Book Was There- Reading in Electronic Times Page 15
At an even deeper level, though, Jacir’s work and the work of other book demolishers isn’t just about a particular moment in time when the book’s viability as a medium seems to be increasingly in doubt. It also captures something fundamental to the act of reading itself, something more timeless about the kindred spirits of mourning and melancholy that go with reading. Just as the imagination of how to transcend books has been integral to the history of books, so too is a sense of melancholy, a persistent sense of loss. Melancholy isn’t a sign of the book’s end; it is its inspiration. Melancholy is reading’s muse.
[FIGURE 8.1] Sam Markham, from the series In a Cold Winter (2002). Courtesy of the artist.
“All my reading is nothing,” remarked the German Enlightenment philosopher Johann Georg Hamann, nicknamed the Magus of the North. “Nothing but to make me duller and increase my boredom and make me despondent.” Or as he wrote in another letter to a friend, “Incessant reading is as much a punishment for me as carrying water through a sieve was for the Danaïdes.”4 In his monumental work The Anatomy of Melancholy, the seventeenth-century scholar Robert Burton counted reading as one of the primary causes of melancholy. According to one classical rhyme on the matter collected by Burton, the common effects of reading included
Grief, labor, care, pale sickness, miseries,
Fear, filthy poverty, hunger that cries,
Terrible monsters to be seen with the eyes.5
When the Visigoths invaded Greece and were intent on burning their books, one of the conquering generals is rumored to have cried out, “Leave them that plague. In time it will consume all their vigor and martial spirits.”6
If a sense of melancholy often surrounds reflections on the future of reading—including my own, I confess it has been impossible to resist—it is because melancholy belongs so fundamentally to the experience of reading. There is ultimately a sadness to reading, not only because it is so nonvital, sluggish, or even deadening. Reading also bears with it a sense of some impossibility, a finitude that no amount of technological innovation will ever fix. What Augustine said of the angels—“they are always reading and what they read never comes to an end”—is never true for us. Letting go belongs as much to the past as it does the future of the book. In the end, we must always let go of the book.
. . .
Over the course of this book I have tried to give many reasons for why reading books has been, and in my opinion continues to be, important. One of the reasons I have most often encountered is the power of redundancy. Books have been important to us because of the way our interactions with them span several domains of sensory and physical experience. Whether it is through the acts of touch, sight, sound, sharing, or acquiring a sense of place, these embodied, and at times interpersonal, ways of interacting with books coalesce to magnify the learning that takes place through them. The same information processed in different ways and woven together is one of the profound secrets of bookish thought.
In his influential account of the birth of writing, Walter Ong argued that redundancy was a core feature of oral cultures, but one that diminished with the onset of writing (you don’t need to repeat that which you’ve written down).7 According to Ong, and many writers who have come in his wake, writing allows for more originality and individuality. And yet even if it is true that written documents contain lower degrees of redundancy than oral narratives (a big if), I think it is safe to say that literate cultures are skilled producers of extraordinary amounts of redundancy. Whether through the practice of manual or mechanical copying or the live performance of written texts, redundancy is reinscribed in literate societies at the level of circulation. One only needs to think about the voluminous amount of copies in circulation today (or during the earlier spread of print) to get some idea of how persistent redundancy is to modern forms of communication. Redundancy is not something that only belongs to “primitive” cultures; it is a basic condition of communicative reliability, of producing mutual understanding. Indeed, as the field of bioinformatics has more recently taught us, it is an elementary condition of life itself.8
The significance of redundancy for human communication is to my mind one of the most persuasive reasons why the printed book should still matter to us today. But it is also a compelling argument for the importance of new forms of electronic reading. Expanding the number of channels through which our ideas circulate makes those ideas potentially richer. That was the lesson of medieval manuscript illustrations that we saw in chapter 1 that highlighted the intersection of books, scrolls, and human speech to achieve a greater sense of understanding. And it was also the lesson of those lab rats I mentioned in chapter 4, who weren’t able to integrate different kinds of information such as “blue” and “left” into a single, more complex idea. More aspects of communication are not just quantitatively different. They are also qualitatively different. Whether it is blue/left or book/computer, these multiple channels synthesize into something greater than the sum of their parts. The aggregation, and not the singularization, of communication is the condition of more complex thought. It is the condition of our humanity. Remember the rats.
