JAMES PURDY AND THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN BOOKS AND TV

MORROW: What makes reading an act of communication where watching the television is noncommunication?

PURDY: If it is an important book, it is another human being talking to you, even though it’s on the written page. Television is something thought up out of a formula not to communicate with another human being, but to manipulate him. To get money out of him because there will be ads. When Whitman wrote Leaves of Grass he wanted to communicate with anyone who would want to understand: He didn’t want to manipulate that person, or get money out of him, he wanted to touch that person. Television is manipulative noncommunication.

Nearly everything in our society follows that principle, though. ...I think the whole society will crash because of this lack of communication. Everything that we do in America is noncommunicative. We lie to get power over people, and to get money. People are manipulated into thinking they want to manipulate! It’s the only thing we believe in, money. We think it would be nice to be rich, because then we wouldn’t have to suffer certain things. Then you spend your life protecting your eggs. It’s a nightmare.

When you are reading a book, you are actually talking with another person, whether you know it or not. I can’t just look at you, and let you talk, and not give you anything. But you can do this to a screen: That’s why it is noncommunication: You cannot give the screen anything, because it’s dead. In Aristophanes’ and Shakespeare’s theaters the players and the audience were one, they weren’t separate: They were communicating with one another. Shakespearean audiences screamed at the actors, threatened them, cheered them. I was brought up not on the theater, because we had no theater, but on the movies. And this has harmed us, because the actors can’t see us. We can see the screen, but it can’t see us. This is the beginning of the noncommunicativeness of our culture.

MORROW: It’s funny that you have to sit in a darkened room to watch television or the movies, but you have to sit in a lightened room to read a book.

PURDY: True. Also, when you read a book you know that one person wrote that book for you, for you. Nobody wrote these television shows, they were compiled by machines, they were tested. And they are considered complete failures unless ninety-eight million people see them. And they don’t even exist! Walt Whitman wrote Leaves of Grass for maybe ten people, but those ten people were communicated with, while the ninety-eight million are not. The reader has to react to the text or it will not come into existence for him, where the television will go on whether you are there or not. Television is eternal, it’s eternal noise. It has no beginning, middle, or end, like a book: it is just...it!

MORROW: When someone reads a book the visual imagery that is formed in his head is an imagery that comes from his own personal past, whereas the television screen provides all ninety-eight million people with a single image that doesn’t relate to anyone’s past except for the cameramen and actors.

PURDY: It doesn’t relate to anything at all.

MORROW: So when I read about some fellow named Daddy Wolf, and I am given no physical description of what a Daddy Wolf looks like, or what he is finally up to, the communicative part I play as a reader comes in the formulation of an imagery in my mind: In the process of reading, my intellect and imagination are sparked into participation: There is room for movement because James Purdy has constructed a landscape for me to bump around in.

PURDY: What is a Daddy Wolf and why is it called Daddy Wolf? You see, you are being opened up, if you are really “conversing” with the book. Even if you are talking about trivial things. You are having a reciprocal human experience. Communication is life. We are only human as long as we have communication with other human beings. If man lived totally alone, he wouldn’t be human. I don’t know what he would be: He’d be something else. This is the whole reason for art, and for life. Only by being next to other people are we human. And in our culture this happens less and less and less and less.

(from a 1982 interview in Conjunctions: http://www.conjunctions.com/archives/c03-jp.htm)