From Word To Word

A friend of mine invited me over to look through some books this afternoon.  Her father, who recently passed away, was an avid collector of many things, including stamps and coins and plates and fossils and shells and rocks, but most of all books, rooms of books and rooms of books and a garage of books and a basement of books, certainly in the thousands of books.   My friend is trying to clean out the house, and she will be taking many of these books to a charity sale at some point, but she asked me and some of her other friends over to have a glass of bourbon, which was poured from one of her father’s many collectible bourbon bottles, and to take what we wanted from his book collection.

As I expected from what I knew of my friend’s father, much of the collection was not really to my taste.  There were boxes and boxes and shelves and shelves of trash war novels, cheap thrillers, biographies, science textbooks, old field guides, histories of the English royal family, and so on.  I did make a few worthwhile discoveries however.  There was a whole section of illustrators in which I found a book dedicated to the work of Howard Pyle, the artist and author that I recently discovered and enjoyed so much.  I also took from this section a number of books illustrated by Gustave Dore, who is one of my favourite artists: Perrault’s Fairy Tales; London: A Pilgrimage; Illustrations for Don Quixote; Illustrations for Rabelais; Illustrations for the Bible; Fables of La Fontaine; and The Divine Comedy.

I also found a section of books for children, all in hardcover and beautifully illustrated, from which I took Howard Pyle’s Pepper and Salt, Lewis Carrol’s Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, Hugh Lofting’s The Voyages of Doctor Dolittle and Doctor Dolittle’s Caravan, and J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Father Christmas Letters.

The rest of my finds included books by Desmond Morris, Robert A. Heinlein, Rudyard Kipling, Farley Mowat, Simone de Beauvoir, Goethe, Mark Twain, Pearl S. Buck, Norman Mailer, Margaret Atwood, Leonard Cohen, Mordecai Richler, and E.J. Pratt, among others, an incongruous group of authors that the other book-hunters were usually more than willing to let me claim.

Of course, in any sizable collection of used books there will be at least a few of those impromptu bookmarks that so inexplicably amuse me, and this one was no exception.  I discovered two sets of drying wildflowers, left to press who knows how long ago and then forgotten, a flattened bit of cigarette foil, some torn tissue paper, a slip of notepaper with math sums on one side and a doodle on the other, a newspaper clipping about Richard Adams, “Watership Makes a Memorable Saga” by Sandra Hunter, and three newspaper clippings about Farley Mowat:  “The Perfect Writer to Plead for Great Whales” by Kildare Dobbs; “Peace on Earth, Good Will” by Gale Garnett; and “The Tragic Parable of Mowat’s Whale” by William French.

The bourbon was also good.

I almost always finish the books that I begin, but Lev Manovich’s The Language of New Media has just become the latest exception.

I have written about this book in the past.  I mentioned it first in a post on database as narrative limit and then again more recently in a post on the nature of the digital object, and I have been forcing myself to read it, in fits and starts between other things, for something like a year now.  It was given to me by my friend Don Moore almost two years ago, and I made two or three ineffectual attempts to begin it before I really got started in the first place, so I feel that I have given it every opportunity to engage me.  If it has failed to do so, I can now put it aside without any damage to my conscience.

My difficulty with the book has nothing to do with its argument.  Though I do often find myself disagreeing with Manovich, I generally enjoy reading a position that challenges my own, so long as it is thoughtful and well articulated, which Manovich’s generally is.  The trouble is that his writing is utterly lacking in style and rhetorical interest.  Manovich may be intelligent, and he may be insightful, and he may offer an interestingly aesthetic approach to the question of how to understand new media, but he is an awful writer, period.  His diction is painfully deliberate.  His sentence structure is monotonous.  His tone reminds me of nothing so much as the textual equivalent of any adult who happens to talk in a Peanuts cartoon.  Every time I begin to read him I am seized by the insurmountable urge to read something, anything, else.

Perhaps the real problem, however, and I am willing to concede this in Manovich’s defense, is that I have been spoiled by the thinkers that I usually read.  To read Jacques Derrida, for example, or Emmanuel Levinas, or Jean-Luc Marion, or Roland Barthes, or Ivan Illich, to name only a few of my favourites, is to be immersed in a aesthetic experience as well as an intellectual one.  These writers attend as much to their language and to their style as they do  their content, the one reinforcing the other.  Perhaps it is only their virtuosity that has made Manovich so unendurable to me.  I will admit the possibility.  Even so, I am finished with Manovich.

