Book Was There- Reading in Electronic Times

by Andrew Piper

  This is not to imply that digital texts are not at some level “there.” This would be to fall prey to the “virtual fallacy” (computing culture’s equivalent to Ruskin’s “pathetic fallacy”). Digital texts are somewhere, but where they are has become increasingly complicated, abstract, even forbidden.19 If the book is a thing you can put things into, the electronic book keeps things out. We cannot see, let alone finger, the source of the screen’s letters, the electromagnetically charged “hard drive,” without destroying it, though we can, in a telling reversal of fortune, touch our software. Unlike books, we cannot feel the impressions of the digital. As Shelley Jackson writes in her hypertext fiction, My Body, “A blind person could trace my drawing with her fingertips three pages down in my notebooks.”20 The touch of the page brings us into the world (three pages down), while the screen keeps us out. Digital texts lack feeling. All that remains of the hand is a ghostly remnant of its having been there at the time of scanning, like the chance encounters with scanners’ hands from Google Books (fig. 1.6), accidental traces of the birth of the digital record. The hand no longer points, like the typographic manicule, it covers over or gets in the way. Hand was there, we might say.

  But digital texts can be grasped, you will say (I, too, own an e-reader or two). Touch has emerged as one of the most important new fields in contemporary computing.21 Falling under the heading of “haptics” (like optics for the hand), it encompasses the development of touch screens, virtual handshakes, and surgical training at a distance. But it is also part of a culture of the “hand-held,” the way computing has steadily been migrating from large rooms to our desks to our hands. The more screenish our world becomes, the more we try to reinsert tactility back into it.

  [FIGURE 1.6] Scanner’s hand from Google Books. Dedication page of Honoré de Balzac, Scènes de la vie de province (Paris: Charpentier, 1850). Courtesy of Google.

  However much electronic books may try to look like their printed brethren, they still change how we manually interact with them and those changes matter for how we read. There are, for starters, no longer any pages to turn. There is no density to the e-book (all is battery), which is incidentally one of its greatest selling points. Open books can be measured by the sliding scale of pages past and future, like steps, just off to the side of the page. What lies after the digital page? An abyss. No matter what the page number says, we have no way to corroborate this evidence with our senses, no idea where we are while we read. The digital page isn’t a window, it’s a door (but like Bluebeard’s castle: to where?). Perhaps Piranesi, with all of those stairwells that lead nowhere, should be considered the father of the digital page.

  If we no longer turn the page, then what do we do? We have, at least for a little while longer, the button.22 The hand no longer points, and thus cognitively and emotionally reaches for something it cannot have (like Michelangelo’s famous finger), it presses or squeezes. The mechanical pressure that gave birth to the book in the form of the wooden handpress is today both vastly reduced in scale and multiplied in number through our interactions with the digital. There is a punctuatedness, a suddenness, but also a repetitiveness to pressing buttons that starkly contrast with the sedate rhythms of the slowly turned page. Buttons convert human motion into an electrical effect. In this, they preserve the idea of “conversion” that was at the core of reading books for Augustine. But in their incessant repetitiveness the meaning of conversion is gradually hollowed out, made less transformative. Conversion loses its singularity, as well as its totality. It is reduced to thousands of little turns. As Roland Barthes once remarked, “to repeat excessively is to enter into loss.”23

  But buttons also resist. Over time, their use causes stress to the human body, known as carpal tunnel syndrome. Like its related postural malady, “text neck,” these syndromes are signs of how computation is beginning to stretch us, both cognitively and corporally.24 The resistance of the button is an intimation of the way technology increasingly seems to be pushing back.

  Perhaps it is for this reason that we are moving away from the world of the button to that of the touch screen. From the ugly three-dimensionality of the mechanical apparatus we ascend to the fantasy of existing in only two dimensions, a world of the single, yet infinite page. Here the finger no longer converts, but conducts. With capacitive touch screens your finger alters the screen’s electrostatic field thereby conveying a command. Instead of pressing to turn the page, we now swipe and, at least for one reading interface, shake.25 Kinesthesia, the sense of bodily movement, overrides the book’s synesthesia, its unique art of conjoining touch, sight, and thought into a unified experience. In an electronic environment, corporal action overtakes reading’s traditional inaction. Ever on the lookout for “impact” or “measurement” today, we appear to be increasingly afraid of reading’s inertia.

  The more my body does, however, the less my mind does. Interactivity is a constraint, not a freedom.26 Swiping has the effect of making everything on the page cognitively lighter, less resistant. After all, the rhythmic swiping of the hand has been one of the most common methods of facilitating “speed-reading.” And as one study after another affirms, the more time we spend reading screens, the less time we spend reading individual units of the text.27 Skimming is the new normal. With my e-book, I no longer pause over the slight caress of the almost turned page—a rapture of anticipation—I just whisk away. Our hands become brooms, sweeping away the alphabetic dust before us.

