‘The Object of Objects: An Elegy for the Anchored Text’. Concluding Statement at an International Conference on ‘The Socio-Semiotics of Objects: The Role of Artifacts in Social Symbolic Processes’
University of Toronto, 24th June, 1990
Modes of pastness#
We all have the power to recall what has been. Each one shares with his own generation the ability to recreate the past. Life in the shadow of pastness is what makes us human. However, in several ways people differ because of the different pasts they have.
Each of us can remember his own past. But the older I get the more I treasure the discrepancies between what is uniquely mine in the past and that which others can share with me. The past that appears in this interstice is that past which can surprise me. For even when we have grown up together and later on recall the same moment that we lived together, my substance that is recalled is frequently not yours. And, further, the chords which the past strikes when it comes to me might jar those that respond in your heart. Only years later I suddenly grasped that when those bells tolled for the wedding, for you they meant death. This is one reason why I like to reminisce with others: the shoddy evening that made me cringe when I thought of it has put on a festive dress since you told me about it.
When the past is invoked it always comes in a different dress. And each time it passes it leaves something new behind, it deposits a freshly-spun layer on the cocoon which I take for my memories. Whenever I take a glass of Burgundy, that memorable afternoon with my brother returns, but with a new coloring.
This diversity of the ‘same’ past is so fascinating and adventurous that it could almost blind us to yet another, even more fundamental difference between past and past. The past returns in quite distinct modes of pastness, according to the historical epoch into which it is called. ‘Les neiges d’antan’ refer to a past which is incomparable to that of ‘the old clock on the staircase.’
Several of these modes of pastness I have to know by experience. When I enter a church — be it Greek or Latin — I know that I am in a temple erected above an empty tomb. The absence of the saint during the Liturgy is of a different kind than the absence of Charlemagne when I discuss his treasures with a colleague in an office. Thanks to my upbringing, I have a spontaneous albeit faint sense of the difference between liturgical and academic remembrance. And I have lived long enough in a Mexican village to sense how the newly-dead come back on 2nd November, walking along the lines of flower petals that show them the way from the grave to their erstwhile home. In spite of the goose pimples, I know that they do not come to be with me.
Other modes of pastness lie completely beyond the range of my feelings. I know about them only by hearsay. My body is dumb to the chords they seem to strike in others. Conceptually, I can refer to the experience that befits the re-presentation of African ancestors or the mythical return of Mexican gods. But the world into which I was born and in which I was raised has blotted out the reality of the ambience in which these events can take place. And the more I reflect upon historical reports about remembrance, the better I come to see that there is a chasm which separates the past now and then.
Culture as mnemosyne#
The present is the mold of the past. What Boas called a culture I, following the advice of Aby Warburg, could just as well call mnemosyne. What else is culture but the frame within which the shadows come back and are enfleshed? Thus understood, the customs and symbols, the rituals and artifacts of a culture can be imagined as one body that resonates when the past emerges. Like the wave patterns that form in a body of water when it is touched by a breeze, culture-as-mnemosyne is affected as a whole by the winds from its own beyond. But just as the waves across a body of water begin to mumble and spray when they hit a cliff or the shore, so there are within each culture coastlines against which memory breaks.
Different ages have used different devices to conjure up what has been: Greeks used the lyre, Aztecs the flute, Bushmen the drum, to make the whole body of mnemosyne resonate to the rhythms of the past. Beads and knots, paintings and marked paths through mountains and deserts, have all been pressed into service for initiation into the past. Franks used notched sticks to recount the exact number of magical words needed for the oath. The Bards had their own techniques, useless to the literate. The Yorubas used masks in dances, Christians assemblies above an empty grave.
Script as a bridge#
Some societies adopted script as a privileged route into the past. But script is not just a path over which shades can come; it is a bridge for messages that have been left, a bridge that spans a chasm into the beyond. Or, it is like a vessel that ferries memories that have been recorded by the dead. But script is not the main material of cultural memories, even in most of those societies where it plays a prominent role. On this point also, contemporary, post-typewriter society is arguably a major exception. Many conceive and perceive their memories, waking or sleeping, as floating, unattached ‘texts.’
