by Andrew Piper
Pages are mirrors. Although we may not be able to read recto and verso of the same page together, we can read them across opposing pages. Like books, pages are always double. As Garret Stewart has reminded us, “Every book is a diptych.”12 Pages face each other; they comment, reflect, illustrate, or confound one another. The scroll is constitutionally singular, one long sheet. Like the filmstrip or the tape spool, it may be comprised of parts sewn together, but the act of splicing is designed to cover over these differences, not highlight them. There is a seamlessness to the scroll that is not true of the book, whose spine is both anatomically and visually prominent. The page is always part of a “gathering,” the book the sum of smaller versions of itself. The page argues for a logic of iterability, of sameness with a difference. It is this ability to mirror, to be like, that was behind the long-standing idea of the “book of nature,” that the book could be a faithful reflection of nature and that nature was like a book. But also ourselves. In one of the most cherished Romantic novels written in German, Heinrich von Ofterdingen (1802), we see how the hero discovers a book in a cave that tells the story of his own life. Deep in the caverns of the book, Heinrich von Ofterdingen wants us to know, we see ourselves.
Pages are folds. The page is not just a part, but always a part of. It is a folded sheet, or else it would be a broadside, poster, or playbill. The essence of the page is the turn. With books reading is experienced as a gradual unfolding. The “foldout” is one of the most popular devices in the history of the book. Whether as a map, a table, a facsimile of a handwritten letter, or a pop-up world in a children’s book, pages are imagined to unfold in our hands (fig. 3.3). They convey a sense of the development of readerly thought. However much we like to remind ourselves that books are the first random access machines, there is still a remarkable degree of sequentiality to the technology of the page. In this, pages mirror the growth of nature around us (not to mention language). As Goethe remarked, “Nature can only achieve all that it can in a series. She does not make leaps.”13 This is one of the reasons that we have spoken of leaves and pages so interchangeably.
[FIGURE 3.3] Lothar Meggendorfer was one of the great innovators in children’s book design at the end of the nineteenth century. Here we see a facsimile of one of his most popular works, Internationaler Circus (1887). Image courtesy of the Rare Books and Special Collections Division, McGill University Library. © Esslinger Verlag, J. F. Schreiber GmbH, Esslingen/Germany.
Taken all together, then, the book is an amalgam of the arbitrary, the simultaneous, and the sequential. Proust might be said to be its ultimate theorist. He takes the scattered associations of thought and puts them in order, an order that is always bursting at the seams. To lose a sense of sequence, no matter how complex, is ultimately to lose sense. That is why Proust’s novel of soporific associations, a work that can only truly be understood at night, begins with the pathway, but also the parallel—the choice to go Swann’s way or the Guermantes’s way. As the anthropologist André Leroi-Gourhan has reminded us, the evolution of the human species was intimately tied to increasing degrees of sequential sophistication in tool cutting.14 No matter how much we are drawn today to the horizontality (and democracy) of distributed cognition, we will always need sequence. Pathways allow us to do things over again, they are technologies of recurrence, perfectibility, and survival. Books, stories, recounting are primordial defenses against extinction.
. . .
The digital page, by contrast, is a fake, a simulation called up from distributed data.15 It is not really there. The digital page could always be otherwise. It is this ludic aspect of the digital that was one of its most attractive features for early proponents. But what interests me is how the page might itself be otherwise. How might the plane of digital presentation move out of the realm of fakery and embrace its inner self, if it has one?
[FIGURE 3.4] Craig Mod, “Books in the Age of the iPad” (2011). Courtesy of the artist.
Roaming. If one of the crucial features of the page is its finitude—that it stops—then one of the first ways to think beyond the page is to transgress its horizontal limits. As an innovative new voice in text design, “Craig Mod,” has suggested, we can begin to imagine texts not as stacked pages but as potentially infinite planes (fig. 3.4).16 Text no longer draws its inspiration from its etymological origins of weaving, but instead from the shape of the “pad” (Apple, as always, helping us see the shape of technology). According to this model, the reading device would remain a lens, much like the page, but now the textual surface is roamable rather than turnable. One of the pleasures of reading the printed page has historically been the way the eye can wander across the page, the way we can take in different parts of the text according to our own plan. Roamable text expands this principle to ever greater dimensions, as reading devices become tools of mobilization rather than iteration. Reading becomes nomadic rather than domestic. Where we “curl up” with a book, we “roam” across a plane. Unlike the branching pathways of links whose routes are difficult to visualize (who has not gotten lost clicking through the web?), the plane seems more navigable to me. It insists on the knowledge of adjacency. There can be no jumping across the plane, as in a book or a hypertext; one must pass through something on the way to something else. Reading assumes a topological structure, one that was latent in the printed page (or even hypertext), but that becomes even more central in understanding the reading “plane.” In learning how to roam, we are initiated more consciously, perhaps more critically, into the nature of our interconnected textual universe.
