by Andrew Piper
The first reason has to do with that embodied aspect that makes handwriting so difficult to learn in the first place. When contemporary commentators draw attention to the ability of digital media to replicate and improve upon note-taking devices like the commonplace book, they often highlight the generative value that resides in such practices. As the media theorist Steven Johnson has written on commonplacing, “When text is free to flow and combine, new forms of value are created.”34 For Johnson, today’s textual aggregation software is like the commonplace book on a grand scale, one that generates new ideas through the act of repurposing. Its advantage is that it can do so more swiftly, more massively, and more “freely.”
But in focusing solely on the outcome of commonplacing, we overlook the value of the labor of commonplacing, all that time spent copying other people’s words with our hands. (There is a humorous moment in Johnson’s piece when he suggests that digital texts appear “broken” if they cannot be copied. It never seems to occur to him that he could copy out the words on the screen by hand.) The point of commonplacing is not just combination, but repetition and, by extension, internalization. In copying the words of another writer word for word, early modern readers were learning how to internalize those words so that they could use them later on, in new ways and in new settings. As Erasmus remarked, comparing his readers to the popular symbol of the honeybee, “What bees bring back is not honey to start with. They turn it into liquid by the action of their mouths and digestive organs, and having transformed it into themselves, they then bring it forth from themselves.”35
True creation for Erasmus begins with copying, with the duplication of existing knowledge. Otherwise it would lack substance. It requires that we know something of what has come before us. But true creation also begins with the time of copying, with the experience of incorporation, what Erasmus calls “digestion.” Cutting and pasting is not the same as tracing letters with one’s hand only faster. In forgoing the process of internalizing learning, of writing things down in one’s soul, as Socrates said of conversation in the Phaedrus, we diminish our ability to create. True creation isn’t the act of moving existing pieces around a board. It is about taking something in and transforming it. It is about taking time. For these thinkers, there is a great deal of knowledge encoded in the act of recreation.
But in learning to write with our hands, we are also learning a different kind of knowledge altogether. When we write with our hands we are also learning to draw, just as when we learn to draw we are learning to think more complexly with words. Research suggests that early elementary school students who draw before they write tend to produce more words and more complex sentences than those who do not.36 And as historians of writing have shown, writing makes drawing more analytical. It allows for more complex visual structures and relations to emerge.37 As Goethe remarked, word and image, drawing and writing, are correlates that eternally search for one another. Handwriting is an integral means of their convergence.
In the field of psychology there is a well-known experiment involving rats that tests their ability to coordinate different kinds of knowledge.38 Rats are very good at navigating mazes and very good at recognizing color. What they cannot do is connect geometric information (left/right) with chromatic information (blue/red). Human cognition, by contrast, is premised on the idea of integrating these different domains of knowledge (whether such integration is modular or graded is up for debate). And it is language, so researchers surmise, that makes possible this communication between different mental faculties. What makes human knowledge unique—what makes humans human in other words—is this additive, multidimensional quality of thought. Drawing isn’t just one more way of thinking. Drawing plus writing is a whole new way of thinking. It is where we become categorically different.
Handwriting is thus a valuable human skill because it is where our representation of the world is at its most multidimensional. Not only does it bring together the opposition between writing and drawing within a single practice. It also articulates a sense of difference beyond itself in relation to the typographic (either printed or electronic). This is why the recent rise of digital handwriting through the electronic stylus will likely remain so unsatisfying. Electronic conduction not only lacks the intimate precision of paper and pen (or pencil, crayon, and charcoal); it also loses handwriting’s ability to preserve a sense of communicative difference from another medium. It loses an opportunity to think about the non-encodable and the non-transferable, the things that are lost when we change how we communicate.
In the Goethe archive, located in Weimar, Germany, one can find among the author’s many papers two folio-sized sheets folded into fourths that belonged to the composition of the last novella of his life, which Goethe tellingly titled “Novella” (fig. 4.4). The archive where they are held is a hulking building that was constructed at the close of the nineteenth century, and it marked the beginning of a larger movement of creating spaces to house the manuscriptural remains of a nation’s most famous writers. The preservation of handwriting, whether in the form of notes, letters, or diaries, had become an integral component not only for understanding a writer’s published work, but for stabilizing a cultural heritage more generally. Today, we are once again seeing the establishment, or reestablishment, of authorial archives, this time in digital form. The process is repeating itself, though with an important difference. Where the paper archive affirmed the material differences of writing, the digital archive flattens everything into identical objects. In the digital archive, everything is reduced to the status of a document.39 The timelessness of the paper archive, by contrast, was meant to redirect our attention to the time and the process of writing.
[FIGURE 4.4] List of keywords related to Goethe’s last work of prose fiction, “Novella.” Courtesy of the Klassik Stiftung Weimar, GSA 25/W1992, Bl. 5.
