A Reader on Reading

According to Jorge Luis Borges, the infinite Library of Babel which he imagined containing all the books in the universe (not only all those that have already been written but all those that may or may not be one day written) could be reduced to no more than one book. In a footnote to the story, Borges suggests that the vast library is useless: one single volume would suffice, if that volume were made up of an infinite number of infinitely thin pages. The handling of this volume would, of course, be painfully cumbersome: each apparent page would unfold into other pages, and the inconceivable middle page would have no verso.

Here we have, in one nightmarish moment, the page in all its glory and all its horror: as an object that allows or demands a frame for the text it contains so that we, the readers, can address it piecemeal and inquire into its meaning; and also as an object that restricts the text to fit its frame, cutting it down to size, separating it from its whole, changing or circumscribing its sense. Every page is of this double nature.

If we define page as the single spatial unit within which a portion of text is contained, then the Sumerian clay tablets and large granite slabs of 5000 to 2000 B.c. count as pages. For practical reasons, the Sumerian page appears to have been considered mainly as a setter of limits. Any given text must fit the space allotted to it: if the text runs on, it must divide itself in units of self-contained sense. The Sumerian tablet doesn’t break off in mid-sentence and continue on another tablet. The space of the tablet and the space of the text coincide.

Both the Sumerian stone slabs and clay tablets were conceived as two-sided. The slabs stood as high as monuments, bearing inscriptions on one or both sides. The tablets, like those used by students, for instance, in order to learn how to write in the scribe schools, carried on the recto the teacher’s text and on the verso the student’s attempt at reproducing that text. The learning system required that the student learn literally to bear in mind the teacher’s writing until he reached the tablet’s other side.

This dual notion ceased almost entirely with the creation of the scroll around the sixth century B.c. Most scrolls were written on one side only, on which the fibers ran horizontally, but there were also scrolls written on both sides — such a scroll was known as opisthograph, and was fairly uncommon. In the scroll, both the idea of frame and the idea of recto-verso seem to disappear. The sheets of papyrus used to form most scrolls were no larger than fifteen inches high by nine inches wide and did not break the text up into something akin to our individual, separate pages. Though the scrolls had margins and were divided into columns, with no space between words, it was the scroll itself that determined the extension of the text (in Greece they were generally twenty to thirty feet long). An ordinary scroll could contain one book of Thucydides or two or three books of the Iliad.

The scroll granted both writer and reader apparent freedom: no truncated lines, except from column to column; no cumulative sense of progression, except as the scroll unfurled and rolled up again; no imposed unit of text, except as the scrolling allowed only one section to be viewed at a time. Trying to demonstrate the paradoxical quality of this freedom, many centuries later, the Spanish writer Juan Benet composed a novel, Una meditación (1969), on a single roll of paper attached to his typewriter, which an elaborate mechanism prevented him from reversing — that is to say, whatever he wrote became the final draft, without the guidance or division of pages.

The appearance of the codex lends a new meaning to the concept of page. It has been suggested that the invention of the codex stemmed from the need to produce a more portable container for the text, and that a folded sheet was obviously more easily transportable than a scroll. Clay was cumbersome, papyrus was brittle, so parchment and vellum became the preferred materials for codex-making in Europe until the first paper mills were installed in Italy in the twelfth century. Other materials had been used in other parts of the world: fanlike wooden books in Korea and Egypt, block-printed books on paper in China, cloth books in other parts of Asia. Whatever the material — vellum, parchment, cloth, paper, or wood — all these pages quietly imposed their limits on the text.

But once the limiting qualities of the page were recognized by readers and writers, those very qualities called for disruption. Whether through shape, interior space, marginalia, or reshuffling, the page’s characteristics were to be constantly altered. In the struggle over the supremacy of the text, the writer and the reader decidedly wanted to be in control.