The Contemporaries Research Group is hosting a panel discussion on the state of literary fiction today and its response to the digital revolution on Thursday 14th November 6.30pm in the ENGLISH FACULTY G06/7. Everyone is welcome.

The book trade has always never stood still, has always evolved to survive and thrive, maybe now more than ever.  The transition to digital is very much on-going and is changing the way readers access and consume literature.

But will these changes be good for literary fiction, will they encourage more people to try more challenging fiction or will the temptations of an easier, cheaper read – or of Pinterest/Instagram/Snapchat/blogs/Netflix/Spotify  etc – mean that literary fiction becomes a more minor sport than it has been recently?

A panel featuring Rachel Calder, literary agent and proprietor of the Sayle Literary Agency, Jill Dawson, award-winning author of The Great Lover and Fred and Edie, Carole Welsh, Publishing Director of Sceptre, and Kasia Boddy, academic and book reviewer, will discuss questions of format and pricing of books, choice and control on social media and
online communities, technology, disruption and engagement to try to assess how well literary fiction might fare in the new digital world.

Join in the conversation at http://www.english.cam.ac.uk/research/contemporary/

It has been amazing to see the interest provoked in academics and members of the general public by the material explored in the AHRC-funded project ‘Wrongdoing in Spain 1800-1936: Realities, Representations, Reactions’.

This second year of the project has been marked particularly by contact with a broader public arising from our exhibition, Read all about it! Wrongdoing in Spain and England in the long nineteenth century. The exhibition opened at the Milstein Exhibition Centre at the University Library on 29 April 2013.  It runs until 23 December 2013, and is accompanied by a virtual exhibition. Digital facsimiles are also now available as part of the Cambridge Digital Library. This is the first time a virtual exhibition at the UL has run alongside the physical one, and it will remain accessible to the public after the closing date of the physical exhibition. The virtual material includes extra items, and provides translations of the (lengthy) titles of the Spanish examples. Both in the mounting of the virtual exhibition and in applying OCR (Optical Character Recognition) to the digitized texts, our project has been a pilot-scheme for the UL’s digital team.

Assembling the exhibition was a major enterprise, and for those who have never done one, let us warn you that it is fascinating, time-consuming and calls on a whole range of new skill-sets. We were in the capable hands of Emily Dourish from the UL.  Alison Sinclair (PI of the Wrongdoing project) selected and curated the Spanish material while Vanessa Lacey (the librarian who had been in charge of cataloguing the thousands of items consigned to the  UL’s Tower) did the same with the English material, and we were supported by Liam Sims. For the Spanish examples we drew on the 2000 pliegos sueltos (chap-books) being digitised and catalogued for the Wrongdoing project, and for the English we drew on the more than 200,000 items of ‘secondary’ (i.e. ‘non-serious’) material in the UL that had been catalogued thanks to money from the Mellon Foundation.

Various things became clear as we worked towards the exhibition itself. There was enthusiasm across the board for our material, whether from the design team who worked on publicity and the layout, or from the UL admissions staff (who see the exhibition all the time); and there was bonding as we voted for Francisquillo el Sastre to be the central icon (he was thereafter known as ‘Scissorman’ for reasons that are apparent from our publicity). A background in doing Sudoku might have been a help for the two curators (and it was the pastime of neither). There were hurdles. Not all material could be exhibited, as it had to pass first under the eagle-eyes of the staff of the Conservation unit; many of the Spanish items were bound together in volumes, sometimes rather tightly, so that it was a challenge to select which item, out of more than a hundred items in a volume, should be put on display; directly comparable material was not always available for the two countries involved. We decided on a life-trajectory as the ‘narrative’ of the exhibition. Thus it begins with ‘Knowing right from wrong’, moves through the teenage years (daughters are singled out more than sons for being wayward) and family frictions, then into more and more extreme and monstrous examples of wrongdoing, with the final pillar in the exhibition being devoted to retribution and various forms of execution.