I am interested, not in devotional art, but in art as devotion, not in the artistic object made to be a site of devotion for its creator or for its receiver, but in the artistic practise that, with the proper spirit, becomes a discipline of the mind and of the body and of the spirit that allows devotion, perhaps, to occur in us.  In an artistic practise of this kind, the object of art, far from becoming an idol, never even becomes an icon, because the iconic function is played by the artistic practise itself.  It is a practise of art in which the artistic object and even the artistic act become radically secondary to an artistic discipline that seeks to be, before all else a devotion, though it knows that true devotion must always lie beyond it.  I would have my reading and my writing become this kind of discipline, this kind of devotion.

As should be clear by now, the space of the home is a subject that is of great concern for me, so I was sincerely pleased to learn that my friend, whom some of you will know as TC from her comments on this site, has begun a blog of short quotations and photos and reflections on the meaning of home.  TC’s comments have often caused me to think differently and more deeply through the idea of home over the past two years or so, and two of her book recommendations, George Perec’s Species of Spaces and Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space, have become a significant part of my personal canon, so I will enjoy the opportunity to read her in the coming months, and I think many of you will as well.

I have only just begun reading Ivan Illich’s In the Vineyard of the Text, and already I have the need to write about it.  This does not bode well for any of you who might be following along with me.  You might have to prepare for a steady diet of Illich’s reflection on the Didascalicon of Hugh of St. Victor over the next few weeks.  I apologize in advance, sincerely.

In his introduction to the book, Illich says, “No one should be misled into taking my footnotes as either proof of, or invitation to, scholarship.  They are there to remind the reader of the rich harvest of memorabilia – rocks, fauna, and flora – which a man has picked up on repeated walks through a certain area, and now would like to share with others.  They are here mainly to encourage the reader to venture into the shelves of the library and experiment with distinct types of reading.”

I love this passage for several reasons.

First, I think that the image of walking along the path and collecting the things that are found there is an apt image for the kind of scholarship that I value.  The walker is not interested in cataloging the flora and fauna of the path exhaustively, nor in classifying them rigorously.  The walker is interested in becoming familiar with the area, with the things that are there every day, with the things that are only rarely there, with the things that make this path singular.  The walker is looking and seeing, is listening and hearing, is finding and gathering, and is also, most significantly, sharing with others what has been found.

The kind of scholarship that Illich is describing with this image proceeds with a similar gait and a similar pace.  It is an invitation to walk with someone who has read and thought and written on certain intellectual paths, with someone who can point to the things that are there to be seen and heard and found.  It does not ask that I replicate a set of results.  It asks that I follow the path that another has made familiar so that it can become familiar to me also.  This is exactly the kind of scholarship that I want to model.

Second, by applying this idea of scholarship to his footnotes, Illich causes me to read his footnotes differently.  They cease being justifications for his scholarly claims and become recommendations for the books and writers and ideas that he has found and loved.  They become the textual equivalent of a verbal phenomenon that is familiar to anyone who talks with others about books and writers.  They say, “Oh, by the way, while we’re on the topic, such and such a book talks about this idea in interesting ways,” or they say, “I remember author so and so said something that relates to this point.”  In other words, they are all the places that our conversation could have gone but did not, all the things that it brushed against and took into itself but did not dwell upon.  They are all the places where our conversation might go next, when we meet again.

Third, Illich’s image is also an encouragement for his readers not to stop at his text, but to read through it to those that he has read himself, to go into the libraries and find the books that he is recommending, to read these things for ourselves.  It is never sufficient, he implies to read about another book or writer, however valuable such reading may be.  It is always necessary to read further and more, to read the many other books that one book always recommends,  even if this process will never be complete, perhaps because it will never be complete.  To read through the book in this way is to take the footnotes as recommendations to more and further reading, as possibilities, as conversations to come.

