There follow responses to a few of the essays.
Karl Young. "Notation and the Art of Reading." pp25-49.
Young notes use of "painted books" for memorization in largely oral societies:
"As teaching tools the books were probably used to engrave myth and history, in a form that could be internally visualized . . . . Their purpose, then, was not to remind readers of things they might otherwise forget, but to help make those things unforgettable . . . . The image of the god Tezcatlipoca would not be in a book to tell students of his existence -- there all were absolutely sure of his presence -- but to fix a concrete image of him in their minds . . ." (27).
Here Young oddly retains a post-Gutenberg sense of knowledge while pointing out the difference in primarily oral culture. As book readers, we feel we either know of Tezcatlipoca or we do not, and Young assumes the same of the Azteca students. But any large illustrations of Tezcatlipoca would naturally enough reflect the written glyphs. In this way, their gods were their words, just as YHWH for the Hebrew scribes, built of aspect and characteristic, entities of spirit and abstraction, intracerebral.
Writing about England in 1620, Young describes the difference in literary form necessitated by different printing and distribution:
The Faerie Queene had become a classic by 1620, recalling an epoch that seemed glorious, however painful it may have been to those actively involved in its political events. The reader may well have heard a good deal of the book read or recited before he bought it and may have already committed some passages to memory -- he may even have used passages as maxims, things he turned over in his mind when making decisions or trying to make sense out of the world. The book he had purchased would probably not be read through and shelved (though some ostentatious buyers might keep a copy on their shelves just for show). It would be used as a script for reading to family and friends, as something to ponder over in private, or as something to commit, in part, to memory (which was still considered one of the basic arts of life). The text is admirably suited to these uses: the narrative allegory could be listened to with varying degrees of attentiveness, its regular rhythms and graceful phrases would be easy to read aloud; and the regular stanzas and rhymes would make passages relatively easy to memorize. Even its inconsistencies and obscurities -- unintentional results of composition in installments -- would make it something to reread many times. When reading the book in private, it would be more a script to declaim than a source os silent information, conveyed from page to brain by an easy activity of the eyes" (36).
Another aspect of early typography may have cognitive implications:
For Shakespeare and Donne and most of their contemporaries a written word was not confined to a single orthographic form: it could change according to the writer's intuitive sense of how it should look or sound, showing shades of emphasis, intonation, color, perhaps even pitch in his own pronunciation" (37).
Another aspect of this were interchangeable letters and variant punctuation:
The use of the apostrophe in possessives had not come into standard usage, and when Donne used a word like 'worlds' he may have primarily meant 'world's,' but wished to leave a sense of secondary meaning: multiple worlds (he was probably familiar with Giordano Bruno's notion of infinite worlds). Letters like 'I' and 'J' or 'U' and 'V' were at that time more or less interchangeable, creating further ambiguities and keeping the reader at a speed approximating serious speech" (38).
Here 's meat for another interpretation, though. Clearly these ambiguities could be used and preserved when they did not signal aural changes. These constitute visual inflections, and by extension, the variant spellings might as easily be taken as visual inflections as well -- particularly since they are not literally aural. I wonder at the resistance of many critics to what seems like the obvious recognition that script one reads is at least as visual as aural. After all, human reception of oral language is also significantly inflected by the visual and, for the speaker, the kinetic. It's altogether typical that Young can go on to discuss Donne's "dramatic gestures" during sermons, apparently without any such relationship occurring to him. The first discussion I have seen of what seems like an obvious fact comes in Jackendoff's recent book (see previous comment here).
Michael Davidson, "The Material Page," (71-79).
"Much of the impetus for calligraphic and concretist experimentation was gained by the increased use of the typewriter and the flexibility of new forms of movable type. Modernist poets such as Pound, Williams, and cummings saw the advantages of this technology in gaining control over their medium. Prior to the modern period, poets had to rely on the skills (and whims) of copy editors and typesetters in interpreting their textual intentions. Modernists poets now could uses new print technologies to indicate exactly what values of spacing and word placement they intended" (74).
Of course, an even bigger jump in this came in the 1980's, with photographic reproduction made relatively cheaply.
Blanchot, Maurice. "The Book to Come" (141-159).
. . . language is a system of highly complex spatial relations whose singularity neither ordinary geometrical space nor the space of everyday life allows us to appreciate. Nothing is created and no discourse can be creative except through the preliminary exploration of the totally vacant region where language, before it is a set of given words, is a silent process of correspondences, or a rhythmic scansion of life. Words exists only to signify the area of correspondence, the space onto which they are projected and which, no sooner signified, furls and unfurls, never being where it is. Poetic space, the space and 'outcome' of language, never exists like an object but is spaced out and scattered . . . .
". . . Mallarmé restores depth to this space" (150).
Wow. (Though let's call it depth and scale.)
I wonder whether Blanchot can possibly gather the meaning of what he wrote in that year. I suppose otherwise I would have to consider it an accident that he would write it, though.
Tedlock, Dennis. "Towards a Poetics of Polyphony and Translatability."
Mayan signs (like Egyptian and Chinese signs) are abundant, providing multiple ways of spelling any given syllable or word. This kind of script is reader-friendly in its own particular ways, permitting the annotation of a word sign with a syllabic hint as to its pronunciation, or permitting a reader to recall a forgotten sign or learn a new one by comparing two different spellings in places where the text would seem to demand the same world . . . . Just as a Mayan poem reminds the hearer that different words can be sued with reference to the same object, so a Mayan text reminds the reader that different signs can be used for the same syllables or words" (268).
Compare this with the comments on John Donne and variable letters in English printing circa Donne and Milton. The effect is similar but far more obvious and probably more extensive in the glyphs. There's a question of visual inflection. In the Mayan texts at the very least, the distinct visuality is clearly and quite specifically allusive, as Tedlock's article (257-277) discusses at length.
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