A Reader on Reading

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.