Zooming. Of all the technologies that have changed how we see our world, the satellite is surely one of the most important.17 Google Earth is the popularized version of the satellite view. For all of its reputation as a search engine, I think one of Google’s most significant contributions is the way it has changed how we visualize information, the way zooming has been irreversibly integrated into our understanding of both space and text. If roaming expands the horizontal edges of the page, zooming bursts through the page’s two-dimensionality.18 It returns us to the realm of microscopy, but perhaps also to the foldout or pop-up. Rather than release us into another space—the traditional dreamscape of the book—zooming suggests a constant quest for the beneath. Like Facebook, there is a preformationist logic at work here, as though everything is contained within everything else. It is only a matter of following the path downward, which is also a path backward to the beginning. Zoomtext has a genetic quality about it.
Aya Karpinska’s Shadows Never Sleep (2009), a recent enchanting example of what she calls “a zoom narrative” (fig. 3.5), is a telling example of the way such digital drilling down is indebted to the association of reading and interiority that emerged out of the eighteenth century and whose most poignant symbol, as we saw in the last chapter, was the silhouette. Karpinska’s whimsical text boxes of cutout images show us the way sentences have become pixilated, divorced from their normal grammar in the same way that the digital page is no longer connected to the spine of the book. But her choice of words is also a reminder of how this new art of discovery is tied to a sense of the anxiety that belonged to childhood. In a world of zooming we are always peering “in corners,” “under the bed,” “beneath the pillow.” As with young children, there is a beneath or behind to all things. In Karpinska’s evocative terms, we “stretch and shudder, whip and creep.” When Walter Benjamin wrote his brief memoir of growing up in Berlin, he spoke of how children have a special knowledge of a home’s corners (not for nothing was a popular German folk hero called “Faithful Eckhart,” Ecke being the German word for corner). Like the little paper cutout dolls in Karpinska’s Shadows Never Sleep, zoomtext returns us to a state of such childlike knowledge of the recess. It is a world filled with curiosity and wonder, but also disorientation, nervousness, and superstition. It suggests the way life online lends itself toward feelings of conspiracy and heteronomy—of being acted upon, the inverse of the book’s imagined autonomy.
> [FIGURE 3.5] Aya Karpinska, Shadows Never Sleep (2009). Courtesy of the artist.
Streaming. One of the most important aspects of the page is its stability. When I turn it, it doesn’t disappear (unless it rips and we all know how traumatic that is). But much writing today takes the form of what David Gelernter has called “lifestreams” (blogs, feeds, tweets, etc.), similar to the “Prayer Companion” used by the nuns in York, England, that streams statements gathered from the web that begin with the words, “I feel.”19 This kind of digital writing is by definition en route; it both comes and goes. Just as the page argues for its structural iterability—you can have as many as you like in one book (up to a point)—it also argues for the same principle at the level of experience. You can keep reading the same page over and over again (again, up to a point). Indeed the institutional study of literature, which for many is anathema to the pleasure of reading, is premised on this idea of rereading. Streams, on the other hand, are defined by their ephemerality. You can never step in the same one twice.
Writers for millennia have dreamed of writing as a stream. It is a means of imagining our way past the discrete nature of the book or the letters of the alphabet. In place of the isolated character there would be nothing but flow, what the poet Friedrich Hölderlin called “the streaming word.” Or as Emily Dickinson wrote:
Tell all the Truth, but tell it slant–
Success in Circuit lies.20
The book, in all its finiteness, could never accommodate such dreams of fluidity. We still lack a satisfactory interface that would allow us to engage, pass on, and then let go of the new information streams. We have spent so much time worrying about the transience of digital texts—that unlike books they seem so impermanent—we have forgotten to install techniques of forgetting them, too. The point of Twitter is not to store it, as the Library of Congress has recently begun to do, but to create efficient means of letting it go, to embrace a kind of writing (and reading) that is expirable. What would be the best way to visualize writing as a stream and not as a plane or page?
. . .
This past week my son was home sick from school. Like most parents, I let him go on the computer so I could get a few things done. When I went down to see what he was doing, I found him “reading” Lego building instructions. There are much worse things he could have discovered, and again like most parents we’ve learned the hard way not to allow any unchaperoned time online anymore. He’s five and although he cannot read yet, there he was meticulously making his way through “page” after “page” of a PDF file he had downloaded (how he had learned this I have no idea) of some extremely lethal flying machine. One by one he studied the pages upon which shapes were coming together to produce more complex shapes, overseen by the large bold numbers in the upper right hand corner of each page.
As we learned in the last chapter about the visual nature of reading, the building instructions that so fascinated my son mirror in many ways how we construct letters from more elementary shapes. Alphabet and architecture are closely related domains. It is no coincidence that his interest in these booklets corresponds to the very year in which he is beginning to learn to make the shape of letters himself (a process that is difficult for him and that I will return to in the next chapter). But equally important is the sequentiality of it all, the way number and letter coalesce in a constructive process. Much recent research suggests that counting, a number sense, precedes language, rather than the other way around as was previously thought.21 A notion of order, magnitude, and succession may underlay our ability to use language, the cognitive precondition of that famed idea of universal grammar. My son’s love of building instructions tells us something important about the intimate relationship between sequence and knowledge, whether it be literate or arithmetic.
