A Reader on Reading

Almost five centuries later, in our time, since silent reading is no longer surprising and since we are always desperately searching for novelty, we have managed to grant the text on the screen its own disembodied voice. At the reader’s request, a computer can now usurp the post-Augustine reader’s magical prerogative: it can either be silent as a saint while I scan the scrolling page or lend a text both voice and graphic features, bringing the dead back to life not through a function of memory (as Augustine proposed) but through mechanics, as a ready-made Golem whose appearance will continue to be perfected. The difference is, the computer’s reading voice isn’t our voice: therefore the tone, modulation, emphasis, and other instruments for making sense of a text have been established outside our understanding. We have not so much given wing to the verba as made the dead scripta walk.

Nor is the computer’s memory the same as our own. For Augustine, those readers who read the Scriptures in the right spirit preserved the text in the mind, relaying its immortality from reader to reader, throughout the generations. “They read it without interruption,” he wrote in the Confessions, “and what they read never passes away.” Augustine praises these readers, who “become” the book itself by carrying the text within them, imprinted in the mind as on a wax tablet.

Being able to remember passages from the essential texts for argument and comparison was still important in Carpaccio’s time. But after the invention of printing, and with the increasing custom of private libraries, access to books for immediate consultation became much easier, and sixteenth-century readers were able to rely far more on the books’ memory than on their own. The multiple pivoting lectern depicted by Carpaccio in Augustine’s study extended the reader’s mnemonic capacities even further, as did other wonderful contraptions — such as the marvelous “rotary reading desk” invented in 1588 by the Italian engineer Agostino Ramelli, which allowed a reader ready access to ten different books at almost the same time, each one open at the required chapter and verse.

The capacious memory of my computer attempts to provide the same service. In certain ways it is vastly superior to those Renaissance inventions. One example: the ancient texts of the Greeks and Romans, so rare that many of the books we call classics were unknown to Augustine, were lovingly and laboriously collected by Carpaccio’s contemporaries. Today all those texts are entirely at my disposal. Two-thirds of all surviving Greek literature up to the time of Alexander, 3.4 million words and twenty-four thousand images, can be found contained in four disks published by Yale University Press (and many of these texts are available in several of the various digital libraries), so that now, with one nibble from my mouse, I can determine, for instance, exactly how many times Aristophanes used the word for “man,” and figure out that it was twice as often as he used the word for “woman.” To come up with such precise statistics, Augustine would have had to strain very hard his mnemonic capacities, even though the art of memory, arduously developed since the days of Greece and Rome, had by then been perfected to an astonishing degree.

However, what my computerized memory cannot do is select and combine, gloss and associate through a mingling of practice and intuition. It can’t, for instance, tell me that in spite of the statistical evidence, it is Aristophanes’ female characters — Praxagora in The Assemblywomen, the market gossips in The Poet and the Women, that old battle-ax Lysistrata — who come to mind when I think of his work, read not online but in the ancient Garnier codices we used at school. The gluttonous memory of my computer is not an active memory, like Augustine’s; it is a repository, like Augustine’s library, albeit vaster and more readily accessible. Thanks to my computer, I can memorize—but I cannot remember. That is a craft I must learn from Augustine and his ancient codices.

By Augustine’s time, the codex, the book of bound sheets, had supplanted the scroll almost completely, since the codex held, over the scroll, obvious advantages. The scroll allowed only certain parts of the text to be shown at a given moment, without permitting the reader to flip through pages or read one chapter while keeping another open with a finger. It therefore laid strictures on the reading sequence. The text was offered to the reader in a predetermined order and only one section at a time. A text such as Finnegans Wake, which suggests an endless reading loop, would have been unthinkable in the days of the scroll. Also, the scroll limited the contents of the text far more than the codex would ever do. It is surmised that the division of the Odyssey into books corresponds not to the poet’s desire but to the necessity of what would fit on one scroll.