The Formation of the Book (#5)

Ivan Illich's In the Vineyard of the Text is a curious, beautiful work. Illich's goal is to detail the emergence of "bookish" reading by way of examining Hugh of St. Victor's Didascalicon, a pedagogical tract written around the year 1128. Hugh was a monk at the Abbey of St. Victor in Paris. During Hugh's lifetime, reading transitioned from an activity done in communal settings, with participants speaking the lines of the text aloud, to one done in silent solitude. Illich remarks that "bookish" reading has dominated Western culture for the past 800 years, and as such it is difficult for us to imagine another way of reading. The communal reading of the monks of St. Victor is uncanny for us to observe: it is, like our education system, directed toward learning as the ultimate goal, but approaches it by very different means.

Communal Reading: Omniunm Expetendorum Prima Est Sapientia

Illich begins by quoting the first line of the Didascalicon: Omniunm expetendorum prima est sapientia, or "Of all things to be sought, the first is wisdom". To Hugh, wisdom is embodied in Christ. Fallen humanity must seek a remedy (remedium) to the darkness in which it had been cast, and the ultimate divine remedy is wisdom. Illich describes Hugh's reading as "an ontologically remedial technique". Illich then spends some time translating the Didascalicon's subtitle, De studio legendi, which we would render as "the study of reading". The OED, Illich tells us, gives the proper meaning of study, when translated from the Latin in this context, as "1: Affection, friendliness, devotion to another's welfare; partisan sympathy; desire, inclination; pleasure or interest felt in something—NB: all these meanings are obsolete since 1697. 2: An employment, occupation—obsolete since 1610." Illich's point is that the Didascalicon refers to study in the sense that it is a central and lifelong occupation, not just a temporary passage of "schooling" to complete before making the leap to adult life.

The book page itself—if properly scrutinized—is a source of light that can make the reader glow if its wisdom has been absorbed. The "spiritual optics" of the scholastic mystics held that the light emanating from the eye was necessary for the perception of the world. For Hugh, the light of the page of the book is enough to kindle the light that is already within the reader, and make them glow with this self-knowledge:

Hugh urges the his students not to read so as to appear learned, but "to seek out the sayings of wise persons, and to ardently strive to keep them ever before the eyes of their mind, as a mirror before their face." In lumine tuo videbimus lumen "In your light we shall see light."

Hugh advises his pupils to keep wisdom at the top of one's mind by training their memory. Specifically, Hugh asks them to construct a memory palace, much in the way Cicero and his contemporaries advised. This is remarkable, since memory training was dead between the fall of Rome and Hugh's time. Hugh conceives of the use of wisdom as accessing the correct way to respond to the world from memory—memory developed from dedicated study. The memory palaces for Hugh's trainees are built by first constructing database tables of all the Biblical patriarchs, all the apostles, and so on. The student is expected to be able to query from those tables on command. As they progressed in their study, the structure of their database acquires additional dimensions: Hugh then requires his students to build a mental Ark (note the relationship between Ark and archive: an arca was a treasure chest or anything that was a container for the safekeeping of objects; archives store books specifically). The memory training is a prerequisite to the practice of reading because Hugh thinks that Biblical wisdom can only be absorbed if the reader already knows the people, places, and events within the book. It is like the experience of rereading any other book. The first reading is always about understanding what happened. Subsequent readings allow for more aesthetic and symbolic richness to be mined from the text, as I am not wasting energy trying to understand the literal plot action. Once the key figures are memorized, the monk-in-training is able to see where they stand in the context of their religious tradition. In other words, this memory training allows Hugh's disciples to reconstruct the history of the Church and placing themselves within it, at the leading edge of time:

The activity which Hugh calls "reading" mediates between this macrocosmic Church and the microcosmos of the reader's personal intimacy. Each person, each place, each thing within this spatiotemporal cosmos must first be literally understood. It then reveals itself as also something else: as sign for something to come in the future, and as accomplishment of some other thing that, by analogy, has pointed toward its coming.

This is the light that Hugh wants to awaken in his pupils—the feeling of continuity with a great spiritual tradition, and, correspondingly, to tap the depth of the bond that their teachers have with God.