One of the further procedures we will be applying to our digitized material is that of optical character recognition, which will allow for searches according to words or phrases. This will contribute enormously to our knowledge of the activity of printers, for example, and in mapping the occurrence of particular types of wrongdoing. It should be noted, however, that you cannot always find varieties of wrongdoing according to their official name. ‘Rape’ (‘violación’) almost never occurs, and this wrongdoing has to be tracked through a variety of circumlocutions, some of which refer to honour, others to flowers that have been made to wither…

The general public has come and been enthusiastic (the comments book attests strongly to this). To the end of October 2013 there were 23,880 visits to the exhibition, of which 17,130 were after 1 July. Over this period the virtual exhibition had 6,307 hits to the site from 4,456 unique visitors. The youngest visitors included ten-year olds from a primary school in Hackney, and there were some even younger at the quiz session we ran on the exhibition at the Festival of Ideas on 26 October. Talks in Cambridge and elsewhere have fielded an even wider age-range, one group almost all in their nineties. All have come up with perceptive comments and insights, not least on the relevance of street-literature of the  nineteenth century to modern issues of wrongdoing, law and order and to issues of education or delinquency.

No less enthusiastic has been the response of academic audiences, even though at times, when one was addressing audiences in Spain, it felt as though news of our collection of sueltos might have provoked thoughts of the Elgin marbles. Contact with new material could come quite randomly. Discussion with an emeritus colleague in London about Goya led to his giving an excellent collection of sueltos to the UL. A visit to a municipal library in Toledo coincided with an exhibition there of aleluyas, the poster-sized sheets of 48 illustrations and accompanying text in couplets. It included some rare examples, and put the PI of the Wrongdoing project onto another large collection.

Colleagues in Spain in fact are keen to work further with our collection, and to find ways of linking collections. Yet more exciting is the prospect of mounting a wide-reaching research project that could work comparatively with the street-literature of several countries.

An online exhibition, via Facebook, is planned for launching at the British Library in Spring 2014. We are able to draw on somewhat different material there, including publications on prisons (and prison-life) and various turn-of-the-century novels which mix modernity with an invitation to be fascinated, or even seduced, by wrongdoing.

I learnt a lot from another current exhibition at the Huntington, about the man sometimes called the ‘founding father of California’.  ‘Junipero Serra and the Legacies of the California Missions’ coincides with the 300^th anniversary of the birth of the Franciscan priest who journeyed in the mid-1700s from the Spanish island of Mallorca to Mexico, and then up to California, where he established a series of missions for the conversion of the native Indians to the Catholic faith.

Curated by Steven Hackel and Catherine Gudis, this tremendous exhibition paints a very complex picture of the relationships between the region’s diverse Indian communities and the Franciscans who ran the missions throughout the eighteenth century and beyond.

Many of the 250+ artefacts (from the Huntington’s collections, and loaned from an impressive number of other places as well) in the exhibition were intriguing material texts – some of the numerous letters Serra wrote to fellow priests in Mexico, and to his family back in Spain; a woodblock supposedly used by Serra to print religious sheets for distribution in the streets; rare surviving written examples of a few of the more than one hundred languages spoken by the Indian communities. One of the really striking things was the bureaucratic efficiency of the Franciscans in charge of the missions, who documented every baptism, marriage, and burial. As the curators are careful to point out, these records would have been for Serra and his colleagues a glorious accounting of souls saved, but they can also be read as a terrible toll of mission life on Californian communities: disease, for example, brought untimely death to thousands of Indians. The surviving records have been collated in the Early California Population Project.

All Californian schoolchildren learn about Junipero Serra today, and this remarkable exhibition attempts to complicate some of the traditional narratives around this figure, emphasising the rich range of responses of the Indians to the missionaries. The curators also stress the ways in which both the Indian and Spanish pasts have been romanticised – through the ‘mission revival’ architectural fashions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and the evolution of the missions into tourist attractions, for example. Another material text chosen for the exhibition speaks of this tendency to mythologise California’s complex past: in 1967, Ronald Reagan was sworn into office as Governor of the state with a bible thought (though nobody can be sure) to have been used by Serra.

The exhibition continues until 6th January 2014, and is definitely worth a visit if you’re in the area.