The scripts of the past can be studied with different intents. For the archaeologist the script itself is an object that survives from the past. For the historian, the script is a vehicle which allows him to recover the events or perceptions that the document was meant to record. For the student of pastness itself, the script has a more specific function. For him, the script is a privileged object which allows him to explore two things: the mode of recall used in a given epoch, and also the image held by that epoch about the nature of memory and therefore of the past.
On the present occasion I want to pursue one very special aspect of script, and ask what it can tell me about an epoch’s perception of pastness. I want to limit myself to the patterning of the surface by the use of letters, and to the effect that this patterning has on the epoch’s conception of ‘memory.’ In other words, I want to examine the power of the pattern of impagination to signify the mode of recall rather than the subject that is recalled through the content of the written.
My subject is impagination as the mold of memory. In any mold I can distinguish two things: I can ask if the coin will be molded round or oval-shaped, small or large, flat or convex, and I can ask whom it will represent, King Pippin or Charlemagne. Here I want to focus on the page in the first sense.
I have no doubt that in different epochs the patterning of the writing surface has molded the concept of what memory is all about. I cannot prove this here; I can only make it plausible by examining a very special instance, namely, the writing surface which took the form of a book-page. I believe that during the twelfth century the page changed its molding function, that a number of technical changes, all affecting the arrangement of letters at this particular moment, made out of the manuscript page a tool that transformed the notion of memory. Though subtle, these changes had a powerful social effect. And they occurred three hundred years before moveable type came into use. They supported a new set of axioms for the obvious, without which Gutenberg and Luther, Leibnitz and Descartes, The New York Review of Books and Penguin Books could never have become what they are.
The end of the old past in the twelfth century#
I will organize my discourse around the writings of a twelfth-century author, Hugh of Saint-Victor. He was an Augustinian Canon Regular born in Flanders around 1100 and brought up in Thuringia. He came to Paris at the time when Abelard began his lectures on method, and the Gothic arches of St Denis were abuilding, when Peter the Venerable brought the Koran from Toledo to translate it, and the first troubadours were composing vernacular songs. He died as head of the School of Saint-Victor. Hugh left a vast opus, and three of his books are particularly suited to show up the historic seam that runs through his relationship with the page. I will comment on the perception of memory in these three books.
The first is the Didascalicon, subtitled, de arte legendi. It is the first book to make the ‘art of reading’ into the subject of a treatise. The explicit contents of the book have often been examined. I have read it, listening to what Hugh implies in answer to two of my questions: what did he do when he ‘read’? And what did he imagine he was doing? What was the precise activity of his hands, mouth, tongue, eyes and ears when he read? And what was the meaning that he gave to lines, words, parchment, ink and whatever else was there, in front of him, on the page? I read the Didascalicon to find out about Hugh’s reading rather than about the substance of his teaching on the seven arts. I did so to become sensitive to the ethology of learning in his time.
As I read Hugh, I felt invited to start out on a pilgrimage through the pages. I ambulate with him through the espalier of lines on which words are strung up like grapes which I can pick, and from which I am urged to suck the tasty sweetness of wisdom. Reading is presented to me as a kinetic activity, as a tasting, as a declamation that will become meaningful only if I open my ears. Of course, the eyes have their role. But it is not the role I attribute to my eyes when I read today. Hugh imagines his eyes as having a double function: they are a source of illumination, since their light makes words on the page sparkle, and they are windows that let in the light of wisdom which shines through the pages.
The second book by Hugh that I want to examine is very short. Today we might call it a hand-out for class. It is titled De tribus maximis circumstantiis and is a manual for pre-teen novices who need elementary instruction on the art of learning by rote. Surprisingly, its text lay unacknowledged for many centuries, and the first printed edition appeared in 1932. Though this pamphlet is tiny, it is of great originality.