Reading itself is a physical activity to Hugh. The reader physically forms the words in their mouth, giving voice to the words on the page. Comparisons to tasting, chewing and digestion abound: St. Bernard tells his followers to be "ruminating animals," Gregory the Great refers to Scripture as food and drink and likens its wisdom to the taste of honey, which, as Illich helpfully reminds us, was regarded in antiquity as the sweetest substance on earth. Hugh refers to reading as a harvest. He wanders the lines of the text—rows of vines—and plucks berries from them, tasting them to see if their flavor—their wisdom—accords with his self. The two halves of the Benedictine Rule, instituted in the 6th century, ora et labora ("pray and work"), are to be accompanied by reading. Seven times daily, the monks meet for prayer, reading from the book and singing the Psalms in choir. The monks can mouth the lines of the Book to themselves during their daily labor. We, as silent "scholastic" readers, cannot understand what we have lost by losing the community of oral readers. We have lost the precise words to describe aspects of our carnal, corporeal existence: Illich tells us that "the vocabulary available for odors, fragrances, and smells was much richer in the vernacular language of the Middle Ages than it is in modern European tongues." The written word is described as providing nourishment by means of engaging the mouth. It is food for the spirit.

This somatic relationship to words reminded of James Salter, my favorite stylist in English:

I’m a frotteur, someone who likes to rub words in his hand, to turn them around and feel them, to wonder if that really is the best word possible. Does that word in this sentence have any electric potential? Does it do anything? Too much electricity will make your reader’s hair frizzy.

Reading In the Vineyard of the Text, it was impossible not to feel self-conscious about how I read. I was tempted to read it out loud, even the footnotes. Going forward, I will print out all of my drafts and mumble them out loud to myself, to force myself to rub the words in my hand as Salter describes. One of my reasons for making this blog is to solidify my memory of the books that I read; reading my posts out loud would further strengthen my memory by building psychomotor connections. I wish I could read every book aloud, but alas, our culture has shifted irrevocably to silent reading. Reading out loud is something I will do with my children, but for now, I must be content with silent reading: I do not have the backstop of the Word of God to compel others to listen to me as I speak.

The Partitioning of the Lectio Divina

St. Augustine defined his leisure, otium, as the withdrawal from earthly activities to pursue the acquisition of wisdom. Hugh exhorts his students to do the same: "[otium] especially is that which takes the soul away from the noise of earthly business and make it have, even in this life, a kind of foretaste of the sweetness of eternal quiet." Hugh does not recognize a break between theology and philosophy—reason, sacred and profane—and will be overridden by the Scholastics of the thirteenth century. To Hugh, they are both aspects of otium, light that can illuminate the path back to God. After Hugh's death, scholastic reading became the dominant practice, done by clerical professionals in alone, in silence, mouths still. Where the monastic reader once mumbled the lines aloud for the benefit of all in earshot, the scholar retreated to their cloister, for the purpose of adding to their own knowledge. The interaction was no longer between the monk and his community; the primary textual relationship became between individual reader and the page in front of them.

Hugh added a preface to the Didascalicon to advocate for a form of universal reading. The monks of St. Victor would provide an example to the laypeople of the city through their approach to reading. The goal was not "universal literacy" as we think of it now. The reason we advocate for universal literacy in modern societies is practical. We need everyone to be able to read to participate in society through understanding legal agreements. The universal reading that Hugh advocates is of a spiritual nature—he wants the laypeople to emulate the monks to bind them closer to God.

One important note that Illich makes is that monastic readers operated more in the Jewish literary tradition than the Greek. In short, the Abrahamic religions are cultures of a book—the Bible or the Torah or the Quran—whereas there was no single book that encapsulated the entire Greek or Roman literary tradition. In a society where technical knowledge is transmitted in writing—or, thinking of the Greeks, where there are many gods—the culture becomes one of many books.

This begs the question: in our secular society, what have we replaced the Bible with? Not just forms of knowledge, such as technical or scholarly texts, or how-to documentation. The way I've replaced holy books is with stories of a different sort—plays, novels, scripted drama. (At least I have.) But the best fiction does not take the form of didactic parables. Good fiction is something distinctly unreligious. Authors are humans; their texts are not the word of God, just the product of one person's imagination. The artist's distinct mode of expression—in a word, style—is essential to the appeal of the novel. One person, with their own life, is attempting to direct all their life force and experience into a world embodied in a text. The world has to be so vividly imagined in the artist's mind so that they can render it poetically enough to seduce the reader.

