WHAT ARE WE REALLY TALKING ABOUT WHEN WE TALK ABOUT THE STATE OF READING? AND WHAT DO WE HOPE TO LEARN FROM THE Answers to that question? Confirmation of deeply held prejudices, or a better understanding of what reading means in digital cultures? We need to pose those questions right up front because the debate about the state of reading has been precipitated by the increasing ubiquity of the e-book, even though reading culture has been undergoing massive infrastructural changes for over a decade in the United States. The public discourse on the state of reading and on whether it has a viable future has focused on the future of the book and of literary reading now that e-books have apparently changed everything. The state of reading, as such, is not at stake because it doesn't seem likely that firemen from Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 will be swinging by your place anytime soon to torch your books and replace them with a well-appointed wall screen, eliminating reading forever in favor of mindless viewing. People will keep reading, if only to take in the endless text that comes at them on their various screens, from the ones on the wall to the ones they carry around with them everywhere on their portable devices. Try looking at those screens without reading. No, it's clear from the assumptions that underpin the end-is-near pronouncements about the e-book that there's reading and then there's reading and that when people talk about the future of reading, they're worried about whether readers worthy of the name will continue reading literary fiction in the twenty-first century. But that isn't a very interesting question because it imagines the act of reading in such an ahistorical manner, curled up in a well-upholstered time warp, far from the unruliness of contemporary reading cultures.

Born on 11 November 1928, Carlos Fuentes on 15 May 2012 met on Parnassus the princes of word and vision that one of his deceased characters dreamed of in El naranjo (1993; The Orange Tree). If, as he wrote in Constancia y otras novelas para vírgenes (1990; “Constancia” and Other Stories for Virgins), readers are the ghosts of writers (296), the author of Terra nostra (1975) was, for his part, a ghost of Cervantes and disciple of Erasmus who rewrote La Celestina, Don Quixote, the successive Don Juans of Tirso de Molina, Zorrilla, and Mozart, the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch and Luca Signorelli, the gnostic gospels, and the texts of the Jewish mystical tradition.

Interface, we think, is the screen, the display, the portal into the online world or computer. The GUI (Graphical User Inter-face), with its menu bars and navigational buttons, is so familiar that we tend to overlook the “gooeyness” of it—the mutable, mediating activity—and take interface for a thing, static, stable, and fixed. Or we take it as a representation of computational processes, a convenient translation of what is “really going on” inside. Neither could be further from actuality.

What if in the final minutes of your heavying
descending

the landing strip kept lying
changing you back
into the air the way a white

backs away in anger when you approach with the directions you've been asked?
—Ed Roberson, “The Aerialist Narratives”

The fate of the nation is foretold in the arcs of birds, in the flight patterns of the ruling class, in the strip of runway hard to see in the fog. Only through the scrutiny of all such lines will our fates grow clear.

—Joseph Donahue, “Metaphysical Shivers: Reading Ed Roberson”

In 1953 I met a young, active, and very committed Carlos Fuentes. He was twenty-three years old, and I was twenty-one. He died on 15 May 2012, four days before I turned eighty. Celia Chávez, the wife of the poet Jaime García Torres, who was Carlos Fuentes's editor for many years, was giving a dinner party that day at her home in Las Lomas, which Fuentes and his wife were to attend. At two o'clock that afternoon, the news hit like a thunderbolt and darkened our spirits. It wasn't possible that Carlos Fuentes could have died.

Any analysis of reading today must consider contemporary writing practices. The epochal shift from print to digital texts has been under way for some time. Indeed, print books are now so interpenetrated with digital media at every stage of their production that they may more appropriately be considered an output form of digital texts than a separate medium. Much has been written about the end of books, but, as Alan Liu observes, they have been deconstructed almost from the beginning, from the remixing of Bible excerpts according to the liturgical calendar to the experimental fiction of Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy to Raymond Queneau's Cent mille milliards de poèmes (“End” 509-11). This tradition notwithstanding, Jessica Pressman correctly detects in some contemporary novels anxiety about the continued life of books and a desire to reassert the book's authority in the face of the exponential expansion of the Web and the ongoing conversion of books into digitized texts, including the several million now available at Google Books and other online venues.