Since Greco-Roman antiquity one of the first things a student had to learn was the art of memory. Until the beginning of the twentieth century, memorization remained one of the basic skills a student of the humanities had to cultivate. Only during the last several decades has it gone out of style. In antiquity, the student usually followed the method Cicero describes. He was trained to construct a mental ‘palace,’ a fantasized dwelling with many rooms. He had to label those passages he wanted to remember with an emblem, for instance a red apple, and place several such marked phrases in one of these imagined rooms if he wanted to have them present at the same point of a debate. Within the confines of this palace, the pupil acquired the skill to dash with agility from one room to another; he learned to be prompt in finding the sentences he had prepared for use in examinations at school or under cross-examination in court.
In De tribus, Hugh places himself in the tradition of memory training. However, Hugh’s novice is warned not to be jumpy. His memory is not being trained for legal attack and defence but for contemplative penetration of Holy Scripture. He learns to stay firm in one place, as if he were in the choir stall of a Gothic cathedral surrounded by several dozen multicolored frames:
My child, Wisdom is a treasure, and thy heart is the place where you want to keep it […] there are distinct hiding places for gold, for silver, for gems. You must come to know these different places to recover what you have hidden in them. You must become like the money changer at the fair whose hands speedily move from one satchel to the other, always reaching for the right coin.
This patient and restful fixation of the learner in his proper place is for Hugh an equivalent to the grounding of wisdom. ‘Confusion is the mother of ignorance and forgetfulness. Discretion makes intelligence shiny and memory strong.’ The pupil is to place his right foot on the beginning of an imaginary line, onto which he will then mark a sequence of Roman numerals running all the way to the horizon. Each one of these discrete numerals from I to beyond XLVIII will then serve the learner as a kind of ledge onto which he can place a concept or an arbitrary visual symbol that labels it. On one of these ‘ladders’ he might list all the rivers that appear in the Bible: the four that flow forth from Paradise, the four that the Israelites had to cross, and the four that water the Holy Land. On another ladder the virtues or the Angels or the Apostles might find their place. While the right foot of the novice keeps all the lines converging, he will reach out, like the money changer at the fair, to recover what he has learned.
The third work I want to examine is much larger and made up of two volumes. It contains a complete set of rules for the construction of Noah’s Ark in the pupil’s heart. It is not meant for novices, but for mature Brothers, although what seems to be taken for granted in his circle would today stamp one as a freak, as a performer in a circus. In the same way in which Noah saved the animals during the flood, the pupil will preserve his memories in the midst of the sinful world’s violent storms. In detail, Hugh describes how this ark is to be built: as a many-tiered floating box, with staircases and ladders, rafters and spars. This imaginary raft serves Hugh as an immense three-dimensional bulletin board. The mast and rudder, each separate part of each door frame, is present to him in every detail. And to each of these structural elements he has attached a memory of a thing. Whatever juicy morsel he has picked up on his pilgrimage through the pages of a book has been pinned by him to a spot of the ark to which he can reach out when he meditates in the dark. With his adult pupils he insists that the monk has left his abode on earth; that he sails through historia with historia’s model — the Ark of Noah — floating in his heart. If Hugh’s Ark were unfolded as a blueprint, with the labels a readable size, a parchment covering a classroom would be needed to print everything he attached to his structure.
Memoria is dying like the forest#
I have tried repeatedly to read from these three books to the students I teach at the University of Pennsylvania. Each time one or two, really puzzled, began to compare their own certainties with those of Hugh. But most spent the semester attempting to evade the necessity of facing an age when people did all the remembering rather than leaving the job to machines. They belong to a generation which accepts not only the disappearance of forests, but of memoria as well. One forestry student suggested an analogy: yes, forests are dying. But haven’t virgin forests died out long ago? Why shouldn’t mixed forests go the same way to extinction? Tree farming will be in, and laws will make sure that there are playgrounds in the farms. This will bring children much closer to nature than hazardous forests now permit.
