Into the Looking-Glass Wood

by Alberto Manguel

  The capacious memory of my word processor attempts to provide the same service. In certain ways it is vastly superior to those Renaissance inventions. For instance:

  The ancient texts of the Greeks and Romans, so rare that many of the books we call classics were unknown to Augustine, were lovingly and laboriously collected by Carpaccio’s contemporaries. Today all those texts are entirely at my disposal. Two-thirds of all surviving Greek literature up to the time of Alexander, 3,400,000 words and 24,000 images, can be found contained in four disks published by Yale University Press, so that now, with one nibble from my mouse, I can determine exactly how many times Aristophanes used the word for “man,” and figure out that it was twice as often as he used the word for “woman.” To come up with such precise statistics, Augustine would have had to strain very hard his mnemonic capacities, even though the art of memory, arduously developed since the days of Greece and Rome, had by then been perfected to an astonishing degree.

  However, what my computerized memory cannot do is select and combine, gloss and associate through a mingling of practice and intuition. It can’t, for instance, tell me that, in spite of the statistical evidence, it is Aristophanes’ women—Praxagora in The Assemblywomen, the market gossips in The Poet and the Women, that old battle-axe Lysistrata—who come to mind when I think of his work read not on CD but in the ancient Garnier codexes we used at school. The gluttonous memory of my computer is not an active memory, like Augustine’s; it is a repository, like Augustine’s library, albeit vaster and perhaps more readily accessible. Thanks to my computer, I can memorize—but I can’t remember. That is a craft I must learn from Augustine and his ancient codexes.

  By Augustine’s time, the codex, the book of bound sheets, had supplanted the scroll almost completely, since the codex held, over the scroll, obvious advantages. The scroll allowed for only certain parts of the text to be shown at a given moment, without permitting the reader to flip through pages or read one chapter while keeping another open with a finger. It therefore laid strictures on the reading sequence. The text was offered to the reader in a predetermined order and only one section at a time. A novel like Julio Cortázar’s Hopscotch, which suggests that the reader choose any sequence of its chapters, would have been unthinkable in the days of the scroll. Also, the scroll limited the contents of the text far more than the codex would ever do. It is surmised that the division of the Odyssey into books corresponds not to the poet’s desire but to the necessity of what would fit on one scroll.

  Today my computer partakes of both book forms: “scrolling” to read a text and yet, if I wish, capable of flipping simultaneously to another section on a separate “window.” But in neither case does it have the full characteristics of its elders: it doesn’t tell me, as the scroll did at a glance, the full physical measure of its contents. Nor does it allow me, in spite of “windows,” to skip and choose pages as dexterously as the codex. On the other hand, my computer is a better retriever: its sniffing-out and fetching functions are infinitely superior to its dog-eared ancestors of parchment and paper.

  Augustine knew (and we seldom remember) that every reader creates, when reading, an imaginary space, a space made up of the person reading and the realm of the words read—what Keats called “that purple-lined palace of sweet sin.” This reading space exists either in the very medium that reveals or contains it (in the book or in the computer) or in its own textual being, incorporeal, as words preserved in the course of time, a place in the reader’s mind. Depending on whether the written word lies at the end or the beginning of a given civilization, whether we see it as the result of a creative process (as did the Greeks) or as the source (as did the Hebrews), the written word becomes—or does not become, as the case may be—the driving force of that civilization.

  What I mean is this: for the Greeks, who assiduously wrote down their philosophical treatises, plays, poems, letters, speeches and commercial transactions, and yet regarded the written word merely as a mnemonic aid, the book was an adjunct to civilized life, never its core; for this reason, the material representation of Greek civilization was in space, in the stones of their cities. For the Hebrews, however, whose daily transactions were oral and whose literature was entrusted largely to memory, the book—the Bible, the revealed word of God—became the core of its civilization, surviving in time, not in space, in the migrations of a nomad people. In a commentary on the Bible, Augustine, coming directly from the Hebrew tradition, noted that words tend towards the quality of music, which finds its being in time and does not have any particular geographical location.

