Book Was There- Reading in Electronic Times Page 4
As faces consume more and more of what and how we read, it is worth asking how the history of reading has been bound up with the history of looking, and looking at faces in particular. Faces are forms of intimacy. They are where we learn to identify, and identify with, things. What can the history of the book’s many faces tell us about the future of reading?
[FIGURE 2.1] Honoré de Balzac, Le Chef-d’oeuvre inconnu. Eaux-fortes originales et dessins gravés sur bois de Pablo Picasso (1931), 80. © Picasso Estate/SODRAC (2011).
. . .
One of the earliest authorial frontispieces in a printed book is not insignificantly from a translation: John Harington’s translation of Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso (1591) (fig. 2.2). Here we see Harington in the bottom portion of the engraving, kept company by his faithful dog as a reminder to readers of his own fidelity as a translator (“traduttore, traditore,” as the Italians have it, every translation betrays its original). Up above there is a bust of Ariosto, a modern classic, as the two writers, set amid a larger architectural edifice, mark out the North and South Poles of European literature.
[FIGURE 2.2] Frontispiece from John Harington’s translation of Orlando Furioso (1591). By permission of the Master and Fellows of St. John’s College, Cambridge.
“Frontispiece” has come to mean any illustration facing the title page, but initially it meant to look at head-on: frontispicium, from frons (forehead) and specio (to look). In its earliest form it applied to architecture, meaning a “facade.” As sixteenth-century writers like Harington were well aware, it was Pindar who first equated writing with building (as in his sixth Olympic ode: “As when we contrive a stately mansion, supporting on golden pillars the well-built portal of the edifice, we will construct the hymn”).6 The frontispiece, pioneered in woodcuts by artists like Lucas Cranach the Elder in Wittenberg in the early sixteenth century, was both an edifice and a portal. It gave the book definition, and it provided an opening. It was another indication of the way rest, as in resting on (like all those columns that adorned early modern frontispieces), was the precondition of bookish thought. Books support our turn inward.
Like books and buildings, letters, too, have many faces. Whether it is the notion of “typeface” or the practice of illuminating letters with faces in manuscripts and early printed books (fig. 2.3), the faces of the letter are numerous. In some cases, as in Antonio Basoli’s Alfabeto Pittorico (1839) or Johann David Steingruber’s Architectonisches Alphabeth (1773), the faces of buildings were imagined to be in the shape of letters. Books, buildings, and letters all converge around the figure of the face.
The frontispiece to Harington’s translation is accordingly covered in faces (twenty-eight as far as I can tell), including the two “authors” on the title page. Where the translator looks back at us, the poet Ariosto looks away. We only see half of his face, and his poetry. But which half comes through in translation? Reading as a form of turning in, the frontispiece tells us, is also a form of turning away—from the world, but also from the text, which is never wholly our own. Like those monstrous faces that grow out of the architectural facade or all those Italian o’s that turn into Anglo-Saxon consonants (more monsters), we turn away in order to transform. The face not only faces us, it also marks a turning point. The face is a space of translation.
The frontispieces of books are a reminder of the way reading is at bottom always multiple. Reading involves an act of translation between itself and the act of looking. As recent research in neuroscience suggests, we see letters in much the same way as we perceive everyday objects through a process of combining more elementary shapes. The faces of letters are composed of geometric patterns already found in nature, “topological invariants” in the words of the neuroscientists.7 Or you could say we see objects in the same way as we read letters. There is a deep-rooted connection between legibility and visuality. The face is where reading and seeing merge. We see letters, and we read faces.
[FIGURE 2.3] In this decorated letter N, we see an image of Louis IX holding a miniature of Saint Chapelle, the beautiful chapel he commissioned to be built in the heart of Paris in 1248. The image conjoins letter, face, and architectural facade all within a single frame. Cholet Master, Grandes chroniques de France (1275/1310), BSG MS 782 fol. 327. Photo IRHT © Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève, Paris.