At the turn of the nineteenth century, the German naturalist Alexander von Humboldt imagined putting “the entire material world in a single book.”9 Humboldt’s obsessions with the Überbuch (his last was tellingly titled Kosmos) stood in stark contrast to his life’s work devoted to promoting an ecological understanding of the earth’s natural diversity. Where he saw complex arrangements of plant life, he saw just one form of communication, the printed book.
Humboldt was writing for an age that in many ways gave birth to our current obsession with books. While the book had been around for over a millennium and half by Humboldt’s day, it was only at the turn of the nineteenth century when we witness a marked and mostly continual quantitative increase in the number of books, an increase that corresponded to a profound emotional investment in books as objects. Whether understood as plagues, earthquakes, or even things one could marry, the extent of the book’s impact on us was imagined to be vast, deep, and lasting.
But that very ubiquity—the way the book emerged as one of the single most important cultural objects after 1800—was a function of its integration with other ways of expressing ourselves (the theater, visual arts, polite conversation, or writing by hand).10 The book was imagined to be a single, all-encompassing medium. And yet this belied the truth of its own heterogeneity and the diverse ways it was woven within a broader field of communication. The book didn’t kill, as Victor Hugo once famously claimed, it coordinated.11 The book was, and has always been, part of an ecosystem, the very idea of which we owe to people like Alexander von Humboldt.
The story of the book’s dominance in the nineteenth century should stand as an important reminder to us today. As we are overrun by computation, much in the same way as we were once overrun by books, we need to remember that what makes us unique as a species is our ability not just to communicate in complex ways through words. It is our ability to layer—or more artisanally understood, to weave—different modes of communication with one another to give those same words a deeper, more profound meaning. While everyone is searching for the magical potion of convergence—the single gadget that can perform all of our computational tasks, like the universal remote control—I think there should be those of us who are continually on the lookout for new communicative species, like the herb hunters in the Amazon today and like Humboldt before them. We may need to put down the book from time to time, but we should make sure not to let the computer become the new book. The universal medium, like the universal library, is a dream that does more harm than good.
NOTES
PROLOGUE
1. Some highlights: Alberto Manguel, A History of Reading (New York: Viking, 1996); Guglielmo Cavallo and Roger Chartier, eds., A History of Reading in the West (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999); and Leah Price, “Reading: The State of the Discipline,” Book History 7 (2004): 303–20. On t
he neuroscience of reading, see Stanislas Dehaene, The Reading Brain: The Science and Evolution of a Human Invention (New York: Viking, 2009), and Maryanne Wolf, Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain (New York: Harper, 2008).
2. As Michael Keller, director of Stanford University’s Libraries, recently remarked about students, “They write their papers online. They read articles online. Many, many, many of them read chapters of books online. I can see in this population of students behaviors that clearly indicate where this is all going.” Laura Sydell, “Stanford Ushers in the Age of Bookless Libraries,” National Public Radio, July 8, 2010, http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=128361395.
3. See Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains (New York: Viking, 2010), and Naomi Baron, Always On: Language in an Online and Mobile World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).
