Book Was There- Reading in Electronic Times Read online

  [FIGURE 2.6] Daniel Gordon, Red Headed Woman (2008). Gordon’s work has shown in the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and he is considered one of the most innovative new portraitists today. Image courtesy of the artist.

  Few issues surround Facebook, or digital media more generally, more ominously than that of surveillance.27 Facebook’s corporate success is largely related to the way it has been able to monetize oversight. “Access,” one of the great rallying cries of new media throughout the ages, no longer only implies access to something, but also access to someone. From the early dreams of digital texts as the offspring of Proteus, an endless transformability, we have awoken to find a retail panopticon where everything we say or see is observed, counted, and recorded. Not just speech, but the “page view” is the new ore. In the nineteenth century, the “view” stood for a popular genre of illustrated books, consisting of picturesque tours of ruins, cathedrals, bowers, gardens, and distant, hazy horizons. The bookish view stood for a suite of visual and emotional vanishing points. Today, the “view” implies that you are being looked at. Instead of the book as window—of seeing through books—social networking is a metalabyrinth of mutual regard. Even readerly underlining, once the bastion of self-referentiality, is now being viewed for marketing purposes with the help of electronic readers. There is no outside the network today except the ever dwindling space-time of off. As Don DeLillo writes in Valparaiso, his satirical drama of contemporary media, “Everything is the interview.”28 We have returned to a world before the invention of privacy.

  Ironically, the blurred face has returned as a compelling new symbol of this digital condition. For Cameron, the blur stood for a sense of an individual’s ineffability, what we could not know. The digital blur, by contrast, is a sign of the breakdown of mutuality, of someone knowing too much. In Michael Wolf’s recent prize-winning exhibit I See You (2010), drawn from images from Google Street View, or Manu Luksch’s Faceless (2007), a video drawn from closed-circuit television in London in which other people’s faces had to be legally blurred when she requested access to them (fig. 2.7), the blur is central to the meaning of the digital portrait.29 These works ask us what it means to be seen, or to have one’s seeing seen, without one’s knowledge, to be captured without consent. The blur is not a sign of some ethical response—here, I’ve blurred your face, now it’s OK. For these artists, the blur is a sign of something that cannot entirely be undone, that cannot entirely be effaced. It cannot be undone, but it also cannot be condoned. The blurred face of Google Street View or closed-circuit television is a sign of an ethical breakdown in the new system of digital looking.

  [FIGURE 2.7] Video still from Manu Luksch, Faceless (2007). In the video, Luksch tells the story of a woman in search of a face. Courtesy of the artist.

  . . .

  The first faces most of us encounter in books are those of animals. The animal face, so central to the children’s tale, does many things: it reminds us of our place in the natural world; it helps us confront our fears (animals in books can be cuddly, but also ambiguously fanged); but most of all animal faces are thought to be simple.30 They can stand for something in the way that human faces cannot. The symbolic simplicity of the animal’s face is a very good way of learning not only how to read faces, but how to read.

  When my children no longer want me to read books to them at night they will no doubt move on to social networking software. They will transition from learning to understand the faces of animals to those of their teenage peers (a remarkable continuity you might say). The looking through and looking away of the book (what did Mole, Rat, and Badger really mean?) will turn to the looking on of the networked profile. How will they learn to negotiate the mobility of online friendship versus the static nature of making friends with the people of their books? How will they deal with the challenges of the asynchronous viewing that belongs to social networking (I don’t see that you see me) versus the one-way viewing of the printed book?

  The answer that I have to offer is not uncharacteristically anachronistic. It is to return to a different time and place: the novel of the baroque court (I can hear the sighing now). Madeleine de Scudéry, María de Zayas, Madame de Lafayette—these are the great theorists of public performance and the travails of personal privacy. As women they were acutely aware of the limited spaces of personal aloneness; as members of court they were attuned to the seething judgments of interlocking social circles; and as writers they knew firsthand of the incalculable responses of a newly burgeoning literary market. These books show us how unnerving it is to suddenly hear your own story told back to you (La Princesse de Clèves) or how serious the moral consequences are of betraying someone else’s story (Novelas amorosas y ejemplares). They teach us what it is like to live in a world of always being seen, but also to learn to take care of narratives entrusted to us.

