A reader on reading - Alberto Manguel 2010

Saint Augustine’s computer
The ideal reader

“But there’s one great advantage in it, that one’s memory

works both ways.”

Through the Looking-Glass, Chapter 5

IN THE FIRST YEARS OF THE sixteenth century, the elders of the guild of San Giorgio degli Schiavoni in Venice commissioned the artist Vittore Carpaccio to paint a series of scenes illustrating the life of Saint Jerome, the fourth-century reader and scholar. The last scene, now set up high on the right as you enter the small, darkened guildhall, is not a portrait of Saint Jerome but of Saint Augustine of Hippo, Saint Jerome’s contemporary. In a story popular since the Middle Ages, it was told that Saint Augustine had sat down at his desk to write to Saint Jerome, asking his opinion on the question of eternal beatitude, when the room filled with light and Augustine heard a voice telling him that Jerome’s spirit had ascended to the heavens.

The room in which Carpaccio placed Augustine is a contemporary Venetian study, as worthy of the author of the Confessions as of the spirit of Jerome, responsible for the Latin version of the Bible and patron saint of translators: thin volumes facing forward on a high shelf, delicate bric-a-brac lined beneath it, a brass-studded leather chair and a small writing desk lifted from the flood-prone floor, a distant table with a rotating lectern beyond the door at the far left, and the saint’s working space, cluttered with open books and with those private objects which the years wash onto every writer’s desk—a seashell, a bell, a silver box. Set in the central alcove, a statue of the risen Christ looks towards a statuette of Venus standing among Augustine’s things; both inhabit, admittedly on different planes, the same human world: the flesh from whose delights Augustine prayed for release (“but not just now”) and the Logos, God’s Word that was in the beginning and whose echo Augustine heard one afternoon in a garden. At an obedient distance, a small white shaggy dog is expectantly watching.

This place depicts both the past and the present of a reader. Anachronism meant nothing to Carpaccio, since the compunction for historical faithfulness is a modern invention, not later perhaps than the nineteenth century and John Ruskin’s Pre-Raphaelite credo of “absolute, uncompromising truth … down to the most minute detail.” Augustine’s study and Augustine’s books, whatever these might have been in the fourth century, were, to Carpaccio and his contemporaries, in all essentials much like theirs. Scrolls or codices, bound leaves of parchment, or the exquisite pocket books that Aldus Manutius had printed just a few years before Carpaccio began his work at the guild were variant forms of the book—the book that changed and would continue to change, and yet remained one and the same. In the sense in which Carpaccio saw it, Augustine’s study is also like my own, a common reader’s realm: the rows of books and memorabilia, the busy desk, the interrupted work, the reader waiting for a voice — his own? the author’s? a spirit’s?—to answer questions seeded by the open page in front of him.

Since the fellowship of readers is a generous one, or so we are told, allow me to place myself for a moment next to Carpaccio’s august reader, he at his desk, I at mine. Has our reading—Augustine’s and Carpaccio’s and mine— altered in the passing centuries? And if so, how has it altered?

When I read a text on a page or a screen, I read silently. Through an unbelievably complex process or series of processes, clusters of neurons in specific sections of my brain decipher the text my eyes take in and make it comprehensible to me, without the need to mouth the words for the benefit of my ears. This silent reading is not as ancient a craft as we might think.

For Saint Augustine, my silent activity would have been, if not incomprehensible, at the very least surprising. In a famous passage of the Confessions, Augustine describes his curious coming upon Saint Ambrose in his cell in Milan, reading silently. “When he read,” Augustine recalled, “his eyes scanned the page and his heart explored the meaning, but his voice was silent and his tongue was still.” Augustine, in the fourth century, usually read as the ancient Greeks and Romans had read, out loud, to make sense of the attached strings of letters without full stops or capitals. It was possible for an experienced and hurried reader to disentangle a text without speaking the words—Augustine himself was able to do this, as he tells us in his description of the tremendous moment of his conversion, when he picks up a volume of Paul’s Epistles and reads “in silence” the oracular line that tells him to “put on Christ like an armor.” But reading out loud was not only considered normal, it was also considered necessary for the full comprehension of a text. Augustine believed that reading needed to be made present; that within the confines of a page the scripta, the written words, had to become verba, spoken words, in order to spring into being. For Augustine, the reader had literally to breathe life into a text, to fill the created space with living language.