4. The fear that there would not be enough readers (and paper) for all the new authors was voiced by Johann Georg Meusel in his eighteenth-century encyclopedia on all living German writers, Das Gelehrte Teutschland, vol. 12 (Lemgo: Meyer, 1806), lxiv. As Christoph Martin Wieland, another contemporary, remarked, “If everyone writes, who will read?” Here is the sentiment in updated form: “Never have so many people written so much to be read by so few.” Katie Hafner, “For Some, the Blogging Never Stops,” New York Times, May 27, 2004, sec. G1. The death of publishing via self-publishing was declared around the most famous case in the eighteenth century, when Friedrich Klopstock, then the German language’s best-known poet, started his own subscription service (it failed). And the fear that people wouldn’t read books anymore (in this case because of newspapers) was voiced by August Prinz in Der Buchhandel vom Jahre 1815 bis zum Jahre 1843 (Altona: Verlags-Bureau, 1855), 26. As scholars like Peter Stallybrass and Leah Price have reminded us, the book has at least since the invention of printing been a minor player in quantitative terms within a larger world of print. As Price writes, “There’s nothing new, then, about the book’s precarious perch within a larger media ecology.” See Leah Price, “Reading as if for Life,” Michigan Quarterly Review 48, no. 4 (2009): 483–98, and Peter Stallybrass, “‘Little Jobs’: Broadsides and the Printing Revolution,” in Agents of Change: Print Culture Studies after Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, ed. Sabrina A. Baron, Eric N. Lindquist, and Eleanor F. Shevlin (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2007).
5. A great deal of recent work has tried to develop ways of thinking about media “ecologies” rather than focus on any one particular medium in isolation. See, for example, the work of Matthew Fuller, Media Ecologies: Materialist Energies in Art and Technoculture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005); N. Katherine Hayles, “Intermediation: The Pursuit of a Vision,” New Literary History 38, no. 1 (2007): 99–125; Dick Higgins, Horizons: The Poetics and Theory of Intermedia (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1984); and the ongoing work of our research group in Montreal, “Interacting with Print: Cultural Practices of Intermediality, 1700–1900,” http://interactingwithprint.org/.
6. Alexis Weedon, ed., A History of the Book in the West, 5 vols. (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2010); Michael F. Suarez, SJ, and H. R. Woud-huysen, eds., The Oxford Companion to the Book, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010); Simon Eliot and Jonathan Rose, eds., A Companion to the History of the Book (London: Blackwell, 2009); and David Finkelstein and Alistair McCleery, eds., The Book History Reader, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2006). There are individual national histories of the book for France, Great Britain, Germany, Ireland, Australia, the United States, Canada, and China.
7. For a notable exception, see the work of Lisa Gitelman, Always Already New: Media, History and the Data of Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), and her edited collection, New Media, 1740–1915 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003).
8. As recent neurological research suggests, when we read we simulate narrative situations in our brain by drawing on our past experiences in the world. Reading is made sense of through this translation between mental simulation and embodied experience. See Nicole K. Speer, Jeremy R. Reynolds, Khena M. Swallow, and Jeffrey M. Zacks, “Reading Stories Activates Neural Representations of Visual and Motor Experiences,” Psychological Science 20, no. 8 (August 2009): 989–99. For recent work that has focused on the historical relationship between bodies and reading books, see Adrian Johns, “The Physiology of Reading: Print and the Passions,” in The Nature of the Book (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 380–443, and Karin Littau, Theories of Reading: Books, Bodies and Bibliomania (Cambridge: Polity, 2007). For work on bodies and digital reading, see Mark Hansen, Bodies in Code (New York: Routledge, 2006), and N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatices (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999).
CHAPTER 1
1. Saint Augustine, The Confessions, trans. R. S. Pine-Coffin (New York: Penguin, 1961), 177.
2. Scholars estimate that it was around 300 AD when the codex achieved parity with the scroll. Colin H. Roberts and T. C. Skeat, The Birth of the Codex (London: British Academy, 1983), 75. On Christianity and reading, see Harry Y. Gamble, Books and Readers in the Early Church: A History of Early Christian Texts (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995), and Anthony Grafton and Megan Williams, Christianity and the Transformation of the Book: Origen, Eusebius, and the Library of Caesarea (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2006).