Returning to Goethe’s sheets, we can see how they consist of an elegantly handwritten list of 107 numbered keywords that extend down the first and third columns with the numbers written in red ink and the words in black. The keywords were written down by Goethe’s secretary one morning as the author dictated them, comprising the narrative framework of his novella, which was to be based on James Fenimore Cooper’s The Pioneers (1823).
Such schematic columns were increasingly common to Goethe’s late work, and in them we can see how important the act of synoptic visualization was for his thinking about narration. Oversight was the beginning of story (as was counting, a point I will return to in chapter 7). But in the beautifully finished state of the handwriting—called a “Reinschrift” or “fair copy”—the handwritten list of keywords is also supposed to be an end in itself. There is something superfluous to this note, a remainder that cannot be incorporated into the printed book that it will eventually become. This fact is beautifully on display (illegible in reproduction) in the way the handwritten columns are bounded by folds in the paper, a practice that was common to Goethe’s note taking so that he or his scribe could subsequently add annotations, after which the list could be copied out again.
The note for Goethe was thus a consummate expression of differentiation: different from its author through the scribal hand; different from its future identity as a printed page through its calligraphic formality; and different to itself in the technique of the fold that divided presentation and annotation within a single leaf. In passing from note to book all of this was necessarily going to be left behind. And yet in its deliberate archival quality, it would still be legible to future readers—not just legible, but gorgeously, flagrantly, flamboyantly so, in order that we might one day understand how writing in books emerges through time. Nothing seemed to argue more forcefully for the morphological relationship between notes and books than this fair copy list of dictated keywords bounded by the fold.
Goethe’s leaf shows us something important about the nature of writing, but also about what it means to think about nature. Where many of his contemporaries were at work incorporating t
he handwritten note into the printed page—making print more notelike as in Poe’s printing of his marginalia or Novalis’s equating the printed fragment with a kind of pollination—for Goethe notes were as much sediments as they were seeds. They showed us the differences that inhered in ideas and natural forms, the insurmountable remainders of life. As his American disciple, Ralph Waldo Emerson, would write, “The law of nature is alternation forevermore.”40
. . .
As I write this, my son is sitting in the next room doing his homework for kindergarten, or “maternelle” as we call it here. It is a “fiche de lecteur,” and he is supposed to write out the title by hand and draw a passage from the book I have just read him in my garbled French-Canadian accent. He routinely struggles with this assignment, both physically and emotionally (his three-year-old sister, meanwhile, is upstairs imitating him, shouting: “This is not barbouillage! [These aren’t scribbles!]”). Where she seems indifferent to the judgment of others in the literally thousands of notes she leaves around the house in her imaginary script, because my son’s letters and his drawings are not as good as many of the students in his class, he feels frustrated by the exercise, much like Trubek’s son and, I am sure, many other boys in particular. I try to tell him that drawing is not about imitation, but expression, and we spend some time looking at books of modern art to make the point as visible as possible (needless to say this doesn’t really work).
What I don’t tell him is how important this struggle is. He is learning to draw while he learns to read, and he is learning to write while he learns to draw. All of those aspects are being bound together in his brain. Were we to let go of handwriting he would lose a key piece of this mental puzzle. Dissociating drawing, writing, and reading from one another would disempower some of his, and our, creative and cognitive potential—not to mention he would have one less tool at his disposal to convey his future self to another. There is a profound sense of person that comes through the work of one’s hand that cannot fully be replicated digitally.
Perhaps most important, in learning to write with their hands, my son and daughter are learning to make those letters in the same way they are learning to make the figures when they draw. There is a craftsmanship, a carefulness, to letter writing (and drawing) that I do not want them to lose. Unlike typewritten letters, handwritten letters are constructions. It is this artisanal aspect of learning to write that is, to my way of thinking, one of the most important aspects of handwriting. Who would want to lose that as part of the saga of human creativity? Surely it is worth the effort.
In one of his earliest essays, Walter Benjamin suggested that the invention of the index card marked the end of the book.41 Its stackability brought us back to the origins of writing and the three-dimensionality of the rune or knot-notation (a fact that curiously overlooks the book’s actual geometry). But the book had also become superfluous for Benjamin because it was merely an in-between stage to the notes that we took down to write books and those we took from books (presumably to write more books). Instead of dispensing with handwriting, we could just dispense with the book. All would be note.
But what Goethe’s handwritten leaf reminds us is that these acts of copying and differentiation are extremely significant for how we think. If we only ever move from notes on cards to more notes on cards or from notes on computers to more notes on computers, where will the sense of the morphology, the multidimensionality of ideas reside? As Nabokov’s The Original of Laura so palpably showed us, there may be notes without books, but there cannot be books without notes. Perhaps one of the essential reasons for preserving the printed book is the way it argues for this transformational nature of writing—that writing, like thought, nature, and the self to which it gives expression, must be understood as a form that changes over time in order to capture the larger truth of who we are and the world we inhabit. Without these material articulations of serial difference, we lose a key piece of knowledge of the world and ourselves.
FIVE
Sharing
Sharing is more difficult than you think.