For some time I’ve been on the trail of an Elizabethan/Jacobean reader named William Neile. It all began when I read the discussion of Garnet’s straw in Julian Yates’ 2003 book Error Misuse Failure. Garnet’s straw was an ear of corn that fell out of a basket that was being used to dismember the body of the Jesuit priest Henry Garnet, just after he was executed for his alleged involvement in the Gunpowder Plot. Removed from the scene by a Catholic onlooker, the straw rapidly became a relic when it was found to bear ‘a perfect face, as if it had been painted, upon one of the husks’. It was encased in crystal and inevitably began to work miracles, which were (just as inevitably) debunked in a Protestant pamphlet entitled The Jesuits Miracles, or New Popish Wonders. Yates included a photograph of the title-page of this book, which has an amusing woodcut of the relic with its tiny face, in his discussion of the furore over Garnet’s posthumous agency. But the title-page of this particular copy (now in the British Library) also testified to a reader’s agency: it had, boldly inscribed beneath the title, the flourished signature of ‘Wm Neile’; further down the page on the right-hand side, the name ‘Jo Neile’.

I’d seen that name before, and I would see it again, most prominently in a lavishly-bound 1602 Bible (possibly the former property of the dying Queen Elizabeth I) in the library of my own Cambridge college, Gonville and Caius. Here it was, again, involved in quite a showy performance–Neile signs his name three times, adds a note to the effect that the book was a gift from his brother Richard, and parades the name ‘Milldred Neile’ down the right-hand margin. I began to look out for Neile books, and to type the occasional idle provenance search into library catalogues that allow for such things.

In the end I came up with a list of about 25 books, and it seemed to me to be an interesting list. There were plays–including John Day’s controversial The Ile of Guls, which ran into serious trouble for its attacks on the Scottish in the first years of the Stuart monarchy; a Jacobean masque, Middleton and Rowley’s The World Tost at Tennis, attacking extravagant clothing; and an old interlude called New Custom. There was page-turning romance (Barnabe Rich’s Don Simonides) and urban reportage (Thomas Dekker’s The Dead Terme). There was a helpful book to teach you how to boast like a Spaniard (Jacques Gaultier’s Rodomontados. Or, Bravadoes and bragardismes). There was religious literature–Latimer’s sermons, a life of Archbishop of Canterbury John Whitgift, more anti-Catholic polemic in various shapes and sizes. Above all, though, there was news, news about embassies to Spain, victories over the Turk, the villainies of the Catholic League, the coronation and later the burial of Henri IV. All of these titles showed signs of attentive reading, in the form of rapid pencil marks in the margins. The collection offered a scratch-portrait of a man-about-town, reading all kinds of things to keep himself informed, entertained and properly prejudiced. Here was a clear-cut case of what I call a ‘polyreader’, a reader on the lines of the poligrafi or ‘polywriters’ who wrote in many different modes to feed the hungry presses of Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Little more than a century after the arrival of print in England, here was the man that books built.

So who was this unknown reader? He was born in 1560, in the parish of St Margaret’s, Westminster, with which he would retain a lifelong association. In his early years, he appears to be have been a servant of William Cecil, Lord Burghley, the most powerful man in the land. He worked closely with his younger brother Richard, who was a household chaplain of Cecil’s at the start of a stellar career that took him from Dean of Westminster, via the bishoprics of Rochester, Lichfield and Coventry, Lincoln, Durham, Winchester, to the Archbishopric of York. William seems to have spent the rest of his life clinging to Richard’s coat-tails, getting various posts in Westminster during his brother’s time there, and becoming his brother’s steward from 1612. He was himself ordained in 1616, and got a living at Sutton-in-the-Marsh, Lincolnshire; he died in 1624. After his death Richard went through William’s almanacs, stretching back to 1593, extracting notes on births, marriages, deaths, debts and freak weather, such as ‘A fearfull thunder one Crack lastinge neere halfe an hower’. (My thanks to Andrew Foster, who wrote the entry on Richard in the new DNB, for some of these biographical details).

Last week I finally got my hands on Will’s will, which turns out to be quite a document. The principal bequests are to his children, who are given various bizarre/delightful combinations of weapons and armour, musical instruments, chests and boxes, and money. (In a later codicil William laments the fact that he seems to have spent all the money, so the gifts have to be scaled down somewhat). But above all, he gives books, and in the process he puts my modest reconstruction of his reading in perspective. To Mildred, his eldest daughter, he gives 100 books. To Richard, his eldest son, he gives 200. Then William and John also get 200 each, while Dorothy and Frances have to make do with just 40 apiece; but newborn Robert, since he’s male, gets 100. Each of the books has, the will informs us, been individually assigned with the name of the recipient written on the title-page–as we saw with the 1602 Bible (for Mildred) and Garnet’s straw (for John), above.

