Franzen, corrected

ITHACA, N.Y., the Patent Office — “Artists are the antennae of the race,” wrote the great literary disruptor Ezra Pound a century ago, during the first age of radio. In today’s terms, that should make them the cellphone towers, fiber-optic cables and network servers of the race. But are they? Look around. The torch of ambition and innovation has passed. Someone is still mastering the night and portioning out the sea, but it isn’t the literati. For what Whitman called “kosmos,” we now call data, and on that subject, writers — notwithstanding the size of their heads — always think small.

I don’t know if fate itself is now using analytics or if it was just dumb luck or what, but I recently found myself face to face with the man held up as literature’s living rebuke to life as data. This pill laments that “you can’t go to a bar with friends without that becoming ‘data’ about you, the bar and what you’re drinking.” He finds Twitter “unspeakably irritating,” for “serious readers and writers … do not like to yak about ourselves.” He maintains that you can’t write a great novel if you have an Internet connection, a position so backward, I'll rechristen him Mr. Neznarf in honor of it.

It was one of those prestige-infested Brooklyn parties where one knows most of the guests only from book jackets and bylines. Reader, I am nowhere near as confident in a roomful of luminaries as I am alone with you on the page, so for the sake of discretion, let me anagram the names of the other personages as well. Suffice it to say that here was the distinguished octogenarian poet and motorcyclist Derrick Lifeseed, next to him the influential editor Liz T. Gamine, there the literary kingmaker Roli Tennis chatting with the award-winning columnist and psychosopher Elvio Bumranker and, further on, old Neznarf himself, standing alone. I was no sooner half out of my coat than fully in the grip of Lifeseed, who had opened his big catcher’s mitt of a right hand and closed it with a leathery thud around my little knuckleball. I poured some gin with my remaining good hand, drank it like Gatorade, cast about for something to simper at, settled on a potted palm and hid myself behind its fronds.

“If content is still king, the palace is burning,” someone was saying, shaking his head.

“I tell my students to forget about plum jobs and think instead how to brand themselves,” someone else was saying, nodding hers.

Easy to say in this crowd, I thought, peering past the palm slats as if through Venetian blinds. But how to build a brand that could take its place among such household names as Neznarf, Tennis, Bumranker and Lifeseed?

“There are 33 million different versions of Netflix,” I heard myself suddenly say, copping a line from the great Joris Evers (who is not strictly speaking a poet but rather a director of global corporate communications). It’s not about “finding a way to present your unique vision to readers,” I mused, whatever the manuals on authorial marketing say. It’s about finding a way to present readers’ unique preferences to themselves. The death of the author is the birth of the brand.

The shaker and the nodder parted ways to reveal Neznarf, still alone. He suddenly struck me as merely life-size, even vulnerable.

His problem, I mused, is not that he’s a Luddite or a snob, as is so often alleged by fellow writers and detractors. The problem is that he and they understand the digital world solely as end-users, instead of as digipreneurs.

Let’s face it, online life has divided humanity into two groups: those who leave tracks and fingerprints and those who dust for them, those who share and overshare and those who aggregate, consolidate and exploit what is overshared. Let us call them sowers and reapers.

The future of literary fame belongs neither to she who manages “to bring her wit and wisdom to the Internet” and create a really brilliant Twitter feed nor to he who abstains from all the fun in an aloof narcissism of pseudo-scruples. It belongs to the writer who stops preening one way or the other and starts reaping. Percy Bysshe Shelley called writers the “unacknowledged legislators of the world,” after all, and surely this falls under parliamentary privilege. For nothing is at once more literary and more statesmanlike than bulk collection of private data.

I began rehearsing my pitch.

Think of the possibilities, Neznarf. Imagine a James Joyce who’d fed on some major data sets before sitting down to disgorge “Ulysses”; picture the length and granularity of what he’d have thus achieved. Pound surely would have scored a popular hit with his “Cantos,” had he set out to write not a “poem including history” but a poem including business informatics or avian flu epidemiology — something useful and quantifiable. Your late friend David’s “Infinite Jest” might have been, well, very like what it is, only a lot more infinite.