When my students open a book, they do not set out on a pilgrimage. In the age of the tape recorder it has become hard to convince any of them to memorize a list of dates. And rare are those colleagues who were privileged to have had a teacher of rhetoric who trained their ability of recall. Memory, when I discuss it with most, has something to do with rote and megabytes, or archetypes and dreams. For them, the page as a pagus — a cultured expanse of fields and buildings that invite one for a walk — it is a romantic fantasy or an escape from the unconscious, not the other side of reality, as it is for Hugh. Even stranger seems the construction of a life-boat for History in the heart.
Not just two sets of incomparable metaphors, but two mental topologies separate Hugh’s world from ours. Two kinds of pages act here as mirrors, as metaphors, and also as co-generators of two distinct mental spaces. I know of no better way to clarify the distance between such heterogeneous mental spaces than an examination of the respective pages. The page layout can be examined as a mirror of the epochal Weltanschauung, but also as its mold.
Comparison of three ‘pages’#
To do so I want to compare not just two but three types of pages: the pagina through which Hugh imagines himself moving, the text which has been familiar to students from the thirteenth to the late twentieth century, and the electronic shadow of a digitalized document file that Wordperfect or Wordstar now enable me to manage on the screen.
Within the last two decades, ‘text’ has acquired a new and vague meaning not only in philosophy and science, but also in ordinary speech. It can refer to a paragraph written in English, a program written in Pascal, a characteristic sequence of amino-bases in a gene, or the sequence of tones in a bird song. Having been brought up on a mixed fare of Biblical exegesis and Karl Kraus, Gide and Mencken, it took me some time in the early sixties to adapt to the new uses of this word in ordinary speech. I still remember how I first noticed this spillover from structuralist and biological usage into the meaning of text, at the time when English departments became part of the ‘school of communications.’ In 1970, more out of loyalty than out of conviction, I agreed to write a foreword for a colleague’s book. When the publisher sent the finished product, I was disturbed by the fact that the ‘text’ of his essay had been radically changed since I had written the foreword. I was upset by this lack of respect for the written word. At a party, more than a decade later, I again ran into the author. I wanted to know what he was doing now. I was a guest in his department, and by ‘doing’ I of course meant ‘writing.’ ‘Fantastic things,’ was his reply. ‘I have bought a text composer and you cannot imagine what kinds of things it can do. I fed our book into it, and it gives me finally a fully satisfactory text.’ I was not just shocked but offended as I saw a ‘text’ cut loose from any page.
Until that moment I had not been aware to what degree I had sanctified the text, to what depth I am beholden to its inviolability. I just cannot extricate myself from its tissue. Unlike Augustine or Hugh, I have been born into a macro-epoch of Western history during which text-derived notions define society, nature and ego. I am not an old rabbi or monk whose home is in the sacred object, who can meander through the book as if it were a valley or desert. I live among copies, articles, and critical editions. I am, through and through, a child of a post-medieval world in which everything which is perceived is also fatally described. My eyes do not wander, they take in the text. I voice and I hear the text that I have taken in. In Hugh’s time, when a cow changed owners, an oath ended the transaction; one hand on the cow’s rump and the other on beard or balls while audible words made the sale. A hundred years later already, the exchange was likely to result in a writ. What confirmed it was not an action but an object which describes the animal and the two parties. The nexus of thing to persons was no longer sworn-to possession but certified holding. Truth came to be embodied in protocols.
This is the world into which I was born. This makes me increasingly into a has-been, a stranger in the new world of homeless text that appears for editing, ghostlike on the screen.
The end of bookishness#
George Steiner has given a name to the self-image that results from being born into the text. He calls them ‘bookish’ people. According to Steiner, bookishness is a historical singularity, a mental climate which results from a unique coincidence of technique, ideology and social texture. It depends on the possibility to own books, to read them in silence, to discuss them ad libitum in echo chambers like academies or coffee shops or periodicals. This kind of relationship to the text has been the ideal of schools. Paradoxically, however, the more schools became compulsory for a majority, the smaller became the percentage of people who are bookish in this sense. For most people born into the middle of the twentieth century, schooling prepared for the text on the screen.
