Download This!

Readers in our wired age will remember that Hari Kunzru8217;s latest novel Transmission has as its protagonist Arjun Mehta, who is a computer techie. With a somewhat dubious degree, a B.Sc. from NOIT, the North Okhla Institute of Technology, Mehta is not a first-class citizen of the global cyberworld. In fact, like the virus he creates later in the novel, Mehta is at once an insider and an outsider in the environment in which he is placed.

We are all Arjun Mehtas. Before Mehta moved to America to serve as a lowly cyber-coolie, Mehta lived in Noida. And like Noida, whose buildings are memorably described by Kunzru as having 8216;8216;every imaginable variant of discreet low-cost modernism8217;8217;, Mehta8217;s own identity seems to be a mix of ability and opportunism, piracy and profit, up-to-date software and patchy connections.

The first email that Mehta sends back to the owner of the Gabbar Singh Internet Shack in Noida is written in the racy and somehow laconic lingo that is supposedly characteristic of email users. Here8217;s the communication as Kunzru presents it:

From: arjunmnetulator.com
To: lovegod2000singhshack.com
Subject: RE: small pants

Hello aamir thankyou for your message how are you yes I am all American now even eating beef pork products that is between you and me someone just have bacon cheeseburger this is how it starts things ok here yes lots of girls wear short pants yes it is nice no have not spoken to many yet or seen p Anderson or bv slayer busy got to go

8212; arjunm

Now, contrast this with the texture of Kunzru8217;s own prose. 8216;8216;Anyone on foot in suburban California is one of four things: poor, foreign, mentally ill or jogging8217;8217; or 8216;8216;He had the look of a man who had recently been fed and would soon be again8217;8217;.

Transmission reproduces through Arjun Mehta8217;s emails the breathless, unpunctuated syntax of the wired age but, in the real world as well as its own internal world of the novel, that language co-exists with the more nuanced, literary, more elaborate prose of Kunzru himself.

This is what has happened to literary activity in the contemporary moment. Instead of shrinking, the practices of reading and writing have grown in range, accommodating the speed and disjunctive affects of wired communication.

When television first became a pervasive reportorial force, bringing news from different parts of the world, it was imagined that this would spell the end of the realistic novels. It is true that no one reads novels to get the news anymore, but what is equally true is that people read literature to wash away the sense of shallowness that remains after the evening news.

People read writers like Philip Roth, Jonathan Franzen, Susan Sontag, Don DeLillo, and even Salman Rushdie, not to find out what is happening in the world as event but to get a valuable handle on it as meaning. What will happen to the role of literary representation as a result of the arrival of the internet?

It was during the days of the siege in Tiananmen that we were told that students surrounded by army tanks were using the internet to find out what was happening to them and also how the world was responding to their heroism. More recently, after the success of the protests against the World Bank and IMF in places like Seattle, we learned that groups in places in America and Kenya and India had formed political communities through email and established solidarity.

These are dramatic instances of a much more mundane process through which global readers have been born. More significantly, wired readers also become writers of a sort when they send their opinions out on email.

My life as a reader and a writer also reflects these changes. This article that you8217;re reading was commissioned by email and I8217;m going to file it later tonight from Dulles airport in Washington DC. I get junk-mail, pleas from Nigerian con-men, not to mention viruses and invitations for porn sites, from addresses located in different corners of the world. Even my mother in Bihar, who can hardly be identified as a netizen in any sense, sends me emails from Patna8217;s cybercafes which are nothing more than phrases like 8216;8216;how r u? miss u.8217;8217; I wonder where she picked up the lingo. Will she now join chat-rooms?

I also visit Indian newspaper sites everyday and pick up details of our national life. Most Indian papers have archived their issues for the last several years. This makes available to a worldwide readership an instant resource.

In P G Wodehouse novels, one found that people awaited the delivery of mail not simply once but at different times of the day. I always regretted not being born into that world. In the part of the world that I grew up, letters took several days to reach their destinations, if at all. The world that I never had has now been restored to me by the arrival of email.

This isn8217;t necessarily a good thing, of course. I find it difficult to imagine that we8217;ll soon see books which will be a collection of email messages between writers. There is a widespread assumption, I think, that missives sent by email are short and hurried. Its syntax speaks only speed. In fact, when I get long messages or even short but flawlessly composed ones I feel like I8217;ve been pushed into an overheated room. Still, I feel nostalgic for the older kind of considered exchange, those that used to be written on paper. Just last week I read in The New Yorker the letters that Robert Lowell had written to his fellow poet, Elizabeth Bishop, and I thought to myself that I couldn8217;t imagine anyone, not even Robert Lowell, writing letters like this on email, ever:

Amitava Kumar is the author, most recently, of Husband of a Fanatic Penguin.