A barbed article by Rafael Lemus on Carlos Fuentes and his work appeared in Letras libres in November 2006. The article offers a fierce critique, but, as Lemus often does, he sees what others do not. His most penetrating remarks about Fuentes, in my view, are the ones that address caricature and, with it, specific work on the image. Thus, “Fuentes returns to his themes and resources, which are classical, and in an effort to sum them up, he caricatures them.” His recent stories “have something anachronistic about them,” and his way of dealing with reality “no longer produces anything but cadavers.”

The 1960s were a crucial decade for museum building in Mexico. The key year was 1964, the end of Adolfo López Mateos's presidential term, since it saw the inauguration of the Museo de Arte Moderno, the Anahuacalli, the Museo de la Ciudad de México, and the most spectacular of all: the Museo Nacional de Antropología, the architect Pedro Ramírez Vázquez's masterpiece and one of the country's primary tourist attractions. The 1960s also witnessed how Carlos Fuentes, a young writer who had published his first novel in 1958, continued to produce his canonical works at a staggering pace. In what follows, the dialogue between Fuentes's early fiction and the Museo Nacional de Antropología, two of the jewels of Mexican high modernism (always a dialogue with nationalism), not only invites a rereading of their most obvious features—namely, the luminous tension between their structures and their meticulous attention to detail—but also, from the distance of half a century (especially from the vantage point of the PRI's return to power), reveals a series of hitherto unexamined gaps and silences that merit critical attention.

It is often said that proper reading relies on the art of taking a pause: On our abilityto suspend the pressing rhythms of the everyday and allow ourselves to absorb, and be absorbed by, alternative structures of temporality. The clocks of the imagination do not run at the same speeds as the timetables of the real; to read is to inhabit the present at one's own pace and in the light of a multitude of unknown pasts and possible futures. Recent years have witnessed a swell in publications pondering the state of reading in our world of instant connectivity and shrinking attention spans. In one of these books, Jane Smiley, a Pulitzer Prize winner, considers the peculiar acts of writing and reading a novel as profound contributions to the process of enlightenment—a kind of enlightenment enlightened about itself and no longer repressing the other of reason: “The way in which novels are created—someone is seized by inspiration and then works out his inspiration methodologically by writing, observing, writing, observing, thinking through, and writing again—is by nature deliberate, dominated neither by reason nor by emotion” (176). According to Smiley, the act of reading a novel re-creates an author's deliberate negotiation of affect and rationality. As readers follow the lines of a (good) book, they remain in relative control over the speed of their reading, able to pause when necessary, to hasten forward when desiring so, to reread passages at their leisure, and to close the pages of the book when overtaken by exhaustion. Good stories rely on intricate plot constructions and narrative tensions, but they also situate readers as subjects freed from the temporal determination and ideological drive of other time-based media. Good books can certainly move readers, but—following Smiley's logic—they will not curtail a reader's freedom to move along the text at his or her own speed, and hence they will allow this reader to simultaneously bring into play emotion and reason, the absorptive and the distant.

Reading isn't what it was. As we enter the “late age of print,” E-Books are still less common than “P-Books” (printed books), but the balance is quickly changing, especially in the world of academic publishing (Striphas xii). While many lament the loss of the p-book's materiality, texts have become more lively as a result of digitization: textual-production platforms like blogging let writers and readers interact with each other and create intimate social relationships. As Kathleen Fitzpatrick found while writing her book Planned Obsolescence using CommentPress, an online platform that enables readers' commenting, writing can become a more social and creative process when done in dialogue with readers. This turn to the social in writing parallels a turn to the social in media generally. Thus, it makes sense to evaluate not how far our devices are taking us from paper—the answer is already pretty far—but rather how digital media are creating new social valences of reading.