Book Was There- Reading in Electronic Times Read online

  [FIGURE 4.1] Vladimir Nabokov, The Original of Laura (Dying Is Fun), edited by Dmitri Nabokov. © 2009 Dmitri Nabokov. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc. Reproduced by permission of Penguin Books Ltd.

  In thinking about the relationship between notes and books, and the various movements between them, I want to think about what happens today when our notes and books increasingly belong to the same medium. Of course we will continue, in Wallace Stevens’s word, to “jot” down ideas on random slips of paper, as Goethe did on theater notices while drafting the last novella of his life or Melville did on a library call slip while taking notes for Billy Budd.2

  But I think it is fair to say that for many of us much of our note taking is done on the same medium as our book writing and—this is where our current moment strikes me as crucially different—our book reading. For medieval scholars, this would have been the case as they moved from one manuscript sheet to another in the reading, copying, and commenting that comprised their notationally filled days. But since the invention of printing there has been an essential schism between note taking and book reading. It is this schism that interests me. As we gradually move to a bookish world that is no longer exclusively defined by the printed book (if it ever was), what happens to this lost sense of metamorphosis surrounding composition—when “all is note” we might say? What happens, in other words, to handwriting?

  [FIGURE 4.2] Arno Schmidt, note-card case. Photo by Friedrich Forssman. © Arno Schmidt Stiftung, Bargfeld, Germany.

  It may seem odd to think about the future of handwriting in relation to the printed book. Print, after all, was the technology that was supposed to have replaced handwriting. And yet one of the unique features of printed books, and print media more generally, has been their ability not only to coexist with manuscript, but to coproduce a variety of handwritten practices in the form of marginalia, dedications, commonplace books, diaries, handwriting manuals, private letters about books, or even signatures (in the case of checks and passports).3 Far from replacing manuscript, it turns out that print has been one of the great engines for keeping handwriting alive. It is this mutuality, this interdependence between handwriting and print, that seems to be one of the key stakes in the move to digital forms of reading. The future of reading, in other words, is connected with how we have understood the value of handwriting as readers.

  . . .

  “In taking these notes, I’m trusting myself to the banality that is in me,” writes Roland Barthes in his notebook after the death of his mother.4 Notes are, first and foremost, records of the quotidian. They are like the basements of our ideas, cluttered, yet full of useful things. “Paid $2.50 for cutting &c: the old tree in front,” writes Walt Whitman in one of his notebooks.5 He even wrote it down twice. In Susan Sontag’s notebooks, now held in the special collections of the University of California, Los Angeles, we find vocabulary lists along with more memorable musings (such as meeting Thomas Mann).6 Notes are where the often mind-numbing, repetitive mundaneness of our daily lives bump into the high-flying acrobatics of human intellect. As the poet James Merrill wrote about his notebooks, “The thought of so many opposing impulses sleeping peacefully face-to-face when the book is shut, remains oddly satisfying.”7 Not only satisfying, I suspect, but in those cohabitating, slumbering thoughts of the poet there undoubtedly lies a spark of creativity. Notes are like silent embers.

  Notes are also meant to be fast, capturing those “quick, unexpected, commonplace, specific things,” in Wallace Stevens’s words, like a raindrop sliding down a clematis vine. Or as Mary Oliver jotted down in one of her notebooks:

  Something totally unexpected,

  like a barking cat.8

  Swiftness and unexpectedness go hand in hand with notes. As Stendhal wrote in a note on the messiness of his handwriting: “Writing: this is how I write when my thoughts are treading on my heels. If I write well, I waste them.”9 For great note takers the suddenness of the note is the precondition of new ideas, possibly the great idea. In Joyce’s notebooks to Finnegans Wake, the first of which he called “Scribbledehobble,” we see one case after another of flashes of insight into the nature of language: “pass the grass / behush the bush,” “muchrooms,” or the unsurpassable, “nutsnolleges.”10

  In the note’s speed, we dream of immediacy, of a place where there is no longer a gap between our thoughts and the words on the page. In the seventeenth century, the age of great diarists like Samuel Pepys, handbooks on tachygraphy, or “short-writing,” were all the rage. As an admirer wrote at the opening of William Hopkins’s The Flying Pen-Man, or The Art of Short Writing (1674):

  For what are Diamonds whilst in the Rocks,

  Lock’d up so close in Nature’s secret Box?