  My computer apparently belongs not to the book-centred Hebrew tradition of Augustine, but to the bookless Greek tradition that required monuments in stone. Even though the world-wide web simulates on my screen a borderless space, the words I conjure up owe their existence to the familiar temple of the computer, erected with its portico-like screen above the cobbled esplanade of my keyboard. Like marble for the Greeks, these plastic stones speak (in fact, thanks to the audio functions I mentioned, they literally speak). And the ritual of access to cyberspace is in certain ways like the rituals of access to a temple or palace, to a symbolic place that requires preparation and learned conventions, decided by invisible and seemingly all-powerful buffs.

  Augustine’s reading rituals, performed around the space of his desk and within the space of his room, were nevertheless dispensable, or at the very least, kept changing. He could choose to move about with the text he was reading, or go and lie in bed with his codex, or leave the room and read in the garden (as he did when he heard the words that led to his conversion), or in the solitary desert. Augustine’s book, as a container of the text, was essentially variable. For the humanist reader of Carpaccio’s time, this variability was of the essence, leading to Aldus Manutius’s invention of the companionable pocket-book. And throughout the centuries, the book became increasingly portable, multiple, replaceable—able to be read anywhere, in any position, at any time.

  My rituals at the computer depend on a complex technology beyond a layperson’s knowledge. Even though a Power-book can allow me to transport my reading to a cliff in the Grand Canyon (as the ads for Macintosh proclaim), the text still owes its existence to the technology that created and maintains it, and still requires my surrendering to the physical “monument” of the machine itself.

  That is why, for Augustine, the words on the page—not the perishable scroll or replaceable codex that held them—had physical solidity, a burning, visible presence. For me, the solidity is in the expensive edifice of the computer, not in the fleeting words. When silent, the phantom text, eerily materializing on the screen and vanishing at the drop of a finger, is certainly different from the sturdy, reassuring, even authoritarian black letters meticulously composed on a piece of parchment or stamped on the page. My electronic text is separated from me by a pane of glass, so that I cannot directly kiss the words as Augustine might have done in his devotion, or inhale the perfume of leather and ink as the contemporaries of Carpaccio did in theirs. This accounts for the difference in the vocabulary used by Augustine and myself to describe the act of reading. Augustine spoke of “devouring” or “savouring” a text—a gastronomical imagery derived from a passage in Ezekiel, in which an angel commands the prophet to eat a book, as later occurs in the Revelation of St. John. I instead speak of “surfing” the web, of “scanning” a text. For Augustine, the text had a material quality that required ingestion. For the computer reader, the text exists only as a surface that is skimmed as he “rides the waves” of information from one cyber-area to another.

  Does all this mean that our reading craft has declined, lost its most precious qualities, become debased or impoverished? Or has it rather improved, progressed, perfected itself since Augustine’s hesitant days? Or are these meaningless questions?

  For many years now we have been prophesying the end of the book and the victory of the electronic media, as if books and electronic media were two gallants comp
eting for the same beautiful reader on the same intellectual battlefield. First film, then television, later video games and VCRs have been cast as the book’s destroyers, and certain writers—Sven Birkerts, for example, in The Gutenberg Elegies—don’t hesitate to use apocalyptic language full of calls for salvation and curses against the Antichrist. All readers may be Luddites at heart—but I think this may be pushing our enthusiasms too far. Technology will not retreat, nor, in spite of countless titles predicting the twilight of the printed word, do the numbers of new books printed every year show signs of diminishing.

  And yet changes will occur. It is true that before most great changes in technology, the previous technological form experiences a flourish, a last-minute exuberance. After the invention of the printing press, the number of manuscripts produced in Europe increased dramatically, and canvas painting mushroomed immediately after the invention of photography. And it seems more than likely that, even though the number of printed books is higher than ever, certain genres now available mainly as codexes will give way to other formats, better suited for their purpose. Encyclopaedias, for instance, will find more efficient homes on a CD-ROM, once the technology develops an intelligent cross-referencing system and not one that simply throws up, with mechanical nonchalance, every example, however irrelevant. With such a sharpened tool, it will be far easier for a computer to scan an encyclopaedic disk than for the most studious of readers to seek out the twenty-nine volumes of the Britannica for all articles mentioning the term reading.