Illich takes himself at his own word in this respect, as he always does.  The footnotes of In the Vineyard of the Text are often very long, comprising more than half the page in many instances, and they could easily be passed over as either too boring or too intimidating to merit the time and effort that reading them would take, but his footnotes are as different as he claims they are, or perhaps I come to read them differently just because he has made such a claim.  I find them often conversational in tone, unafraid to reference an almost irrelevant anecdote or to recommend a particular book with a kind of personal fervour, and I sometimes find myself reflecting on them as much as the text itself.  Most interestingly, they also make me wonder what other textual conventions might be used in this way, against themselves, in order to foster a reading that is more open and more convivial.

I had a chance to go by the EBC library today and search through the discards.  I was doing so primarily to make a point to my class that it is possible to find good books just about anywhere, but my visit proved much more productive than I expected.  I found a number of books that were interesting but for which I was not necessarily looking, the sort of books I thought I would find:

D. Mackenzie Brown – Ultimate Concern: Tillich in Dialogue
Friedrich Schleiermacher – On Religion
R. J. Kaufmann, editor – G. B. Shaw: A Collection of Critical Essays
Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus – The Lives of the Twelve Caesars
Frederick Buechner – The Sacred Journey
Martis Esslin, editor - Samuel Beckett: A Collection of Critical Essays
Hugh Kenner - Samuel Beckett
Sigmund Freud – Totem and Taboo

More excitingly, I also found a novel by one of my favourite and most elusive authors: Many Dimensions by Charles Williams.  I have written at length about Charles Williams before, so I will not do so again.  I will just say that I love his books and was disappointed to find, when I got home, that Many Dimensions is one I already own. On the other hand, simply discovering it among the discards, so unexpectedly, was a profound delight, and I will now have something to give Dave Humphrey when we meet on Wednesday night.

I have been thinking lately about the nature of the work of art in the age of what I will call digital replication.  This thinking has led me in some disparate directions that I cannot possibly follow all at once, so this post will probably be the first of several that follow a loosely related set of ideas.  I have no real conclusion in mind, not yet, so consider this the textual corollary of thinking aloud.

As my title suggests, I have been thinking this question of digital replication through Walter Benjamin’s famous essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”.  I first read this essay in a university theory class, then read it again some time later in order to better understand a friend’s article, and then read it again just recently as I was preparing to write this post.  It is a marvelous essay, and I will return to it in a moment, but I think that I should probably begin where so much of my thinking seems to begin, over a cup of coffee with Dave Humphrey.

Actually, on the night in question, I think I was drinking an oatmeal stout rather than a coffee, and I was listening to Dave theorize about why I prefer to search out books in yardsales and thriftstores rather than just to buy them online.  It suddenly occurred to me that I had already begun to answer this question some time ago in a post on dying texts, where I made a distinction between the physical book, which was falling apart as I was reading it, and the work of writing, which was embodied in many such physical books and in other forms as well.  I began to wonder whether my fascination with rescuing discarded books was an expression of a kind of fetish for the physical book, not in and of itself, because I am reader rather than a collector of books, but as the singular place where my own story intersects the story of the work of writing.  In other words, perhaps my fetish is with the book as the physical marker of a literary experience, as one of the elements that produces this experience, as a tangible synecdoche for this experience.  It is not that I am confusing the literary work with the form in which it happens to be embodied, but that my experience of the literary work is so dependent on it being embodied in one form or another that this form itself becomes an inextricable part of my experience.

This explains, I think, at least in part, why I love used bookstores and yardsales and thriftstores, because the books that I find there have stories that began far before I found them, so the intersection of their stories and mine is far more interesting.  They have inscriptions on their titlepages, and makeshift bookmarks, and notes in their margins, and coffee stains, and the pricetags of long forgotten booksellers.  They also have the story of where and when I happened to stumble upon them, the story of how their stories and mine happened to become entangled.  I love these stories about books.  I love them as much as the stories that the books contain.  I love them because they inform my reading of the literary work that they share with me, because they help make that reading and that experience what it is.  My fetish, in other words, is for story of the physical book as an element in the production of my literary experience.

