On Spaces of Reading and Substrates of Texts
Further Notes Towards a Deep History of Textuality
When I was a teenager I had a room in the upstairs part of our house, a projection of the main house, lying above the garage, the roof low and slanting down so that the side walls were only a few feet high. The floor was of wood unstained slabs, giving an attempted rustic look; the window at the south end looked out at a line of water oaks that demarcated the neighbor’s field from our plot of land. To one side of the window was my bed, on the other my reading chair. It was there that I immersed myself in literary texts in a way that I do not think I have ever re-obtained in post-adolescence life, certainly not in such volume—I remember many evenings, late into the night, spent reading straight, undisturbed by other concerns or interruptions. We had the internet by then, but it was resident in our desktop computer downstairs in a corner nook of an office. Instead of a computer, the little table beside my reading chair was stacked with books. Then as now I consumed everything—grammars of Old English, campaign histories of First World War battles, botanical manuals—but literature and poetry were paramount in those days. My memories of reading are not so much of specific passages, or even of specific books, but rather of the feeling of entry into a self-contained world, heightened by the physical space within which I was reading.
Inspired by a visit to William Faulkner’s home, Rowan Oak, where he had penciled the outline to his novel A Fable (pictured above), I came home and started to write on the walls of my room as well—I don’t remember whether I consulted with my parents first, probably not, either way they weren’t bothered by it. I think I might have written out a handful of my own compositions, but otherwise I penciled in excerpts from novels—a lot of Dostoevsky at the time—and poetry, a few verses of Scripture, a prayer or two from whatever prayer book I had gotten my hands on. Little did I know that I was participating, via my own improvised manner, in a long and venerable tradition of wall-writing (as in the image at the top of this essay, depicting wall-writing in an early modern Persianate palace, poetry in this example), a practice I would only discover as a historian many years later, and one which I continue to explore intermittently. In my case the writing on the wall was part of my creation of a space of reading, a physical container for encounters with texts that over time took on aspects of those texts themselves in its very substrate. Surrounded by the traces of texts I had read I became a part of vast worlds without and within.
Of course much has changed in the world of texts and reading since I was a teenager, at both the personal and the global level. While I retained some of my teenage reading habits in college I began to shift into more academic and particularized readings, as scholarly monographs began to predominate, and then with graduate school all but completely overtaking my reading habits. This has remained the case to the present: if you can call any of my reading ‘leisure’ it is so because the topics of the scholarly monographs I am reading are not directly related to my ‘professional’ areas of study. I seldom read fiction, and rarely really immerse myself in poetry. I plow through multiple books in a usual week, though at a slower rate than was once the case. The cause of my slow-down is probably the same as everyone else: not really because I am now an adult with the responsibilities of adulthood, from children to community organizing. No, my reduced rate of textual consumption (accompanied by a reduced level of textual immersion and attention, if I am being quite honest) has its etiology in the same culprit as everyone else on this planet: the transformations in electronic information devices and systems over the course of this century.
Simply put—and I suspect I hardly need to elaborate on this experience—my attention drifts more readily, I stop when reading to look something up, I hit an emotionally or intellectually challenging passage and take a break to scroll through Twitter, my laptop readily available. I remember an email that needs to be dispatched, a journal article congruent with the book I’m trying to read. And so forth. But I also have found that deep intensive reading is just harder, and has been for some time, not simply being a symptom of getting older or having more responsibilities or other things of that sort. My brain really has been, at some level, rewired. I can to a degree imaginatively connect with my younger self, sitting in a not especially comfortable chair surrounded by the traces of books inscribed on the walls, reading for hours, inhabiting emergent worlds at the intersect of my self and the text—but it’s foggier than it was once was as a memory, and I wonder how accurate my memory actually is.
If it is hard to really recover our pre-digital reading habits and felt sense of what a text is, doing so for pre-modern, especially pre-print, readers is considerably harder. That—always partial—recovery has become a central goal of mine in my professional work, both because there is intrinsic interest but also because understanding these things in historical contexts is revelatory for our own lives, with the question of texts, reading, knowledge, and perception about as fundamental to everything else as you could ask for.
Of course it works the other way around too: reflection and critical analysis of our own textual histories and emergent worlds can act as jumping off points for understanding past ones. If nothing else, realizing the gap between, say, the digital and the printed opens up an awareness of the constructedness, of the contingency, of print-based reading, that there is a how to it and a history. It was not always thus—we understand this because it is no longer really thus, the sort of reading experience that I remember from my adolescence is, for me at least, largely in the past, recoverable only in a diminished sense today.
And yet. One of the additional lessons of my own personal, and decidedly idiosyncratic in some ways, history of reading is that old practices can survive and transmutate in unexpected, quite unpredictable ways: in my case, the habit of wall-writing, the technically unauthorized (but not necessarily socially unacceptable) and undirected addition of text to built, or otherwise socially constituted, environments. Thinking a bit more about this form of textuality is a helpful exercise in getting back behind the print to digital rupture (the description itself not even accurate—the digital has most assuredly not supplanted print, but it has changed our experienced of print as well as many other dynamics).
At some point in the last century or two a break took place in the relationship of people, space, substrate, and text (or to be more capacious, ‘text’). If in the pre-modern world, globally so far as I can tell, the majority of public substrates—from the walls of Paleolithic cave art shrines to early modern church pews—were more or less open to textual (and before texts stricto sensu, other forms of information conveyance such as rock art) interventions by others, in the modern world such things are almost always construed as graffiti, with a tenuous carve-out for fliers and stickers and the like. Within books, continued additions to texts grew more and more suspect, forbidden entirely in some contexts, and generally of more diminishing returns than in the era of the manuscript.