  But these are obvious transformations. Essentially, nothing precious need be lost. It may be that the qualities we nostalgically wish to retain in books as they appear now, and as the humanist readers imagined them, will reappear under clever guises in the electronic media. We can already scribble on electronic notepads and there are Powerbooks and digital books further reduced to fit in one’s hand. The woman in the subway reading her paperback novel and the man next to her listening to the thud-thud bass of his Walkman, the student making notes on the margins of her textbook and the child playing a hand-held Nintendo by her side, may all combine their instruments (as the home computers do now) in a single portable apparatus that will offer all these textual possibilities: displaying text, reciting, allowing for annotations and proposing playful modes of research on one small portable screen or by some other yet-to-be-invented device. The CD-ROM (and whatever else will take its place in the imminent future) is like Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk, a sort of mini-opera, in which all the senses must come into play in order to recreate a text.

  So why do we fear the change?

  It isn’t likely that reading will lose, in the electronic revolution, its aristocratic qualities. In the blurred childhoods of the past, reading appears either as a duty destined to preserve certain notions of authority (as in the scriptoriums of Mesopotamia and of the European Middle Ages) or as a leisure-class activity throughout our various histories, accorded to those with means or usurped by those without them. Most of our societies (by no means all) have assembled around a book and for these the library became an essential symbol of power. Symbolically, the ancient world ends with the destruction of the Library of Alexandria; symbolically, the twentieth century ends with the rebuilding of the library of Sarajevo.

  But the notion of true democratic reading is illusory. Carnegie’s nineteenth-century libraries were temples to his class where the common readers were allowed to enter, mindful of their position, in veneration of established authority. Reading may bring some measure of social change, as Matthew Arnold believed, but it also can become a way of killing time or of slowing down time against the communality of death, arrogantly set against the monotonous cadence of time spent at work, “doing time” as it were in the countless illiterate sweatshops, mines, fields and factories on which our societies are built.

  What will certainly change is the idea of books as property. The notion of the book as an object of value, because of its contents, its history or its decorations, has existed since the days of the scrolls, but it was not until the fourteenth century (in Europe at least) that the rise of a bourgeois audience, beyond the realms of the nobility and the clergy, created a market in which the possession of books became a mark of social standing and the production of books a profit-making business like any other. A whole modern industry arose to fill this commercial need, causing Doris Lessing to exhort her beleaguered fellow workers:

  And it does no harm to repeat, as often as you can, “Without me the literary industry would not exist: the publishers, the agents, the sub-agents, the sub-sub-agents, the accountants, the libel lawyers, the departments of literature, the professors, the theses, the books of criticism, the reviewers, the book pages—all this vast and proliferating edifice is because of this small, patronized, put-down and underpaid person.”

  But in the days of the new technology, the industry (which will not disappear) will have to work otherwise in order to survive. Essays on the Internet, poems transmitted through modem, books copied onto disk and passed on from friend to friend have begun to bypass publishers and booksellers. Interactive novels question the very notion of authorship. Who will be paid royalties for a text scanned in Salamanca, received on e-mail in Recife, modified in Melbourne, expanded in Ecuador, saved on a soft disk in San Francisco? Who in fact is the author of that multifarious text? Like the many contributors to the construction of a medieval cathedral or to the production of a Hollywood film, the new industry will find, no doubt, ways of securing a profit for someone, Church or Multinational. And Doris Lessing’s small and underpaid person may have to resign herself to becoming even smaller and more underpaid.