For Steiner, bookishness comes with print. While I find his phenomenology of bookishness admirable, I argue that the unique bookish character of Western perception is older than the technique of printing with moveable characters. In my opinion, bookishness comes into existence when the visible text undergoes a mutation, when it begins to float above the page and, 300 years before printing, its shadow can appear here and there, in this or that book, on parchment or in the ‘soul.’ This happened at the time of Hugh’s death, two generations before universities were founded. The text itself became a pilgrim that could come to rest here and there. It became a ship laden with goods which could anchor in any harbor. But it could not be read, its treasures could not be unloaded, unless it had come to rest at a pier. I am amazed but not ashamed to notice how deeply I am marked by this bookish sense for the text.
And I am certainly not alone. An almost trivial experience confirms it. Living as I do on the fringes of institutions, one thing I had to give up long ago was the stenographer. When I was in my twenties and thirties it seemed obvious that I could call someone and dictate. This is how much writing has been done since the art was invented. Then came the dictaphone and, later, the computer. Stenographers became rare treasures, secretaries became expensive, typists mere operators of text-managing machines, while editors called for floppies. For people who are not in the organization, it became mandatory to type what they had penned, and this meant to learn to use the computer. Under these circumstances, I have had the opportunity to teach this minimal skill to almost half a dozen of my closest associates. The machine, after all, works like a typewriter for people with weak fingers, to which a few functions are added. And the first function the newcomer must learn is ‘DELETE.’ I have observed how six people, all of them learned readers, reacted to their first encounter with the delete key: all were upset, two actually became sick. The disappearance of a blocked sentence, and the closing of the gap by an onrush of words, were experienced by each of them as something offensive. This is not how we forget, nor is the command ‘RESTORE’ an analog to how we remember. For a bookish mind there is something deeply disturbing in the way in which the terminology of humanist criticism is appropriated by the programmer of machine commands. What appears on the screen is not written. It is writing as little as Magritte’s ‘pipe’ is a pipe.
When I sit in front of the computer screen, I face an object which is beyond the horizon established by alphabetic literacy. Hieroglyphics and Maya codices are beyond the skyline of letters. But, historically speaking, these antiques — like Assyrian clay tablets, pyramid texts and Maya bark codices — are out of my inner line of vision, they lie beyond the horizon in back of me. They are models of bridges into the past of another time, as distant from my text as the George Washington Bridge is from the lianas that Incas plaited across the canyons of the Andes. What I face, what lies in front of me, is a flood of programmed arrangements that train me to select, retrieve, block, insert, delete, save, restore, merge, release and go to, to toggle on and off between files that are neither present nor absent. And when I have spent a sufficient number of hours in front of the screen, it has an effect on me. It takes some time for my eyes to readapt themselves to the adobe walls and ceiling beams of the room in which I sit. It requires an effort to discard the tool kit of cybernetic concepts that I used to transfer my manu scriptum into a computer file.
To recall means to let things appear, to let them emerge from below the surface of the water, to allow them to step out of the mist. It also means to turn around and look backward with longing eyes, straining the ear to pick up a tune that has become faint. It means to raise the dead by conjuring up their shadows. All these metaphors work when I re-call and re-dress the forgotten. But this is not what I do as a historian of the page. My intent here is the recovery of a past mode of pastness. I want to recover the page as it looked for Hugh of Saint-Victor. I want to gain understanding of the way in which the page brought the past back for him. His memoria, and not what memory has become in the age of computers, is the subject of my inquiry. And to come close to this subject I need a discipline which keeps me alert to my own way of looking, while I interpret his writings about the ars legendi.
Kuchenbuch’s crab#
In the search for a historiographic discipline which recovers the past without ever forgetting its distance from the present, Ludolf Kuchenbuch has found a parable. He speaks of historiography through the eyes of a crab. Most animals get away by turning around, and facing ahead. The crab moves backward, while its popping eyes remain fixed to the object they flee. The screen is my image for the present. Phoenician, Hebrew, cuneiform and hieroglyphic script are back there, out of my reach. I want to explore what happens if I begin to move backwards, with my eyes fixed on the present. And during a first stage of such a blind trip into the past, what gets between me and the screen are things I recall from my own past experience.