So there is some work to be done here. I have about 25 books, but it would be nice to locate the remaining 855. If you find one, let me know (jes1003@cam.ac.uk)!

This summer’s exhibition at the Huntington (running until 28^th October) reveals more than 40 intriguing examples of extra-illustrated books from the Library’s collection. Ranging from the late 1700s to the early 1900s, these ‘Grangerised’ volumes (named after James Granger, the eighteenth-century biographer and print collector, and a notable extra-illustrator) expose a fashion for customising printed books with the addition of prints, manuscripts, and other paper materials. One of the stars of the exhibition is a part (containing Romans and 1 Corinthians) of the mid-nineteenth-century Kitto Bible, ‘probably the largest Bible in the world’: originating as a very ordinary two-volume Bible, it now consists of an astonishing sixty individual books. Canonical works appear to have been particular favourites for Grangerisers – impressively expanded editions of Shakespeare and Virgil both feature here, too.

The delicate process of extra-illustration involved taking a book apart at the binding, cutting frames within its pages, pasting additional sheets into these frames, and then re-binding the sheets, which helped to reduce the problem of the volume becoming too awkwardly voluminous. The exhibition’s curators have even made a short film demonstration (http://vimeo.com/65673921) – although they reassure viewers that no eighteenth-century prints were harmed in the experiment. This sense of apprehension towards extra-illustration and the cutting and altering it involved comes across very strongly in the exhibition commentaries, which is not surprising, coming as they do from a curator of rare books. The Huntington has more than a thousand extra-illustrated books in its holdings, and while they are often incredibly striking to the casual viewer, they present all kinds of bibliographical and curatorial tangles for those who look after them. How do you catalogue a book that contains material from many different sources, none of which is necessarily contemporaneous with the original printed volume? How do you catalogue an engraving that would normally be found in an art collection, but which has been pasted into a book with lots of other prints, each from a different source? These ‘illuminated palaces’ have a complicated reception history (they were not short of critics in their heyday), and they continue to challenge our definition of ‘the book’ today.

Seminars in the History of Material Texts

Thursdays at 5.30 pm, room SR-24, Faculty of English, 9 West Rd

17 October Alison Knight (CRASSH/Emmanuel)

‘“The Margent Profitable”: The Marginal Note in the Early Modern Bible’

31 October Hildegard Diemberger and Stephen Hugh-Jones (Social Anthropology, Cambridge)

‘Palm-leaf, Paper, Digital Dharma: Exploring the Materiality of Tibetan Buddhist Texts and their Transformations’

14 November Ruth Abbott (English, Cambridge), ‘George Eliot’s Poetry Notebook’

All welcome. Wine & soft drinks will be served at the start of the seminar.

For more information, please contact Jason Scott-Warren (jes1003@cam.ac.uk), Andrew Zurcher (aez20@cam.ac.uk) or Dunstan Roberts (dcdr2@cam.ac.uk)

So Morrissey is going to have his autobiography published in Penguin Classics. Joining the likes of Susan Sontag, Italo Calvino, Vladimir Nabokov and Evelyn Waugh on the imprint’s non-fiction list, Morrissey’s signing must raise some serious questions about what the ‘classic’ label means in the twenty-first century. As a legend in his own lifetime and someone who brought the most world-weary wisdom to the heart of youth culture, Morrissey has a better claim than many to instant classic status. But the arguments that bedevilled the publication of the autobiography (just a couple of weeks ago it was going to be pulled thanks to a ‘last minute content disagreement’) makes one worry about the timelessness of this particular screed.

Will it be annotated? My copy of L. P. Hartley’s The Go-Between (only a Penguin Modern Classic, not a Penguin Classic) manages to provide seven footnotes in the first two paragraphs, many of them giving away the plot and decoding the symbolism for readers who like to have their symbolism decoded. I hope we won’t have to work out Morrissey’s symbolism all by ourselves.