  This bleak prospect is not, however, without a few stimulating vistas. In January of 1996, shortly after the death of President Mitterrand, the French government, following the age-honoured custom of governments everywhere, banned a book, Le Grand Secret. In this book, the president’s doctors, Claude Gubier and Michel Gonod, revealed intimate details of their illustrious patient’s decline and made public the official efforts to conceal the gravity of his illness. Banning books has always been an assumed prerogative of those in power, and until now writers have had no recourse against edicts and bonfires except samizdat editions and faith in a more tolerant future. Brave words have been spoken from home fires burning or from the waiting-rooms of exile, but the banning of books continues. Until now. On 23 January 1996, Pascal Barbaud, owner of a cybercafé in Besançon where customers can, for a fee, use the cafe’s Internet service, decided to scan Le Grand Secret onto the Internet. The Internet was, apparently, beyond any one government’s jurisdiction (I say “was” because the censors, with the ancient excuse of the threat of pornography or hate literature, are entering this sanctum too). And so Barbaud succeeded in his subversive mission. Since no one person need be responsible for an Internet text, Le Grand Secret became the first banned book openly to escape the powers of the censor.

  And yet no reader is ever satisfied. The Internet Grand Secret is a mere copying of the printed text. But what if it were opened up to the participation of each Internet user, like the on-screen novels of Robert Coover, to which any reader may add his or her inspiration, or change the beginning or the end? Privileged with the time to read, somewhat freed from the constraints of censorship, in the luxury of a private space, our fearful reader wonders: will we still be able to read critically such an electronic text, a text liable to be transformed by its readers on the screen, a protean (or, in our ugly vocabulary, “interactive”) text?

  In our fear, we forget that every text is, in a very essential sense, “interactive,” changing according to a particular reader at a particular hour and in a particular place. Every single reading carries the reader into the “spiral of interpretation,” as the French historian Jean-Marie Pailler has called it. No reading can avoid it, every reading adds a turn to its vertiginous ascent. There never was “pure reading”: in reading Diderot, the act becomes confused with conversation; in Danielle Steele with titillati
on; in Defoe with reportage; in others with instruction, with gossip, with lexicography, with cataloguing, with hysterics. There seems to be no Platonic archetype of any one reading, as there seems to be no Platonic archetype of any one book. The notion of a text being “passive” is only true in the abstract: from the earliest scrolls to the displays of Bauhaus typography, every recorded text, every book in whatever shape, carries implicitly or explicitly an aesthetic intention. No two manuscripts were ever the same, as the arduous cataloguers of Alexandria remarked, forcing them to choose “definitive” versions of the books they were preserving, and establishing in the process the epistemological rule of reading: that every new copy supersedes the previous one, since it must of necessity include it. And while Gutenberg’s printing press, recreating the miracle of the loaves and fishes, multiplied one same text a thousand times, every reader proceeds to individualize his or her copy with scribbles, stains, markings of different sorts, so that no copy, once read, is identical to another. All these myriad variations, all these various runs of thumb-printed copies, have not prevented us, however, from speaking of “my very own copy” of Hamlet or King Lear much as we speak of “the one and only” Shakespeare. Electronic texts will find new ways to generalize and define, and new critics will find vocabularies generous enough to accommodate the possibility of change.

  The misplaced fear of technology, which once opposed the codex to the scroll, now opposes the scroll to the codex. It opposes the unfurling text on the screen to the multiple pages of the humanist reader’s hand-held book. But all technology, whether satanic mills or satanic Chernobyls, has a human measure; it is impossible to remove the human strand even from the most inhuman of technological devices. They are our creation, even if we try to deny them (as the Red Queen would say) with both hands. Recognizing that human measure, like understanding the exact meaning of the coloured palm marks on the walls of prehistoric caves, may be beyond our present capabilities. What we require therefore is not a new humanist reader but a more effective one, one who will restore to the text now enmeshed in technological devices the ambiguity that lent it a divinatory capacity. What we need is not to marvel at the effects of virtual reality, but to recognize its very real and useful defects, the necessary cracks through which we can enter a space yet uncreated. We need to be less, not more, assertive. Whether, for the future humanist reader, the book in its present form will remain unchanged or not is in some ways an idle question. My guess (but it is no more than a guess) is that by and large it will not change very drastically, because it has adapted so well to our requirements—though these, in-deed, may change.…