  What’s Art entomb’d within a private breast?

  Like Love and Light: diffuse it and increas’t.11

  For the late Victorians, photography was imagined to be the new medium capable of solving the problem of the instantaneity of thought, bypassing the stenographic note altogether. Louis Darget, member of the Society for the Study of Supernormal Pictures, pioneered the genre of the “thought photograph,” taking unexposed plates and pressing them to the foreheads of sitters. We are forever on the paradoxical hunt for technologies that allow us to communicate without them.

  Notes not only let us go fast, they also allow us to look over our ideas in some distilled fashion. Notes are technologies of oversight. Goethe was famous for creating vast charts prior to writing. Synopsis was a key antecedent to narration, the visualization of writing an essential step in the creative process. In the work of his contemporary Stendhal, whose autobiography, The Life of Henry Brulard (1835–36), remained unpublished (yet bound) at the time of his death, numerous pages were covered with topographical drawings from Stendhal’s childhood. The visual is deeply specific, perhaps comically so in Stendhal, in ways that language never could be. “I could write a volume on the circumstances of the death of someone so dear,” Stendhal writes on the occasion of his mother’s death when he was a young boy. “That’s to say, I know nothing whatsoever of the details.”12 In his visual rendering of the event, by contrast, all is detail (fig. 4.3). The sense of scale, the domestic labels, and the numbered annotations—“1) my father in his armchair, 2) fireplace, 3) M. Pison”—are the graphical poles to writing’s looseness.

  As the proliferation of schemas, lists, or maps tell us, perhaps one of the most important aspects of the note is this visual element. As Samuel Coleridge writes in his notebooks, “Without drawing I feel myself but half invested in language.”13 Notes allow us to bring words and images together, to write and envision at the same time. “Word and image are correlates that eternally search for one another,” suggests Goethe in one of his many aphorisms.14 Peruse the notebooks of Leonardo, Michelangelo, or Goethe and you will witness the deep complementarity of drawing and writing, the beauty, spark, and curiosity of intermedial thought.

  Notes may be deeply visual, but they are also good for cancellation.15 They allow us to see something disappear. Notes are vanishing points, a place where we undo our ideas, an integral part of the lost and found of reading. “Marginalia are deliberately pencilled,” writes Poe, “because the mind of the reader wishes to unburthen itself of a thought.”16 Or as Coleridge writes in his notebooks, “Half a page wasted in Nonsense, and a whole page in the confutation of it. But such is the nature of exercise—I walk a mile for health—& then another to return home again.”17

  [FIGURE 4.3] In this drawing Stendhal reconstructs his family home at the time of his mother’s memorial, labeling each of the rooms (“my mother’s bedroom,” “reception room,” “small room,” “kitchen,” “bed”) as well as the position of people within them (“1. my Father in his armchair,” “2. fireplace,” “3. M. Pison,” “4. my uncle”). Stendhal, Vie de Henry Brulard (1835–36), 1:248. Courtesy of the Bibliothèque Municipale de Grenoble, France.

  Notes are like exercise, the systole a
nd diastole, the in and out, of thought.

  The most iconic symbol of such “unburthening” thought has been that indispensable handwritten sign, the scribble. Nabokov may have achieved the apex of this art of cancellation in a note included in Laura, in which we see him working through a list of synonyms for the word “erasure” (efface, expunge, delete, rub out), where one of the words is itself scribbled out. As the Enlightenment satirist and natural scientist Georg Lichtenberg remarked in his collection of aphorisms, The Waste-Books, “With many a work of a celebrated writer I would rather read what he has crossed out than what he has let stand.”18 There is a subtle difference between the cross-out—where what is underneath is still legible, as in Joyce’s notebooks to Finnegans Wake—and the scribble proper, where, as in Nabokov, the idea is fully blocked from view, but not the fact of its once having been thought. No matter how much our hard drives can preserve our writing in multiple different states, it still seems a far cry from the layering of assertion and cancellation made possible by the handwritten note.