Perhaps the best example of this idea comes from one of the most famous books of faces, Johann Lavater’s four-volume Physiognomic Fragments (1775), which contains over eight hundred illustrations of faces. The Swiss pastor believed you could divine a person’s soul from his or her face and that such divination would one day be quantifiable as a science (not for nothing was the Age of Enlightenment also known as the Age of Quackery). Lavater’s work became a European sensation, translated into seven languages by the end of the century, and emerged as one of the most important, if also troubling, landmarks to the face of the book (it later gave birth to the field of phrenology and its use by the Nazis in the twentieth century).8
To his contemporaries, however, Lavater’s book helped set in motion the silhouette craze of the late eighteenth century, named after Etienne de Silhouette, who had a fondness for cutout images of acquaintances’ profiles. Lavater taught readers to find meaning in the outlines of the human face, but also how to read shadows (fig. 2.4). “A person’s silhouette is the weakest, the emptiest and at the same time the truest and most faithful image that one can make of a person,” he wrote in his characteristic sentimental style.9
For Lavater and his contemporaries, the book of silhouettes was an important visual tool. In learning how to read the contrasts between the black-and-white contours of the face, readers were learning how to see the world as one vast legible page.10 It was a telling sign of the way reading in the eighteenth century was gradually colonizing the world of looking (though we may worry about its opposite today). “Listen,” says Faust in Paul Valéry’s Mon Faust, a twentieth-century rewriting of the myth, “I want to create a great work, a book . . .” To which Mephisto replies, “You? Aren’t you satisfied with being a book?”11 From the eighteenth century onward, wherever people looked they saw (through) their books.
As our world becomes more intensely visual by the day, we often forget the important role that books have played in shaping our perception. Books change how we look, not just in the sense of how we see but also how we are seen. This point was beautifully explored in the work of the Victorian photographer Julia Margaret Cameron (1815–79), who was born in Calcutta and lived for many years as a neighbor to Alfred Lord Tennyson on the Isle of Wight. Cameron worked in a century overwhelmed by books, but also by photography—by the 1860s, 300–400 million miniature photographic portraits printed on cartes de visite were being sold in London every year. As historians of photography have recently begun to remind us, the birth of photography was intimately related to the history of the book.12 For Cameron, who liked to collect her portraits into albums, there was something decidedly bookish about the way she understood the new visual art. As she wrote to the natural scientist John Herschel, who introduced her to photography, “Yes—the history of the human face is a book we don’t tire of if we can get its grand truths and learn them by heart.”13
[FIGURE 2.4] “An ordinary Physionomist will pronounce of what that head is capable or incapable, as soon as he has seen the very remarkable section of the profile which is between a and b; a good Observer will decide it by that which is between e and d; and finally, the real Connoisseur will need no more, to settle his judgement, than the space between a and e.” Image of Abbé Raynal in Johann Caspar Lavater, Essays on Physiognomy, Designed to Promote the Knowledge and the Love of Mankind, vol. 1 (1789), 251. Courtesy of the Osler Library of the History of Medicine, McGill University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada.
Cameron’s photographs are suffused with a strong sense of the turning that belonged to reading books. Perhaps it was due to the fact that prior to becoming a photographer she was a translator of the most famous illustrated
ballad to come out of the eighteenth century, Gottfried August Bürger’s Leonora. For Cameron, the spirit of photography was born out of the transformative practices of translation.14 When we look at the portraits of her sitters, particularly her female sitters, we see how one of their most pronounced features is the way they turn, sometimes wistfully, sometimes aggressively, away from us. Whether it is the strained neck muscles in the portrait of her niece, Julia Jackson (1867), the future mother of Virginia Woolf; the signature botanical swirl in the unforgettable rosebush of The Gardener’s Daughter (1867); or her telltale soft focus, as in The Dream (1869) (fig. 2.5), Cameron’s women are decidedly vorticular.
