Indexical Affordances (Technologies of Writing Redux)

We took a look at some passages in Cyrano de Bergerac’s Voyages to the Moon and the Sun today in the Technologies of Writing seminar. I was particularly struck by this one (as translated by Richard Aldington):

At the opening of the box I found something in metal almost similar to our clocks, filled with an infinite number of little springs and imperceptible machines. It is a book indeed, but a miraculous book without pages or letters; in fine, it is a book to learn from which eyes are useless, only ears are needed. When someone wishes to read he winds up the machine with a large number of all sorts of keys; then he turns the pointer toward the chatper he wishes to hear, and immediately, as if from a man’s mouth or a musical instument, this machine gives out all the distinct and different sounds which serve as the epxression of speech between the noble Moon-dwellers.

When I had reflected on this miraculous invention in book-making I was no longer surprised that the young men of that country possessed more knowledge at sixteen or eighteen than grey-beards in our World. Since they know how to read as soon as they speak, they are never without reading. Indoors, out of doors, in town, travelling, on foot, on horseback, they can have in their pocket or hanging from their saddle-bows as many as thirty of these books, and they have only to wind up a spring to hear a chapter, or several chapters if they are in the mood to hear a whole book. In this way you have continually about you all great men, living or dead, and you hear them viva voce.

Obviously there’s much one can say about the way this anticipates the gramophone, or even books on tape and iPods. The business about juveniles having more information at their disposal than the elders of previous generations sounds especially contemporary. But what really interests me here is that the exercise of re-imagining the book yields up an almost phenomenological definition of what a book is. Note that de Bergerac explicitly jettisons both pages and letters. Clearly you can have a book without them. What is essential, in fact what seems treated with inordinate specificity, is that a book is divisible into chapters. The essence of the book emerges, therefore, as indexical space: “he turns the pointer towards the chapter he wishes to hear.”

Indexical space has been a constant theme this semester, from the way one interacts with a codex with their hands (unlike a scroll which uses the hands to hold it open, a book is free standing and the reader can use their hands for navigation—holding open several pages at once—or else—crucially—the hand can be used for writing). With books also come bookmarks, artificial technologies for multiplying the fingers and the hands, as visualized in this painting by Arcimboldo.

This is the digital book in the most literal sense. More recently, we’ve read about manicules, the representations of the readers’ pointing hand ubiquitous in early modern books (manicules were both drawn and printed—Bill Sherman has been doing fascinating work on these symbols of late, and the observant reader will note that you see them everywhere).

De Bergerac’s book machine is thus very much in keeping with what I’ve learned these last few months about books, bookspace, bodies, and readers. Some similar ideas emerge in a book called The Myth of the Paperless Office (MIT, 2004). The key concept is that of affordances, the authors’ term for the raw, literal, material specificity of particular media—the fact that paper is pliable, for example, or that it is porous and has two sides. (PBS pointed this out in the seminar today: in an era when paper was an expensive and precious commodity—for a while you couldn’t be buried in 17th century England in linens because the rag was wanted for paper making—there are a striking number of documents that survive that are printed only on one side. Why? Because they were disseminated by posting, that is by being affixed to a vertical surface in a public space—an affordance specific to paper.) Compare how coarse the digital screen is in the same dissemination plane in the same kinds of public spaces:

But screens have their affordances too . . .

The question here is not what you see but how you see.

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.)

Technologies of Writing Seminar (1)

So I thought I’d have a go at writing up my notes from the first Technologies of Writing seminar yesterday. (This is the Folger Institute seminar, taught by Peter Stallybrass and Roger Chartier.) There’s no way I can do justice to the three hours, which included not only some terrific conversation but a long presentation of images. But here are some main themes to emerge from this first day.

1. The amazing diversity of materials, instruments, implements, surfaces, supports, furniture, and physical spaces associated with writing. Consider this list of writing surfaces: rock, slate, clay, cloth, ivory, sand, bone, wax, plaster, papyrus, parchment (skin), and, of course, paper. Exercise: how many different writing technologies can you pick out in the following image of Saint Jerome (1480)?