As I move away from the screen onto which my eyes remained fastened, the first stop I make is in Cornell. I cannot forget the occasion, the night Che Guevara was killed. I was there to study the archives of Myron Stykos who — with a huge grant from the Ford Foundation — had gathered thousands of Latin American editorials dealing with birth control. He wanted to classify the reasons for which people approved or disapproved. I wanted to use the same material to find out what coil, spiral and pill and condom meant. With his economic resources, Stykos had even then been able to use a computer. For a whole night I re-programmed it, straining my limited knowledge of Fortran. This was my first encounter with the machine. If I now remember the sleepless night alone in the lab and the later conversations with engineers, one thing becomes clear to me: then, twenty-five years back, anything approaching the text composer I now take for granted was not utopian, but it certainly was not something commonly envisaged. No doubt, information theory had already begun to drench common talk. Systems analysis had begun to enter hard and social sciences. Cybernetic terminology had come into fashion in the Academy. But in newspapers, any use of these new words was frankly mystifying if they were not somehow explained.
Had I gotten up from the work station, turned around and, in my memory, walked back to the mid-sixties, almost inevitably I would have kept on those special glasses I wear to type my manuscript into Wordperfect. I would have moved back through the books I have read since then, from Penrose or Moravec or both the late and earlier writings of Chomsky, and to the first encounters with Förster or his pupils Varela and Maturana. I would have focused my attention on how I came slowly to see things as I see them now. I would have assembled materials for the socio-genesis of my current concepts and percepts. But by moving back in a crab-like manner, my main attention is drawn to how my world was then. My discipline consists in remembering the surprise as its elements were shattered or dissolved. I try not to look at a past moment with foresight, but to know the present with crab-like hindsight. In the mid-sixties, text, though no longer bookish, was still essentially related to paper and print.
As I move about ten years further back, into the late fifties, the screen goes out of sight. Only a pale glitter above my mental horizon indicates the work station from which I have moved back. At the University, no one seriously thought of a Department of Communications. I remember an evening with visiting biologists in a seafood restaurant on the south coast of Puerto Rico. These colleagues had come for a conference on genetics and spoke about information that was textually encoded in genes. I understood what they were saying: the analogies between message-strings and biological variations were striking. But there was from the beginning something uncanny for a medievalist: did these people really speak of a submicroscopic text in the book of nature? Whom did this eerie text address? It took me years to sort out the mental discomfort caused to me by the necessity of accepting this novel metaphor. It was obvious that these biologists used ‘text’ for a sequence of characters which no one had written, no one was meant to understand, no one was meant to interpret. They spoke of ‘writing’ and ‘reading’ as functions performed by things, not by people.
As I reflect on these two first stations in my crab-like crawling through landscapes of past innocence, I am tempted to stop at the next station: my first encounter with the idea that language can be studied as a code. Remembering my own mental framework in the late forties, and reminding my colleagues of theirs, I would have a sufficient distance from the present to describe and then analyze the gulf between the mental space then and now. If I did this, my main attention would be drawn to the way in which the existence of the new use of text has affected the popular mind rather than technical or scientific discourse. The symbolic impact of suggestive things, like ‘the’ computer, that act as sacred symbols, and the symbolic impact of conjuring words, like ‘the’ text, would hold my main interest. But at this time I only want to create the proper mood for such an analysis. I want to achieve this by going back to the rather distant past when a new technology had a faintly comparable effect. By pointing out the great difficulties faced by the historian in interpreting the change of the page in 1200 A.D., I hope to enliven the courage of those who focus on the recent past. To throw light on what I see as the end of the era of bookish reading, I want to look at its beginning and again, in crab-like fashion, move back to the time just before the University came into existence.