  We often hear that there is too much confession today, and by association too much voyeurism. We are haunted by the ghost of Rousseau, whose Confessions (1782) changed the reading world for good. I suspect that this is nothing more than a veiled elitism, a feeling shared among many that not everyone should be able to represent his or herself, a sentiment echoed through the ages. I personally cannot help thinking that social media will make us more, not less, receptive to friendship, just as eighteenth-century Pietists imagined we became more receptive to God by reflecting on ourselves everyday with pen and paper. Writing about oneself and photographing oneself doesn’t have to be seen as the consummate act of narcissism that it is often portrayed to be. It can also be a way of opening ourselves up to others. But social media can also teach us to have a sense of playfulness about our identities, like Henri Beyle, aka Stendhal, that great Romantic epigone of the baroque who employed close to two hundred and fifty pseudonyms throughout his life. Like Beyle, I want my kids to learn the art of pseudonymity in a world that has largely given up on anonymity. In response to the privatization of the public sphere, we need a renewed sense of public dissimulation.

  Mostly, though, I hope that as my children learn more about these bygone worlds and their halls of mirrors they will learn to relate to others without fully needing to know them, to be able to turn off their looking glasses. I want them to value the recognition of another’s privacy, the night of knowledge in the words of Milton’s prophetic sonnet. Or as Rilke wrote to his friend, the artist Paula Modersohn-Becker, “I consider this to be the highest task of the union of two people: that each one should keep watch over the solitude of the other.”31

  Reading books, and looking on the world through books, teaches us to relate to that which we cannot fully know. Books teach us to see the world multiply, from all its angles. The multiple faces of books presuppose a nonknowledge of another that has deep ethical implications (“I wak’d, she fled,” as Milton writes). The digital face, on the other hand, encourages us to see the world as multiple, as consisting of hybrids, compositions, or “paroxysms,” in Hermann Broch’s words. Facebook presupposes an inherent presence of another, that there is no I without You, and that, too, is ethically profound. There is an entanglement to social networking that is as meaningful as the book’s pedagogy of mental distance, that I can never in the end fully know you.

  As the eighteenth-century Swiss pastor Johann Lavater understood, reading faces is an essential human task. It forms the basis of the act of “acknowledgment” that is the prerequisite of all political, social, and moral equality.32 The face is where we recognize each other in a social sense. Learning how to read faces—how to master the double act of looking and reading, whether online or off—is where we learn to care about something and someone without a sense of possession. If holding is a precondition of dreaming, facing is a precondition of caring. It is through faces where we meet others at a distance. We embrace another with our hands, but we greet others at a distance with our faces. The face is where we learn to be together apart. If we value this apartness as much as we value being social, then we will need to hold on to books and their fa
ces. Unlike social networking, in books no one is looking where you are looking.

  THREE

  Turning the Page (Roaming, Zooming, Streaming)

  Pages so many, paper so much!

  WALTER SCOTT [waverley]

  All is leaf!

  J. W. GOETHE

  The page is the atom of the book, its most basic building block (and like atoms it too consists of smaller elements, soot, gum, hide, linen, pulp, thread, so many bibliographic quarks). But the page is also a frame, that which marks a boundary. For almost two millennia the page has been the primary way that we have accessed reading. The page is where words assume order, and it is that order that has helped shape the meaning of words for us.

  Until now, digital texts have largely not departed from the page view (even if, in an interesting case of double remediation they have incorporated the logic of the scroll into the page). Websites are stacked piles of pages, browsers are static “windows,” and e-books aren’t simulations of books at all, but single pages. In Goethe’s words, all is still very much leaf or page. Or better yet: today, all is recto.

