal challenges will this present? (The White House and indeed the entire federal government are still wrestling with these issues.)

There are many other questions, some of them technical, others esthetic.

I think something is being lost, in the same way that we nearly lost the traditions of calligraphy and manuscript illumination to movable type. But I think something may be gained, too. I see no reason why e-mail messaging should not evolve into an art form of compelling significance, the way graffiti has. Perhaps there will be less guile, more spontaneity, less concern for posterity and more concern for genuine exchange.

In its brevity and immediacy, for example, it’s somewhat akin to poetry. Its marriage to visual context—we often send e-mails with images of various kinds—could readily evolve into art. Freed of formal constraints, the e-mail might come to convey, if it doesn’t already, something more like the way we think before we censor our thoughts.

The phenomenon might be something like the transition from formal to free verse. The element of interactivity introduces a mercurial aspect to communications as well as the possibility of mining information handily and virtually without limit.

Will it encourage inarticulateness, something like the lazy use of the word like to suggest something the speaker is unwilling or unable to complete? I don’t know. I leave it to linguists. So much impacts our manner of speech: weather, science, crime, war, money, medicine. I can’t imagine it won’t change our way of communicating, but I see no reason for foreboding. For now I merely wonder how we shall preserve our exchanges. —DM