In the galleries: Russell Banks adapts to a word processor

Today it seems, with iPads and hybrid cars and 3-D blockbusters, technology advancements are, quite literally, right in our faces. Almost jaded by the constant onslaught, we expect constant development and easily adapt, rarely finding ourselves bewildered by new devices. This, however, was not always so.

American author Russell Banks’s 1989 novel Affliction, which in early drafts he titled “Dead of Winter,” was his first attempt to construct a work of fiction on a word processor. Used to typewriters or even plain pencil and paper, the word processor, with its editing capabilities such as formatting or spell check, offered a completely new experience.

In a page of typed notes on display in the Ransom Center’s current exhibition, Culture Unbound: Collecting in the Twenty-First Century, Banks reveals his early experiences using the word processor. He starts off by writing in all caps: “STILL VERY MUCH LEARNING TO THINK ON THIS MACHINE.” Banks reflects on the “strange experience” and how the technology alters his outlook on the writing process.

For Banks, the word processor made it seem as if productivity was non-existent. He writes: “The simple mechanics of the task get in the way right now, but surely no more than the simple mechanics of pencil and paper. Since there is no object, no product on paper emerging as I go, there seems to be no activity. That’s the greatest difference at present. This is not quite thinking and not quite writing, either, but something in between—until printed.”

In the diary-like notes, Banks indulges himself with such observations “to work out how to use the thing to do the thing.” Those observations must have helped: Banks published Affliction in 1989, and it was later adapted into an award-winning film in 1997 by Paul Schrader, whose archive also resides at the Ransom Center.