  Much of the current debate about the future of reading turns on the crowdedness of the digital page versus its bookish predecessor. There is just too much stuff on the screen now. The webcam portrait is the new face of text. We are breeding generations of distracted readers, people who simply cannot pay attention long enough to finish a book.

  This is undoubtedly true, but only to a point. We have of course been here before. “Read much, not many,” said Pliny the Younger in the first century AD, initiating a standard refrain about reading through the ages.1 We have always worried about how to instill careful reading, no matter what the object. Keats said to read one page of poetry per day.2 Erasmus suggested to read the Gospels by “bit[ing] off some of this medicine constantly . . . chew it assiduously and pass it down into our spiritual stomachs [and] do not cast it up again.”3 Alongside the slow food movement we now have (once again) appeals for slow reading (and of course antiregurgitation).4

  But we have also been here before in terms of page design. The medieval page reveled in its cacophony (fig. 3.1). So did the great printed critical editions of the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century humanists, like Joseph Scaliger or Daniel Heinsius.5 As much as I like the geometric asceticism that printed pages can take (from early sixteenth-century Aldine editions to Romantic promoters of the wide margins in the nineteenth century), I am also drawn to the full page of the book. The scribal and scholarly commitment to textual abundance suggests an exuberance about reading that I hope we will never forget. Our notebooks still often look like this. They are reminders of the spillage of human thought.

  Of course there is something markedly different about the digital page. Medieval or Renaissance marginalia don’t blink. (Is there anything more offensive to the eye than blinking lights, which have always been meant as warning signals?) If e-books today are serene imitators of the modern printed page, “enhanced” e-books, every publisher’s dream, will soon consist of vast amounts of animation (sound tracks, pop-up windows, and moving images). If I were designing a reader today in our age of enhancement, I would call it The Pygmalion.

  It may be that we should no longer even call this reading. Listening to music, watching movies, pointing, and clicking—these have nothing to do with reading. But we should also remember that reading has very often had this “multimedial” quality about it, even if not in such an overpopulated sense. Reading has traditionally been imbedded in aural practices of reading aloud (whether in school, church, at the dinner table, before bed, or for the visually impaired), just as, as I tried to show in the last chapter, it has so often been codefined by the act of looking (ceremonial books, travel books, and coffee-table books to name a few). In my own house as a child, reading was definitely loud. Family members were constantly reading their favorite passages aloud or shouting, “Look at this!” (like a parental pop-up window). Digital texts may be different in degree—in the way they are able to amplify our historical relations to the page (more crowded, more multimedial)—but they are not truly different in kind. They still do not, as yet, depart from the traditional atomic structure of the book: the page view.

  [FIGURE 3.1] Three versions of Psalm 118 based on St. Jerome’s edition. The left column is the Gallican text with Latin interlinear gloss from the church fathers. The middle column is the Roman text with an Anglo-Saxon interlinear translation. And the right column is the Hebrew text with French interlinear translation. From The Canterbury Psalter (1147), MS R.17.1 fol. 219v. By permission of the Master and Fellows of Trinity College, Cambridge.

  And this is where I think we need to shift the terms of the debate. What matters is not the ability to add links or visual or audio content. This strikes me as just a departure from, not an enhancement of, reading. Rather, what should be at stake is how we may or may not reconceptualize the formal structure of reading. That is why reflecting on the nature of the page, rather than just the technology, is so important. It is the text’s architecture, its structural details, that play as much a role in shaping our reading experiences as the underlying material profile of the book or screen. Only when we reconceptualize the page as the basic unit of reading are we truly entering into new conceptual terrain.

  If our relationship to holding texts and looking at texts will be two of the features that will change most dramatically in the years to come as reading moves from pages to screens, our relationship to the “page” as the fundamental interface of text is also on the verge of potentially undergoing a categorical shift. It bears reflecting on what pages have done and what we would do without them.