J. W. GOETHE [the man of fifty]
We not only keep books, but we also give them away. Books are some of the most important objects that we share with one another. We may largely read in isolation today, but we still wish for commonality when it comes to reading. This is part of the longing that is reading.
In the summer of 2010, the Concord Free Press published its first book, Give and Take, by Stona Finch, about a jazz pianist-cum-jewel thief. Instead of selling the book to readers, the press gave the book away for free. They asked readers for a donation—not to the press, but to a charity of their choice. They then requested that readers pass the book on to another reader when they were finished, who was asked to make a further charitable contribution in a great chain of giving. The book raised more than $40,000.
This is an important story, but not because it offers an example of the newly popular economics of “free.”1 After all, a lot of money changed hands. Rather, it highlights the rich history of how books have served as gift objects. In the ninth century, Charlemagne, the emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, bequeathed his entire royal library, one of the most impressive in all of medieval Europe, to be sold off and the proceeds given to the poor. In the nineteenth century, books were some of the most important gift items in the burgeoning industry known as Christmas.2 In the wake of the Napoleonic wars, to take another example, the Prussian government created a lottery designed to raise money for the families of crippled soldiers. They did so by giving away books for every purchased ticket, an anthology of fiction and poetry by the day’s leading writers. After World War I, Queen Mary did the same thing, creating a book “in aid of convalescent auxiliary hospitals for soldiers and sailors who have lost their limbs in the war.”3 Throughout their history books have been invested with an almost magical power to hold us together, or, as in the case of those returning soldiers, to piece us spiritually back together.
Reading is never purely an act of isolation. When we read, we enter into a world of commonality, whether of language, story, or material object. Reading socializes. “To us these marvelous tales have been told,” begins the great medieval German epic The Nibelungenlied. Reading is about the constitution of some “us.” If my previous chapters have been about the way we relate to reading as individuals—where reading serves as a form of individuation—this chapter is about the way we have reading in common, how we form social bonds through our reading material. The physicality of what we read is an integral part of this story. How different technologies facilitate or inhibit the act of sharing will be a key determinant not only of their future success, but of the way we think about reading.
Almost every major textual initiative today is structured around three overlapping notions of sharing: commonality, transferability, and sociability. We want other people to read the same thing we are reading (commonality); we want to be able to send other people what we are reading (transferability); and we want to be able to talk to other people about what we are reading (sociability). “Social reading” is shaping up to be the core identity, or ideology if you will, of digital media.
I say ideology because there is also something duplicitous about the new commitment to sharing. Never before has the proprietary relationship to reading and ideas been more in force. Sharing texts has never been more popular—and illegal. As historians of copyright have reminded us, the initial idea of the limited nature of intellectual property that emerged in the eighteenth century, a kind of compromise between serving a common good and individual incentive, is becoming increasingly one-sided.4 In a culture of licensing and digital rights management (DRM), owning is becoming absolute, while sharing is now the limited practice. Corporate interest is winning out over a sense of the history of human habit. What disappears is that common space that binds us together, where ideas are no longer yours or mine but ours.
But do we really understand what we mean by sharing or “social” media? The mor
e inclined we are to see sharing as the solution to our increasingly restrictive landscape of intellectual property, the more I want to ask after sharing’s nature. Rather than indulge in another, and as far as I can tell largely impotent, critique of copyright (roll on Disney, roll on), I am interested in thinking about the challenges of having reading in common. As the great historian of Renaissance gift practices Natalie Zemon Davis once argued, “We have concentrated on the book as a commodity rather than on the book as a bearer of benefits and duties, on copyright rather than common right.”5 When we debate copyright today, we often take for granted that we know what its opposite is, this thing called “common right.”
My aim in this chapter is to bring into view how writers and readers of the past have thought about what it means to hold reading in common, and in particular how they have thought about the difficulty of sharing what one has read. One of the fundamental identities of book reading as it has emerged over time is the challenge it poses to producing a sense of commonality. Reading is a technique of socialization with a deeply asocial element. Virginia Woolf’s well-known appeal to “the common reader” in her collections of essays in the early twentieth century was just one of the most famous examples of a steady appeal to commonality when it comes to reading. Such appeals are constant, one suspects, because never quite successful.
There are two camps emerging today in the reading wars: those who would defend the intellectual commons and those who would defend intellectual property. It’s time to move beyond this oversimplified antagonism. Rather than rehearse arguments for and against, rather than announce that all is sharing despite a legal reality that flies in the face of such a pronouncement, we would do well to spend more time reflecting on what it means to hold ideas in common.6 If there is such a thing as an intellectual “commons” or a “common reader” how did he, she, or it get there? What are the kinds of practices and technologies that make it possible to have reading in common, and what are the limitations? Can there be such a thing as too much sharing? As we share more and more with one another, will we conversely own less and less? Is sharing a licensed file of code the same as sharing a book? Can it even be called sharing if we don’t actually give some thing away?