As we think about designing new reading interfaces in the future, I hope we can begin to move past the boundaries of the page, to stop faking it so to speak. Nothing seems more misguided than creating websites that are meant to look like books or books that are meant to look like websites. If one day, in the words of Walter Scott’s fictional publisher, there are simply too many pages and paper costs too much to continue to make books, then we might want to impersonate the book online. Until then, I hope we continue to think beyond the page.
But on a deeper level, reviewing the list of digital alternatives above reveals the way these new forms of reading preserve, albeit in altered form, a basic aspect of seriality that belonged to the printed page, and of course the scroll before it. The logic of the page was that of the fold and the turn; it was both unique and serially adjacent to what followed, which was also structurally similar. In each of the cases above, whether roaming, zooming, or streaming, we continue to move serially, only in new ways—we zoom through, roam past, or stream by. As Nietzsche said of man, “Regardless of where he lives, the desert and the cave are always with him,” and presumably, so too is the stream.22
The successful reading interfaces of the future, whether handwritten, print, or digital, will ideally continue to preserve this sense of the “pathway.” It is one of the oldest forms of human understanding, where mental thought mirrors how we make our way physically through the world. Unlike the so-called information superhighway, on the pathway (or even the road) I am aware of where I am, of moving through space. The truth of this sentiment is reflected not only in the deep anthropological record of toolmaking or the more recent cognitive experiments from the psych lab. It is also there in the way it forms the core of one of our most recurringly popular genres of storytelling, the road narrative. From the picaresque wanderings of Encolpius in the first century Satyricon to Lazarillo de Tormes in the sixteenth century, to the accidental urgency of Jack Kerouac in the twentieth, to the cinematically inspired digital work of Young-Hae Chang’s Dakota at the opening of the twenty-first century, passing through space mirrors our passage through time and, ultimately, through thought. I want my children to learn how to learn one thing after another, to accept that there is a before and an after in life. I think reading books is still one of the best ways we have of reminding us of this fact. As Goethe once remarked, “It would be a lowly art that allowed itself to be understood all at once.”23
FOUR
Of Note
Once as I looked up I saw a big, pure drop of rain slip from leaf to leaf of a clematis vine. The thought occurred to me that it was just such quick, unexpected, commonplace, specific things that poets jot down in their note-books.
WALLACE STEVENS
Reading is born from writing, but it also begets more writing. Reading is not only synonymous with dreaming (or sleepwalking), it can also be extractive. When we read, we take, we transform, we do. This is what we call taking notes. The verb is important to the noun’s meaning. Not all of these notes, of course, will become more writing. But writing almost always begins as notes. Notes are an essential part of the economy of reading. They are translational at their core, like the ribosomes of human thought.
With the recent publication of Vladimir Nabokov’s final, incomplete novel, The Original of Laura (2008), readers were offered a timely reminder of the tangled relationship between books and notes. All that remained of Nabokov’s “novel” at the time of his death was a stack of index cards left in a safe. The book that they became consisted of pages of perforated color facsimiles of note cards with printed transcriptions beneath. There was something profoundly disjunctive between the cards, the kind that anyone could buy at a drugstore, and the weightiness of the book to which they belonged, the last remaining novel by one of the twentieth-century’s greatest writers.
In its affectionate reproduction of the authors’ note cards in book form, The Original of Laura performed, at both a visual and tactile level, what we might call a morphological theory of media—that notes could become books, indeed that these two very different forms of writing (the cheapness of the index card and the majesty of the book) might be synonymous with one another. But in the cards’ perforation—o
ne of the most inspired publishing decisions of our so-called late age of print—the note cards’ possible removal from the book also drew attention to the hole in the book . . . that was the note (fig. 4.1). Without notes, so Laura tells us, we have no books.
“So where is Faust?” a French visitor once asked Goethe. It was a question that would plague him his entire life. In reply Goethe is said to have dumped a sack of notes onto the table, declaring, “voilà mon Faust.”1 Some forty years later, Samuel Taylor Coleridge began publishing the “marginalia” from his books in Blackwood’s Magazine, later popularized across the Atlantic by Edgar Allen Poe in the Democratic Review. In the first half of the twentieth century, Walter Benjamin created one of the greatest scholarly monuments of the modern period, The Arcades Project, consisting of an enormous collection of file folders of notes. The postwar writer Arno Schmidt began keeping his writing in elaborate note-card cases (fig. 4.2), from which would emerge bibliographic monstrosities like his elephantine novel The Dream of Notes (1970). More recently, Ann Carson in Nox (2010) has reimagined the book as a box containing one long foldout card of facsimiles of notes about her recently deceased brother. And there is a new website, Things in Books, that records the scraps of paper (and much more) found in books across the world. However diverse these projects may be, they are all different ways that individuals over the past two centuries have explored the relationship between the technology of the note and that of the book, to understand how our notes grow into, out of, alongside, or simply in our books.