  Then there is the notation that is not a cancellation of an idea one has already had, but a placeholder for an idea one hopes might come. In the notebooks of Walt Whitman we see him working on his evocative poem “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” where he writes, “I too have— —/ have—have—/ I too have— — — felt the curious questioning come upon me.”19 In the notebooks of the Romantic naturalist turned novelist Achim von Arnim, we see an inkblot from his notes on electricity that is gradually transformed into a rather comical image of a Phoenix (one that looks more like a turkey).20 Handwritten lines lead us on to new thoughts and visions, they are premonitions, like Whitman’s poetry, of what is (hopefully) to come.

  If notes are signs of ourselves at our most intimate (hopeful, vacuous, diffuse), they can also be records of thoughts not our own. Notes can record those chance musings we overhear in the course of our day and that we could never invent on our own, like F. Scott Fitzgerald who wrote down in his notebooks the crass and dreamy words of his age:

  Bijou, regarding her cigarette fingers: “Oh, Trevah! Get me the pumice stone.”21

  Then there is the commonplace book, which consists of words copied down from our reading and which took off in the Renaissance under the tutelage of Erasmus and is still very much with us. In the sixteenth century, commonplacing was a way of learning the art of rhetoric, of how classical authors thought and spoke so that young readers might learn to do the same.22 The posterior nature of the note, the way it came after reading, was also preparatory, to get us ready for something else. Never simply rhetorical, the copying of commonplaces was a way of understanding the world, of breaking it down into orderable parts. As Philipp Melanchthon remarked in his De locis communes, “Do not think commonplaces are to be invented casually or arbitrarily: they are derived from the deep structures of nature.”23

  Sometimes, though, we don’t copy, we just jot down ideas right there on the page in front of us. This is the difference between notation and annotation, between the before, the after, and the simultaneous. Scholars like Heather Jackson, Anthony Grafton, and William Shermann have given us marvelous histories of the things people have written down in the margins of their books.24 Who would not want to know what Ben Jonson thought of Chaucer (Jonson drew a long flower by the lines, “For he that truly loves servant is, / Were lother be shamed than to die”) or Virginia Woolf of James Joyce (“No one has any wish to abuse the ancients”).25

  But as the book historian Leah Price has reminded us, perhaps books mark us most when we don’t mark them.26 In Herman Melville’s copy of Dante’s Divine Comedy, which was translated by Henry Francis Cary under the title The Vision in 1814, we find copious amounts of marginal notes. But there is one canto of the Inferno that curiously lacks all marginalia: Canto 26, the tale of Ulysses, the great maritime adventurer, who begins his story:

  Forth I sail’d

  Into the deep illimitable main,

  With but one bark . . . 27

  Three years after buying Cary’s Dante, Melville would complete Moby Dick (1851). The absence of annotation was, in this case, not a sign of distraction. It was an indication of a reader’s most profound identification with his reading. At some point, we must put the pen down.

  . . .

  Today, there is no lack of note-taking software out there. Indeed, you could say we live in a golden age of notes. Devonthink allows you to search algorithmically for clippings you’ve pasted from your reading, a kind of desktop-sized Google. Collex allows you to annotate online objects located in archives or digital repositories and repurpose them to produce your own personal collections and exhibits. Jotspot, now Google Sites, allows users to create collaborative work spaces, from family websites to corporate projects. The iPad has a bookmarks feature that allows you to save all your underlinings (though not annotations) from your reading, and the Sony and Kindle e-readers save annotations as separate, downloadable files. PDF programs like Adobe have elaborate markup features, and Microsoft’s “track changes” has proven remarkably successful for collaborative authorship. Indeed, one could argue that the web itself is just a giant notepad, where every text is by definition annotated in “hypertext markup language.” Blogs are not only like electronic diaries, they also have a commentary function, making them a hybrid between medieval and modern books. Your hard drive, too, will save everything you write in multiple states, essentially a sprawling notebook of unfinished business. And then there is LivePen, which sucks up your notes into its internal memory and saves them to your desktop as PDF files. It gives a whole new meaning to the inhalation of ideas.