2. The importance of erasure. Since writing spaces are often volumetric they have a finite surface area and a finite capacity. The materials are expensive and need to be re-used. In antiquity, wax was the erasable medium of choice. One carried about wax tablets and used the sharp end of a metal stylus to incise text. The other end of the stylus, flat, could be used to erase the text. A servant (or slave) would later transcribe your jottings onto parchment for permanent storage (few of these wax tablets survive, perhaps because they were never conceived as anything but temporary conveyances for the written word). As Peter pointed out, one writes in wax, not on wax—a distinction that would later become important to Freud when he talks about the mystic writing pad, which these tablets resemble. Freud also reminds us of the associations with writing and the mind—Hamlet refers to the “tables of his memory,” which was the phrase that launched PBS and RC onto this line of inquiry. Of course erasable storage is fundamental to computing too. Katie King, my colleague here at Maryland, is in the seminar with me, and at lunch beforehand she talked about an early confrontation with the materiality of computers when, as a graduate student doing her word processing on a mainframe, she was suddenly confronted with the bone-chilling message: DUMPING CORE / OUT OF DISK.

3. “Persistence and chronic tensions.” The phrase is Don Fowler’s, and the point is that writing technologies overlap, superimpose, and feed back on each other in rich and unpredictable ways. Rather than hard and fast breaks in the history of writing technologies, practices persist, co-exist, and exert mutual force and influence. One historian of the book, Frederick Kilgor, uses the phrase “punctuated equilibrium” (borrowed from Stephen J. Gould’s work in evolutionary biology) to talk about writing technologies as characterized by long periods of stasis and stability, marked by periodic eruptions of innovation. This seems wrong to me. While most scholars can talk at some length about Gutenberg, far fewer are aware of writing tables, erasable tablets in the that functioned as a kind of early modern PDA; hence Prince Hamlet: “My Tables, My Tables; Meet it is I Set it Downe!” The same individual could be entirely comfortable reading aloud to others (declamation), reading aloud to his (or her) own self, and reading silently. Orality is still very much with us. Or take print and manuscript culture. Handwritten diaries have their origins in printed almanacs when people began adding their own marginal notations and jottings. Soon enough, commerce caught on and almanacs were deliberately printed with space enough for people to add their annotations. The point is that here printed objects serve as a catalyst for an outburst of manuscript writing. This makes simplistic narratives of one medium replacing another (“ceci tuera cela”) suspect, and has obvious implications for our current digital age, when book production increases every year and we’ve not yet managed to achieve the nirvana of the paperless office.

4. The oscillation between materiality and metaphor. This is legion in the history and representation of writing. When Plato speaks of older memories hardening, he almost certainly has in mind the materiality of wax writing surfaces, which eventually lost their viscosity and needed to be recast. Likewise, in the Christian tradition the tablets carried by Moses are typically depicted with curved tops (as opposed to the Judaic tradition where they are usually flat). This curvature mimics the shape of wax writing tablets. So, we (literally) have stone shaped by wax. Representation piled on top of representation. In the paintings we looked at writing technologies contemporary with the artist were frequently depicted side by side with those that the subject would have actually used.

5. The importance of the commercial sphere. This is a point RC really leaned on. You cannot separate the culture of the book from the culture of records and archives. Roger noted the parallels between commercial ledgers and diaries, for example. This is particularly useful to me in my work on computer storage, because many of these technologies originated in office and industry, not more belletristic settings.

6. Finally, a word about scholarly method. The history of writing has some very practical things to teach us about our own work habits. As Peter notes, it’s difficult, in illustrations such as the one of Saint Jerome above, to tell if the figure is author, scribe, or translator. Reading and writing are always bound together, and the writer is always surrounded by his (or her) reading—which in turn propels the writing. Cayce,in William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition, calls this always asking the next question. Take the line in Hamlet, the “tables of the mind.” Well, what are those? That question lead directly to PBS and RC’s findings in this area. Likewise, paintings are a rich source for learning about writing technologies. What is that thing dangling from the book? And so on. (Peter had hilarious tales about being pursued through galleries as he snapped some of the illicit pictures he used to illustrate the lecture.) Likewise, the the Proceedings of the Old Bailey, now online (1674 to 1834). Many of these cases dealt with forgery and written fraud. A gold mine for any scholar interested in such things. The lesson here, I think, is that the historian of writing has to be alert to finding his or her materials anywhere, scavenging and scrounging from records and representations of all kinds, and must always be prepared to ask the next question. This dovetails nicely with a thesis Peter has about working instead of thinking, but that’s an entry for another day.

I’ll end with this image, which amazingly I had never seen before.

Cubism? Nope. It’s Arcimboldo, The Librarian 1566. Notice the fingers as bookmarks (Stallybrass: “The culture of the codex requires not only that you remember your hands but that you make them proliferate.”) Extra credit: what are the things in the librarian’s hair (look closely, just above the eyes)?