And the trick is to render a world that is not just beautiful, but recognizable. In other words, the world has to be populated by characters that we recognize as human. The value of the novel is in how deeply it communicates truth about the human condition: that people are difficult, messy, containing "multitudes" as Whitman put it. While everyone is the hero of their own story, the best novelist juxtaposes the absurdity of a world where everyone aspires to heroism, blind to how deeply their true personality is reflected in their actions. The novelist is the master of teasing those flaws out, of making the central conflict the line bwtween good and evil that runs through every man's heart. My favorite writers—Proust, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Camus, Mann, Eliot—show just how difficult people can be. (Difficult here meaning that people are "difficult to figure out"; they are multifaceted, strangers even to themselves.)

Is it wisdom that I seek in the pages of the book? Certainly, but it is not divine or moral wisdom. Or at least not practical moral wisdom. If I were looking for practical teaching in morality, I would read moral philosophy, or . The wisdom contained in novels lies in the rendering of the complexity of human relations with much more detail than one could ever have in situations from one's own life. The artist has the power to present situations from multiple points of view; the narrator can even tell us what lies deepest in each of their characters' hearts. In our own lives, other people, no matter how close we are to them, will always remain a partial mystery to us. One of the things I was struck by when reading Proust was that he was able to capture exactly how rich my inner monologue and memory were, how a smell or a little phrase can unspool miles of mental thread, bringing me back to a lost past. It then occurred to me that everyone's inner lives were that full of detail. A world unlike any other lies within each of us. And we are only ever able to interact with a small portion of it.

In a recent essay, Justin E. H. Smith makes a defense of the humanities on the grounds that engaging with artistic works is spiritually edifying. Ludovico Settembrini from Mann's The Magic Mountain could not have put it better:

Here is why I actually think humanistic inquiry should be defended: because it elevates the human spirit. Nothing is interesting or uninteresting in itself in a pre-given way. What is of interest in studying a humanistic object is not only the object, but the character of the relation that emerges between that object and oneself. What emerges from humanistic inquiry is thus best understood as an I-Thou relation, rather than an I-It relation.

When we engage with the work on the page, we develop a relationship with the work, and by extension, with the person that created it. Even Illich calls Hugh of St. Victor a "friend" and "teacher": "for decades a very special affection has tied me to Hugh of St. Victor, to whom I feel as grateful as I am to the very best of my still living teachers..." Illich engages with Hugh's work in a I-thou relationship, coming to know the work as the product of a single and singular mind.

The Bookish Text and the Screen

Illich's central historical argument is that the invention of the printing press is overrated in importance with respect to the proliferation of the book. True, it allowed for the mass dissemination of the book. It also established the "critical edition" because the printing press enabled the use of page numbering; a critic could refer to page numbers safely only if they assumed that their reader possessed an identical copy of the text. Before the printing press, the critic could only refer to book, chapter and verse.

But it is not the technological innovation that invented the book as we know it today. The book was beginning to take shape during Hugh's lifetime in the form of the codex. The Bible could not be a bound whole without technological innovations. Handwritten script was shrunk in size and extensive shorthand was integrated; paper came to replace parchment as the material for the pages; bindings were developed to thread paper pages together such that they could lay open; and a more flexible cover was developed to reduce weight and account for the book being laid open on the reader's lap instead of on a lectern. Textual commentary moved from being incorporated in a gloss between the lines or in the margins to the main body of the text, with the referenced material clearly delineated using quotation marks or block quotes and reference locations in the margin. This took tremendous labor on the part of Peter the Lombard and his calligrapher, who had to calculate exactly how much commentary and verse would fit on each page before attempting to transcribe it. Instead of the reader being "put into order" by the book, the author imposes his order on the text for the purposes of elucidating his thoughts on the text.

As one example, Illich asks us to consider the conflict between the standardization of the page layout and the placement of illustrations on medieval manuscripts. Illustrations appeal to the imagination and allow those who are less sophisticated to grasp the meaning of the words on the page; they are giant context clues. The illustration also serves to remind the keeper of the book or script that it is a sacred object. Illustrations are adornments meant to evoke delight in the reader as they give voice to the words on the page; it is a way of engaging the eye not as a means to digest the page more efficiently, but for the eye to be enlisted in penetrating toward the truth contained in the words. Illich notes that the illustrations and embellishments contained in manuscripts die off over the twelfth century. As the bookish text ascends to dominance over the course of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the university succeeds the monastery as the home of the book. The university is primarily concerned with the book as a vehicle for information; the monastery treats it as a revered object. The university does without unnecessary adornments.