  In Judd Morrissey’s The Jew’s Daughter (2000), a title derived from a ballad sung in James Joyce’s Ulysses and certainly one of the finest web fictions to date, we are presented with a single, yet unstable page (fig. 1.7).28 As the cursor moves over highlighted words in the text, portions of the page suddenly change. It marks a nice inversion to Goldsmith’s discretely revelatory cursor that brought text into view. In Morrissey we keep reading the same page over and over again, even as parts of it continue to change. We never “get” anywhere in this palimpsestual universe, just as it never stays the same.

  The evanescence of The Jew’s Daughter is everything that Anselm Kiefer’s lead books were not. With even the barest proximity between the simulated forefinger and the simulated letter in Morrissey, text can suddenly not be there. It replaces the durable impression of the printing press or the less durable pressure of the button with the instability of electronic projection. When we touch texts in an online world, Morrissey reminds us, they can change in an instant. My hold over them is less secure. Contact is now conductivity.

  [FIGURE 1.7] The first “page” from Judd Morrissey, The Jew’s Daughter (2000). The lines beginning with the words “and without knowledge” and ending with the words “in my window, I” will disappear and be replaced by new lines when the cursor touches the highlighted word “criminal.” Reproduced courtesy of the artist.

  As the digital scholar Matthew Kirschenbaum has recently cautioned us, however, digital texts are both notoriously difficult to preserve and incredibly hard to delete.29 Reading my old Apple IIe diskettes today is as difficult as trying to completely erase my current hard drive (the National Security Administration recommends that anything short of immolation is not entirely foolproof). Digital texts are both sticky and fragile, hard to hold on to and hard to let go of.30

  Kirschenbaum’s reminder is a timely one, a welcome correction to the widespread belief in the instability of digital texts. But what strikes me as even more important is not this apparent choice between preservation and loss, between claims of one medium being more or less stable than another. Rather, at issue is understanding the way these two categories, the lost and found, mutually inform one another as conditions of knowledge. In the nineteenth century, it had become fashionable to travel to old libraries and scour collections for “lost” manuscripts, ultimately with the aim of publishing them in print, much like the itinerant humanists of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries had done before them. The losability (and thus discoverability) of manuscript sources had b
ecome a key complement to reading printed books. The sense of print’s durability depended upon an imagined sense of the perishability of handwriting, although this was by no means actually the case (compare the longevity of many medieval manuscripts with the fragility of Renaissance chapbooks or much nineteenth-century ephemera and you will see what I mean). Printed books, too, can come and go. Indeed, the more there were of them the more they required vigilant attention to ensure their proper reproduction over time. The sense of lost-and-foundness that belonged to reading in the nineteenth century was an essential component of the rising historical awareness that gripped the century and that is in many ways still with us. Thinking historically rests on the contradictory notion of something being both simultaneously present and absent, on grasping and letting go.

  Scholars of the future will no doubt troll libraries to locate “lost” print editions of undigitized texts, just like their print predecessors scoured libraries for lost manuscripts. At the same time, like their print predecessors, they will also work tirelessly on preserving digital texts through time, maintaining our hold over the written record, as the great British editor Richard Bentley had done in the eighteenth century and as Kirschenbaum and others are beginning to do today.31 But what matters to such future endeavors is not some ultimate hoped for completion of the digital record—that we will digitize all the books (or all the pieces of paper in the world) or that all digital texts will be preserved forever. Rather, these archival practices are important because they engage in the oscillatory rhythms of the lost and found of historical thinking, something that was itself very much a product of modern bookish learning. By drawing attention to the incomplete remnants of print or the challenging legacies of the digital, scholars can help complicate beliefs about digital writing as something either purely evanescent or permanently present, what Kirschenbaum calls “the long now” of software. They will lend digital writing a sense of temporary closure, a sense of internal differentiation with itself.

  Perhaps this is what is ultimately most interesting about Morrissey’s digital page in The Jew’s Daughter—the way its instability is compensated for by the imposed act of rereading. It keeps repeating itself with a difference. Only portions of the text fly away and are replaced when we touch them. Morrissey’s single page has the structure of a refrain about it, like the genre of the ballad from which it derives its inspiration. As a work, it mixes novelty and repetition, instability with iterability, which has been at the heart of all true knowledge regardless of the medium. Plato famously said that the problem of writing is that it keeps telling us the same thing over and over again.32 Morrissey’s digital answer is, sort of. There is a great deal of wisdom preserved in this “sort of,” in reading’s dialectic of the lost and found.

  . . .

  Tonight I will read to my children before they go to bed. Although the “bedtime story” was only invented as a common practice at the end of the nineteenth century, there has always been a durable physiological connection between sleep and reading.33 Unlike the nursemaid’s oral tales that were meant to frighten children into staying in their beds (magnificently parodied by the fantasist E. T. A. Hoffmann in The Sandman), the slightly monotonous rhythm of parents’ reading aloud is imagined to be a more effective way of accessing the unconsciousness of sleep.

  Once the circus of getting ready for bed is over (why pajamas are so hard to put on is a mystery), we search out a clear plot of carpet and choose a book to read. Maybe it will be something from the Frog and Toad series or Tinker and Tanker or, the house favorite, George and Martha. The prevalence of so many pairs reminds me that children’s books are often concerned with the ambiguous sociability of reading, the way we are both together and apart when we read. In this, these books nicely recall that first great childish reader, Don Quixote, and his pint-sized literary companion.