Generally speaking, these days, when someone says she has been on a wild goose chase, she’s been out trying to accomplish something she has come to recognize as fruitless and zany. When we use this phrase, our emphasis is on the goal, some object we have been seeking, the quarry, which has eluded us. This is strange because the clear emphasis in the phrase itself is on the process of the movement – the chase – and not on the quarry. It’s the more odd because the phrase originally did refer to the course and not to any sort of goal; the goose was not to be caught, but its erratic and unpredictable flight imitated. Geese come into it because when wild geese migrate, those following the leader will imitate and pursue its every move, no matter how erratic or unpredictable. Thus a “wild goose chase” described a country sport in which a follower was required to reproduce the exact movements of a leader, or a horse race in which the second rider had to direct his horse in just those motions and gestures set, as a pattern, by the first. Over time, its true purpose having been forgotten, the phrase was taken to refer to a course without a purpose, “a foolish, fruitless, or hopeless quest” (OED, “wild goose chase”, n. 2); the phrase’s focus on the course at the expense of the goal was taken to be a flaw, rather than the point of the experience.

I was on a wild goose chase this afternoon, in the Cambridge University Library. Due to space limitations, in places the classification system no longer corresponds to the physical organization of the books on the shelf, and by a series of imperfectly visible notices you may be led from a truncated series on one shelf, to another part of the library, from there to a window, from the window to a far corner, from the corner to a rebate behind an elevator shaft, and so on until at last you discover that the object of your increasingly abject desire – and the desire has of course been growing exponentially in proportion to your frustration – is somewhere in use, by someone else. This is a wild goose chase in both senses: an absurd and erratic dance, orchestrated by the librarian who, discarding notices in his wake, has preceded you; and a fruitless and zany quest for a fugitive end.

A sixteenth-century epistolary cipher. Doesn’t this fill you with a sense of collegial calm?

It so happens that the book I was looking for contains an essay on early modern codes and ciphers, and their use in the manuscript letters of the period. In particular, it deals with the the almost inexplicable fact that most of these codes are remarkably, even incredibly, straightforward. Even a wild goose wouldn’t be fooled. A simple alphanumeric substitution, especially one that proceeds linearly from a=1 to z=26, was unlikely to detain Sir Thomas Phelippes for very long. So why bother? It may be, say some, that the goal was not to deceive or confuse prying eyes, but to lead the reader on a satisfyingly sociable wild goose chase; that is, if I use a cipher, you must get out your key and decipher it, following every step I take, in a way that brings us together. We may look like a couple of dumb birds, but we look like a couple of dumb birds. Share the key with a small community of like-minded friends, co-religionists, or conspirators, and you have a gaggle, or what scholars call an epistolary community.

This kind of socially constructive practice turns on the materiality of the things that pass between people – the material letter with its material marks, the physical book in its lovingly prepared oubliette. I have no doubt that the scholars on South Front 4 this afternoon had watched a succession of agitated, swearing colleagues bustle from notice to notice around the University Library stacks, and in some sense we were brought closer together by the experience. Quite apart from the book that I ought now to be reading (reader: I found it somewhere else), these professional and educational rituals have an interest in their own right, for they are the ceremonies that we perform around the sacred or devotional objects at the centre of our intellectual pursuits. By contrast, the fragmentation of scholarly communities through the deprecation of material texts, and the gradual transformation of libraries into internet workstations, deprives us of our wild goose chases, and of the ritually enacted performances that construct us as a social group, and create bonds of affection, trust, and communication between us. The instant gratification characteristic of online databases – those that hold citations, journal articles, scanned books, and copies of rare printed and manuscript material – collapses the race and the chase into a single step. Everything is so much faster and less frustrating, it’s true; but all the same, everything is so much faster, and so less frustrating. It needs no Michel come from Montaigne to tell us that difficulty increases desire, nor to tell us this:

C’est, au demeurant, une très utile science que la science de l’entregent. Elle est, comme la grace et la beauté, conciliatrice des premiers abords de la societé et familiarité; et par consequent nous ouvre la porte à nous instruire par les exemples d’autruy, et à exploiter et produire nostre exemple; s’il a quelque chose d’instruisant et communicable. [The knowledge of entertainment is otherwise a profitable knowledge. It is, as grace and beautie are, the reconciler of the first accoastings of society and familiarity: and by consequence, it openeth the entrance to instruct us by the example of others, and to exploit and produce our example, if it have any instructing or communicable thing in it.] (Montaigne, “Ceremonie de l’entreveuë des Roys”, Essais, 1.13)

Now for my book.