Data mining fulfills a promise latent in print culture from the latter’s beginnings. “The privacy and anonymity of print,” wrote Ian Watt in his brilliant account of the rise of the English novel, “placed the reader behind a keyhole where he, too, could peep in unobserved” on the intimate domestic and psychological lives of characters and “get inside their minds as well as inside their houses.” Watt was describing 18th century epistolary novels, but he saw “Ulysses” as the “supreme culmination” of this aspect of print culture.

In fact, it was just a way station. “Ulysses” was a hand-built mechanism for sensing, capturing and rendering visible the “unfulfilled desires, vague wishes, enfeebling anxieties, morbid compulsions and dreary vacuities” of one man. Google’s automated databases have since done this for all of mankind.

The data-enabled bards of tomorrow will get into the minds and houses of readers as well as characters. This will prove a great advantage of screen over page: As reader peeps in on character, writer can peep in on reader. For as Horace said, the role of literature is “to delight and instruct” the reader, and surely to do that well in today’s fast-paced economy, you need accurate, voluminous real-time information about what he or she is doing and thinking.

Where today’s Netflix is going, the Neznarfs of tomorrow will follow. The company has long been warehousing vast amounts of viewer data — not just location, demographics, social media data and selection history but things like if, when and why you stop watching; how often you pause, rewind and replay; and in what sorts of scenes — which it uses not only to make recommendations but also to shape the original content it produces.

Writers can in fact go much further than filmmakers down this promising path. Practically speaking, Netflix can use viewer-response data to shape only the next season or series. You can’t shoot, stream and edit midstream a million different permutations of “House of Cards”; Kevin Spacey would lose his s---. But literature is a cheaper, looser, altogether more protean medium, Neznarf, so it’s better suited to real-time automation and substitution algorithms.

If Kindle senses your mounting irritation in the purple patches of “Netherland,” for example, there’s no reason you couldn’t find those bits clearing away as you proceed. By Chapter 2, Joseph O’Neill’s sentences have the limpidity and formal reserve of Raymond Carver’s. And why should you have to endure the smell of Leopold Bloom’s breakfast if a Buzzfeed quiz you once took revealed you don’t like organ meats? Bacon and eggs is more like it. Or maybe you’re vegan, in which case, so is Mr. Bloom. “Trigger warnings” will become obsolete. Adam Kirsch will be able to enjoy your 2010 blockbuster — the one with the cerulean warbler on the cover — without fear of encountering criticism of neoconservatives.

Vladimir Nabokov was amused when a potential publisher of “Lolita” greenlighted it on the condition that Lolita become a boy and Humbert a farmer, and the whole thing recast “in short, strong, ‘realistic’ sentences (‘He acts crazy. We all act crazy, I guess. I guess God acts crazy.’ Etc.).” In the future, such a reader will simply think that’s what he read in the first place, and the great thing is, he’ll be right.

Roland Barthes and Stanley Fish were onto something: It is the reader who creates a text. Readers are customers, and customers are always right. Why should tomorrow’s reader of “Paradise Lost” be “surprised by sin” or, worse, find that it is she “in addition to Satan who is the stranger in Paradise” (which hardly sounds like a customer journey worth paying for)? If she is herself immaculate, then Adam and Eve can simply relax in the garden forever, naked and unemployed, eating everything but the apples — at least until Kindle detects a flagging of interest, at which point something else can happen.

For as a great critic once observed, “To know that someone out there is writing down your century, your generation, your language, your life … makes you long for news of yourself.” I know you want to be that someone, Neznarf. But this isn’t about you — the critic couldn’t have been clearer on that score — it’s about us. And our appetite for news of ourselves has never been greater, nor have the tools for delivering it — with all the noise of otherness filtered out — ever been more powerful. If you won’t pick them up, someone else will.

I was as ready as I'd ever be. Parting the fronds like stage curtains I narrowed my eyes on Neznarf. He lifted his, and our gaze met. Surely he’d be interested, I thought, but even if not he was wedged between sofa and piano with no clear path of exit. Gin and confidence were out of the gates and racing through my veins like a pair of thoroughbreds. It was time to step out of the tree.