Spatial form and electronic texts

I’ll say this for the Kindle. It is forcing me to rethink my deepest convictions about literary form.

Over at the New Republic, Rochelle Gurstein finds herself hanging back from the celebration of the new electronic media. While the congnitive scientist Steven Pinker (Mr Rebecca Goldstein) plugs Twitter, e-mail, PowerPoint, and Google (“Far from making us stupid,” he bubbles, “these technologies are the only things that will keep us smart”), Gurstein observes that the champions of progress “have no awareness that there are also losses—equally as real as the gains (even if the gain is as paltry as “keeping us smart’)—and that no form of bookkeeping can ever reconcile the two.”

What could possibly be lost in the wholesale adoption of the new electronic media? Quoting a friend, she says that “the world we have on our computer screens lacks physical, tangible materiality” and is “changing the feel of our lives in unpredictable ways.” Gurstein is not especially persuasive on the “physical, tangible materiality” that is being lost among the Kindles and iPads, saying only that we writers want the “the fruits of our labor to exist between hard or even soft covers in our own time and after us” (which is just another way of saying that “we” cling to a romantic conception of literature against the terror of oblivion). Moreover, the “presence of books on our bookshelves transports us back to the time and place where we first read them,” consoling us with an image (or illusion) of the continuity of self.

This is the sort of vague language, expressing a musty nostalgia for a golden age, that makes techno-revolutionaries reach for their guns. But I don’t want to be too hard on Gurstein. She is right that something is lost in reading texts on the Kindle and iPad, and she is right that it has something to do with the “physical, tangible materiality” of books. I wasn’t much clearer when I tried to define the loss last Friday.

Since then I have gone back to an essay that I learned in graduate school to abuse as a particularly noxious outbreak of the New Criticism—namely, Joseph Frank’s famous essay on “Spatial Form in Modern Literature,” which first appeared in the Sewanee Review, then edited by Allen Tate, in 1945. (In an irony that probably refutes my case, I downloaded a copy of The Idea of Spatial Form, a collection of Frank’s six essays on the subject, to my Kindle.)

Frank’s basic point is that a “good deal of modern literature makes no sense if read only as a sequence”—as an experience confined to time, occupying no space. The view of literature as exclusively temporal—even if, as J. V. Cunningham pointed out, reading may occur at different times and the times may be compared—might be called the triumph of the scroll. The literary experience unrolls in advancing time, and the reader is constantly urged forward.

The scroll is a notoriously cumbersome format in which to handle texts, as anyone who has ever watched the baal korei struggling to find his place in the weekly reading can attest. But even the rabbis, who were familiar and comfortable with scrolls, held a spatial conception of the biblical text. Not only did it move forward, in a narrative line, but it also invited connections across time, at different physical places in the text. In the second century, Yishmael ben Elisha codified the principle as g’zerah shavah, teaching that similar words and expressions in different contexts can be studied and cited to elucidate one another.

In the twelfth century, Maimonides carried the principle a step further, arguing in his commentary on the Mishnah that the manner in which the Bible was given, which can only metaphorically be described as “speaking,” is of far lesser moment than the fact that it was given by God. As such it constitutes an unbreakable unity, and thus “there is no difference between verses like ‘And the sons of Ham were Cush and Egypt’ [Gen 10.6] . . . and verses like ‘I am the LORD your God’ [Exod 20.2].” Legally and even philologically, there is no chronological development within the Bible; there is no earlier and later; the words of the text are treated as a simultaneity.

There is nothing very remarkable in any of this. It is merely to say that texts form patterns that are distinct from, sometimes even opposed to, their narrative or argumentative development. Because it exists in space as well as in time, the codex, the print-and-binding book, provides a convenient form for such extra-temporal patterning. Obviously, the patterns continue to populate a text even when it is reduced to electronic form. But the forward push that electronic form encourages, its scroll-like unrolling, discourages the spatial recognition of patterns, if only by making the text more difficult to conceive—to hold in the hand as well as the mind—as a whole.

A very small and trivial example. Yesterday I was reading Bill James’s Whatever Happened to the Hall of Fame on my Kindle. (I bought the book precisely because an Amazon reviewer complained that it is old. It was first published in 1995.) In typical fashion, James tries to devise statistical standards for admission to baseball’s Hall of Fame. The entire second chapter of the book, “76 Trombones,” is made up of quotations from a variety of sources, asserting that Lefty O’Doul or Phil Rizzuto or Dick Allen or Doc Cramer—some player not currently enshrined—deserves induction in the Hall. After a page or two, the chapter bored me: I grasped its principle and was eager to turn to James’s argument. It was unclear, though, whether James had simply compiled several pages of epigraphs, which would be followed by his own prose, or whether the entire chapter (as turned out to be the case) was taken up by the quotations.

In a print-and-binding copy, I could have quickly thumbed the chapter and flipped to the next. Unable to see the whole in an instant, though, I was reduced to paging [click] through [click] the [click] chapter [click], page [click] by [click] page. The codex mirrors the literary text’s spatial structure by permitting the eye, as if roaming over a building, to take in the whole at a glance. But the spatial dimension is just what electronic texts lack.