What happened? Certainly the shift to typographical print was one factor: printers sometimes deliberately foreclosed on margins, and aesthetically print and handwritten text just don’t match, at least not in the way that several hands in a manuscript have a broad similarity to one another, even if not identical. The foreclosing of hand writing on the walls of shrines, churches, public places in general, is rather more complex, and is probably ultimately multi-causal, ranging from preservationist impulses (a name carved in a scene rock from 1800 is history, from 2015 is vandalism) to a similar shift in aesthetics, as well as other factors.
Still, the technological and infrastructural changes of early modernity and modernity in and of themselves as physical artifacts are not however enough to explain these changes, in and of themselves: after all, a typographically printed book can just as easily provide spacious margins for readers’ additions, and if anything industrial modernity has vastly, indeed exponentially, expanded the possible human-produced substrates upon which one might presumably write (think of the vast expanses of concrete, perhaps the physical marker of industrial modernity above all else). At the same time both the number of people capable of writing and the availability of the raw material—pen and ink, and later an even wider host of writing media—have greatly expanded from premodern numbers.
There are two major factors at play here, I think: one is our relationship to text as such and especially the aesthetics and the power relationships embedded in the physical substrates and modes of reproduction of text. The other is our relationship to space and to built environments in particular. Let’s consider the latter point first: generally speaking, the last couple of centuries have seen a reduction in places and spaces that are open to ongoing creative participation, replaced by spaces that are foreclosed to such participation, often at threat of legal sanction. This has been a lengthy process, with roots in the ancient past: for instance, for many of our Neolithic ancestors living spaces had a porousness and process orientation alien not just to us but to many generations prior to us. The dead were buried within the house, which was itself in such cases subject to a constant process of addition and subtraction, settlement and familial home merging into one another, akin to a living organism. The deliberate destruction of houses was long common, consigned to purifying flames, with a new structure built atop the remnants of the old; whatever ritual meaning this carried is now usually lost to us but that it had meaning is clear enough.
Less dramatically, wall-writing was but one form of active participation in the construction of public space that persisted for a very long time indeed. Beginning—at least—with Paleolithic “cave art,” many communal, ritual, and other forms of space (including the personal!) were marked by ongoing active modification and addition, not as secondary features but as core constitutive practices. Depositing a votive offering, writing a prayer on the wall, or touching or kissing or scraping some dirt from the floor: these were acts that made sacred spaces, with similar interventions constituting social and political spaces and places as well. These practices survive today, but very sporadically. Think of the Vietnam Wall on the National Mall, its participatory aspect (people taking rubbings of names, leaving votives in front of the Wall) one of the things that marks it out from all the other monuments and memorials in the city. The sticker and graffiti festooned bathroom of a dive bar is another example, albeit not a sacred one, in which active participation is encouraged as part of the making of a social space. But in general places charged with meaning are marked more by the foreclosing of touch and addition and engagement, with the museum perhaps the paragon of such strictures. You cannot kiss an icon in a museum (unless you want to get thrown out!).
As for the first factor, the aesthetic and the power relations almost invisibly embedded in material substrates and modes of reproduction, at a very basic level the eventual hegemony of typographic print worked to downgrade handwritten text interventions, or rather to isolate them within certain spaces and contexts. This was a long process, and I am not entirely sure how crucial typographic print per se was to it. More important, I think, was the combination of modern industrialization with the aesthetics of typographic print, with print a sort of pioneer or reverse anachronism, an outpost of (seemingly) endlessly reproducible standardization and perfect reproducibility in a continued sea of the non-standardized and variant. Over time—and this is to collapse into a few lines some of the most complex and deeply layered historical processes in the archives of human memory!—mechanization and industrialization recoded what was acceptable and what was not. What could be standardized and controlled was acceptable, because legible and containable, both rendered real possibilities for holders of power in a way that simply had not been true prior to industrialization.
Divergence from the standardization and legibility of industrial, typographic print ended up coding two very different things in very different contexts: when unauthorized and generated “from below,” from without the gaze and approval of power, handwritten text indicates poverty, backwardness, or disorder. Graffiti in the negative sense is very much a product of such a context; the disdain long shown to cultures that persisted with manuscript production late into the industrial print era is another instance. But in other contexts handwritten text—calligraphy as it is often encoded—could signal elite taste, authenticity, and status, precisely because it does not threaten the larger order, and remains contained within categories of “arts” or “crafts.”
This drive for perfection and precise reproducibility can be seen of course in many other areas of life, as our basic expectations have come to be inexorably shaped by the literal shape and form of industrial materials and products. The lawn of carefully tended grass as the landscape aesthetic par excellence is an obvious example.
But now we are risking opening up into expansive territory indeed. To go back to my idiosyncratic—though not quite, it was not entirely sui generis—youthful habit of writing out passages of text on my bedroom wall, creating over time the very physical space of my own deep reading, I think we can see therein a little opening of possibility, one in an albeit widely dispersed archipelago of exceptions to the rule, survivals and re-emergences of forms of textuality, construction of space, and social norms that long pre-date industrialization and which while suppressed never entirely disappeared. The takeaway, well one of them at least, is that possibilities lurk even in the most seemingly hegemonic systems. The history of textuality points to this complexity, and gives us hope that even in what seems like an increasingly bleak era there are other futures latent, waiting to be realized.