The skin is a supple and a slippery surface on which to write, so already impregnated and under-primed with various kinds of meaning that no word or phrase, when scored or inked on the skin, can be read simply. Cattle are branded, slaves and prisoners marked, warriors wounded both ritually and really, while the demographics of tattooing both abroad and at home predispose people to read the inked skin in particular ways – class, race, gender, and other categories are all at play, stressed and sometimes fractured. Last weekend’s (Ninth) International London Tattoo Convention (http://www.thelondontattooconvention.com/) put me in mind of tattooing again,  and made me worry about the fact that I had written “WAFFLES” across my forearm in mad majuscules – not the “Que sais-je” of the post-modern Montaigne, alas, but a reminder to myself to season the irons before next Saturday breakfast, so that I don’t let down my daughter (again).

The tattoo convention also reminded me of the two inked skincases in Herman Melville’s Moby Dick – Queequeg’s metaphysical mapping, and Ishmael’s mnemonic self-writing. Of Queequeg’s illustrated skin Melville tells us a great deal, but nothing of all that description gets us any closer to an understanding of Queequeg himself, or of the “heavens and the earth” of which he is the microcosm:

[T]his tattooing had been the work of a departed prophet and seer of his island, who, by those hieroglyphic marks, had written out on his body a complete theory of the heavens and the earth, and a mystical treatise on the art of attaining truth; so that Queequeg in his own proper person was a riddle to unfold; a wondrous work in one volume; but whose mysteries not even himself could read, though his own live heart beat against them; and these mysteries were therefore destined in the end to moulder away with the living parchment whereon they were inscribed, and so be unsolved to the last.

The tattooing on Queequeg’s skin, the liminal surface between his beating heart and the world, draws attention to the incommensurability of the man and his universe, the strangeness of the human figure in its wide and inhuman seascape. The skin here is a material witness of the unintelligibility of the world to the human observer, but also of the human observer to the world. By contrast, Ishmael uses at least part of his body as a surface for recording observations about this world, here the dimensions of a whale:

 The skeleton dimensions I shall now proceed to set down are copied verbatim from my right arm, where I had them tattooed; as in my wild wanderings at that period, there was no other secure way of preserving such valuable statistics. But as I was crowded for space, and wished the other parts of my body to remain a blank page for a poem I was then composing—at least, what untattooed parts might remain—I did not trouble myself with the odd inches; nor, indeed, should inches at all enter into a congenial admeasurement of the whale.

The literature with which Ishmael crowds the surface of his body lies cheek by jowl with “valuable statistics”; here, on the surface of his body, the world can be measured, and represented. What other fantastical figurations might cover the tattooed parts, we never learn, but certainly his skin appears (unlike Queequeg’s) a legible parchment. In both cases, though, Melville draws attention to the skin of the human body as a site for literary writing, as the place for “a wondrous work in one volume”, or the material on which one might compose a poem. Certainly the two men provide different versions of what Moby Dick, as a novel, itself is – a collection of facts and figures, of methods and dimensions, a narrative, a history, but also a poem of the world and its making, its flourishing and its destruction, a sort of occult chronicle of all things. In that sense, the two men’s skins provide by analogy two models for the novel. But in his tattoos Melville seems also to draw us right down from the grand literary project to the human basis, and the leaves fanning beneath our fingers become momentarily the case of a whale, the skin of a whaler. The skin might be a version of the novel; or the novel might be skin.

“Prince Giolo”, a tattooed Pacific Islander famously purchased, returned to England, and displayed in 1691. According to Thomas Hyde’s account of Giolo’s life (An account of the famous Prince Giolo, pub. 1592), the tattoos on Giolo’s back were even more impressive, and Queequeggian: “the more admirable back parts afford us a lively Representation of one quarter part of the World upon and betwixt his shoulders, where the Arctic and Tropick Circles meet in the North Pole upon his Neck.”