Of course, every book, whether bought new from the mass bookseller or used online or digitized for my electronic reader, every book will have such a story, but some of these stories will be more interesting than others.  If a friend and I both place an order for copies of the same book online, their stories, at least for us, are practically indistinguishable from each other, and they are also practically indistinguishable from any number of other such orders placed by people around the world.  We will all have had our different reasons for placing that order, of course, but each copy of that book will have been published in the same place, shipped in the same ways, ordered from the same forms.  There is a story here, certainly, because there is always a story, but it is a story that is hardly worth telling, at least not without stomach churning levels of irony or boredom or both.

As I was thinking these things with Dave, sipping on my stout, I found myself recalling the opening section of “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”, where Benjamin analyzes how the ability to reproduce the work of art has altered our relation to the work of art as such, so I dug out the essay when I returned home.  It is, as I have already said, a marvelous bit of thinking, and I would like to spend a great more time on it than this present space will allow me.  The central ideas for my own purposes, however are these:

Benjamin argues that the age of mechanical reproduction and it ability to produce innumerable physical copies of an original work of art “withers the aura of the work of art.”  By this he means that reproduction undermines the work of art’s authenticity and jeopardizes its authority as an object, because “it substitutes a plurality of copies for a unique existence.”  He still maintains the idea of the original, arguing that “even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art” lacks the original’s “presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be,” but he argues that the aura, the authenticity, and the authority of this original is undermined by mass reproduction.

His reasons for this are fairly simple.  He first argues that “the presence of the original is the prerequisite to the concept of authenticity,” and that “the uniqueness of a work of art is inseparable from its being embedded in the fabric of tradition.”  He then suggests that “the technique of reproduction detaches the reproduced object from the domain of tradition” and therefore distances is also from the original work of art.  This distance, obscuring the singular history of the work of art, also withers its authority and authenticity, its aura.

One interesting implication of this line of reasoning is that it opens the possibility for reproductions to take on the kinds of authority and authenticity that were once reserved for the original.  If, as Benjamin says, “the authenticity of a thing is the essence of all that is transmissible from its beginning, ranging from its substantive duration to its testimony to the history that it has experienced,” then a reproduction certainly obscures the authenticity of its original through the distance that it imposes between itself and the historical singularity of its original, but it also becomes a historical singularity in and of itself and becomes capable of founding its own authority and its own authenticity.  In other words, the ability to produce copies of the work of art makes possible the kind of fetishism that I was describing earlier.  It reduces the value of the original, because this original is no longer the only place where the work of art finds a form, but it opens the possibility that the copies will become originals of a sort as they take on their own history, and this history may actually increase their authenticity beyond that of their original, if they are signed by the author, for example, or owned by a celebrity.  Mechanical reproduction, therefore, devalues but does not eliminate the original, and produces many physical copies that can themselves obtain value as they take on a singular history.

All of this brings me to a possibility that first occurred to me as I was sitting there with Dave over my pint, though I did not then have the benefit of Benjamin’s terminology to articulate it: if the age of mechanical reproduction introduces the possibility that a copy might take on its own authority and authenticity, the age of digital replication ends this possibility definitively.    The reason for this is that the digitized replication is always entirely identical to its original and to every other copy.  These replications are always indistinguishable.   They always substitute for one another perfectly.  There is, in other words, no original, or perhaps there are only originals, and none of these originals are subject to history in a way that can mark them as singular and therefore authoritative or authentic.  History leaves them untouched, unmarked, so they are incapable of taking on the aura of authority or authenticity.

This means that the digitized replication can never become a fetishized object in the way of the mechanical reproduction, because it will never be possible for its story to become singular and to intersect with the story of the reader.  I will never find notes in the margin of an etext or a signature on the cover of an mp3 file.  I will never find their stories in a thriftstore or a garage sale.   In the mode of their physical existence, they are as different from the book as the book is from the oral recitation.  This new mode of existence, I think, needs to be the subject of some serious reflection, and I hope to do some of this reflection in future posts.

For the moment, though, I will close with a confession of sorts.  While I am not certain whether digital replication is essentially better or worse than mechanical reproduction, I must admit an intense nostalgia for the stories and the histories that mechanical reproduction enables.  My own understanding of the literary experience is so entirely wrapped up in the physicality of the book and in the history that produces it as an authentic and authoritative object, even if for no one but myself, that I cannot imagine reading apart from these things, and I can only see the digital replication as a kind of loss, whatever benefits it might also have.  Perhaps these are the questions that I will need to explore next.

