Technologies of Writing (2-3)

[Read previous posts in this series.]

The last two weeks we continued to develop themes from the first class, using a variety of texts including numerous images of saints and scribes writing (most readily available on the Web), the Bible, the poetry of George Herbert, and Cervantes’ Don Quixote. With regard to the images, a Google search on St. Jerome, Gregory, Matthew, Hildegard, and others will turn up dozens and dozens of instances where writing is the main activity depicted. Consider these three representations of Saint Matthew and the angel:

These are an anonymous 15th century French illumination, an oil by Simone Cantarini (1645/1648), and an oil by Rembrandt (1661), respectively. There are at least two levels on which discussion can transpire. Literal—”What’s that thing on Matthew’s desk?”—and figurative—how does the angel’s relationship to Matthew alter the way writing is depicted in each image? Collecting images of this sort would make an excellent activity for class discussion.

We spent much of yesterday on Don Quixtote, a text Roger Chartier has worked on extensively. It is, of course, a metafiction and recursive text. The constant leakage between the world of the book and the world of the reader is the primary mechanism by which Cervantes achieves his satire. This is the tradition of Borges’ Pierre Menard and Paul Auster’s use of the Quixote and I won’t dwell on it here. Second, and more important for our purposes, writing and the material difficulties of writing often dominate the plot. This means that actual writing technologies and the interactions between them are described in some detail—as in the episode where Don Quixote, lost in the wilderness of the Sierra Morenas, must write several letters and legal documents. He considers the implements available for this task:

[S]ince we have no paper, we should write as the ancients did on leaves of trees or on tablets of wax, though it will be as hard to find wax as paper. But now that I come to think of it, there is Cardenio’s book. I will write on that and you must see to it that it is copied out upon paper in a good round hand at the first village where you find a schoolmaster or a sacristan to transcribe it for you. But don’t have it transcribed by a notary, for their writing is so garbled that Satan himself would not make it out. (247)

There’s quite a lot going on in these sentences: Sancho Panza, whom Don Quixote is addressing, cannot read or write, and so the letters must be transcribed by a third party. (Sancho can, however, commit words to memory, and his misrememberings provide for additional layers of confusion in the plot.) Three possibilities for transcription are mentioned, scholarly, clerical, and juridical. I don’t know the exact reason for the gibe at the notaries, but presumably one could track it down. “Cardenio’s book” is earlier described as a “little memorandum book”; in fact it is a writing table, a portable codex with erasable pages (they were prepared with a special varnish) meant for temporary notes and jottings. (Such writing tables were a lost technology until recovered by PS and RC.) Note that the writing must be transferred to regular paper before it can assume proper legal authority. Mention is also made of the wax tablets, forerunners to Cardenio’s memory book. With regard to the ancients writing on leaves, it’s worth recalling that many of our earliest words for book have associations with trees: codex from the Latin “caudex,” book from the German for “beech,” the Latin “liber” which originally meant bark. What emerges here, I think, is that terms like orality and literacy do not operate as Ongian binaries but as part of an overlapping spectrum which constructs and consists of different kinds of writing, different kinds of writing technologies, and different kinds of writers (and readers). There are numerous such episodes throughout the text, perhaps the most famous of which is Don Quixote’s visit to a Barcelona printing shop in Part II.

Don Quixote displays a constant tension between erasure and inscription. The written word is always threatened with disappearance in this text, no matter its origin, medium, or audience. This phenomenon starts in the preface, where the text is almost kept from publication by the author’s inability to write a preface containing the customary verses, notes, and other paratextual apparatus. Then, in Part I, chapter 8, the narrative is abruptly stopped, quite cinematically, arms upraised in the midst of a sword fight. Who is the author up to this point? Cervantes of course, but the text refutes such literalism when in the next chapter it introduces “Cide Hamete Benengeli, Arabian historian.” His pages, which represent the continuation of the tale, are intercepted by the narrator in a Toledo bazaar as they are on their way to be sold as scrap to a rug merchant—as was pointed out by a member of the seminar, the text constantly teeters on the brink of disappearance, even as DQ himself searches for an appropriate author of his adventures. Later, in the second half of the book (published ten years later) the characters encounter the written exploits of their own earlier selves. For all of these reasons, I’m now strongly considering using excerpts from Don Quixote when I teach my Intro to Literary Studies next fall.

Much of our attention has also been focused on writing surfaces. Writing begins not with stones but with the heart. This is a well established biblical trope, for example Ezekial 36.26: “A new heart also wil I give you, and a new spirit will I put within you, and I will take away the stonie heart out of your flesh, and I will give you a heart of flesh.” Like the stiff-necked man who cannot bow his head before the lord, the stoney heart is a surfcae that cannot be written on. Recall that Moses’ stone tablets are broken almost as soon as they are received; when they are inscribed again, god is copying his own writing and so the commandments are received from a scribe as well as an author. In George Herbert’s “The Alter,” god becomes an etcher: “Thy power doth cut.” The poem appears The Temple and the 1674 W. Godbid (London) edition features some rather amazing constructions of the book as a physical space:

[Click to enlarge.]

Note that the order of stanzas is transposed, 2 above 1, in order to create the perspective for the three-dimensional effect—predictably, the two stanzas remained transposed in many later, more conventional typographic settings of the poem.

Perhaps the final thing to be said is that our focus on interactions between orality, manuscript writing, and printing is giving me some new perspectives on theorists like Ong, whose sharp psychological divide between orality and literacy now seems less compelling than the myriad and complex ways different modes of communication interacted with and fed back on one another. But neither are simple models of “complementarity” necessarily sufficient, where each mode of communication is treated as having its place in a broad spectrum of writing technologies. Peter Stallybrass favors a model by which which new technologies like print paradoxically spur revolutions in older practices, for example manuscript writing; his favorite example of this is actually a quite contemporary one: the customs forms that one fills out when traveling to the United States from abroad. A printed, mass-produced form becomes the setting for autographic manuscript writing. Peter describes this as an instance of “compulsory literacy” and makes the point that literacy itself is not a homogeneous descriptor—the skills required by a scribal copyist, for example, were very different from those of an accountant or someone keeping a datebook. (See, for example, the schoolmaster, cleric, and notary in Don Quixtote, above.)