The veiled young woman of The Dream is one of many of Cameron’s women who take flight, like the children she liked to photograph while sleeping or dressed as angels. In the foreground we see how the woman’s long hair is blurred, an undulating screen that keeps us slightly at bay. Only in the background, in the picture’s depth, does she come into focus. As she recedes, she is held back by an ambiguous hand that reaches for her broach, a subtle play on the pull of portraiture, which derives from the Latin traho, “to draw in.” The broach, the very center of the portrait, is also a clasp, that which binds her shroud around her and one of the most important icons in the history of books. In the play of grasping and retreating that marks out Cameron’s image, the photographic portrait mirrors the medium of the book in which it will eventually appear and to which it pays a kind of homage. Cameron’s crowning project would be an illustrated edition of Tennyson’s Idylls of the King, where the photographic portrait is imagined as reading’s double.
[FIGURE 2.5] Julia Margaret Cameron, The Dream (1869). Courtesy of the National Media Museum/Science and Society Picture Library, UK.
If, for artists like Balzac and Cameron, beneath the lines of every book is a face, what then is beneath the face? In Facile (1935), a collaboration between the poet Paul Eluard and the photographer Man Ray, we are offered a tentative answer. In one poem, the face of a young woman has been cut off by the edge of the page. For the surrealist Man Ray, behind the human face is just another face, this time of the page. In books, it seems, we never get past the face. In Rainer Maria Rilke’s modernist novel of a psychologically unstable young man in Paris, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge (1910), we are told the story of a woman who left her face in her hands one day when she looked up. It is an unbearable sight, like looking at angels. We cannot bear, so Rilke tells us, to see behind the face.
This, then, is the paradoxical end of reading as looking: no matter how often we turn the face of the page, we never get anything more than the face—of yet another page. There is a repetitiveness to the look of reading, one that propels the readers’ quest for something more, a desire to look through, past, or beyond. Perhaps the history of reading addiction—that all too common desire to finish all of the books—can be understood as the hope to find more than a face when we read, to finally find a body or a corpus. As Eudora Welty remarked about when she was a child, “I looked for the book I couldn’t have and it was a row. That was how I learned about the Series Books. There were many of everything, generations of everybody, instead of one. I wasn’t coming to the end of reading, after all—I was saved.”15 The faces of the book go on and on. Reading’s salvation is also reading’s curse. Cameron knew this; she inscribed lines from Milton’s sonnet “On his deceased wife” onto a copy of The Dream that she included in an album to a friend:
Her face was vail’d, yet to my fancied sight,
Love, sweetness, goodness, in her person shin’d
So clear, as in no face with more delight.
But O as to embrace me she enclin’d
I wak’d, she fled, and day brought back my night.
The bookish face ultimately marks a line of flight. Every frontispiece is a death mask.
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The online face, by contrast, is always too close. I am curiously drawn to the uncomfortable crampedness of the face of the webcam.16 It marks a distinct inversion of Cameron’s Victorian vision of receding women. Instead of the book’s impressions, the webcam captures a sense of compression as one of the essential features of the digital. For Walter Benjamin, German-Jewish philosopher and one of the twentieth-century’s great theorists of new media, photographic portraits from the nineteenth century revealed entire, and entirely lost, worlds that unfolded out of the photograph’s plane.17 According to Benjamin, the look of the nineteenth-century face expressed a sense of lost time, famously captured in the stern, yet longing eyes of the philosopher Friedrich Schelling. In today’s webcam portraits, by contrast, time looks crowded, heavy, compressed.
“I have no idea what time it is,” begins Ellen Ullman’s cult memoir of being a software engineer in Close to the Machine (1997). It is the pitch-perfect reversal of Proust’s opening gambit from In Search of Lost Time that begins, “For a long time . . .” The closeness of the screen unsettles, it infiltrates our sense of temporal sequence. “I have passed through a membrane where the real world and its uses no longer matter,” continues Ullman. “I am a software engineer.”18 The idea of “lost time” takes on a whole new meaning online—not in the sense of an irrevocable pastness, a nostalgia; instead, time itself is now what is lost. We are losing our sense of time online.