By the ninth century, punctuation and the greater diffusion of books had established silent reading as common, and a new element — privacy—had become a feature of the craft. For these new readers, silent reading allowed a sort of amorous intimacy with the text, creating invisible walls around them and the activity of reading. Seven centuries later, Carpaccio would have considered silent reading part and parcel of the scholar’s work, and his scholarly Augustine would necessarily be pictured in a private and quiet place.

Almost five centuries later, in our time, since silent reading is no longer surprising and since we are always desperately searching for novelty, we have managed to grant the text on the screen its own disembodied voice. At the reader’s request, a computer can now usurp the post-Augustine reader’s magical prerogative: it can either be silent as a saint while I scan the scrolling page or lend a text both voice and graphic features, bringing the dead back to life not through a function of memory (as Augustine proposed) but through mechanics, as a ready-made Golem whose appearance will continue to be perfected. The difference is, the computer’s reading voice isn’t our voice: therefore the tone, modulation, emphasis, and other instruments for making sense of a text have been established outside our understanding. We have not so much given wing to the verba as made the dead scripta walk.

Nor is the computer’s memory the same as our own. For Augustine, those readers who read the Scriptures in the right spirit preserved the text in the mind, relaying its immortality from reader to reader, throughout the generations. “They read it without interruption,” he wrote in the Confessions, “and what they read never passes away.” Augustine praises these readers, who “become” the book itself by carrying the text within them, imprinted in the mind as on a wax tablet.

Being able to remember passages from the essential texts for argument and comparison was still important in Carpaccio’s time. But after the invention of printing, and with the increasing custom of private libraries, access to books for immediate consultation became much easier, and sixteenth-century readers were able to rely far more on the books’ memory than on their own. The multiple pivoting lectern depicted by Carpaccio in Augustine’s study extended the reader’s mnemonic capacities even further, as did other wonderful contraptions — such as the marvelous “rotary reading desk” invented in 1588 by the Italian engineer Agostino Ramelli, which allowed a reader ready access to ten different books at almost the same time, each one open at the required chapter and verse.

The capacious memory of my computer attempts to provide the same service. In certain ways it is vastly superior to those Renaissance inventions. One example: 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, 3.4 million words and twenty-four thousand images, can be found contained in four disks published by Yale University Press (and many of these texts are available in several of the various digital libraries), so that now, with one nibble from my mouse, I can determine, for instance, 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’ female characters — Praxagora in The Assemblywomen, the market gossips in The Poet and the Women, that old battle-ax Lysistrata — who come to mind when I think of his work, read not online but in the ancient Garnier codices 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 more readily accessible. Thanks to my computer, I can memorize—but I cannot remember. That is a craft I must learn from Augustine and his ancient codices.

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 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 text such as Finnegans Wake, which suggests an endless reading loop, 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 electronic screens partake of both book forms: “scrolling” a text and yet, if I wish, capable of flipping simultaneously to another section on a separate window. But in neither case do they have the full characteristics of their elders: they don’t tell me, as the scroll did at a glance, the full physical measure of the text’s contents. Nor do they allow me, in spite of windows, to skip and choose pages as dexterously as the codex did. 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 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 Greek 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 their civilization, surviving in time, not space, in the migrations of a nomad people. In one of his scriptural commentaries, 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-centered Hebrew tradition of Augustine but to the bookless Greek tradition that required monuments in stone. Even though the 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 its audio functions, 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 computer 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 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 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, though also translatable, depend on a complex technology many times beyond a layperson’s knowledge. Even though a laptop or Blackberry can allow me to transport my reading to a cliff in the Grand Canyon (as the ads 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 edifice of the electronic device, 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, authoritarian black letters meticulously composed on a piece of parchment or stamped on the page. My electronic text is separated from me by a screen, 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 “savoring” a text — a gastronomical imagery derived from a passage in Ezekiel, in which an angel commands the prophet to eat a book, an image repeated later in the Revelation of Saint 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 electronic reader, the text exists only as a surface that is skimmed as he or she “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 competing for the same beautiful reader on the same intellectual battlefield. First film, then television, later video games and DVDs and virtual libraries have been cast as the book’s destroyers, and certain writers — Sven Birkerts, for example, in The Gutenberg Elegies—do not 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 turning points in technology, the previous technological form experiences a flourish, a lastminute 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. It seems more than likely that even though the number of printed books is higher than ever, certain genres now available mainly as codices will give way to other formats, better suited for their purpose. Encyclopedias, for instance, will find more efficient homes in electronic containers, once the technology develops a more intelligent cross-referencing system and not one that simply throws up, with mechanical nonchalance, every example, however irrelevant.

