Looking back at the 1939 New York World's Fair, David Gelernter's "novel with an index" exposes the irrevocable link between technology and nostalgia.
Technology and nostalgia are the evil twins of contemporary imagination. One torments us with the miraculous possibility of what might be, the other tempts us just as powerfully to mourn what was.
We never seem to find peace with either. Over and over we learn that technology cannot in itself make us happy, or ever quite live up to our unreasoning expectations. Again and again we discover that the past was never as simple or as sweet as we remember it.
Nobody grapples with this insoluble dilemma more than those in the midst of a new culture - like the digital one - that promises a great deal, provokes fierce controversy, and inspires constant backward glances. We are confronted almost daily with laments from Luddites and attacks by social critics, economic refugees, and other disenchanted observers who suggest that technology has made things worse, not better.
The air was cleaner before cars; life was quieter before phones; the sweeping changes brought about by the digital revolution are less desirable than the things they're supplanting. Change is always both threatening and painful, simultaneously provoking angry challenges and melancholy mythologizing.
David Gelernter, a computer science professor at Yale University, takes on both subjects in an evocative book and in the process speaks directly to new media. In 1939: The Lost World of the Fair (Free Press), he uses one of the last great visionary exhibitions of the century - the New York World's Fair on the brink of World War II - to raise a number of questions about our modern lives.
Gelernter is no Luddite, of course. He is well-known for writing The Muse in the Machine, which argues that artificial intelligence should include emotions, and for creating Linda, a parallel-processing language that permits small, cheap, and idle computers to do the work of much larger and more sophisticated hardware. And though the new book refers to it only glancingly, Gelernter, sadly, achieved even wider renown for the severe injuries he suffered in 1993 at the hands of the Unabomber.
To Gelernter, the l939 World's Fair is a metaphor for our utopian expectations as well as our disenchantment with machines. Set on 1,200 acres in Flushing Meadow, Queens, the exposition marked the apogee, he believes, of America's touching and often naïve hopes for technology. It opened during a transitional moment - sandwiched between the Great Depression and the most horrendous war humankind had known - when the world seemed to be holding its breath and before America vaulted to its status as a superpower. The fair's vision of a new age promised comfort, convenience, and change - communities newly dubbed "suburbs," gleaming interstate highways, cheap and plentiful electricity, travel by jet airplane and sleek motorcars. And the expo's nomenclature was wonderfully evocative: exhibits like the Lagoon of Nations, a City of Light diorama called Democracity, the Ford Motor Company's Road of Tomorrow. The fair's centerpieces, a tall spire side by side with a giant globe, were called, respectively, the Trylon and the Perisphere.
In an author's note, Gelernter calls his work a "history book," adding that the characters are fictional. Elsewhere, he has called 1939 a "novel with an index." Drawing on historical research and his own imagination, Gelernter weaves together fantasy and fact to create a dreamy look back.
"I remember the large room," recalls a fictitious visitor to the AT&T pavilion, "a sort of auditorium, in which they allowed visitors chosen by lot to place free long-distance calls from glass booths - and then everyone listened in!" In the RCA Building, three executives watched the company's latest model 1939 TV.
The most popular pavilion, writes Gelernter, was General Motors's giant Futurama; long lines of visitors entered the exhibit through a striking cleft in the building's face. Inside, a giant map of the United States occupied the far wall, as a narrator described the country's overburdened road network. Visitors were "transported" to the world of 1960 by a moving train of chairs more than 1,500 feet long, an imaginary coast-to-coast ride that led past cities with tall skyscrapers, elaborate highways, towering suspension bridges, green open spaces, and amusement parks. "All eyes to the future," intoned the narrator. This became not merely a popular exhibit, suggests Gelernter, but a shrine to the country's collective civic religion.
The fair made good on its pledge to deliver the future - "the American utopia" - by 1970. But it was a bittersweet deal, one that forever broke our technological hearts. Gelernter writes: "I think we will see that we are adrift, at least in part, because we are no longer marching toward utopia: We no longer can, because we are in it. And we will understand, too, that the fair ought to be approached today with the respect for its fundamental strangeness accorded by all civilized people to the shrine of a dead faith."
The 1939 World's Fair predicted that city dwellers would fiee to the suburbs, and they have. It foresaw that automobiles and highways would reshape the American landscape, and they have. It envisioned that the country's working and middle classes would become affiuent enough to live "the good life," and many have.
In fact, adds Gelernter, "all sorts of gadgets and wonder-stuff the fair ballyhooed or introduced, from TV to Lucite, fax machines to fuel-efficient cars and fiuorescent lighting and robots and rockets and nylon stockings ... have all taken root and are fiourishing."