In new media parlance, this means that we are now “always on.”19 Fatigue is one of the basic conditions of the digital. When we look at screens we become prematurely tired, the optical equivalent of carpal tunnel syndrome. In this, digital reading marks a return to what it must have been like to read by candlelight, only now there is too much backlighting, or too little up front, as in the undifferentiated grayscape of electronic ink. But we are also tired because of the permanent arousal that screens promise. We know about the history of pornographic books (there were many), but books either were or were not erotic.20 Digital interfaces, by contrast, always might be. With its endlessly rotating panoply of masturbating men, Chatroulette.com might just be the perfect crystallization of the web’s visual nature.21
For Benjamin, the punctuated stimulations of new visual media like photography or the cinema offered a sense of what he optimistically called “awakening.”22 There was a messianic sense about them that seems almost impossible to embrace today. One century later, we might say that instead of awakening our relationship to the incessant on-ness of the digital could be categorized as a form of sleepwalking, an idea coined by Benjamin’s contemporary, the novelist Hermann Broch, in his modernist landmark The Sleepwalkers (1932). We may dream in books, or awake in the cinema, but we sleepwalk through the web.
By this I do not mean to suggest that we are more thoughtless online (the cliché of becoming shallower). Sleepwalking is different than dreaming because it marks out a confusion of categories. When we dream we are still asleep. When we sleepwalk, by contrast, we are mentally asleep, and yet physically awake. We are out of sync with our ourselves and our world. Sleepwalking represents a clash of states. “Underneath the visible soporific nature of life lay a constant tension of the individual elements,” writes Broch of his heroine, Hanna Wendling. “Were you to excise a single piece from the fabric of her reality, you would find a monstrous torsion, a paroxysm of molecules.”23 If the bookish world of frontispieces was a world of death masks—of flights from reality—the world of digital faces is full of such “monstrous torsions,” paroxysms of multiple states of being (tired, virtual, real, simulated, artificial, bored, enhanced, transformed, etc.). The digital portrait is a persistent encounter with the face of the not exactly vital. The 419 letter, the sock puppet, the printable organ, or even searingly banal web pages like “That Was NOT Your Last Piece of Gum Stop Lying” (3,015,023 likes on Facebook at last count) are the novel faces of text today. The zombie is our new Doppelgänger. As Brian Christian writes, reading has become a permanent Turing test to assess where the machine ends and the human begins.24
No other website has modeled our encounter with screens on the face more t
horoughly of course than Facebook. Facebook is the almost perfect rejection of Balzac’s prohibition of the “head-on” or de face. Facebook is so many faces, insistent, protruding, in your face. But on the other hand, Facebook is pure profile (your user “profile” being the core of social networking). However unconsciously, it counts Lavater as one of its forefathers.
And yet unlike the boundedness of the silhouette, the essence of the Facebook profile is that I am always more than myself, what one commentator has cleverly called the new “narcisystem.”25 In place of the many angles of the bookish face—the condition of its ineffability—the new online face is composed of numerous other people’s faces. It is a return to the idea of preformationism, that all beings are contained in every single being in a kind of universal potentia. There is something deeply theological, but also grotesque, about this idea of the personal assemblage, nicely captured in Daniel Gordon’s celebrated portraits that are collages of images found online (fig. 2.6).
For generations of artists and writers, envisioning with books began with a sense of looking away. In a world of social networking this turns instead into an act of “looking on”—looking on others in a kind of permanent state of voyeurism and looking onto the next person in a great chain (or collage) of being. Unlike the black box of the bibliographic silhouette, the digital profile is the sum of other egos. From the Freudian (and decidedly bookish) notion of the “ego” with its quaint tripartite structure (ego, id, and superego), we should now more properly be speaking of the digital egology, the ecological ego. Beneath the bookish face was nothing but an unsettling void. Beneath the digital face lies instead the graph, the new optical unconscious.26 Balzac’s unknown masterpiece—that haze of wavy lines that covered over the face—has been turned inside out. Instead of the face being beneath the text, underneath the face of digital text is always more text (first graph, then code). A host of new media projects, such as Giselle Beiguelman’s Code UP (2004), Lisa Jevbratt’s 1:1 (1999), or Ryoji Ikeda’s Datamatics (2006), are attempts to visualize the text beneath the image, to see the conditions of how we look digitally.