3. David Katz, The World of Touch, ed. and trans. Lester E. Krueger (Hillsdale, NJ: LEA Publishers, 1989), 226. It was originally published in 1925 as Der Aufbau der Tastwelt (Leipzig: J. A. Barth, 1925). For a recent discussion of the relationship between the human hand and cognition, see Raymond Tallis, The Hand: A Philosophical Inquiry into Human Being (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2003). One of the founding works in this field is André Leroi-Gourhan, Gesture and Speech, trans. Anna Bostock Berger (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993). Finally, for the argument that we have different neural pathways for our motor and visual relationship to words, see Stanislas Dehaene, The Reading Brain: The Science and Evolution of a Human Invention (New York: Viking, 2009), 57. According to neurologists, then, touch is a different cognitive means of knowing language.
4. The Journal of Eugène Delacroix, trans. Lucy Norton (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1980), 29.
5. Michael Camille, “Seeing and Reading: Some Visual Implications of Medieval Literacy and Illiteracy,” Art History 8, no. 1 (March 1985): 39; Horst Wenzel, “Von der Gotteshand zum Datenhandschuh. Zur Medialität des Begreifens,” Bild, Schrift, Zahl, ed. Sybille Krämer and Horst Bredekamp (Munich: Fink, 2003), 25–55; Meyer Schapiro, Words and Pictures: On the Literal and the Symbolic in the Illustration of a Text (The Hague: Mouton, 1983).
6. John Bulwer, Chirologia, or the Naturall Language of the Hand (1644), n.p.
7. See the delightful introductory study by William H. Sherman, “Toward a History of the Manicule,” Used Books: Marking Readers in Renaissance England (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania University Press, 2008), 25–52.
8. Claire Sherman, ed., Writing on Hands: Memory and Knowledge in Early Modern Europe (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2000).
9. See useful catalogs such as The Russian Avant-Garde Book, 1910–1934, ed. Margit Rowell and Deborah Wye (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2002); Renée Riese Hubert’s Surrealism and the Book (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988); and most recently, Anna Sigridur Arnar, The Book as Instrument: Stephane Mallarmé, the Artist’s Book, and the Transformation of Print Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011).
10. The clasp belongs to the history of elegant bindings, an important part of the story of the book’s tactility. See Paul Needham, Twelve Centuries of Bookbindings, 400–1600 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979); D. Miner, The History of Bookbinding, 525–1950 (Baltimore: Walters Art Gallery, 1957); and Philippa Marks, Beautiful Bookbindings: A Thousand Years of the Bookbinder’s Art (Newcastle: Oak Knoll, 2011).
11. See Susan Tucker, Katherine Ott, and Patricia P. Buckler, eds., The Scrapbook in American Life (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2006), and Jessica Helfand, Scrapbooks: An American History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008).
12. The practice of creating impressions from inked flowers (and not just pressing actual flowers in books) dates back at least to the Codex Atlanticus of Leonardo da Vinci. It became quite popular in the eighteenth century, for example, in the German botanist’s Johann Hieronymus Kniphof’s multivolume work Botanica in Originali (Erfurt: J. M. Funcke, 1747), which contained over one thousand impressions of plants. Auer’s invention is discussed in his Die Entdeckung des Naturselbstdruckes (Vienna: K.k. Hof-u. Staatsdruckerei, 1854), which was written in four languages. For a brief history of the technique, see Roderick Cave and Geoffrey Wakeman, Typographia Naturalis (Wymondham: Brewhouse Press, 1967).
13. J. W. Goethe, West-östlicher Divan, in Sämtliche Werke, vol. 3.1, ed. Hendrik Birus (Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1994), 417.
14. While we often think in terms of small books becoming increasingly popular over time—that the book goes from large to small—there have always been small books. Indeed, much of the book’s initial reception in competition with the scroll centered around its diminutive size. As the Roman poet Martial wrote in one of the earliest references to the codex, “Leave the great ones to their scrolls, a single hand can grasp me.” Martial, Epigrams, ed. and trans. D. R. Shackleton Bailey, vol. 1 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 43 (translation modified from the original).
15. Charles Nodier, “L’Amateur de livres,” Bulletin du Bibliophile, no. 6 (June 1842): 249. See also the delightfully eclectic history of the topic, Holbrook Jackson, The Anatomy of Bibliomania (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001).