Yet in many ways it seems our quality of life has decayed markedly in the last half-century. The economy is troubled, crime has worsened, and education is declining along with our collective sense of optimism and well-being. The rosy futurists of the 1939 World's Fair didn't foresee the explosion of violence in America, the drug and gun epidemics, the emergence of a permanent and despairing underclass.
How did this happen? "I am more disposed to believe the truism," writes Gelernter, "that there is almost nothing more dispiriting than getting exactly what you have always longed for." Since the fair's promise of a technologically driven, better future has been fulfilled, we have nothing real to aspire to. The future was most stirring and meaningful when it loomed on the horizon, before it arrived and began unsettling our lives.
And the digital revolution? Despite his own prominent place in it, Gelernter almost ignores the subject in his book. "Computers do have the potential to change everyday life radically," he writes. "But for my money they haven't yet. An imagination deficit among software builders, complacency, and low standards on the users' part have killed any chance of a real computer revolution so far."
Indeed. Despite the awe-filled crowds that fiocked to one of America's last great corporate-political achievements - wondering at the great new era that seemed just around the next exhibit - 1939 is less a story of warm refiection than one of rueful reminiscence. It isn't clear where Gelernter is taking us with all these visions of lost hope. For most of the book, it doesn't seem like anyplace we want to go. We can't go back, yet his future is an empty place.
Gelernter seems tantalized by nostalgia, understanding how much of a trap it can be even as he is irresistibly drawn into it. He acknowledges the difficulties of the era even as he mythologizes the World's Fair, and the city, country, and time in which it was held. He invents fictional characters who tour the fair and fall in love - a device that, unconsciously or not, is manipulative and distortive. Who wouldn't want to be young and in love and setting their eyes on the future - at a World's Fair or in a Kansas wheat field?
Building his historical research into the fictional diary of a woman who, having explored every cranny of the fair with her lover, was "interviewed" extensively by the author in her Manhattan apartment, Gelernter has created a gauzy book filled with longing and reverence for that mini-utopia in Queens, the past we can never live up to again. His experiments with different writing styles evoke a different time and place. And he challenges us to rethink some of the basic tenets of our culture. But this is not, as the author's note claims, a history book. And novels don't have indexes. We are never sure in 1939 what is true and what isn't. In a book that uses purported history to argue that we've lost our native optimism and our faith in technology, that matters a lot.
Gelernter's book arrives amid extraordinary controversy surrounding the entity loosely known as the Internet. "An Internet backlash is in full swing," New York magazine announced this spring. The idea sweeping much of the mainstream media is that the explosion of digital information is de-civilizing. That it is dangerous as well as desensitizing, that what preceded it was more meaningful, more human. His message may be less angry and reactionary, but Gelernter's haunted revision of history only adds to the sense of doom. If faith stems only from promise and not achievement, if utopia comes only from expectation, not realization, if wonder is lost when dreams come true, as 1939 soberly suggests, we are in for a barren time.
Yet opposite this bleak picture stands an irreconcilably different view of technology and change. It is a vision built by aging shut-ins fighting gallantly to gather on the Net; by teenagers publishing online zines; by poets and pitchmen firing up their respective Web pages. The explosion of energy coming from digital designers, musicians, filmmakers, photographers, and even advertisers is altering our basic notions of creativity. A new dream of the future is being born. Of course, in a half-century or so, these same digital revolutionaries will form the nostalgic material of somebody else's "history." Imagine the writer of that book - or CD-ROM or digital bedside laptop tablet - longing for the time when clunky computers sprouted wires, modems hissed, and chips held finite memory. Think how much wonder our time might hold.
As lovely as the writing and the imagery in 1939 can be, Gelernter's plea for the past doesn't quite ring true. He seems to be in mourning, but it isn't clear for what. Asking us to grieve for a period when so many Americans had just suffered cruelly from economic deprivation and tens of millions of people around the world were about to be slaughtered, when the rhythms of farm and factory were brutal and when ethnic and sexual minorities were imprisoned in lives over which they had no control - that's asking too much.
In 1939, Gelernter suggests that not only are technology and nostalgia irrevocably linked, but so are technology and faith. In the process, he seems to be losing some of his own faith, a poignant and brave thing to share so openly. History is unsparing to romantics and visionaries. Perhaps to the faithful as well. It tells us that every age has looked back and hungered for a time that was better, younger, purer, more filled with wonder, faith, and hope.
Despite the twists and turns of this techno time journey, Gelernter does end up in the right place, asking the right questions. What, he asks, did the fair amount to in the end? He finds his answer at the conclusion of 1939, in a quote from The New Yorker: "Life will probably always be like that - the men of vision creating, the little men carping, with terror and amazement in their hearts." Adds Gelernter, "It is a sentence to treasure." Then and now.