Of course books used to be bound in skins of various kinds, and it’s not much of a leap to start musing on the material dependence of our culture (including our literature) on the oil extracted from whales. It comes as no surprise when Melville classes his cetacean quarry in its various sizes and bulks, from duodecimo to folio. Michaelangelo stands in a sewer, eating a leg of lamb. But writing on the body brings very immediately to the attention the various ideological, economic, emotional, and even ontological operations at work in verbal representations of all kinds, and the way in which those representations constrain and limit, authorize and empower, connect and divide us. The mother who has tattooed a portrait of her child on her chest, or the child’s name on her shoulder, remembers the child, but also owns and assimilates it. The muscled masculine arm festooned with flowers can tolerate the perfume and sensuous colour of their blooms. The full embrace of a torso entablatured at once celebrates and denigrates the body, adorning it and effacing it, re-conceptualizing and re-equipping it as a surface rather than a solid of penetrable stuff. Paper is close to parchment, and parchment is skin; the activities of writing and reading always memorialize this corporeality, even if you aren’t working on Melville, or Plath, or Gilbert Godfrey. Every time we write and read, we cross that oceanic gap between the heavens and the earth, between the sea and sky, the gap that sounds us from guggle to zatch. Tattoos mind that gap; what do CPUs do?

I’m just reimmersing myself in Leah Price’s indecently clever How to do Things with Books in Victorian Britain (2012), and have come to a point early on where she cites Elaine Scarry on the way that print in general, and literature in particular, is defined ‘by its power to drown out the significance that would otherwise be attached to its material form’. Scarry, in Dreaming by the Book (1999), writes that unlike music, sculpture, or painting, ‘verbal art, especially narrative, is almost bereft of any sensuous content. Its visual features … consist of monotonous small black marks on a white page’. Any sensory response the book elicits is ‘not only irrelevant but even antagonistic to the mental images that a poem or novel … produces’.

A short time before I came across this passage, I was listening to my 9-year-old son doing his reading homework. (He has to do 20 minutes a day, every week-day, and does he grumble). He’s reading a delightful book by Kate DiCamillo called Because of Winn-Dixie, about a girl from Florida who unexpectedly acquires a dog and a life. He doesn’t like reading to himself so he reads aloud, and it’s seriously interesting to hear him and to ponder how much is going on when a literate adult approaches a sentence.

Things are exacerbated, I imagine, when you are reading a book that is maybe 75% conversation, and in an unfamiliar version of English. But what comes across to me as I listen is the extraordinary amount of hard-won skill that goes into working out the emphases of printed speech. To be able to predict where a sentence is going, to sense the likely arc of the words and guess how it will answer to the sentences that preceded it–this is not an innate ability, but is one that we have to acquire and go on acquiring throughout our lives. Turns of phrase that come naturally to me sound bizarre to a 9-year-old; to talk of ‘a candy that was famous the world over’, for instance, is plain ungrammatical. And (come to that) why do they have to put so many ‘m’s into ‘Mmmm-hmmm’? And why do they always have to write ‘the Herman W. Block Memorial Library’ every time they mention it, instead of just saying ‘the library’? Some of the most characteristic sentences in the book have the temerity to be just one or two words long (‘And I have to admit, he stank. Bad.’, or the ubiquitous ‘Yes, ma’am’). To get the force of them you have to be able to make a lot out of a microscopic bit of punctuation that you would rather didn’t exist, and put your knowledge together with an understanding of unfamiliar idioms, accents, tones of voice.

What I think I’m noticing as I listen to this fledgling reader is the complex orality of the printed word. It’s not a new or profound point, and doubtless there’s a vast literature on it somewhere (Walter Ong is in the back of my mind…) But it concerns me that people who think about ‘the book’ as an artefact wouldn’t bracket voice with the ‘material’ aspects of a text. In Price’s quotation from Scarry, a poem or novel furnishes ‘mental images’, but even to begin to think this way is to start to neglect the process of making meaning from the succession of words on the page. And that meaning is secured by material means, although it doesn’t involve anything obvious like a different kind of paper, or a change in the font, or a marginal note. Along with word-order, ‘visual’ phenomena including spelling, elision, and punctuation can all be invoked to render the voice. (‘Sister Pullet, you may do as you like, and you may let your husband rob you back again o’ the money he’s given you, but that isn’t my sperrit.’–to pull a sentence not quite at random from George Eliot). Dashes, brackets, semicolons, exclamation marks, italics and commas all offers subtle tools for rendering vocal cadences. And don’t get me started on paragraph breaks… Far from being monotonous, the average printed page positively fizzes; and the smaller that black mark is, the more important it is likely to be.