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 paper, and there are e-books reduced to fit in the reader’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 iPod, the student making notes on the margins of her textbook and the child playing a handheld Nintendo by her side will all combine their instruments (as certain mobile phones 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 — a device that, like Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk, will allow for a sort of mini-opera, in which all the senses must come into play in order to re-create and enhance a text.

So why do we fear the change?

It is unlikely 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 scriptoria 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. Andrew 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 “pure value” (the expression belongs to Maurice Blanchot) 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 in blogs, books published electronically have begun to bypass editors 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 key 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, underpaid person may have to resign herself to becoming even smaller and more underpaid.

However, in our fear, we forget that as regards a text, pace Blanchot, there never was such a thing as “pure value.” Every text is, in an essential sense, an interactive text, 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 writing” or “pure reading”: in reading Diderot, the act becomes confused with conversation; in Danielle Steele with titillation; 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, from the cuneiform tablets to the graphic novels of today, 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, re-creating 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 handheld 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 colored 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. We need to question more. Whether, for the future humanist reader, the book in its present form will remain unchanged 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 be transformed drastically because it has adapted so well to our requirements—though these, indeed, may change….

The question I ask myself instead is this: In these new technological spaces, with these artifacts that will certainly coexist with (and in some cases supplant) the book, how will we succeed in still able being to invent, to remember, to learn, to record, to reject, to wonder, to exult, to subvert, to rejoice?

By what means will we continue to be creative readers instead of passive viewers?

Years ago, George Steiner suggested that the anti-bookish movement would drive reading back to its birthplace and that there would be reading houses like the old monastic libraries, where those of us quaint enough to wish to peruse an old-fashioned book would go and sit and read in silence. Something of the sort takes place every day in the monastery of the Holy Cross in Chicago’s South Side, but not in the way Steiner imagined: here the monks, after morning prayers, switch on their computers and work away in their scriptorium like their ancestors a thousand years ago, copying and glossing and preserving texts for future generations. And even the privacy of devotional reading will not, apparently, retreat into secrecy; it has instead become ecumenical. God Himself can apparently be reached via the Jerusalem “Wailing Wall” site for readers of the Old Testament, or via the Vatican’s Pope site for readers of the New.

To these visions of reading, I would like to add three more, imagined not too long ago by Ray Bradbury for our not-so-distant future.

· In one of the stories of The Martian Chronicles, “There Will Come Soft Rains,” a fully automated house offers as an evening diversion to read a poem to its inhabitants, and when it receives no response it selects and reads a poem on its own, unaware that the entire family has been annihilated in a nuclear war. This is the future of reading without readers.

· Another story, “Usher II,” records the saga of a heroic devotee of Poe in an age when fiction is considered not a source of thought but something dangerously real. After Poe’s works are outlawed, a passionate reader builds a weird and perilous house as a shrine to his hero, through which he destroys both his enemies and the books he intends to avenge. This is the future of readers without reading.

· The third, the most famous, is in Fahrenheit 451 and depicts a future in which books are burned and groups of literature lovers have memorized their favorite books, carrying them around in their heads like walking libraries. This is a future in which readers and reading, in order to survive, follow Augustine’s precept and become one and the same.

Automated reading that requires no readers; the act of reading left to old-fashioned cranks who believe in books not as monsters but as places for dialogue; books transformed into a memory carried about until the mind caves in and the spirit fails … these scenarios suit our new century: the end of books set against the end of time, after the end of the second millennium. At the end of the first, the Adamites burned their libraries before joining their brethren in preparation for the Apocalypse so as not to carry useless wisdom into the promised Kingdom of Heaven.

Our fears are endemic fears, rooted in our time. They do not branch into the unknowable future; they demand a conclusive answer, here and now. “Stupidity,” wrote Flaubert, “consists in a desire to conclude.” Indeed. As every reader knows, the point, the essential quality of the act of reading, now and always, is that it tends to no foreseeable end, to no conclusion. Every reading prolongs another, begun in some afternoon thousands of years ago and of which we know nothing; every reading projects its shadow onto the following page, lending it content and context. In this way the story grows, layer after layer, like the skin of the society whose history the act preserves. In Carpaccio’s painting Augustine sits, as attentive as his dog, pen poised, book shining like a screen, looking straight into the light, listening. The room, the instruments keep changing, the books on the shelf shed their covers, the texts tell stories in voices not yet born.