  . . .

  First, pages.

  Pages are windows. Pages allow us to look through, to transport ourselves into an imaginative space off the page. The use of marginal illustrations (fig. 3.2), the width of blank margins, the degree of whiteness of the page (which is never truly white), the shape of typefaces, and the distances between letters and words—all play a role in facilitating fenestration. But so does the text. Scenes of sleeping, dreaming, meandering, tinkering, and distant viewing (hilltops or cityscapes) are all descriptive techniques of having us see through something. When Virginia Woolf writes of Mrs. Ramsay in To the Lighthouse, “And she waited a little, knitting, wondering, and slowly those words they had said at dinner, ‘the China rose is all abloom and buzzing with the honey bee,’ began washing from side to side of her mind rhythmically,”6 I know to let my mind wander, too, to see through the page before me, to enter into the world of Mrs. Ramsay’s drifting mind as I then drift back to my own.

  Pages are frames. Pages not only allow us to look through, but also at, to see something that has been distilled. Pages are like microscopes, only in reverse. They reduce the world to something comprehensible. Unlike cinema screens, pages are smaller than the world they represent. When the twentieth-century Swiss writer Robert Walser began writing short stories in microscript while residing in a sanitarium, he was trying to find a way to capture this smallness of writing. Pages are an attempt to grasp that which is around us, to bring it down to size, to order it, and finally to save it. As Susan Orlean wrote about her orchid thief, so too of the page: “There are too many ideas and things and people. Too many directions to go. I was starting to believe the reason it matters to care passionately about something, is that it whittles the world down to a more manageable size.”7 Pages are signs of passion. They whittle, like sculptures with the excess marble chipped away.

  [FIGURE 3.2] The Prayer Book of Kaiser Maximilian I (1513) was one of the most important illustrated books of the early sixteenth century and included marginal illustrations by artists such as Albrecht Dürer, Lucas Cranach the Elder, and Albrecht Altdorfer, among others. Folio 56v is reproduced here courtesy of the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, München.

  We have developed many ways of framing reading over the ages: columns, headpieces, illuminated letters, footnotes, and of course punctuation are all ways of brin
ging words into focus. The introduction of spacing between words in the seventh century, the gradual standardization of punctuation and spelling in the seventeenth century (the great age of dictionaries), or even the vogue in the nineteenth century for presenting classics in double columns (the book as the new pantheon)—these are so many ways of arguing for the orderliness of reading amid the cacophony of texts.8 So too is the age-old technique of ekphrasis, of focusing on a single object through the act of description. Description, which is a problem for narratologists (what happens when we describe something?), is a way of focusing our attention. It is a verbal form of punctuation. When Balzac writes of a Parisian gambling house, “The various salons are teeming with spectators and players; indigent old men who shuffle along in search of warmth; tormented faces belonging to those whose orgies began in wine and will end up in the Seine,”9 this is a world I can know all at once. He has made Paris graspable for me two centuries later and an ocean away.

  Pages are individuations. No matter how large or small, pages are finite. Unlike scrolls, pages are material arguments of individualization. We cannot read the recto and verso sides of the page at the same time (although we can intimate that more is to come when the ink bleeds through). As in Augustine’s Confessions, pages allow us to access the world at random, out of sequence, as a piece.10 Chapter headings (but not running headers), page numbers (but not gathering signatures), stanzas, paragraph breaks, and the numbering of verses are all forms of individuation. So too are rhetorical devices like synecdoche, where the part stands for the whole, and narrative devices like direct speech, which carves the world into different voices. Quotation marks, which came into use in the sixteenth century in France and the seventeenth century in England, are to the page as the page is to the book. As Marjorie Garber has written in her study of quotation marks, the duplication of quotation also implies a duplicity, a taking out of context—quotation marks are the grammatical seams of any text.11