  Almost all of the features of note taking I described in the first section about handwriting are thus replicable, if not improvable, with digital software. We can type faster than we can write with our hands; no collection of commonplaces could be more heterogeneous, yet potentially orderable than our hard drives; synoptic tables are easier than ever to construct; digital devices record better, whether acoustically or typographically through functions like copy and paste; and we can still annotate our texts, just like in the margins of our books. And by creating annotations as separate files, the digital synthesizes commonplacing and marginalia in a single act.

  This leaves us with just one, but perhaps deeply significant, difference: handwriting. As Melville urged in his novel Pierre, or the Ambiguities: “But the handwriting, Pierre,—they want the sight of your hand!”28 In a world of increasingly mass-produced texts, handwriting mattered in the nineteenth century. Albums of autographs, dedication leaves within Gift Books, and of course letters (more and more letters) were increasingly popular as the century wore on, various ways of preserving the image of handwriting alongside the widespread mechanization of writing.

  The question is, does handwriting still matter? In a world of digital interfaces that are themselves remarkably successful in transcoding most, if not all, of our motley note-taking practices (right down to the signature which can be algorithmically reconfigured), is there any value left to the handwritten?

  For many readers, the answer is clearly yes. We are treated to a regular volley of lamentations over the death of handwriting in the popular press these days, no less numerous than those assailing the death of the book.29 (Their mutual frequency should tell us something about their codependence as media.) And an ever-growing body of research concerns the cognitive benefits of handwriting and drawing, of crafting symbols with one’s hand rather than a keyboard. Nevertheless, handwriting, and especially cursive, is taught less and less in schools in the name of a new “keyboarding” mandate. While we have been here before (remember the typewriter?), handwriting’s institutional future seems more up for grabs than ever before.

  Much of the fervor surrounding handwriting was encapsulated in a thoughtful piece written in a small online magazine, Good, in which the scholar and writer Anne Trubek suggested that we should stop teaching handwriting altogether.30 She received over 1,400 replies. Trubek’s point was strai
ghtforward enough. Handwriting has historically been imbued, she argued, with a sense of class and moral privilege. Good penmanship was a sign of being a good person (and a man, as the gendered connotations of the word were important). A less “expressive” medium like typing would level the playing field, yet another way that new media often seem to have (or are thought to have) a democratizing effect. Teachers, after all, grade neatly written papers better than poorly written ones, privileging form over content and disadvantaging students who might have great ideas but face challenges with their motor skills. As Trubek tells us, this was the case with her son, once again gender being a salient piece of the story.

  In addition to being “fairer,” typing is also faster. It more closely aligns thinking with our writing, a latter day version of those Victorian thought photographs. Recent studies suggest that students who struggle with handwriting struggle with writing more generally as they progress through the educational system.31 Difficulty with either the manual challenges of handwriting or the temporal disjunction between thought and expression can negatively impact students’ future interest in the practice of writing. In the time it takes to master the cognitive-motor alignments of handwriting, we lose students along the way. If we dropped handwriting altogether, so Trubek, there would be no more discouraged writers, just confident typists.

  Learning how to write with one’s hands is indeed difficult. Nineteenth-century handbooks that tried to bring handwriting to the adult masses often provided suggestions about tying up one’s body to produce the proper strokes.32 As one researcher in the field of handwriting studies has suggested, “Using a pen is one of the most demanding and complex fine motor functions of humans involving movements of different parts of the arm and distinct grip force adjustments during movements.”33 So if it is so difficult, and if it does contribute to negative educational outcomes, why take the time to learn it? Why not teach typing earlier and abandon the laborious training of handwriting instruction altogether?