  As I begin to read, the kids begin to lean into me. Our bodies assume positions of rest, the book our shared column of support. No matter what advertisers say, this could never be true of the acrobatic screen. As we gradually sink into the floor, and each other, our minds are freed to follow their own pathways, unlike the prescribed pathways of the web. We read and we drift. “The words of my book nothing,” writes Walt Whitman, “the drift of it everything.”34

  New research continues to emphasize the importance of mind wandering for learning.35 It turns out that not paying attention is one of the best ways of discovering new ideas. Reading books, whether silently or aloud, remains one of the most efficient means of enabling such errant thinking. As our bodies rest, our minds begin to work in a different way. New connections, new pathways, and sharp turns are being made as we meander our way through the book, but also away from it. There is no way to tell if anyone is actually paying attention anymore as I read, including myself. This seems to be one of the great benefits of reading aloud, that you can think of something else while you do it. We may be holding the book together, but our minds are no doubt far apart by now. The fairy tale is the first story of childhood because it tells of such leaving behind (parents and home), of entering the dreamscape of the woods—and the mind. It tells of the crooked path of change. How can one know where reading books ends and dreaming in books begins?

  We come back in the end to Dr. Faustus, who was one of the most important folk heroes of the world of printed books and a rough contemporary of Don Quixote. Faust was a product of early modern learning, of all those books that were increasingly available to readers. Faust was Quixote’s serious side. Unlike the Don, however, who steadily devoured works of fiction, Faust tried to know too much about the world. He tried to surpass what could be known in a book, whether it was the Bible or the alchemical handbook. Faust, the fist, in other words, is our modern day demon, not Mephistopheles, his devilish double. Faust reminds us of the way books are totems against ceaseless activity, tools for securing the somatic calm that is the beginning of all careful but also visionary thought. If we believe in the value of rest, and the kind of conversional thinking that it makes possible, then we will want to preserve books and their spaces of readerly rest.

  But Faust also reminds us not to hold on too tightly. He shows us the risks of grasping. I find joy in the way words escape me with Morrissey, in their lightness, the way I can make them go away. They remind me that the meaning of reading lies in the oscillatory rhythms of the opening and closing hand.

  TWO

  Face, Book

  As for me, I came expecting to see faces and see nothing but backs!

  VICTOR HUGO [notre dame de paris]

  Beneath the lines of every book is a face. This is the lesson of Honoré de Balzac’s masterpiece The Unknown Masterpiece (1832–45), the story of the young seventeenth-century artist Nicolas Poussin, who gains entry into the studio of the age’s most famous (and fictional) painter, Master Frenhofer. Frenhofer will finally reveal his life’s masterpiece, a portrait of a young woman. Poussin and his guide, François Porbus, move themselves expectantly in front of the painting. They are shocked at what they see, or rather, don’t see: there is no portrait, just a mass of wavy lines (and one beautiful foot).

  “Do you see anything?” Poussin asked of Porbus.

  “No . . . do you?”

  “I see nothing.”

  The two young men strain to see through the lines, “moving first to the right, then to the left, then head-on (deface), lowering and raising themselves by turns.” Finally, after glimpsing the foot, Porbus exclaims, “There is a woman beneath!” The narrator continues, “Both artists turned involuntarily to Frenhofer. They began to have some understanding, vague though it was, of the ecstasy in which he lived.”1 The next day when Porbus returns he learns that Frenhofer has burned his work and died in the night.

  In his fiction about the face composed of wavy lines, Balzac was asking what it is we see when we read a book. Books have never just been objects of reading. To understand books is to understand the act of looking that transpires between us and them.2 It is to a
sk how we face books and how they face us.

  Faces abound in books, no more so than in the emerging vogue of the authorial frontispiece that set in at the turn of the seventeenth century, the age of Poussin, Rembrandt, and Caravaggio and the first golden age of print, of Don Quixote, Shakespeare’s first folio, and Racine’s Oeuvres (of which twenty different editions were published by the end of the century).3 For Balzac, who was writing for an era that saw the vast commodification of the authorial portrait (Byron was its muse), not everyone could see the face behind the book, the human dimension that coursed like tendrils through the work and that was not just slapped on its surface.4 It took a particular kind of looking to see this face, not just the visionary kind that might not be there, like Frenhofer, when you woke up in the morning. One only saw this face if one looked “by turns.” Head-on (de face), Balzac wants us to know, we will never see the true face of the book. It is no accident that Picasso, the great cubist, created an exquisite illustrated edition of Balzac’s tale (fig. 2.1).

  Today, the Web is awash with faces. We are all Byron now. As one commentator remarked, “We’ve turned the web into a vast narcissistic culture.”5 The face continues to serve as one of the most common techniques for organizing our interactions with new media (not for nothing do we speak of interfaces). Faces are how we make sense of technologies and ourselves through them. Facebook isn’t a quaint gesture of remediation. It is an urgent, massive cultural attempt to understand.