As I wrote a few weeks ago in a post on teaching literature and teaching reading, I will be asking my students to learn a little differently this fall, to learn without essays, without exams, without traditional lectures, even without mandatory texts.  Instead, they will be going with me to a used bookstore, where they will buy five books of their own choosing.  They will then be responsible to read these texts and to blog their responses to this reading on their own blogs, which will all be aggregated with the class blog into a blog planet.  In order to provide a model of what this kind of reading and writing might look like, I will be reading and writing along with my students in exactly the ways that I am asking of them, but I would like them to have many such models, to see the many approaches that skilled and interested readers might bring to a text.

So, I am extending an invitation to you, whoever you may be, to read and write along with us this fall.   You may do so very simply.  You need only to read what you would be reading in any case, without even the very rudimentary guidelines that I have set for my students, and then to blog about what your reading inspires in you, whenever and however often you feel so inspired.  Just create a category for your responses, something like Literature or Reading or whatever, and then send me the RSS feed for the category so that I can include it in the blog planet.   Of course, if this seems like too much commitment, you can also participate just by adding the blog planet to your reader and commenting on the posts that interest you.

If you want, you can even accompany us on our trip to the bookstore, for which I will post details shortly, or you can join us for our open discussions, which will be held during two or three of our classes this semester.  I will also be asking some of you personally to make guest appearances in our class discussions, and if you would like to participate in some way that I have not yet imagined, just let me know.  I am willing to explore anything that might make the learning process more open and more accessible.

My hope, in this invitation, in you, in your participation, is that it will produce precisely this openness and this accessibility.  I want to turn the focus of the learning process away from the requirements of the institution and toward the passions and the disciplines of reading and writing in the world, a reading and writing that you and I produce every day.  I want my students to find themselves engaged with people who read and write, not because they have something due tomorrow, but because they find something valuable in the very acts of reading and writing.  I want them, not merely to join a class for a semester, but to join a community of readers for life.

If you are at all interested in being involved with this project in any way, please let me know just leave a comment here or email me at jeremylukehill@gmail.com.

Note:  This post has been changed several times to reflect some technical changes that I have been forced to make.

I wrote a post recently on the way that I read, but I have been reflecting since then that this description of my reading practise is grossly misrepresentative without a similar account of the way that I also misread.  If it is true, as my earlier post suggests, that reading well demands the discipline to read properly, it also true, to precisely the same degree, that reading well demands the desire to read improperly.  So, though I have already written about this desire in passing on earlier occasions, let me dwell on it now a little more fully.

To read according to desire is to read without regard for anything but the pleasure of the text.  It is to approach the text like a lover, to seek it out wherever it is and wherever it might be.  Those who read like this, who desire like this, who love like this, are always looking, through libraries and bookstores, through the bookshelves of friends, through the recommendations of others, through yardsales and thrift stores and fleamarkets.  When they find what they are seeking, they hunger and lust for it, seize and possess it.  They do not read it, but throw themselves into it, immerse themselves in it, like a madness or a desperation, and they find that they themselves have becomes seized and possessed.

This kind of reading does not remain distinct from the reader, does not leave the reader unaltered.  It permeates the reader’s being, marks it and changes it, leaves the signs of love on it, leaves the scratches and bites of a ferocious love.  The reader bears these scars with a wild and terrified joy, with a fearful pride, hoping and dreading that others will see the wounds and guess what has made them.

At night, lying in bed, the one who desires reading, the one who loves reading, wakes, haunted by the dream of the text, and rises and goes about the house, through the city, into the streets, and seeks, though it does not always find, and yet finds and embraces and does not let go and returns to the house and to the room and to the bed.  The reader who desires is always going and seeking and finding and returning.  The reader who loves is always loving again, and once more, and yet another time, but is never satisfied.  This is the desire without which any practise of reading, any discipline of reading, will be empty and void.

I know, I know, I have already posted once today, and at length, but I promise that this will be short.  I began reading Roberto Bolano’s The Savage Detectives this afternoon, and came across a phrase that encapsulates my understanding of the world so simply and so truly that I felt compelled to share it.  “Every book in the world,” Bolano says, “is out there waiting to be read by me.”  I can hardly think of a more beautiful sentence.