Walter Benjamin has invented the seductive image of the ‘Angel of History.’ He looks back and faces the gale of time that rushes him backward into the present. And before this angel’s steadfast eyes, the wreckage of time stretches out. As a crab, I move in the exact opposite way. While the present from which I come remains steadily in front of me, one after the other of my own certainties disappears from the landscape through which I move back. About the time the Romanesque atria were replaced by Gothic portals, my back collides with a door which opens as I move beyond it and stop. This is the moment which Richard Southern calls a hinge-time into European or Modern times, but which I prefer to see as the turning of a page. In fact, I like to imagine that the door which my crab’s rump has moved is a manuscript page — this allows me to continue my daydream. In the Romanesque cloister in which I have come to a stop, I can see two objects in front of me: the door that has opened inwards, and next to it many other pages of a previous time. And through the door opening in the very far distance I can still see a faint glint of neon. Keeping myself with much discipline in the crab’s posture, I continue to face two ‘texts’ which lie in the beyond, while I examine Hugh’s pagina which fits the age in which I have arrived. This discipline might help to distance both electronic and bookish categories from the text I am now examining.
Hugh’s book begins with the sentence that reading is a search, a kind of pilgrimage. It is seeking light that will enlighten his eyes. As I read him, I can see him in the choir, patiently waiting for the dawn to reveal the scenes of the stained glass. Words still light up; they each have their own luminosity, like the figures in the epoch’s miniatures painted on gold ground. Painted light, which by the time of the early printing press begins to strike the figures of Renaissance artists, is not of his time. Thomas Aquinas, in the thirteenth century, can already conceive it when he speaks of lumen formate sub quo as something which we might call the ‘perspective of a discipline.’ No, Hugh wants to implant self-igniting words in the hearts of his pupils. He wants his students to memorize treasures. When placed where they belong, words can be woven, textured into historia. When well memorized, words illuminate each other mutually in the analogies of their meaning.
Whatever survived the wrath of the Creator against a humankind that got mixed up with the giants was assigned its place on the Ark of Noah. The book can thus be seen as an Ark. The heart then contains a book. The twelfth century is rich in ways to inculcate this point. We must guard what we let into the heart to preserve it from stains. Before using the brush, the heart’s surface should be softened so that the ink imbibes the substance. No one should be able to erase these traits. They should be as firm as on a parchment on which the penknife cannot dig out what has been written without creating a hole. The colors should be layed on in several coats, well polished to make them glitter.
Arca means both barge and chest. It’s a vessel for objects like words. Almost tasteless is the external book, modi cum sapita est lectio, nisi glossam sumat ex corde, unless it gets its sound (or just as well translated, ‘its tongue’) from the heart. What Hugh picks up on his way through the lines can be heard by his ear and tasted by his mouth. His lips bring out the sound of the pages, voces paginarum, as if they were the strings of a lyre. In Hugh’s writings the sharp line between things and words that some of his contemporaries try to draw is still very fuzzy. He reads orally, describing the sensation this leaves on lips and tongue: sweetness sweeter than honey. Hugh stands at the end of a mumbling, meditative, degustatory, auditory tradition of reading that was initiated by the Church Fathers, especially Augustine. It would be a grave mistake to confuse the memoria cultivated by this monkish, liturgical reading with that other, classical memoria that was fostered by Roman rhetoric teachers who prepared politicians and lawyers, training them to use words in harangues and arguments. Only when medieval memoria is understood in contrast to Ciceronian precepts will its end, around 1200, be properly understood.
Hugh is the first author I know who looks beyond his own epoch of reading; he distinguishes three kinds of reading, namely, for my own ears, for those of my listeners and that which is done by silent contemplation of the page. How he did this third kind of reading remains a mystery to me as I sit, like a crab, looking both at the page from the next century, that has opened as a door into my line of vision, and — in contrast to it — at those pages which were written before Hugh’s death in 1142. The early and high medieval page is not meant to be absorbed by mere looking. It calls for kinesthetic decipherment. Glosses invade the interlinear space. One page looks like the next. Paragraphs are rare. Titles give little help. You can go back to a physical spot in the book where the sentence you remember will be found in this particular manuscript. But scribal techniques do almost nothing to help your visual orientation within a ‘text.’ I cannot help imagining that the pagina Hugh contemplated in silence was an ark floating in his heart rather than an object before his exterior eyes. He knew into which of its rooms to move, above which door to look at a lintel to find the sentence he had attached there.