Illich laments that the age of the bookish text has come to an end—he wrote In the Vineyard of the Text in 1993, at the dawn of the personal computing era. He remarks that the defining textual idiom of our time is not that of ink on a page, but a screen where letters are projected and changed instantly. To him, the screen or the electronically copied handout bear no context and carry no stamp of the author; the screen only serves to transmit "information". He does not say so explicitly, but it is clear that he is disturbed by the lack of physical embodiment of the text, as if the representation on the screen was a ghostly apparition. The words on the screen can simply be modified to say anything; there is no publisher to confirm the veracity of the words; there is no manuscript for us to fall back upon. I would go as far as to say that to Illich, there simply is no such thing as an electronic text because it can be instantly modified in this way. It is no longer an artifact. A physical book can sit on my shelf for decades, and I will know that the text will not change. Will historians will be able to look up "definitive" digital archives at the end of the century? Will we have the diligence to continue converting our digital files to new storage media every 5-10 years in perpetuity? Even if we do so, will future computing platforms even support our current file types or read our best storage media? There is much to fear about the preservation of culture. And forget about websites: can you think of a single website not backed by corporate coffers that has survived untouched for the past decade? And social media platforms stand the biggest chance of crumbling. Have you looked at anyone's MySpace recently? (Probably not, you'd be too mortified.) As Julian Assange said, the Internet is made of exploding paper.

What does that mean for my project here? I am attempting to make each of my posts as "bookish" as possible by rigorously proofreading them and ensuring that I can stand behind every sentence. If I do change my mind, I will add a new post with commentary and let the original stand. I will not bend to the temptation faced by news websites to continuously edit their stories to optimize for search engines and reader attention. And I am going to be diligent about backing up my documents and keeping them in Markdown, a format that seems as promising as any other. As a writer, these are small costs to pay compared to the impossibility of mass dissemination in the age of print.

There remains the criticism of "user-generated content" as it was called back in the Web 2.0 days. Everyone knows that digital texts served over the Internet dominate because digital media has marginal costs asymptotically close to zero and very low capital requirements to produce work. Click and engagement metrics have shattered the illusion that the public has an appetite for fact-based reporting. So now, everyone can make their own memes, engage in politics, write their own blog on a global network, and make money from it. The chief question is, are we better off living in a world without the gatekeepers of the publishing industry for distributing texts?

To no one's surprise (I am writing this on a blog, after all), my answer is yes. From an information perspective, Venkatesh Rao makes the case that networked information systems allow us to experience more of life. Without blogs and the Internet, my own intellectual development would have been stunted. It is through the Internet, after all, that I came to Illich, and to many of my favorite books besides. Without it, I would have been at the mercy of the recommendations of inept high school English teachers who would have been happy if I read pop-lit with glossy covers. Wikipedia alone is one of humanity's greatest achievements. So, for selfish reasons, I am very pro-Internet. And I am always skeptical of reactionary narratives of some long-lost golden age, as if the gatekeepers never made any mistakes in the past.

But I also don't think that Illich is far off. The transition from print to screen is certainly momentous. I want to emphasize just how strange it is that we can communicate with anyone. There is no longer the assumption of a particular audience that we are writing for, and I think this is behind most Internet arguments. I expect global demographic shifts to have outsize effects on public discourse. For example, over the next couple of decades, I expect the United States to lose its dominance over the English-speaking Internet as Indian economic development brings more Indians online. That will be a revelation. We are still coming to grips with what this mode of cultural production means for society.

For books, I am mostly concerned with the consolidation of the publishing industry and its dependence on Amazon. I also don't think a screen is the ideal way to transmit texts. With words on a screen, I scroll and skim much faster than I would if the text were on a page. The page is a frictional forcing function that charts your progress. Flipping through the pages is a much more conscious act than flicking the scroll wheel. I once owned a Kindle, but abandoned it because I lost the ability to navigate the books by feel. Now my reading process is focused on generating two artifacts: a blog post reflecting on the book, and my own, marked up copy of the text. Before I started thinking about the long-term, I hated marking up my books. I didn't want to disrupt the clean flow of the text and wanted to preserve the newness of the book. But now I am conscious of reading for my future self. I want to leave something of myself behind on the page, scattering breadcrumbs to lead my future self back to the source of wisdom. I only hope that by my example I can help extend the life of the physical book a little longer before we augment ourselves to store texts in our brain, a memory palace that will live in the cloud.