This is completely different when I look at a page one hundred years younger. The page has become the support for a graphically articulated text. The page is no longer a storage place for objects, nor an espalier of word-bearing vines. The carefully articulated page on the backturned door that faces me, results from the fusion of a dozen technical innovations. What would have startled Hugh are paragraphs, indentures, numbering of arguments ad primum__… ad quintum, the space between the lines that has been cleared of glosses. Stars or crockets refer to where the gloss fits. The main text is written in a larger script. The scribe must have calculated carefully how much of it fits on each page so the corresponding volume of marginal notes would still fit. Mercury red is used to mark quotations as distinct from the author’s own words. On the first page I find a table of contents which refers to the chapter number, or even the verse. Titles and subtitles strike the eye. There might even be an index at the end of the book which lists not only names but also things in alphabetical order. The idea of ordering things by the first letter of the corresponding word would have struck Hugh’s generation as quirky. This is hard for us to grasp until we remember that we too would be maddened by a list of months, weekdays or street numbers in alphabetical order. But we also have difficulty keeping in mind how new random access was to a society in which reading was always a pilgrimage, a route meandering from here to there. The more I look at the two pages next to each other, the clearer I see here the birth of a visible something: a verbal texture fixed by writing to be taken in at a glance. The text can now be visualized, imagined, conceived as something which has real existence apart from its incarnation within these covers or those.
Moving counter to the Angel of History, I have reached that point at which the text was born. The idea of the text is something comparable to the idea of the alphabet. Once the alphabet had been invented, it was there, one of those things which, once born, is mature — like the wheel, the horse collar, or the rudder placed into the axis of the ship. They cannot be significantly improved, but they can be used in totally unexpected ways. This is what happened to letters when they became the stuff from which visualized text was made. And since the text took off from the page, it has remained a powerful metaphor. And just as letters were the stuff out of which the new entity was then made, so the text has now become the stuff from which an entirely new set of concepts is derived.
In physics, Max Planck resurrected the metaphor of the world as a book and of the scientist as a ‘reader’ of nature. He compared the physicist to the archaeologist trying to make sense of the traces left by a totally alien culture that has neither the intent to reveal to, nor the desire to hide, something from the reader. The first to use writing no longer as a metaphor but as an explanatory analogy was also a physicist, the Jewish emigrant Erwin Schrodinger. From Dublin in 1943, he suggested that genetic substance could best be understood as a stable text whose occasional variations had to be interpreted as textual variations. As a physicist, Schrodinger stepped completely beyond his domain formulating this biological model. Only a few months later, the biologist Avery demonstrated for the first time that genomes could be ‘inserted’ into bacteria, almost like a gloss that slips into the manuscript’s main text. Each individual at the moment of fertilization could now be visualized as an original text.
Schrodinger’s idea affected the notion of text at least as deeply as the scribal revolution did around 1200. He brought into existence something new, a sequence of ‘letters’ that exercises power without coming from or addressing a mind. Since Schrodinger, ‘text’ is a meaningless and senseless program which acts as a determinant for the organization of a process.
The first person to have understood the extraordinary semantic consequence of this re-formulation of text as authorless command not destined to be given meaning in the act of reading, is Erwin Chargaff. Celebrating the hundredth anniversary of the first isolation of ‘nucleic acids’, (by Miescher in 1869) Chargaff says that upon reading Schrodinger in the light of Avery’s experiments ‘though obscurely, I saw before me, in very rough lines, a “grammar” of biology.’ Chargaff understood that by transforming Schrodinger’s animistic analogy into an explanatory model, just four ‘bases’ — rather than a great variety of ‘letters’ — would be sufficient to encode the variability of living nature. It was also Chargaff who made me understand the two-fold symbolic consequence of the new language of biology. First, the nightmare of universal literacy is now being anchored in the ability of organic molecules ‘to read’ each other. Second, progress henceforth means that man re-programs the book of nature.
By this comment the crab has vaulted through the open door that separates Romanesque and Gothic pages and landed again in front of the computer.